Lecture Notes

PHIL 407

Table of contents

Lecture 1: What is Justice?
Lecture 2: Deontology vs Consequentialism
Lecture 3: Peter Singer
Lecture 4: Brian Barry
Lecture 5: Brian Barry and Goodwin
Lecture 6: Robert E. Goodin
Lecture 7: David Miller
Lecture 8: Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty
Lecture 9: Law of Peoples
Lecture 10: Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy
Lecture 11: Rawls’ Law of Peoples – Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World
Lecture 12: Responsibility and Global Justice, a Social Connection Model
Lecture 13: Associative Duties, Global Justice, and the Colonies
Lecture 14: Relational Immigration

Lecture 1: What is Justice?

We are reading from a very particular tradition of Western political philsophy, for good or for ill
At least potentially a difference between moral and political justice; doing what is moral and what is politically right; can come into tension
Is justice real? What does it mean to say that justice is real? Or is justice a convention, what we came together to decide what is real or not?
- Maybe it is a real convention?
- Or is there a natural/supernatural thing we call justice?
- Maybe justice comes from God?
Is there a pre-political thing?
Maybe there is no property in the pre-political, there is no structure which says that this belongs to you or me
Distinction between political and moral, convention and nature, and the pre-political.

Pre-Socratic Thought

Heraclitus – 540-480 BCE
- You never step in the same river twice – things are always changing
- Reality is constant change; stability is fake; you get the idea of stability because of the unity of opposites – opposite forces cancel each other out
Parmenides
- Reality is one
- Reality is fixed and eternal, and in fact change and motion are the illusion.
Sophists of ancient Athens – both sides of an argument can be rationally defended
- Distinction between phusis (nature) and convention (nomos)
- All socia adn political affairs are in the realm of hte nomos and might even go against phusis; this is the real source of freedom.
- The fact that you can curb things in our human nature shows us that we are free, the source of freedom.
- Sophists made a lot of money in Athens
- Socrates was the anti-Sophist, hated the sophists
- Sophists emphasized the ability to persuade and motivate
- Is the ability to persuade or motivate others the same as obtaining truth (justice)?
- Truth, to the sophists, was artificial and context-dependent
Plato – 427-347 BCE
- Plato disagreed with the sophists
- Plato comes from an elite aristocratic family
- Student of Socrates; Socrates is executed for corrupting the youth
- 530 people in the jury
- Plato thinks that democracy is bad; democracy starts wars with Sparta; when Sparta puts in people that can manage the state, it is democracy that overthrows them and kills in Socrates
- Realism: truth exists independent of us. Sophists are wrong – democracy creates people who are easily persuaded, not people who follow the truth.
Plato, the Divided Line – Plato’s claim to fame through the mouth of Socrates
- The physical world of senses: Heroclitus is write. All you have is constant change.
- But when you reason, you have the invisible world of reason, a stability here – Parmenides is right. Brings them together.
- As you move from each level, you get closer to the truth: conjecture, belief, understanding, knowledge/science
- You have an idea of what a chair is
Plato’s allegory of the cave – metaphysical and political at the same time
- Most people are chained in the empirical world, looking at shadows on the wall
- The man escapes the cave and sees the real realm of forms, the higher realm – you see the sun, the sun is the cause of everything and the form of the good
- What happens if you try to tell people in the cave about the outside world? People kill you. Socrates, case en point.
Tripartite soul
- Greeks are about character – usually it’s about ethics – do you have good character? You will do the right thing when presented with certain ethical quandaries. For Plato, you must have a balanced soul.
- Moral pyschology of Plato: appetites (physical desires), spirited (emotional), rational (logical)
  - Does this map onto Freud’s id, ego, superego?
- Exact symmetry with government
  - Worker / appetite
  - SOldier / courage
  - King / reason
The Republic
- A lot of political philosophy is done via hte idea that things can be different
- Peace of Nicias (421 BCE); Republic written in 380, 40 years after; Democracy restored to Athens in 403
- Peace of Nicias – the war might end, things might end, etc.
- We start with a descent. The higher we go, the closer we get to truth and knowledge.
- Start from the common view and work up.
- When you read The Republic, pay attention to the ascending and the descending. The philosopher must always return back tot eh cave.
- Cephalous – first definition of justice. Depicted as an old traditionalist: Speak the truth adn give back what one has taken from another. Social contract view of justice. Plato thinks this is a bad form of justice. The shadows are real, but they’re not the real thing. Easy arguments against relativism
- Polemarchus – Do good to your friends and harm to your enemies. Isn’t justice supposed to make things better? HOw can we harm in service of justice
- Thrasymachus – the sophist. Only time that Socrates is scared. Justice is simplyt he advantage of the stronger. Injustice is a virtue, justice is vice. Politics is really a game of power and domination; the winners write history and make laws.
- Nietzsche as Thrasymachus – revolt against Christian morality. Cephalous and Polemarchus agree that justice is a virtue and injustice is a vice.

