Philosophy Of International Justice Research Paper

1. International Inequality

Most people in countries that are relatively rich per capita think that foreign aid should be a small part of their government’s total aid budget even if it is an effective means of relieving the most urgent deprivations in the world at large. Much philosophical thinking about international justice has been prompted by arguments that this patriotic bias is incompatible with the equal valuing of everyone’s life that morality demands.

1.1 Impartial Concern

This challenge to ordinary patriotism is clearest in moralities that take the moral point of view to be, fundamentally, a perspective of impartial concern for all. Utilitarianism is the most familiar and simplest example. If the right choice is always the one that creates as much happiness as any alternative, then each of us should always be willing to contribute to the needy whenever the consequent loss in happiness would be less than the consequent gain. Since the vast majority of the neediest live in countries with relatively few local means of relief, citizens of richer countries should use tax-financed aid to relieve these desperate foreign needs even if serious but lesser domestic needs for education, meaningful work, or comfortable housing go unmet.

Even within a morality of impartial concern and under the factual assumption that foreign aid effectively provides for urgent foreign needs, transfers are ruled out when they would so lower a rich country’s productivity that it becomes a less efficient instrument for increasing world happiness. Moreover, if one departs from the classical utilitarian focus on individual acts and determines moral responsibilities by asking what institutional assignments of responsibility produce the most happiness, there is (as Goodin and others have noted) a powerful case for some significant duty of patriotic bias in most countries. A worldwide system of institutional responsibilities including special responsibilities toward needy compatriots relies on the spontaneous concerns of the most effective social groups, guides aid according to the best-informed deliberations, and favors the least costly transfers. Still, if responsibilities are to be determined by welfare-maximizing institutions, then the efficiency of modern international communication and transportation, the vastly unequal resources of the richest countries and poor ones, and the specially desperate neediness of the many who suffer in poor countries would seem to call for a demanding responsibility of citizens of the richest countries to help needy citizens of poor countries, a responsibility overriding the standard patriotic bias, appropriate though the latter might be in a less unequal world.

The challenge to routine attitudes toward foreign poverty is especially daunting because it does not depend on utilitarianism’s distinctive view of the dictates of impartial concern. In assessments of domestic justice, many political philosophers favor, instead, the perspective of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, (1971) according to which the justice of a society’s basic institutions is determined by standards of political choice which all participants would prefer in the so-called ‘original position,’ in which each seeks to promote his or her life-goals while ignorant of their specific content and of his or her special advantages or disadvantages. The outcome, Rawls argued, would include an egalitarian ‘difference principle’ requiring that the life-prospects typical of the worst-off social position be as great as possible. Although Rawls has resisted its use in assessing global economic justice, others (for example, Beitz and Pogge) have taken a cosmopolitan original position, in which the deliberants do not know where in the world they live, to be an appropriate response to worldwide interdependence and inequality. If (as some of Rawls’ own arguments suggest), commitment to the original position reflects a duty to use institutions to reduce lifelong burdens of the brute bad luck of birth in a disadvantaged social situation, then this cosmopolitan original position, presumably yielding a global difference principle, seems an appropriate response to the enormous, undeserved lifelong difference it makes to be born in Burkina Faso, say, rather than in Belgium.

The case for demanding duties of foreign aid is also strengthened by a parallel, which Singer strikingly deployed, with certain well-established duties of rescue. It is wrong for a passerby to refuse to save a toddler drowning in a wading pool because rescue would ruin his expensive suit. It is hard to discern any morally relevant difference between this obligatory rescue and preventing the death from dysentery of a child in a foreign country through a similarly costly donation to a project of foreign aid.

1.2 Ethical Nationalism

Arguments that impartial concern entails stringent duties of international aid are frequently offered in criticism of routine patriotic biases. But others (for example, David Miller) take these shocking consequences to reveal the inadequacy of moral universalism, the assumption, widespread among philosophers, that all moral duties ultimately derive from some perspective of equal appreciation of everyone’s worth. Perhaps this universalism underrates special obligations of loyalty to certain kinds of unchosen associates.

Alleged duties of special concern for fellow-members of one’s nationality have been of special interest to critics of universalism because such claims have a powerful appeal and yet are hard to reconcile with a universalist morality. Most members of a nationality feel a special obligation to help continue the distinctive culture and history with which they identify and to look after the well-being of those who share this culture and history. According to an ethic of nationality, this sentiment is morally insightful. Those who can be part of such a project of continuity and special concern ought to seize this opportunity. As a consequence, they will have less concern for outsiders, even though these outsiders have equally valuable lives.

