Political Theory of Global Justice

A Cosmopolitan Case for the World State

Luis Cabrera

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415700221
• eBook ISBN: 9781135996390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Could global government be the answer to global poverty and starvation?Cosmopolitan thinkers challenge the widely held belief that we owe more to our co-citizens than to those in other countries. This book offers a moral argument for world government, claiming that not only do we have strong obligations to people elsewhere, but that accountable integration among nation-states will help ensure that all persons can lead a decent life.Cabrera considers both the views of those political philosophers who say we have much stronger obligations to help our co-citizens than foreigners and those cosmopolitans who say our duties are equally strong to each but resist restructuring.

1 Priorities

I am floored when I read about the millions that our government proposes to spend rebuilding Afghanistan. As long as one American child goes to bed hungry, we should not give a dime overseas. As long as one American is out of a job, not one dime should be sent overseas. As long as one American child can’t read, the money should be invested here. As long as one senior can’t pay for medication, not one dollar should leave our shores. If we can’t care for our own, we can’t care very much, can we?¹

Introduction

Finding nation-states on a map is diverting child’s play, a memory game using the brightly colored, oddly shaped pieces of the global political puzzle. Finding them on photos shot from satellites or space capsules is another matter entirely.² A river or peninsula may mark the familiar boundary, but the illusion of state borders as immutable geographic features is impossible to sustain. The same holds true on the surface of the earth, where, in the absence of fences topped with barbed wire and away from checkpoint gates, nothing much distinguishes states from one another.³ Yet, for most people, state boundaries have strong moral significance. A natural disaster striking one part of the country may be viewed by unafflicted compatriots, however distant, as the highest of emergencies, requiring the immediate transfer of resources to the stricken area. Conversely, the same disaster striking a nearby group across a national border likely will be viewed as a matter for beneficent action, for transfer of the resources that can be spared or the charitable contributions collected after compatriots have been rescued from dire straits. The same generally holds for longer-term issues of deprivation and need. Foreign poverty, while acknowledged as morally significant, is viewed as appropriately addressed only after needs closer to home have been met.

Some political theorists accept this “common-sense” view and assert that humans simply are ethical particularists. We are born into distinct communities that nurture us and shape our moral understandings in unique ways. The theorist’s task, they say, is to account for the common-sense view and ground its requirements in rigorous argument.⁴ Cosmopolitan theorists are more skeptical of the view that compatriots deserve strong priority, including in distributions of resources and opportunities. They reject common-sense justifications and maintain that the sentiments which underlie priority to compatriots should be as open to question as envy or any other ostensibly ineradicable human sentiment.⁵ Subsequent chapters will explore the cosmopolitan approach, which at root views individuals, not communities or nation-states, as the primary unit of moral concern. This chapter explores some of the most important or prominent defenses of the common-sense view for compatriot priority. Three broad approaches are considered, and the most prominent or formidable arguments are analyzed within each approach. As will be shown, each argument encounters significant difficulties defending compatriot priority on its own terms, that is, without being pitted against any specific positive argument for a more cosmopolitan approach.

The constitutive approach

We can begin by considering the constitutive approach to grounding compatriot priority. Proponents of this approach argue that, since we are partially constituted by our communities, they are the natural focus of our concern and obligations. It is incoherent, they contend, to attempt to be a true ethical universalist, because that would require construction of a person without roots or moral center. Moralities take shape within communities, among individuals who are partially constituted by those communities. Individuals both naturally and rightly give priority to others who are similarly constituted.

The constitutive approach falls within the broad rubric of communitarianism, which can be characterized as an orientation to social theory that places primary emphasis on communal obligations rather than individual rights.⁶ The focus here is on what will be called the complex-constitutive approach, as distinguished from the simple constitutive approach. The simple approach is represented in recent works by Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor, among others.⁷ It is concerned almost exclusively with how shared understandings arise within a community and give individuals their moral framework. The content of the shared understandings is not generally at issue. The simple approach has been criticized for holding an unrealistically homogenous and static view of community, as well as for failing to allow for any critical purchase within communities. In other words, by holding a rigid view of shared understandings and mostly failing to consider how race, class, gender and other markers can figure in oppression of individuals inside constitutive communities, the simple constitutivist ignores important moral questions.

