Its soaring rhetoric emphasized the values of compassion, empowerment, and entitlement. It helped that in a book was published that had a profound impact on how the American public viewed poverty. The War on Poverty unleashed a wave of grassroots organizing and activism. In submitting the bill to Congress, President Johnson stated:. Women in particular were galvanized and advocated for better food, schools, and healthcare for their children. It engaged in legislative lobbying and public protest.
In the welfare rights movement scored a major victory when the U. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Goldberg v. In his majority opinion, Justice William Brennan echoed the fundamental premise and narrative of the War on Poverty:.
We have come to recognize that forces not within the control of the poor contribute to their poverty. This perception, against the background of our traditions, has significantly influenced the development of the contemporary public assistance system.
The War on Poverty was launched on the eve of a tumultuous decade. At the same time the massive federal poverty program was being developed and implemented, the country was entering a period of sustained economic decline. It is also important to note that the coinciding war in Vietnam contributed to the shaping of perceptions and policies around the War on Poverty, particularly how returning soldiers were treated and the ongoing movements for civil rights and justice.
For the millions of African Americans who migrated out of the Jim Crow South and moved into poor urban neighborhoods in the north and west of the country, the collapse of manufacturing and heavy industry in those areas meant living lives of extreme poverty. Frustration with police misconduct, joblessness, and the slow pace of change sparked urban uprisings in poor black communities across the country.
Poverty became more and more associated not with widows and orphans or Appalachia, but with black city dwellers. This association was reinforced by the mass media all through the lates and '70s. Martin Gilens, a political scientist at Princeton University, studied decades of media coverage for his book Why Americans Hate Welfare. He explains:.
Starting around , the discourse about the War on Poverty became much more negative, and that was for a few reasons, one of them being that programs that the administration had been promoting were now out in the field, and people, especially conservatives, were starting to take aim at them.
Beginning in the mids journalists, academics, and other influential voices introduced and popularized concepts that became the received wisdom when it came to the causes of poverty in the United States. Each of them set poor African American urban dwellers apart from the rest of society. They are the unreachables; the American underclass. A U. This was not a new concept. Out of the urban underclass and the culture of poverty came an additional racist trope: the dysfunctional black family.
In Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson Administration and a supporter of the War on Poverty. Drawing on the work of black sociologists E. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.
During the s the American conservative movement was in disarray. The stunning defeat of Barry Goldwater and his vision of small government and laissez-faire economics was a major setback for the movement. Days after the election, a small group of conservative intellectuals, including William F. Buckley, Jr. One of their chief objectives was to discredit the War on Poverty. The conservative movement viewed the War on Poverty as a threat to its social philosophy based on personal responsibility; individualism; and a laissez-faire, free market economy.
According to its adherents, programs for the poor might be a necessary evil at times, but they should be kept as small as possible. To challenge the War on Poverty and the values it stood for, they needed to construct a narrative that both discredited the social and economic policies enacted under its mantle and stigmatized the recipients of its programs.
This narrative began to be built toward racializing public assistance, and that was the key point of the transition. It was part of the tumultuous s and it was fought really intensely by not just the think tanks, but by the corporations who were beginning to think that they were losing the battle big time, especially when the social programs of the Great Society came in.
The conservative narrative received a considerable lift from the state of the American economy during the mids. The fiscal crisis that drove New York City to the brink of bankruptcy was characterized by low economic growth, high unemployment, inflation, and a dramatic increase in AFDC rolls nationwide. All these factors lent support to the conservative narrative that blamed federal programs for concentrated urban poverty and economic decline.
Conservatives put serious resources into their narrative shift project. With the leadership of several child psychologists and physicians, Shriver and the OEO created Head Start, a community-responsive program geared towards pre-school children, giving them the tools they needed, from meals to mentorship, to prepare for entering elementary school. While some child development experts thought the program should begin with a small experiment - children or so - Shriver knew that to make an impact the program had to reach as many children as possible with its launch.
Since , Head Start has served over 36 million children. The paper was exactly the kind of perspective Shriver had been seeking in designing the War on Poverty. The law is more than a control; it is an instrument for social change. The role of [the] OEO program is to provide the means within the democratic process for the law and lawyers to release the bonds which imprison people in poverty, to marshal the forces of law to combat the causes and effects of poverty.
Each day, I ask myself, how will lawyers representing poor people defeat the cycle of poverty? VISTA Volunteers In Service To American pairs volunteers with domestic anti-poverty organizations, giving the volunteers work experience in the public service sector while providing organizations with vital energy and labor.