Current philosophical partisans of ethical nationalism are well aware that nationalism can lead to callousness and brutality. As a moral barrier to nationalist excesses, they insist on respect for certain basic rights possessed by everyone in virtue of mere common humanity. Even if one’s positive duty of aid to foreigners is quite undemanding, one must respect stringent negative duties not to steal from them or kill them. However, it is troubling that the vast distance between this humane nationalism and the outlook that motivates genocide and wars of national expansion has been created by piecemeal stipulation of a limited set of duties to humanity. If the duty of loyalty to the nationalist project of mutual concern and cultural continuity so easily overrides positive concern for outsiders’ needs, why can’t it justify ethnic cleansing, as a means of preventing the eventual disintegration of a nationality through intermarriage and cultural intermingling? A principled explanation of why the ethnic cleanser’s nationalism is depraved would appeal to some regulative principle on the basis of which both goals of nationality and specific human rights receive their moral authority—but the principles claiming such comprehensive power are the bases for universalist moralities. Moreover, any political morality in which nationality-based concern is fundamental seems open to morally troubling discriminations in policies of domestic aid, for example, the provision of lesser health benefits to those who are not members of the dominant nationality.

1.3 International Justice And Domestic Fairness

In addition to its role in stimulating doubts about the adequacy of universalist morality, resistance to demands for global beneficence has contributed to investigations of forms of universalism that do not express a fundamental perspective of impartial concern. In general, there is no need to be impartially concerned for different people in order to regard them as having equal moral worth. Parents are usually much more concerned for their own children than for other people’s children, without remotely supposing that the lives of other people’s children are any less valuable.

Because of its well-established role in discussions of political obligation, the duty to treat others fairly was one of the first universalist resources used to justify patriotic bias in a framework of equal respect but not of impartial concern. Benefiting from one’s engagement in a cooperative scheme that depends on most participants’ willingness to subordinate immediate self-interest to the advancement of the scheme, one ought to seek a fair division of the benefits and burdens of the shared project among all participants. Free-riding shows inadequate respect. So, on general grounds of fairness, compatriots have a special mutual obligation of reciprocity for one another’s contributions to their shared political community. Dagger and others drew the international moral: lacking a similar debt of reciprocity to outsiders, just participants in a political community will be less concerned for the nonparticipants’ well-being.

Such duties of political community are far from excluding foreign aid. If important foreign burdens can be relieved without any serious loss to compatriots, this help might be required in order to express the equal valuing of all. Moreover, citizens of per capita rich countries participate in an international system of economic and political institutions, involving lesser, but significant, benefits and burdens, and consequent lesser duties of reciprocity.

In criticizing this appeal to mere political community, ethical nationalists have questioned its capacity to generate adequate obligations of concern for needy compatriots. It is hard to see how an obligation of reciprocity could dictate special concern for compatriots who cannot contribute to one’s political community because they suffer from severe lifelong physical disabilities. (Similarly, compatriots burdened by natural, rather than social, disadvantages seem inadequately supported by a complementary argument from political fairness, the argument that the ultimate coerciveness of government makes special concern for those burdened by laws that one upholds a dictate of respect for persons.)

1.4 Universal Respect And Special Relationships

Such doubts concerning the adequacy of appeals to political fairness have contributed to growing interest in the interaction of equal respect for all with the proper valuing of special relationships. Most people would deny that someone properly values friendship if she would desert a friend as part of a strategy for introducing friendship into the lives of two other, friendless people, taking friendship to be nothing more than a good to be impartially promoted. In general (as Scheffler, Scanlon and others have emphasized), the proper valuing of a worthwhile relationship entails special concern for others to whom one happens to be so related. Since those who lack valuable and beneficent relationships, through no fault of their own, can be specially needy, the proper valuing of relationships conflicts with standards of distributive fairness requiring the minimization of burdens of brute bad luck. But it does not obviously conflict with the injunction to show equal respect for persons; indeed, the failure properly to value one’s relationships, as in the case of the philanthropic desertion of the friend, seems to show disrespect. By the same token, the proper valuing of relationships seems a dictate, rather than a competitor, of alternative fundamental precepts equivalent to the injunction to conform to rules that could express equal respect for all, precepts requiring conformity to rules that all could freely impose on themselves without lacking self-respect or that all could freely impose on themselves in light of a rationale that would be a reasonable basis for their joint agreement.