The complex-constitutive approach, by contrast, runs in a broadly contractarian direction. Complex constitutivists attempt to show how understandings may evolve so as to make communities more inclusive of women, minorities and other historically oppressed or excluded groups. The variant appears in its clearest and perhaps most contractarian form in Michael Walzer’s work, but separate works by Yael Tamir and others add nuances.⁸ In the complex-constitutive approach, community is foregrounded as a human need. For Walzer, community means primarily culture, religion and politics. “It is only under the aegis of these three that all the other things we need become socially recognized needs, take on historical and determinate form.”⁹ Individuals join under common political institutions to determine which goods should be provided as part of a common life with those who share the moral understandings of that life. As moral understandings are shaped within communities, so are understandings about the appropriate kinds of resources that should be subject to distribution, the levels of distribution and the objects to which distributions should be directed, for example, to public baths rather than public education in Attic Greece.¹⁰ Since co-citizens have been shaped by the same moral understandings, in general, they can understand only with one another how distributions are to be accomplished and arranged. Thus, they owe distributive obligations to compatriots that they do not owe to noncompatriots.

Theorists within the complex-constitutive approach are generally explicit that the contract meant is not the Hobbesian version of autonomous rights holders joining to create a new community de novo.

Over a long period of time, shared experiences and cooperative activity of many different kinds shape a common life. “Contract” is a metaphor for a process of association and mutuality, the ongoing character of which the state claims to protect against external encroachment.

Thus, the concern is not only to explore how specific moral understandings arise within specific communities, but how those understandings may evolve over time, perhaps becoming more inclusive and expressing a more thoroughly shared identity.

To gain a better sense of the complex-constitutive approach, it will be useful here to distinguish it from two other prominent approaches with which it shares a family resemblance. Both of these approaches to compatriot priority also will serve as critical reference points for other arguments throughout this book. The first is mutual benefit. Mutual benefit arguments defend priority to compatriots on grounds that compatriots continually are providing benefits to one another—contributing to the social product—and can rightfully expect that they will receive priority over non-compatriots in distributions. The complex-constitutive approach similarly emphasizes joint production of the social product to be distributed, but it does not focus on benefits given or received. Thus, it avoids the common asymmetry problem in mutual-benefit arguments, which have difficulty showing why priority should be given to members who are less able or even unable to contribute. In other words, the mutual-benefit argument presumes a symmetry in contributions given and benefits received by compatriots that does not generally exist. Ill compatriots, those who are lesser abled or otherwise restricted can introduce asymmetry in one direction. Guest workers, undocumented immigrants and other resident noncompatriots, who may contribute greatly to the social product but receive less than citizens in distributions, can introduce asymmetry in another direction. Arguments made in the complex-constitutivist approach do not impose such a symmetry requirement. They emphasize the shared understandings that lead to a specific distribution of the social product, rather than the balance of benefits given and received.

The second approach, which I will call assigned responsibility, also bears a surface resemblance to the complex-constitutive approach. Assigned responsibility, as conceived by Robert Goodin,¹² refers to conditions under which priority to compatriots might be defensible. Goodin argues that, just as lifeguards are assigned life-saving responsibility on a particular stretch of beach to eliminate confusion and promote safety, a system of states charged with looking after their own peoples also could be efficient and fair. Priority to compatriots would be justified on grounds that it would be the most efficient means of discharging what are described as our general distributive obligations to all of humanity. Compatriots would justifiably give one another priority in distributions, under the assumption that citizens of other states would be doing the same. However, Goodin also argues that giving priority to compatriots would be defensible only if each state had sufficient resources to care for its charges. If this were not the case, significant transfers would be required from richer to poorer states. Priority to compatriots would not be justified until all states were roughly equal in their ability to carry out their assigned responsibilities. As Goodin notes, states actually are vastly unequal in their abilities to protect and promote the interests of those living within their borders. But for the complex constitutivist, inequality between states is mostly beside the point. The key claim in that approach is that we can decide on the appropriate distribution of the social product only with those who share our moral understandings, those with whom we have built a common life. We owe priority to compatriots in distributions because they are the ones who understand with us those things that must be prioritized, regardless of the total set of resources commanded by our compatriot set or how it compares to the resource endowments of other sets.

The complex-constitutivist approach is on the whole highly nuanced and has produced a number of edifying arguments. However, it is vulnerable to two important objections. The first will be called the poor fit objection. It is concerned with the tendency of complex constitutivists to collapse distinctions between states and the nations and other communal groupings found within and across their boundaries. This collapsing elides important questions about whether the shared understandings that are said to be so crucial to setting distributive priorities are indeed shared. The second general objection will be called undercutting. It focuses on how the contractarian emphasis in the complex-constitutive approach actually serves to undercut claims about the distinctiveness of different communities, and thus weakens the claim that compatriots can decide distributive issues only with one another.