Youth Corps pairs teenagers and young adults with community services opportunities while also providing them with mentorship and transitional services. Jobs Corps was formed to provide at-risk youth with vocational training and job placement. In addition to education and job training, participants receive housing, meals, medical care, a living stipend, and other necessary resources in order to successfully enter the workforce.
Upward Bound provides resources to prepare students for college such as mentorship, tutoring, test prep, and summer programming.
Foster Grandparents matches volunteers 55 and older and children with exceptional needs to provide mentorship and friendship. Work-Study provides federal funding to institutions to provide part-time work opportunities to low-income undergraduate and graduate students, helping them pay for higher education.
Speaking on The War on Poverty, he said,. And that lesson says that democracy doesn't just stop with a vote! Democracy has to go all the way through our society -- from the way that we plan our programs to, the way we staff and run them -- that goes for education, for job training, for job placement, for legal services, for consumer education, for pre-school education.
That principle is sinking deeper and deeper, broader and broader. And it will continue to spread and spread. Second, utilitarianism is foundationally impartial. Partiality towards particular others can only be justified instrumentally. Utilitarianism would condemn a state for showing special concern for its own citizens, for instance, unless that concern was the best means to maximise utility worldwide.
Third, utilitarianism endorses a monist theory of the good. It recognises just one ultimate good: utility or, as on some variants, happiness or pleasure. Fourth, utilitarianism is indifferent to distribution. It sees no more reason to help people in need than well-off people if either option increases utility by the same degree. Fifth, famously, utilitarianism recognises no deontic constraints on the pursuit of the good. As such, utilitarianism does not share the same concern for distinguishing, as just war theorists typically do, between doing harm and allowing harm to occur, intentional and unintentional harm, innocence and liability.
Avoiding criticisms of utilitarianism, this article leaves space for supererogation, partiality, value pluralism, distribution and deontic constraints. Just war theorists cannot then dismiss the arguments presented here as relying on some alien moral schema.
What the arguments rely upon, rather, is an interpretation of just war theory conditions. A war may be just even if an alternative policy of poverty alleviation produces a greater good, but it could not be just if that alternative renders war disproportionate or unnecessary. Footnote 1. One final preliminary.
This article concerns objections to war from poverty, but one might wonder whether the arguments set forth have wider implications. If poverty can render war unjust, why not climate change, health care or education policy? My answer is that I am confident that other social issues could also provide objections to war, but proving this requires further work. The argument that poverty can render war disproportionate proceeds from the recognition of a problem concerning the proportionality condition.
To apply the condition, we must make a proportionality calculation comparing the costs and benefits of war. But which costs warrant inclusion? Only the direct costs of war the death and destruction wrought by military action or opportunity costs as well the costs of a failure to do what could be done in the absence of war? Standardly, only direct costs are counted, but this can yield absurd results. Consider the following example. State A is facing two crises in quick succession.
First, the crops failed. To avert famine, the government needs to import food at significant expense. The ministers inform her that the military is in bad repair, relying on outdated equipment. A war could be won but would drag on, killing one thousand State A citizens. Call this proposed war the Long War. The Long War, let us assume, is disproportionate. Reclaiming the territory is not worth a thousand lives. But the ministers have an alternative plan.
They propose refitting the military with fancy new equipment. Once refitted, the military could recover the territory swiftly, with minimal casualties. Call this proposed war the Short War. The Short War has a downside. Refitting the military will be expensive; so expensive, in fact, it will leave State A without funds to avert famine.
A million people will starve. It seems clear that if the Long War is disproportionate, so is the Short War. The proportionality condition is there to prevent wars yielding excessive costs. If a thousand deaths are excessive, a million certainly are. Opportunity costs should sometimes be included in a proportionality calculation. Should they always? Consider another example. Like State A, State B has lost territory to an invader.
State B, however, is wealthy. But here is an alternative plan: rather than wage war it could use the funds to buy everyone in the world a new TV.
If State B wages war to reclaim its territory, the never gifted TVs represent an opportunity cost of a kind. Yet this opportunity cost should not be included in a proportionality calculation.
Why not? The answer can be found in the first anti-utilitarian idea considered above: the distinction between duty and supererogation. Since State B is not obliged to buy everyone a new TV, that opportunity cost should not count as a cost of war.
We can see then that only some opportunity costs should be included in a proportionality calculation and we have a way to determine which. An opportunity cost should be included when it represents a duty violation Mellow Why is it duty that matters here?
Because unjust wars are not merely suboptimal; they are un just. They violate moral requirements. A failure to do what is supererogatory violates no moral requirements.