A hybrid strategy in which the demands of equal respect are specified, in part, by reflection on special relationships may be a means by which a broadly universalist morality can avoid duties of impartial global beneficence without lapsing into callousness. When compatriots’ potentially demanding loyalty to their political institutions is compatible with their self-respect, perhaps, as in the case of a worthwhile friendship, proper valuing of their relationship entails special loyalty to one another, a loyalty that should not be calibrated to others’ actual contributions any more than loyalty among friends. This loyalty, deriving from political obligations acquired at birth, may preclude the hard words, ‘I would do nothing for you if you had been unable to contribute to our joint political project, through no fault of your own.’ If so, then, on pain of arbitrariness, this special concern might have to be extended to others who cannot take part in the joint political project because of severe disability but are within the scope of an obligation to take part if one can. Assuming that special concern for associates ought to be proportionate to the importance of the shared institution and the potential demands of the institutional loyalties that sustain it, there would be a significant though lesser duty of foreign aid, reflecting engagement in international cooperation.

A related recent trend in moral philosophy has insisted on the irreducible role of one’s special relationship to oneself in limiting duties to aid others. Many advocates of legitimate self-concern deny that someone is obliged to embrace rules of giving that would, foreseeably, seriously worsen his or her life, even rules solely dictating the relief of burdens much greater than the burdens of giving. Perhaps the morally crucial difference between the practices of rescuing victims close at hand that are Singer’s starting point and the practices of global rescue meeting his demand for global concern is that the balance of foreseeable lifelong costs and potential benefits would violate the legitimate self-concern of the less vulnerable if the rules of rescue were global. Perhaps (as Richard Miller and others have argued) departures from patriotic bias in tax-financed aid on the part of governments of countries that are the best off per capita would impose losses on their citizens, in trusting civic relationships and other morally important goods, that would be too great a cost, even as a means of relieving more urgent needs abroad. If so, unequal concern would show no disrespect, but only a legitimate concern for one’s own well-being, whose legitimacy the foreign poor could acknowledge without any lack of self-respect.

Of course, much depends on how the seriousness of costs and deprivations is assessed, on how respect, self-respect, and reasonableness are construed, and on how the line is drawn between mere nongiving and participation in coercive projects, contexts in which appeals to one’s well-being or one’s valuable relationships provide much less support for partiality. For example, Shue has argued that poor people in the poorest countries would lack self-respect if they accepted practices of foreign aid that neglected their basic rights, i.e., their rights to the security, subsistence, and health care needed to enjoy any further rights, even if this neglect protected cultural goods in per capita rich countries or the relatively expensive life-projects with which many people in rich countries intelligently identify as giving order and value to their lives. Pogge has emphasized the constraints on the self-advancement of people in poor countries imposed by the worldwide economic dominance of firms and institutions controlled by people in rich countries, and the tendency of international practices of investment and purchase to encourage the corrupt repression that blights many poor countries. An appropriately nuanced moral typology of coercion and complicity might reveal duties of justice toward the poor of these countries that could require large sacrifices from people in richer parts of the world. The shift from a universalism of impartial concern to a universalism of equal respect is a shift to a broad framework, whose content and coherence is the subject of heated controversy.

2. Sovereignty

Rights to freedom from interference play an important role in international political discourse, as they do in domestic controversies over civil liberties. However, the characteristic explicit topic of international complaints of unjust interference is the autonomy of governments (or, more precisely, national governments), rather than individuals. There is broad agreement on certain presumptions against international interference: special justifications are required to legitimate interference by one government in political life within the territory controlled by another; this burden of proof is extremely heavy when interference takes the form of armed invasion, which is never justifiable merely as a means of advancing the interests of the invading government or its citizens; defensive war is usually a just response to armed attack. Still, virtually every theorist agrees that the burdens of justifying interference can sometimes be met and that some regimes could not justly be defended against armed attack from abroad. After all, individuals, not governments, are the ultimate bearers of moral rights, and, far from uniformly protecting the rights of people in their territories, governments often violate them, sometimes in atrocious ways. Different views of the relationship between the rights and morally urgent needs of individuals and the collective political processes in which they take part have sustained conflicting specifications of the duty not to intrude on sovereignty and the rightness of defending sovereignty.

