On Helping One’s Neighbor: Severe Poverty and the Religious Ethics of Obligation by Bharat Ranganathan

Severe poverty is arguably the most pervasive yet overlooked form of contemporary violence. The nearly one billion people who live under conditions of severe poverty are subject to widespread exploitation, chronic malnutrition, and lack of access to safe water, sanitation, adequate shelter, and basic preventive healthcare. For religious ethicists, severe poverty raises several pressing moral questions: what sorts of obligations (if any) do affluent people have to severely poor people? On which terms? And to what extent? Drawing from religious ethics and moral and political philosophy, Bharat Ranganathan’s On Helping One’s Neighbor answers these questions, arguing that affluent people have demanding institutional and interpersonal obligations to severely poor people. This Roundtable Session brings together scholars from across the methodological spectrum whose work focuses on different dimensions of human rights and religious ethics to assess Ranganathan’s argument and the contributions religious ethics makes to debates about severe poverty.