Consider another route to the same point. Distributive justice tells us what, morally speaking, belongs to whom. No doubt, it can sometimes be permissible to take what belongs to others, but the costs of doing so must be included in a proportionality calculation. The opportunity costs of war to those denied their entitlements are as real and important as the direct costs wrought by bullets and bombs. The warring state cannot fulfil its duty to alleviate poverty if it wages war at least not without violating some further duty.
The costs of failing to fulfil the duty to alleviate poverty are so great that, when added to the direct costs, they outweigh the benefits of waging war. A comment on each condition. Condition 1 demonstrates the difference between the proportionality argument and the utility maximising argument. The proportionality argument does not assume that states must pursue the greatest good, but merely that states have a duty to alleviate poverty.
The proportionality argument thus leaves space for supererogation. That states do have duties to alleviate poverty is the predominant view in the distributive justice literature. Disagreement arises as to how demanding the duty is. On some accounts, it is highly demanding Singer ; Unger ; on other accounts, only moderately so Cullity ; Miller ; Murphy I shall assume here that state do have duties to alleviate poverty and will briefly defend this view in Sect.
On the question of demandingness, I remain neutral between the rival accounts. It is worth noting that the duty to alleviate poverty is not necessarily the same as a duty to send aid. Two points brings this out. First, there are other, possibly more effective, means to reduce global poverty, such as changing international rules governing trade, investment and migration or assisting domestic reforms Moyo ; Risse ; Wenar ; Easterly Second, global poverty is not our only focus.
States have duties to alleviate poverty at home as well as abroad. Indeed, it might be that the former takes priority. Whatever methods we adopt and whatever our focus, alleviating poverty is likely to carry costs. Changing rules and restructuring institutions is costly for those states and individuals who benefit from the status quo. Where there are costs, it is possible that funding poverty alleviation will prove incompatible with waging war. Footnote 2.
To count, the two must be incompatible. But when are the two incompatible? It might be thought that incompatibility only arises if we interpret the duty to alleviate poverty as highly demanding.
If we interpret the duty as moderately demanding, then one might think that states can do both. Section 4 demonstrates that this is not necessarily the case.
A state does nothing wrong in failing to alleviate poverty if some greater good is thereby achieved. But how should the benefits of war be weighed against the costs of unalleviated poverty? Proportionality calculations are difficult irrespective of whether one includes the costs of unalleviated poverty among the costs of war.
One central problem is determining how factors of different kinds should be weighed against one another. For instance, if the defence of territory counts for something, how much does it count against the death and destruction wrought by war?
This article is silent on such issues not because they are unimportant—they are crucial—but because they are not unique to the topic raised here. What we need to consider is whether there is any reason to weigh the same type of benefit or cost differently depending on whether it is generated by war or poverty alleviation.
I shall take as my example the benefit of saving lives. Human lives might not be the only thing worth caring about, but, clearly, they are of great importance. Suppose a war saves lives by, say, preventing terrorism or ending despotism.
How should those lives be weighed against lives lost due to unalleviated poverty? A straightforward answer is one-for-one. Since alleviating poverty is typically more cost-effective at saving lives than waging wars, this answer makes it more likely that war will prove disproportionate. But is this answer right? Some might argue that lives saved by war should be awarded additional weight since war prevents intentional harm rather than harms that are natural or unintentional.
Such an argument appeals to at least one of two moral doctrines: the doctrine of doing and allowing DDA and the doctrine of double effect DDE. DDA draws a distinction between doing harming and merely allowing harm to occur, deeming it worse to do harm. DDE draws a distinction between intentionally harming and merely harming as a side effect, deeming it worse to intentionally harm.
From DDA and DDE, one might seek to deduce the philosophical claim that it is more important to save people from intentional harm than natural misfortune or unintentional harm. This argument goes wrong in several places. The empirical claim is problematic.
While there is fierce disagreement among economists as to the causes of poverty, there is wide agreement that human injustices, such as violence, discrimination and misgovernment, play a crucial role Rodrik et al.
Poverty is a harm caused by humans, not a natural misfortune. The claim that it is an unintentional harm may seem more plausible, but even this does not always hold.
Sometimes people are poor because the powerful intended them to be so. In other cases, such as the US, minorities have been impoverished by a history of discrimination intended to keep them down.
The philosophical claim is also controversial. It is not obvious that we have greater reason to save people from intentional harm than natural misfortune or unintentional harm. Consider a case in which you can save people from an arson attack or a from a fire caused by lightning. It seems clear you should save the We might conclude from this, as several philosophers have, that the type of threat victims are subject to is an entirely irrelevant factor when deciding whom to rescue McMahan , 60—62; Singer ; Parfit , 46; Murphy , — Alternatively, we might conclude that threat-type is relevant but not especially important.