2.1 Moral Individualism And Political Autonomy

The gap between alleged rights to noninterference of governments, on the one hand, and rights and morally significant needs of individuals, on the other, is specially wide in moralities that value political arrangements solely as instruments for promoting individualist goods, i.e., goods enjoyed by individuals which do not intrinsically depend on their participation in any specific kind of societal process. A strong presumption against invasion which does not respond to an armed attack may be justifiable on this basis. Such intrusion usually provokes resistance and deadly violence, which may disastrously expand as military alliances and rival national interests are mobilized. If the government of the invaded territory has protected people in the secure enjoyment of fundamental liberties, they lose a vital basis for well-being, and a new one may be hard to create. On the other hand, a government that violates fundamental liberties is apt to receive new popular support when nationalist sentiments are inflamed by invasion.

Still, just as a universalism of impartial concern challenged routine favoritism toward needy compatriots, impartial concern for individualist benefits challenges moral barriers to interference that most people would impose. Since the well-being of those in the invaded country has no special standing, a war of conquest could, in principle, be justified by net gains to all affected due to increased benefits to the subjects of the invading government—say, the gains to poor people in Iraq from the acquisition of oil reserves formerly controlled by rich Kuwaitis. Moreover, since no intrinsic value is ascribed to such collective goals as joint participation in government on the basis of a shared, distinctive culture, foreseeable benefits to the conquered in health, literacy, or material prosperity can yield a case for imperialist conquest that destroys popular local political institutions.

2.2 Collective Self-Determination

Seeking to raise higher moral barriers to interference, many theorists have ascribed independent moral value to individuals’ engagement in certain collective processes through which they determine their own political institutions within their own familiar political communities. If participation in such a collective process can enrich someone’s life, apart from individualist benefits, then it is easy to explain why the conquest of another people’s territory cannot be justified simply by net individualist gains. The difficulty is to avoid the overvaluation of the project of basing political outcomes on what is locally shared. In 1994, the government of Rwanda massacred a half-million Tutsis and moderate Hutus, acting solely within its borders. Foreign governments surely had no duty to permit the bloody enactment of this local drama to run its course just because it was local.

What exceptions will be made to the presumption against military intervention and how far they will extend to nonmilitary interference will depend on what forms of collective self-determination are valued. Both a strong presumption against interference and strictly limited exemptions (such as Walzer’s ‘rules of disregard’ of the prohibition of nondefensive war) can be derived from the special value of national self-determination, the effort to base common political arrangements on the shared identities constitutive of nationality. Foreign invasion normally interferes with this process, but may promote it, in exceptional cases, by supporting the national uprisings of minorities or by countering the prior intervention of outside powers; moreover, if the value of national self-determination is contingent on avoidance of the gravest injustices in the struggle to determine national institutions, there is a room for intervention to stop massacre or enslavement.

Still, a valuing of national self-determination that supports distinctive prohibitions of military intervention must fence off some struggles in which some compatriots threaten others with injustices so grave that they are rightly resisted with deadly force. Lesser injustices, after all, are not just causes for the use of deadly force by any group, domestic or foreign. To insist that those grim struggles must be kept fratricidal strikes many as a dangerous overvaluing of the national character of political life as opposed to its justice. In addition, basing foreign military neutrality on the valuing of national self-determination often seems to combine cleareyed acceptance of nonideal national political processes with naive blindness to international economic processes. Far from relying solely on local resources, tyrannical sovereign governments have nearly always benefited from internationally recognized prerogatives to negotiate loans, sell natural resources and buy arms.

In constructing substantial but nonabsolute barriers to intervention, Rawls has relied on a different standard of valued collective self-determination, analogous to his domestic political liberalism, through which fellow-citizens of a single society respectfully respond to diversity in their comprehensive moral doctrines. His international analogue is a ‘law of peoples’ that would be willingly accepted by representatives of all peoples whose dominant political culture is, at least, ‘decent’— morally flawed, perhaps, through departures from liberal democracy, but still meriting respect as including an international precept that military force is not to be an instrument for advancing the national interest and a domestic commitment to the rule of law and the pursuit of the common good.

This respect for certain illiberal political cultures has troubled many of those who share Rawls’ view that such cultures are, nonetheless, seriously defective. If, for example, a political culture disrespects women, despite seeking in its own way to include their good in the common good, should there be a strict prohibition of international interference, even through trade discrimination and diplomatic pressure? A rigid rule of noninterference seems to deny that individual persons are the bearers of moral rights.

