Abstract
Consumption and material wealth are important values for most people living in affluent societies. Unless we opt for an ascetic life, caring about material goods is rather inescapable; we all need to consume at least basic goods like food and shelter, and most of us desire to have at least some material belongings. This said, there seems to be nothing wrong with this state of affairs, it is just how things are. But there are two facts that turn the whole issue of consumption and possession into a moral question of great importance. One major issue is that there are many people in the world who are so very poor compared to the people living in affluent societies. That in one part of the world people are struggling for survival while in another people dwell in the palaces of consumption is a major question of global justice, a question political philosophy is putting more and more attention to, and rightfully so (Pogge 2001, 2007), but this is not the question we are concerned with in this paper. We want to look at the second issue, which is the wealth differences within affluent societies and the high income gaps there, a moral problem totally different from the global situation.
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Notes
- 1.
It is, of course, possible that someone decides freely to make a living by collecting returnable bottles and even accept that this means to live in relative poverty. But here, like with all other important goods, it should be clear that it is before all else the involuntary deprivation that is morally problematic.
- 2.
This is not to imply that there is some kind of strange collective entity that has a value in itself, something like a nation. A society identical with a state should rather be understood in the terms of an encompassing group as Margalit and Raz (1990) phrase it. It is a constructed group with no direct value of its own, but, nonetheless, the identity of the individual members is dependent on it, which makes the group very valuable in an instrumental way.
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Müller, J., Neuhäuser, C. (2011). Relative Poverty. In: Kaufmann, P., Kuch, H., Neuhaeuser, C., Webster, E. (eds) Humiliation, Degradation, Dehumanization. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9661-6_12
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