Some world leaders are heartless people

Nov 10, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Why my dad got seven of us when he could not even feed four children is a mystery that used to obsess me until I got over it partly because of sociology textbooks I read. I loved him dearly, but there was a Freudian anger I carried in me when he was alive because our poverty was too extreme.
I felt I didn’t deserve to be so poor, wanting some (not all) basic things, like food and clothing, that all humans should have but were denied to me even in the dying stage of my teenage years. Maybe he should not have brought me into the world. It is a crazy thing a human being could do – bring children on earth to live in poverty. Society should be harsh on them. Why bring children that you know will end up starving in the world?
At the bottom of it all is moral responsibility. In the past, our elders excused this kind of behaviour by pointing to lack of education and birth control. It is much more than that. Maybe we can use the theory of the great English philosopher David Hume on moral responsibility, to disagree especially in situations where world leaders who beg their citizens to vote for them, but when they get in they keep their citizens in a ravished state of homelessness and starvation.
David Hume’s theory of moral responsibility is one of the most complex and controversial approaches to knowledge in the history of human thought. But Hume, like Nietzsche, Hobbes and Plato, is greatly misunderstood. When dissected carefully, Hume’s adumbration of moral responsibility offers the best explanation as to why we pursue obligations.
I will use Hume’s philosophy to attempt to prove that China, India and Brazil have deeply flawed leadership in which the word “horrible” could be used to describe the politics of these governments. Chinese rulers of course don’t beg for votes so they can be excused.
In his book, Treatise of Human Nature, Hume pontificated on what is moral responsibility and concluded that the only actions for which people are ethically responsible are those that inhere in their characters and originate from their dispositions.
Hume accepts that such actions relate to agents to qualify them for positive or negative evaluation.
For Hume, an action is believed to bear such a relation to an agent when it is intentional and deliberate. To quote him, “By the intention we judge of the action, and according as that is good or bad, they become the causes of love or hatred (taken from the Oxford Univ. Press,1978 edition of Hume’s book, p 411 – for one of the best elucidations of what Hume meant by the nature of moral responsibility see; Clarence Shole Johnson, “Hume’s Theory of Moral Responsibility: Some Unresolved Areas,” in DIALOGUE: Canadian Philosophical Review, Vol xxxi, No.1, Winter 1992).
Hume can be potently applied to how the Indians, Brazilians and Chinese treat their people. BBC journalist, Yogita Lamaye, writing on the newly launched Indian space project cynically remarked; “But when a country is home to millions of people in extreme poverty, why do they feel the need to explore other worlds.” (source- BBC Business, online edition, Nov 3, 2013).  Why does India want to spend that humongous amount on space exploration when such knowledge can be obtained from American, Russian and European research?
Why not spend that money on taking people out of poverty whose votes you begged for?
There is no other word to describe what Brazil is doing but “insanity.” Brazil is hosting the next football World Cup and summer Olympics.  I read where Russia may have to spend more than US$22 billion on the World Cup in 2018 (source -www.pravda.ru – aug 22, 2013) Qatar will spend US$200 billion (source- www.sportsgrid, july 9, 2013) for the event in 2022.
Think then of the unspeakable sum Brazil will have to fork out for the Cup and the Olympics.
Can Brazil afford it? No, it cannot, by any stretch of the imagination. Only if it is alright to keep the dozens and dozens of millions of Brazilians that live in excruciating poverty.
Grant Shapps, the Chairman of the ruling Conservative Party in the UK says that over fifty million Brazilians live in shanty towns (source – Daily Mail and Guardian, online editions, September 11, 2013).
How can any nation like Brazil spend such incredible billions of American dollars on two global sporting events while poverty is so widespread?
Finally, China. In a country where people work for virtually slave wages, China’s aid and investment spread around the world is in the vicinity of the trillions. China must have the worst income inequality in the world. I guess the great philosopher Arthur Koester was right. Humans are inherently flawed.

 

 

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