The Honors College’s star lecture series for this year is all about exploring issues around poverty. On Tuesday, philosophy professor Peter Higgins spoke in the Student Center Ballroom about the philosophy side of poverty. The name of the lecture was “Charity, Beneficence, or Justice?” Higgins did a lecture for last year’s star lecture series and came back this year by popular demand.
Higgins engaged the audience full of mostly Honors students in some thought experiments. The experiments portrayed some examples of moral dilemmas. Higgins made it clear in the beginning that he would talk about some dreary stuff and bring up very depressing statistics.
“If you leave the room without feeling depressed, there might be something wrong with you,” he said.
Some statistics that he presented produced quite a reaction from the audience. Some statistics were more memorable than others. One student thought it was unbelievable that the number of people who die from poverty-related causes every seven months are equivalent to the amount that died in the Nazi death camps.
“I thought it was eye opening when he mentioned that,” said Becca White, EMU freshman. “The Holocaust is seen as such a big event. This proves that poverty should be treated with intentness and looked at more closely.”
Higgins also highlighted facts that dealt with racial and gender inequality. He said that most poor countries are in South Asia, Africa and East Asia. He also said none of these countries had any white people in them and that 70 percent of poor people are women.
“It was one if my favorite lectures,” said Tayler Murphy, EMU freshman. “It was interesting that 40 percent of people live in severe poverty globally and live on two dollars a day. And 97 percent of poor people in America have colored TV.”
He said economic inequality between the rich and poor has increased over the centuries. Also, poverty is the indirect cause of 50,000 deaths a day.
“I thought the lecture was interesting because he brought up a lot of point that I never thought about before like how overpopulation is one of the biggest reasons why poverty exists,” Wright said.
“We have to realize how much we are connected to suffering around the world and it’s not just that there are poor people we can help, but that our wealth can impoverish other people as well,” Higgins said. “We must be critical of institutions of society and how they contribute to poverty of other people.”