Perhaps we should always save the greater number but prioritise those threatened with intentional harm when the numbers are equal; save arson victims over natural fire victims, for instance Tadros , — It does not really matter which conclusion we draw. When it comes to proportionality, they deliver near identical results. These doctrines are primarily there to guide us in decisions over when we may permissibly harm. They do not have obvious implications for rescuers.
One can consistently hold that there is something especially wrong about harming and intentional harming, without believing that, in rescue cases, those who have been wronged in these ways should be prioritised over the victims of other misfortunes Murphy , — Let us turn to another reason to question a one-for-one trade-off between lives saved by war against lives lost due to unalleviated poverty. Some argue that states should be partial towards their own citizens. This view has implications for how we weigh lives saved by war against lives saved by poverty alleviation when the nationality of the victims differs.
It will not, however, always direct us to award lives saved by war greater weight. To see this, consider the four following choices a government may face:. Only in case 1 does the idea of partiality towards citizens direct us to award the lives saved by war greater weight than lives saved by poverty alleviation.
In cases 2 and 3 , there is no effect, and in case 4 , partiality would add additional weight to lives saved by poverty alleviation. This section has not sought to rule out the possibility that war could prove proportionate even if it saves fewer lives than it costs. Saving lives is not the only thing that matters. There could be other benefits of war that warrant inclusion within a proportionately calculation e. There are also, let us note, often other benefits of poverty alleviation e.
A full proportionality calculation would weigh all relevant benefits and costs. What this section has argued is that a given benefit, saving lives, is of equivalent importance whether it is achieved by poverty alleviation or by war.
This makes it more likely that the costs of unalleviated poverty will render war disproportionate. The idea that poverty can render war unjust has not been recognised by just war theorists. The theorists that have considered it have swiftly rejected it. McKim and McMahan come to a similar conclusion: for them the Gulf War would not have been rendered unjust even if aid would have saved more lives than the total population of Kuwait McMahan and McKim , Why do these theorists reject a poverty-based objection to war?
One reason seems to be a failure to take the idea of a duty to alleviate poverty seriously. These theorists seem to have assumed that a poverty-based objection must take the form of the utility maximizing argument I bracketed at the start Hurka , ; McMahan and McKim , That argument holds that states should always adopt the policy that produces the greater good. But as we have seen, the utility maximising argument is not the only relevant argument here.
The argument presented above, based on a duty to alleviate poverty, leaves space for supererogation. Why have just war theorists overlooked the idea of a duty to alleviate poverty? Do they reject it? Interestingly, the one philosopher that comes closest to making the proportionality argument, Mellow , — , does air skepticism. Mellow accepts that if a state has a duty to alleviate poverty and war prevents it from fulfilling that duty, then the costs of unalleviated poverty should be included within a proportionality calculation.
Spending decisions by political leaders are often rightly criticized, even on moral grounds, but it is generally accepted that a leader has broad discretion in spending public resources, and, in particular, does not generally violate her duties if she spends those resources in ways that do not maximize the benefit for the poor Mellow , Below, I shall explain why the view is misguided. First, let me query whether the view is even commonly held.
As I have noted, the view is not commonly held among theorists of distributive justice. But nor does it seem to be commonly held among the public. The evidence suggests that people do think that the government is obligated to take some action to alleviate poverty Miller , There is, however, a view that is commonly held that is suggested in the above quotation: the idea that a leader has political authority to decide how revenue is spent.
It is a question of authority whether a leader has the right to rule on a given issue, e. It is a question of distributive justice whether a leader has a duty to spend revenue in a particular way, e.
The two are distinct. A leader can have a right to rule and a duty to alleviate poverty. Authority does not then entail moral permissibility. A leader can make an authoritative decision to wage war and violate her duty to alleviate poverty.
Footnote 3. Mellow's argument against a duty to alleviate poverty fails. Perhaps this is unsurprising since, had it succeeded, a widely-held view about distributive justice would have been prone to easy refutation. So why then have just war theorists not taken the idea of a duty to alleviate poverty seriously? Perhaps the answer is that, for too long, the philosophical debate regarding justice in war took place in isolation from the philosophical debate regarding distributive justice.
Two literatures developed upon two related topics with little attempt at integration. This was surely a mistake. Footnote 4. While states have a duty to alleviate poverty, this duty could only render war disproportionate if waging war and fulfilling the duty were incompatible. Incompatibility is likely to arise if the duty to alleviate poverty is interpreted as highly demanding. If the duty to alleviate poverty requires a state to devote most of its resources to that end, then the state will struggle to find resources to wage war as well.
