Vigas

In Sections 4.3 and 4.4 I outlined two problems with the way internationalists sharply drew up the distinction between burdened and well-ordered societies. They both point to the possibility of a conflict between what justice requires internationally and what it requires domestically, when it is unclear when one ends and the other begins.

How can these conflicts be resolved? Risse offers an approach that seems to have the potential to solve them at the level of practicality, but without disturbing the philosophically more troubling assertion that a separate list of global obligations exist on either side of the sharp dividing line between developed and non-developed countries. Instead, he suggests that there might be a demand of reasonable conduct that may apply in this case:

Let us say that anything that can reasonably be expected of us is a “demand of reasonable conduct.” “There is a demand of reasonable conduct on person P to perform action A” is then equivalent to “P can be reasonably expected to do A,” as well as to “It would be unreasonable for P not to do A.”

Obligations of justice are demands of reasonable conduct, and particularly stringent ones, but they are not the only ones.³¹

On a purely philosophical level this approach might seem unsatisfactory, as it fails to solve the problem of what our duties are, leaving a rather fuzzy middle-ground. Yet I suspect that the fuzziness is a feature rather than a bug. It could enable us to argue that some things ought to be done, at least in normal times, even if they are not the kind of absolute moral demands that rights are.

You might then say that although, for instance, it is not a duty of justice to help disease-prone countries develop their healthcare systems to better deal with potentially devastating outbreaks, to raise global education levels or to give some trade advantages to some countries, there is nonetheless a duty of reasonableness. Or, if we return to my previous scenario, we might then say that although the Superwealthians do not have a duty of justice not to impose their deal on the Nonasrichistanians, they nonetheless have a duty of reasonableness to at least take the interests of the other party into account. Reasonableness, then, goes further than demands of justice in terms of its scope, while not containing that crucial

31 Risse, On Global Justice, 132.

feature of duties of justice, that they can only be subordinate to other, more demanding or more immediate, duties of justice.

There is a degree of intuitive appeal to this answer. In our own lives we usually distinguish between the things that it is reasonable to refrain from doing, and the things that are downright forbidden. We might say that someone has acted wrongfully even if they have not technically done anything wrong, by acting against common understandings of reasonableness. But it also highlights one possible weakness. In our lives the consequences of acting unreasonably can be significant. Even if we will not run into trouble with the law we risk losing respectability and harming our social standing, which in turn could harm our friendships or career prospects. Hence, most people will comply with these demands of reasonableness even if there are no formal requirement for us to do so. It is not immediately clear to me that there is the same imperative for states to live up to demands of reasonableness. Not that failing to follow accepted norms will not have consequences; they could be severe. But states nonetheless have the option not to follow the norms in a way that individuals cannot. Whether self-interestedness is an inevitable feature of the system, as realists claim, or a result of how the players choose to play the game, as critics contend, the end result is the same. It is not clear how states would feel compelled to live up to vague duties of reasonableness when, (a) they are explicitly not duties of justice, and they cannot therefore be held to account when breaking them, and (b) the kinds of legally enforced close inter-personal ties that ensure individuals’ co-operation in a domestic structure have no comparison in the international arena.

There is another, potentially more devastating, problem at a deeper conceptual level. Internationalists agree that global justice takes lexical priority over duties of domestic justice. But duties of justice generally take precedence over other concerns, both domestically and internationally. In some cases demands of reasonableness might, according to some, command us to continue to offer substantial amounts (whether money, natural resources, human resources, etc.) even after the target country (or a majority of its citizens) has attained a minimally decent life. But others will argue that, the demands of justice having been met internationally, the resources must be spent on the worst off within the donor country, even if those people are still much better off than the global poor. Remember that domestically the concern is with relative poverty. Absolute poverty, arguably, does not feature as part of a domestic theory of justice, as absolute poverty in a well-ordered society is simply a particularly egregious form of relative poverty. There is therefore, in principle, no limit to what claims of justice can override international duties of reasonableness. If the lexical ordering of principles is maintained, any domestic inequality will take precedence over global concerns of any nature, above the minimum threshold for justice.

Who wins out? Which claim is more pressing? As Chris Armstrong points out, it is by no means clear what happens if nations violate moral standards of reasonableness in the name of domestic justice.³² Risse seems primarily concerned with immigration rights, and does not seem to consider other problems with this principle.

32 Chris Armstrong, “Global Justice between Minimalism and Egalitarianism,” Political Theory 42, no. 1 (2014): 119–29.

What is clear is that the point at which demands of justice do potentially transition into demands of reasonableness depends on the cut-off point at which a society ceases to be burdened and becomes well-ordered. As we saw in Chapter 3, there is disagreement about when this is, as it depends on whether we should properly be concerned for the welfare of individuals or for the stability of a society. In the former the duty will be much more demanding, and the dilemma Risse outlines seems less pertinent. In the latter the duty is less demanding, but the potential scope for duties of reasonableness is much greater. Perhaps, though that is an argument for another day, it is more plausible to say that there is both a duty of concern for the stability of burdened societies, and for the well-being of individuals in them, each of which carry their own responsibilities and will be discharged in different ways.