2.3 Kantian Sovereignty

In assessing international duties of noninterference, as in assessing duties of international aid, some theorists try to steer a middle course in which a perspective of universal respect for individuals ascribes moral authority both to certain local forms of collective self-rule and to norms of world community. This broadly Kantian project has an important antecedent in Kant’s own arguments that world justice requires a world federation of sovereign liberal democracies.

A broadly Kantian assessment of the virtues and limits of political sovereignty takes its start in arguments for liberal–democratic forms of political association and against world government. If a morally responsible person is someone committed to living by principles expressing full and equal respect for all, then such a person will aspire to a political life through which each can freely, rationally and self-respectfully commit himself or herself to uphold the outcome of the shared process of public deliberation. Such a political order will guarantee each the civil liberties and democratic rights that no one could self-respectfully renounce and will base legislation on principled persuasion in which each can effectively participate, seeking common ground yet open to inevitable compromises. Because the diversity of cultural norms makes it impossible to base adequate legislation on principled persuasion worldwide and because the diffusion of civic activity worldwide would make it so hard to resist an oppressive central authority, a mutually respectful political life must be based on national sovereignty (which Kant contrasted with the ‘soulless despotism’ of world government). However, the commitment to base one’s life on principles expressing equal respect for everyone everywhere also dictates support for appropriate worldwide norms of conduct among governments.

Because of the connection between worldwide respect for persons and localized republican polity, such international norms would require noninterference with foreigners who are working out the terms of their shared political life on the basis of deliberative democracy and respect for civil liberties, even if the process and its outcomes are currently defective. In addition, presumptions against interference will extend to more deeply flawed regimes. Given the dispersal of military power among national governments, a broad permission to intervene to rectify serious injustice could produce a ghastly enlargement of the perils of Locke’s state of nature, in which the anarchic pursuit of justice by individuals leads to a deadly spiral of intervention and counter intervention, driven by inevitable disagreements and conflicts of interest. Moreover, an ethic based on observance of rules that all could freely and self-respectfully impose on themselves will count it as a serious loss when people who have attained Rawls’s standard of decency in their political outlook are forced to conform to laws departing from their own defective understanding of the demands of justice. Finally, if peace and commerce tend to be the best background for displaying the advantages of liberal democracy and overcoming social conflicts that make it unworkable, international institutions will tend to promote an ultimate pacific confederacy of liberal democracies if they prohibit military intervention and enhance economic interaction among governments above a threshold of civil and political liberties which is well below the full demands of justice.

These considerations parallel some of Rawls’ arguments for his law of peoples and are one natural extension of civic republican thinking into the international realm. They would sustain an international code of conduct, expressing an aspiration to worldwide liberal democracy, which includes a strong presumption against military intervention and a corresponding right to repel invasion. The precise nature of the limited rules allowing intervention will depend on the global milieu of military capacities and political sentiments. But they would probably permit some military interventions against home-grown tyrants, invited by popular movements in the direction of liberal democracy, even when humane nationalists’ threshold of atrocity has not been crossed. There would be even greater scope for nonviolent interference with foreign tyranny through diplomatic pressure, trade discrimination, or public condemnation meant to change political life within a foreign territory.

A role in affirming and preserving the distinctive culture of a nationality will not be a fundamental reason for leaving a government alone. This ultimate detachment from nationalist concerns strikes some as a recipe for cultural imperialism. In addition, ethical nationalists argue that stable and effective justice depends on pervasive sentiments of solidarity based on nationality. If so, the universalist appraisal of sovereignty leads to the alienated stance of support for the public encouragement of evaluative outlooks whose insightfulness the universalist denies.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Kantian and civic republican justifications of the presumption against intervention is their tendency to support systematic shifts in political authority that would reduce the scope of national sovereignty. These justifications ground the international rights of national governments on the need to support public facilities through which people can express respect for one another’s autonomy. Without any intention to meddle in another government’s political affairs, decisions made in the territory of one government (for example, interest-rate policies of the US Federal Reserve) can have a profound impact on the lives of people elsewhere. If we should show respect for fellow-citizens by giving them a voice in regulating processes that would otherwise subordinate their lives to the unconstrained will of others, then, on the same grounds, we ought to show respect for those whose lives are molded by transnational processes, by providing them with a voice in the collective regulation of these processes. As the needed international institutions expand their scope and their democratic legitimacy, many disputes over the morality of foreign aid and intervention may be ended, not by conclusive arguments but by obsolescence, due to new international patterns of political loyalty, reciprocity and self-respectful trust.

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