Aristotle's Responsibility To Eradicate Poverty

“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal”, this is a popular epigram from the famous philosopher Aristotle derived from his work Politics, where he writes "For all men lay hold on justice of some sort, but they only advance to a certain point, and do not express the principle of absolute justice in its entirety. For instance, it is thought that justice is equality, and so it is, though not for everybody but only for those who are equals; and it is thought that inequality is just, for so indeed it is, though not for everybody, but for those who are unequal”. In his own time Aristotle defended unequal merit and the existence of hierarchical relationships and indeed if we look at the state of the world today, it seems

Two opposing viewpoints can be found in this debate on who’s responsibility it is to eradicate poverty, those who believe it is up to each individual state’s responsibility to eradicate poverty and the cosmopolitan approach that advocates for placing responsibility on the shoulders of the rich and powerful. I will argue for the cosmopolitan approach as it is evident the secular statist approach has thus failed to amass any significant progress. The cosmopolitan position calls for the principles of distributive justice to be applied on the global scale because people as individuals, rather than states are morally primary. The ideals of the Cosmopolitan position can be traced back most recently to John Rawls “A theory of Justice” where his work resuscitated the social contract tradition and argued about the injustices of resource inequality. He introduce the basic principles of justice, which he argues ought to be the principles of justice governing the basic structure of a society. These principles set forth what fairness should be in relation to people and rules pertaining to them in what he calls the “Original Position”. The “Original Position” is situation where individuals come together to formulate the basic principles of justice in order to obtain “Primary Goods” which are, rights and liberties and access to positions, this is all done behind “veil of ignorance” which is the state of not knowing any characteristic about themselves, like age, race, religions, class, etc. but they do have general information like that different races, jobs, religions, etc. exist just don’t know if they fall under any of those categories. According to this “original position”, individuals thus do not want to take too many risks, as they know that