Duty of assistance and models of responsibility

Resumo

Our aim in this paper is to discuss the problem of overdemandingness of assistance-based models of responsibility in the discussion of world poverty. We shall take Singer’s approach as paradigmatic and argue that its overdemandingness creates an impasse in the theoretical discussion, which can only be solved by combining more models of responsibility, e.g., the causal model. This involves denying one of Singer’s main methodological presuppositions: the separation between factual and normative aspects in his argument. However, our strategy still presupposes a background of assistance-based models, which is only to be specified by other models. With this we will show that the fact Singer’s approach is often criticized as overdemanding is not a matter of the content of the duty it imposes. Rather it is a matter of the moral force of the rationale provided by it.