The poor fit objection

It is highly problematic, according to the poor fit objection, to speak of shared understandings determining distributions among compatriots when states often contain a number of disparate communities with widely diverging understandings on central common issues.¹³ Not only do understandings differ among ethnic or national groups bound together in the processes of state building, but class, ideological and other sharp differences within states make it difficult to sustain the claim that compatriots can understand only with each other the distributive priorities that should be set.

The constitutivist response is that outsiders should not think that they can easily identify a lack of shared understandings among the citizens of a state, because they do not share the deep historical experience of having been constituted by that state. Outsiders “don’t know enough about its history, and they have no direct experience and can form no concrete judgments of the conflicts and harmonies, the historical choices and cultural affinities, the loyalties and resentments that underlie it.”¹⁴ Thus, outsiders should not presume to intervene in the domestic affairs of most states.¹⁵ Where distributions are concerned, outsiders would be obliged by their own ignorance to presume that states do contain distinct communities of shared understandings, and that the individuals shaped morally by those communities are the only ones with an appropriate understanding of how the resources produced by their community should be distributed.

However, there are numerous instances where the poor fit is not so hard to see.¹⁶ In the case of the constitutionally multinational state, which contains two or several formally recognized, distinct historical communities, a seamless fit between nation and state is not presumed at all. Likewise, some intra-state groups are recognized as distinct through the granting of some autonomy to their regions. Thus, their members are deciding often with their sub-national group what is to be prioritized and to whom certain distributions should be restricted according to their presumably distinct shared understandings. In short, priority to compatriots—the state’s full citizenry—cannot be justified on constitutive grounds if the set of compatriots and the set of those who are partially constituted by shared moral understandings is not co-extensive.

Anticipating or responding to the poor fit objection pushes some constitutivists one step farther, toward the one-nation, one-state ideal.¹⁷ Walzer, Tamir and David Miller are perhaps the clearest proponents of schemes that would grant significant political control to each distinct national group, including in current multinational states. Each theorist acknowledges the difficulties in trying to ensure that every distinct nation, however small, receives its own sovereign state. For example, the United States contains hundreds of Native American tribes that are formally recognized as distinct national groups. Walzer and Tamir propose to address the difficulty through the devolution of sovereignty to smaller national units, combined with supranational affiliation and organization of states, in schemes resembling the evolving shape of the European Union. Thus, if it were not possible to give every nation a discrete sovereign state, it would be possible to establish a system guided by the principle that “all nations are entitled to a public sphere in which they constitute the majority.”¹⁸ Walzer terms the creation of such public spheres the completion of the states system.¹⁹ It would give many more distinct nations an arena within which their distinctive way of life would be protected and in which they could decide on appropriate objects and levels of redistribution.

I will emphasize here that, in advocating devolution, the complex-constitutive approach is no longer arguing for compatriot priority. Priority to compatriots has become priority to co-nationals. With that in mind, we may ask where devolution halts. Do shared understandings distinct enough to merit the restriction of distributions begin and end with national groups, or are there still smaller groups that should be taken into account? In other words, can even the highly elaborated and prescriptive devolutionary response overcome the poor fit objection? There are reasons to be skeptical. First, groups within nations may speak a different variant of the national language, follow a different religion, have a distinct ethnicity or history.²⁰ Many differences can be traced to the bloodier aspects of nation-building.²¹ The excluded or oppressed groups of the past receive relatively little consideration in the constitutive approach.²² But still they remain, partially absorbed into larger groups, scattered or surviving in pockets, complicating the question of shared understandings in a given geographic region. We may point to indigenous groups throughout the Americas, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia and elsewhere; Jews, the Rom and others in Europe, Christians in many Muslim states.²³

Other complications for the move to a one-nation, one-state model include distinctions among co-nationals that do not necessarily spring from historical processes of state-building. Divisions of class, geography and other factors can account for significant differences in the way individuals are constituted, yet these are discounted in constitutivist arguments for compatriot priority. Brian Walker, for example, has argued persuasively that in Western liberal democracies, gays and lesbians should qualify as nations under most current definitions:

The stages which the gay movement has gone through on its way to national consciousness match up, step for step, with the developmental stages we k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the Jericho road
• 1 Priorities
• 2 Consequences
• 3 Moral reciprocity and self-development rights
• 4 The cosmopolitan imperative
• 5 Democratic distance
• 6 Citizenship, armed tyranny and the democratic peace
• 7 Possibilities
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index