Pilares

Can there be a conflict between the duties we have towards non-compatriots on the internationalist account, and those shared between citizens? Can a developed country have competing duties of justice towards the absolute poor non-compatriots in the developing world and the relatively poor members of their own societies? And if so, how can that tension be resolved? These questions occupy surprisingly little space in the existing literature, which to my mind constitutes a significant oversight.

The answer generally seems to be that there is very little conflict.

“Well-ordered peoples have a duty to assist burdened societies,” says

Rawls, and that duty comes before any duties to their own citizens.¹ Blake asks what would make special responsiveness to the needs of one’s fellow citizens morally acceptable and compatible with equal respect for all individuals, and answers that you must ensure that all persons are able to lead a worthwhile life before special attention to compatriots is justified.

While on the internationalist account, it is compatible with equal moral concern for all persons to give special attention to compatriots, this is only true if the country can show that it does so as part of a moral system that preserves the basic rights of everyone, citizen and foreigner alike.² Risse goes further, and claims that the principles of justice under which the distribution of goods and rights take place are only valid if everyone has access to enough of them to lead a minimally decent life.³ Conversely, then, where they do not, the global order would be seriously flawed.⁴ (Of course, we also saw in the previous chapter how some rights apply globally regardless of the wealth of the rights-holder, in line with Risse’s principle of common ownership.)

So it looks like there is no conflict, but a clear lexical ordering of duties. It is only after we have properly dealt with the duties of justice we have towards people on account of our shared humanity that we can justifiably give preference to our own citizens. This, of course, is a strong

1 Rawls, LP, 106. His italics.

2 Blake, Justice and FP, 115.

3 Risse, On Global Justice, 212.

4 For Risse, however, you cannot evaluate distributive outcomes independently of the their origins. Whereas, for instance, Pogge (“Real World Justice,” The Journal of Ethics 9, no. 1–2 (2005): 29–53) holds the global order to blame for the abject poverty of millions in the world, Risse credits it with bringing global poverty down from 75% in 1820 to 25% in 2005 (Mathias Risse, “How Does the Global Order Harm the Poor?,”

Philosophy & Public Affairs 33, no. 4 (2005): 369). The fact of continued abject poverty would not in itself, therefore, be enough to render the global order unjust. I discuss this objection in much greater detail in Chapter 7.

motivating factor behind limiting the duties we have towards non-compatriots, along with the practice-dependent account of human rights we saw in the previous chapter.

Of course, even if internationalists are right that international justice claims must have a “core of inviolability”, to borrow Nagel’s phrase,⁵ which places a strict limit on what can count, it is a long stretch to then argue that anything goes once the strict requirements of justice have been fulfilled. Indeed, internationalists will argue that they do, in fact, show an adequate concern for non-citizens both in burdened and well-ordered societies. To Blake, the international sphere is properly understood as a second-order site of justice. This has some implications for the duties countries have towards each other. Domestic justice is complete, he says, because individuals do not, within certain parameters (the law and some moral principles), have a responsibility to worry about the wider consequences of their actions. They may reasonably expect their domestic political structure to be able to protect the rights and interest of their fellow citizens. The international system, on the other hand, has no such political structure. Although international regulatory institutions exist, they do not have anywhere near the power to ensure equitable outcomes irrespective of individual state behaviour. International justice, therefore, is incomplete. The upshot is that each country has a duty not just to uphold the rules and regulations of international trade, but to be aware of the wider effects of their foreign policy decisions.⁶ This is because, Blake argues, all individuals have a right to live under institutions

5 Nagel, “Personal Rights,” 93.

6 Blake, Justice and FP, 111–112.

and circumstances that ensure their equal status. Any state that claims to uphold the moral equality of everyone must make sure they “are not causally complicit in sustaining those circumstances and institutional forms that deny autonomy to individual persons.”⁷

Richard Miller endorses a similar view, arguing that, for instance, global organisations such as the World Trade Organization, with the backing from the US, are able to use the threat of power and aggression to get their way, even as that power often does not actually need to be put to use. Poorer or smaller countries without the same clout find themselves with little choice but to acquiesce to whatever is decided.⁸ This coercion would not be justified to the citizens of those states, and is therefore morally deeply troubling. The implications of this kind of power is something I discuss in detail in Chapter 7, but for now it is worth briefly mentioning to put the next sections into context.

These authors nonetheless share an important assumption implicit in their argument. Your restrictions on legitimate foreign policy face a considerable drop as soon as you are reasonably sure that the subject of your foreign policy will not fall below the very low threshold for meeting the basic needs of an autonomous people I outlined in Chapter 3. Despite the difference between being just over or just under the threshold for well-orderedness being one of degrees, then, the change in foreign policies that may legitimately be imposed upon them is one of kinds. The dichotomous distinction between burdened and well-ordered societies, I argue, is a weak point in the theory. On the border between well-orderedness and

7 Ibid., 113–114.

8 Miller, Globalizing Justice, 124–126.

burdenedness, where a society does not clearly belong in one category over the other, this creates some very uncomfortable and implausible conclusions.