Many people, however, do not interpret the duty as this demanding. In their view, the duty to alleviate poverty only requires people to make a moderate sacrifice for others. This moderate duty to alleviate poverty could be fulfilled while leaving surplus revenue for other projects, such as waging war.
In this section, I will argue that, contrary to what one might initially expect, incompatibility can arise even if we interpret the duty to alleviate poverty as only moderately demanding. Footnote 5 Let us start by considering what I take to be the most plausible argument for a moderate duty. This argument holds that there are limits to the sacrifices people can be expected to make to help others. Each person has her own projects; her own life to lead.
We should not expect people to act as saints or heroes, surpassing ordinary levels of human generosity Wolf ; Scheffler ; Cullity ; Miller If individuals cannot be expected to make grave sacrifices to help others, individual taxpayers cannot be expected to make grave sacrifices to help the poor.
So clearly this argument, if accepted, would support the idea of a moderate duty to alleviate poverty. But notice that the argument applies generally, to all forms of altruism. People cannot be expected to make grave sacrifices for others by way of any altruistic activity, not just poverty alleviation. Another implication of the argument is that governments should not force people to make grave sacrifices to help others.
For if people cannot be expected to help others at a certain cost to themselves, it would seem wrong for a government to force them to provide this help Haydar ; Murphy , 82— On the moderate duty view then, governments are not only permitted but also required not to force their citizens to make grave sacrifices to help others.
Governments can tax citizens to enforce moderate duties, but they must stop there. Footnote 6. Now consider war. When states wage wars, taxpayers are forced to fund them. How can governments justify imposing these costs? Some wars are arguably in the interests of all taxpayers and can be justified as such. Many wars, however, require some or all taxpayers to make sacrifices to help others. If these wars can be justified at all, they are justified as a means to assist a different group of people to the taxpayers who pay for it.
The term should not mislead. An altruistic war is defined by the strongest justification for war not what motivates people to wage it. The leaders of a country may declare war for self-interested reasons, but still the war could be altruistic in the defined sense.
Wars of humanitarian intervention, such as Kosovo, Libya and the Ivory Coast, are perhaps the most obvious examples of altruistic wars. Less obvious examples are wars of national self-defence that, in actuality, only constitute a net-benefit for a minority of citizens. Suppose, for instance, that a state goes to war against terrorists targeting a subgroup of its citizens, such as an ethnic minority. The strongest justification for such a war is to defend the subgroup, not all taxpayers.
A slightly different example is a war like Afghanistan that aims to confront terrorists who do constitute a threat to all taxpayers but a threat so minimal that it seems unlikely that a self-interested taxpayer, who understood the risks, would voluntarily contribute.
Footnote 7. Let us now bring these points together. We have seen that the most plausible argument for a moderate duty to alleviate poverty implies that there are limits upon the level of altruistic sacrifice that governments can force taxpayers to make. We have also seen that when governments wage altruistic wars, they force some or all taxpayers to make altruistic sacrifices. From this, it is clear that a moderate duty to alleviate poverty can prove incompatible with war. If the argument for a moderate duty to alleviate poverty is right, the revenue that governments can justly collect for altruistic projects is limited.
Altruistic wars draw from this limited revenue. Waging altruistic wars consumes revenue that could be spent on poverty alleviation and since this is so, when we make a proportionality calculation, the costs of unalleviated poverty should be included among the costs of altruistic war. It might be objected that often when a government wages war, its citizens support it.
If the citizens support the war, the government cannot be said to be forcing them to make altruistic sacrifices. If there are limits to the revenue governments can force from taxpayers to fund altruistic purposes, such wars do not draw from it. Popular wars and a moderate duty to alleviate poverty are compatible. Two replies. First, even when a state does have the support of most of its citizens, there will always be dissenters.
These dissenters are forced to pay for a war they do not support. If there are limits to what states can force their citizens to do for others, then, by taxing dissenters to pay for an altruistic war, governments deplete the resources they may spend on poverty alleviation.
The existence of dissenting minorities shows that incompatibility remains. By a conditional duty to alleviate poverty, I mean a duty to alleviate poverty that is conditional on a willingness to make an altruistic sacrifice.
If citizens are willing to spend X dollars on an altruistic war, but spending X dollars alleviating poverty would produce a greater good, then citizens may have a conditional duty to alleviate poverty.
This is true even if the citizens have no duty to spend X dollars on either project were they unwilling to make an altruistic sacrifice. To understand this point, consider the following example. Suppose you are escaping from a burning building. While escaping, you encounter a baby and a caged parrot.
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