Abstract

In this article, part of a symposium devoted to Hennie Lötter’s Poverty, Ethics and Justice, my aims are threefold. First, I present a careful reading of Lötter’s original and compelling central conception of the nature of poverty as the inability to ‘obtain adequate economic resources….to maintain physical health and engage in social activities distinctive of human beings in their respective societies’. After motivating this view, particularly in comparison to other salient accounts of poverty, I, second, raise some objections to it, regarding relativistic implications that it has. Third, I propose another, more universalist conception of the nature of poverty, which is inspired by some of Lötter’s other remarks and which is all the stronger. According to this view, people are more poor, the less they can obtain adequate economic resources to pursue a wide array of finally valuable activities and states characteristic of human beings. I conclude by briefly pointing out how this view merits critical comparison with related views, such as Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach.