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Individual Responsibility in a Global Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2009

Samuel Scheffler
Samuel Scheffler
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

As the twentieth century begins to draw to a close, Europe is undergoing a process of political transformation whose outcome cannot be predicted with confidence, in part because the process is being driven by two powerful but conflicting tendencies. The first is the movement toward greater economic and political union among the countries of Western Europe. The second is the pressure, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, for the countries of Eastern Europe to fragment along ethnic and communal lines.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , Winter 1995 , pp. 219 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1995

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References

1 One liberal who docs not take the nation-state for granted but who recognizes that most liberals do, is Kymlicka, Will in Literalism. Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1989).Google Scholar

2 As Tamir, Yael observes in Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993) p 10Google Scholar: “[M]any national elements, although unacknowledged, have been fused into liberal thought…. For example, the liberal conception of distributive justice is particularistic and applies only within well-defined, relatively closed social frameworks, which favor members over nonmcmbers.” For a historical account of changes in the way the concept of a ‘nation’ has been understood, see Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

3 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 457.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., p. 8.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., p. 457. In Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, Rawls writes:

[A]s a first approximation, the problem of social justice concerns the basic structure as a closed background system. To start with the society of nations would seem merely to push one step further back the task of finding a theory of background justice. At some level there must exist a closed background system, and it is this subject for which we want a theory. We are better prepared to take up this problem for a society (illustrated by nations) conceived as a more or less self-sufficient scheme of social cooperation and as possessing a more or less complete culture. If we are successful in the case of a society, we can try to extend and to adjust our initial theory as further inquiry requires, (p. 272n.)

In his recent essay “The Law of Peoples,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 20 (1993), pp. 36–68Google Scholar, Rawls makes good on his suggestion that the topic of international justice should be addressed once a theory of justice for a single society has been developed. In chapter 6 of his Resizing Rawls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, however, Thomas Pogge argues that we should “abandon Rawls's primary emphasis on domestic institutions in favor of globalizing his entire conception of justice” (p. 240). For a similar suggestion, see Beitz, Charles, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), Part 3.Google Scholar

7 In “The Law of Peoples,” Rawls writes:

I follow Kant's lead in Perpetual Peace in thinking that a world government—by which I mean a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central governments—would either be a global despotism or else a fragile empire torn by frequent civil strife as various regions and peoples try to gain their political autonomy, (p. 46)

Nagel, Thomas takes a similar position in Equality and Partiality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), ch. 15Google Scholar. For a defense of the Kantian idea of a “pacific union” of liberal states as the most plausible route to world peace, see the two-part article by Doyle, Michael, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 12 (1983), pp. 205–35 and 323–53Google Scholar. See also Waldron, Jeremy, “Spedai Ties and Natural Duties,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 22 (1993), pp. 3–30.Google Scholar

8 Consequentialism, as I understand it, is a view that first gives some principle for ranking overall states of affairs from best to worst from an impersonal standpoint, and then says that the right act (or polity or institutional arrangement) in any given situation is the one that will produce the highest-ranked state of affairs that is available.

9 For some interesting suggestions, see Tamir, , Liberal NationalismGoogle Scholar, ch. 7.

10 See Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (London: Macmillan and Company, Ltd., 1907)Google Scholar. Book III. chs. IV and XI. Sidgwick also emphasizes the absence of any consensus about the extent of many of these obligations. The point is not merely that the extent of the obligation depends on the type of special relationship involved, but that with respect to any single type of relationship, it is often difficult to say how far the obligations of the participants are thought to extend.

