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States of Risk: Should Cosmopolitans Favor Their Compatriots?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Richard Vernon
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Abstract

Recent cosmopolitan thinking attempts to find a place for local (including national) attachment, but all of the proposals offered have been exposed to telling critique. There are objections to the claim that local obligations are only instances of cosmopolitan duty, and to the claim that we can give a moral justification to national societies as networks of mutual benefit. This article argues that it is not mutual benefit but mutual risk that grounds compatriot preference. While exposure to coercion as such does not track national boundaries, exposure to the risks of state abuse, political choice, and social conformity provide us with a reason to take our compatriots' interests seriously. The same argument, however, displays the limits of this reasoning, and also grounds a demanding obligation to aid other societies.

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Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , Winter 2007 , pp. 451 - 469
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2007

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References

Notes

1 Robert E. Goodin, “What Is So Special about Our Fellow-Countrymen?” Ethics 98, no. 4 (July 1988), pp. 663–86.

2 Andrew Mason, “Special Obligations to Compatriots,” Ethics 107, no. 3 (April 1997), pp. 427–47.

3 Christopher Wellman, “Relational Facts in Liberal Political Theory: Is There Magic in the Pronoun ‘My’?” Ethics 110, no. 3 (April 2000), pp. 537–62.

4 Richard W. Miller, “Cosmopolitan Respect and Patriotic Concern,” in Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, eds., The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 127–47.

5 Michael Blake, “Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 30, no. 3 (Summer 2001), pp. 257–96; Thomas Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, no. 2 (April 2005), pp. 113–47; and Andrea Sangiovanni, “Global Justice, Reciprocity, and the State,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 35, no. 1 (Winter 2007), pp. 3–39.

6 Daniel Weinstock speaks bluntly of the “failure” of arguments of this general type, in “National Partiality: Confronting the Intuitions,” Monist 82, no. 3 (1999), p. 517.

7 David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 64.

8 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” in Martha C. Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), pp. 21–29; and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).

9 Charles Beitz, “International Relations, Philosophy of,” in Edward Craig, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 4 (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 831.

10 David Miller, “Cosmopolitanism: A Critique,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5 (2002), pp. 80–85.

11 Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 97–110.

12 Goodin, “What Is So Special about Our Fellow-Countrymen?” pp. 679–83.

13 The classic recent statement of this distinction is Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 11–12.

14 Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 18.

15 Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances, pp. 100, 102–03, and 109.

16 For a fuller treatment of the ideas in this paragraph, see Richard Vernon, “Obligation by Association?” Political Studies (forthcoming).

17 Miller, On Nationality, pp. 62–64; and Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 171–72.

18 In addition to Singer's critique, see Jeffrey D. Sachs, “How Aid Can Work,” New York Review of Books 53 (December 21, 2006), p. 97.

19 Goodin, “What Is So Special about Our Fellow-Countrymen?” pp. 685–86.

20 For Wellman's critique of Mason, see his “Friends, Compatriots, and Special Political Obligation,” Political Theory 29 (2001), pp. 217–36. See notes 2 and 3 above for the articles commented on here.

21 Singer, One World, p. 175.

22 Of course, the analogy that Socrates draws here between family and state corresponds to one of the most contested claims in recent thought: see, e.g., Henry Shue, “Mediating Duties,” Ethics 98, no. 4 (July 1988), pp. 687–704; and Singer, One World, pp. 154–68.

23 See, e.g., Goodin, “What Is So Special about Our Fellow-Countrymen?” pp. 675–78. The critique is also central to Martha Nussbaum's Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2006).

24 Sangiovanni, “Global Justice, Reciprocity, and the State,” p. 19.

25 See Kok-Chor Tan, “Patriotic Obligations,” Monist 86, no. 3 (2003), pp. 434–53; and Richard J. Arneson, “Do Patriotic Ties Limit Global Justice Duties?” Journal of Ethics 9 (2005), pp. 127–50.

26 The debate is begun by Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 136–43.

27 Thomas Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism: A Defence,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5, no. 3 (2002), pp. 86–91. The issue of negative duties is discussed in a companion article to this, “A Global Harm Principle?”

28 Blake, “Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy,” p. 260.

29 Ibid., pp. 264–65.

30 Arneson, “Do Patriotic Ties Limit Global Justice Duties?”

31 Blake, “Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy,” p. 293.

32 For this objection, see Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel, “Extra Rempublicam Nulla Justitia?” Philosophy and Public Affairs 34 (2006), p. 167.

33 Sangiovanni, “Global Justice, Reciprocity, and the State,” pp. 10–14.

34 Cohen and Sabel, “Extra Rempublicam Nulla Justitia?” pp. 149–53.

35 Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice,” p. 133.

36 Ibid., p. 115.

37 The number of victims of their own governments exceeds the number of those killed by enemy action by a factor of more than four. See R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1994).

38 David Luban, “A Theory of Crimes Against Humanity,” Yale Journal of International Law 29, no. 1 (2004), p. 117. For a similar view, see Richard Vernon, “What Is Crime Against Humanity?” Journal of Political Philosophy 10 (2002), pp. 231–49.

39 Luban, “A Theory of Crimes Against Humanity,” p. 138. It should be noted that the argument from state abuse is mentioned, though not developed, by Appiah in “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” p. 28: “States matter because they are both necessary to so many human purposes and because they have so great a potential for abuse” (emphasis added).

40 See Geoffrey Garrett, Partisan Politics in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

41 Thomas Scanlon, “The Difficulty of Tolerance,” in David Heyd, ed., Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 226–39.

42 As an anonymous reader points out, it also needs a qualification. If political societies ceased to be distinctive in the ways enumerated here, then the argument for compatriot preference would fail. I certainly accept this point.

43 Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

44 Amy Chua, World on Fire (New York: Doubleday, 2003).

45 Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).

46 L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964 [orig. pub. 1911]). See also the influential work of T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965).

47 This thought is expanded in Richard Vernon, “Contractualism and Global Justice: The Iteration Proviso,” Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 19, no. 2 (2006), pp. 345–56.