11 Derek Parfit writes:

Most of us believe that there are certain people to whom we have special obligations. These are the people to whom we stand in certain relations—such as our children, parents, friends, benefactors, pupils, patients, clients, colleagues, members of our own trade union, those whom we represent, or our fellow-citizens. (Parfit, , Reasons and Persons [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984], p. 95)Google Scholar

Sidgwick says:

We should all agree that each of us is bound to show kindness to his parents and spouse and children, and to other kinsmen in a less degree: and to those who have rendered services to him, and any others whom he may have admitted to his intimacy and called friends: and to neighbors and to fellow-countrymen more than others: and perhaps we may say to those of our own race more than to black or yellow men, and generally to human beings in proportion to their affinity to ourselves. And to our country as a corporate whole we believe ourselves to owe the greatest sacrifices when occasion calls (but in a lower stage of civilization this debt is thought to be due rather to one's king or chief): and a similar obligation seems to be recognized, though less definitely and in a less degree, as regards minor corporations of which we are members. (Sidgwick, , The Methods of Ethics, p. 246)Google Scholar

As Parfit and Sidgwick both suggest, and as is suggested by the list given in the text, common-sense morality tends to subsume political obligations within the broad category of special obligations. Liberal theorists, however, have rarely done this. (One exception is Ronald Dworkin, who does construe political obligations as what he calls “associative obligations” in his Law's Empire [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986], pp. 195–216.)Google Scholar That is, liberal theorists have rarely treated the mere fact of one's membership in a political community as the ultimate source of one's obligations to other members of that community. Instead, they have generally sought to provide a less directly particularistic basis for political obligations: a basis in actual or hypothetical consent, or in the requirements of a fair system of cooperation, or in a natural duty to support just institutions. This is perhaps symptomatic of the universalistic tendency within the liberal tradition. When combined with liberalism's explicit focus on the individual society as the relevant unit of justification and its tacit reliance on the category of the nation-state, this tendency creates a tension within liberal thought, and exposes it both to universalist and to particularist criticism. For a particularist argument that explicitly relates political ties to special relationships of other kinds, see MacIntyre, Alasdair, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” The Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas, 1984.Google Scholar

12 See, for example, Williams, Bernard, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,”Google Scholar in Smart, J. J. C. and Williams, Bernard, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 77–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 This is especially true in cases where the outcome in question results from the actions of an extremely large number of people, each of whom makes only a tiny contribution to the production of that outcome. For a discussion of the moral significance of such cases, see Part 1 of Parfit, 's Reasons and PersonsGoogle Scholar, esp. ch. 3. For criticism of Parfit, see Otsuka, Michael, “The Paradox of Group Beneficence,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 20 (1991), pp. 132–19.Google Scholar

14 For a wide-ranging account of these developments, see Kennedy, Paul, Preparing for the Tuvnty-First Century (New York: Random House, 1993).Google Scholar

15 See my “Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes, and Liberalism in Philosophy and Politics.” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 21 (1992). pp. 299–323.Google Scholar

16 Consider, in this connection. Onora [Nell] O'Neill, 's claim that “[m]odern economic causal chains are so complex that only those who are economically isolated and self-sufficient could know” that they are “not part of any system of activities causing unjustifiable deaths” (“Lifeboat Earth.” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 4 [1975], p. 286).Google Scholar

17 Consider, in this connection, the following remarks by Hart, H. L. A. and Honoré, Tony in Causation in the Law, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. lxxx:CrossRefGoogle Scholar

The idea that individuals are primarily responsible for the harm which their actions are sufficient to produce without the intervention of others or of extraordinary natural events is important, not merely to law and morality, but to the preservation of something else of great moment in human life. This is the individual's sense of himself as a separate person whose character is manifested in such actions. Individuals come to understand themselves as distinct persons, to whatever extent they do, and to acquire a sense of self-respect largely by reflection on those changes in the world about them which their actions are sufficient to bring about without the intervention of others and which are therefore attributable to them separately.

18 Compare Pogge, Thomas in Realizing Rawls, pp. 8–9:Google Scholar

The effects of my conduct reverberate throughout the world, intermingling with the effects of the conduct of billions of other human beings…. Thus, many morally salient features of the situations of human beings (persistent starvation in northeastern Brazil, civil war in El Salvador, famine in India) arise from the confluence of the often very remote effects of the conduct of vast numbers of human beings. We as individuals have no hope of coping with such complexity and interdependence if we take the existing ground rules for granted and merely ask “How should I act?”… We can cope only by attending to the scheme of ground rules which shapes the way persons act and codetermines how their actions, together, affect the lives of others.

19 Hobsbawm, , Nations and Nationalism since 1780, p. 174.Google Scholar