St. Augustine – 354-430 CE

Brought together Platonism and Catholicism
Christ leaves the cave and comes back
Two worlds view: intelliglbe world of heaven and the sensible material world
Render unto Cesar what is Cesar’s and God what is God’s
Government is inherenntlyc orrupt, necessarily because of original sin.

St. Thomas Aquinas – 1225-1274

Reintroduces Aristotle into the West
Eternal Law: God’s mind
Natural Law: to find out what is in God’s mind through reason
Positive Law: law that is promulgated by an authority
Scholasticism: Bible + Aristotle

Niccolo Machiavelli – 1469-1527

Modern period
Voyages and conquest
Luther for Christianity, the 99 theses
Bacon and the scientific method – the way you find out truth is not by trying to find it through its pristine state but by changing things and seeing what it does
Machiavelli: I can do for politics what Copernicus did for astronomy, turn it into a kind of science
Had a long history in foreign and military affairs
What if Thrasymachus responded to Plato? Thrasymachus just leaves in Book 1.
Machiavelli is tortured and exiled
Amoral realism: who cares! What you do is to study historical cases and draw conclusiosn for effective tactics.
St. Augustine: there is no morality in politics, you are trying to affect certain things

Social Contract Theory

Social contracts:
- Hobbes: security
- Locke: liberty, we are born in the image of God, we need a government which will protect our liberty
- Rosseau: equality, what you should care about is equality. Inequality creates instability and insecurity; economic domination is the worst form of tyranny. General will is of equality.
- Hume: this is a fiction, there was never a social contract – every regime is the product of conquest and domination, and you just get used to it – that’s how you get stability. If you want change, it has to be slow
The Security question: metaphor of war, how do we avoid a state of war? And if we find ourselves in war, what do we do?
The Liberty question: metaphor of slavery, what does it means to be a slave (dominated)? How dow e avoid this cnodition of domination?

Thomas Hobbes – 1588-1679 – and Social Contract History

Hobbes was infleunced by the English Civil War, the 30 years war, the Peace of Westphalia, Enlightenment commitments to science and reason
Thirty Years War, 1618 and 1648
- Religious wars are about establishing the superioority of one religion over another – submit, convert, or die. War becomes conventional foreign policy.
Peace of Westphalia 1648. Ends 30 years of war.
- Ends universal ambitions of the Holy Roman Empire
- Establishes the nation-state system, states are the highest authorities – you don’t go to the pope, the head of state determines the religion of the state. A model for how to end really nasty wars.
English Civil War, 1642 – 1651
- Parliamentarians vs the Royalists
- James the 1st unites Scotland and England in 1603, but dies in 1625
- Charles the 1st takes over but married a Catholic French princess, Henrietta Maria
- Kingdom is split on the idea of absolute monarchy; the nobility like it because it keeps them in power, poor folks don’t like it as much.
- Merchants (what become the bourgeoisie) want more ppower
- 1628, the Petition of Right: Parliament controls taxes. Charles just stops calling Parliament into session.
- Sctoland invades English over Anglican vs Puritan dispute.
- Republic – government with checks on power, usually a democracy, but there are other bodies too
- Charles is captured and executed; Oliver Cromwell acts like a king but dies
Sir Robert Filmer – 1588 - 1653: argued for the Divine Right of Kings. The right of kings to rule ogoes back to the Biblical Adam. It is impossible for people to give the alws to themselves. Uses the analogy of the nuclear family, where the father is the source of the law
Aristotle – 384 - 322 BCE, ancient Greek view of nature, justice is living in accordance with nature and living against nature turns us into monsters. What is moral is natural. The legal/political should reflect morality
- To do the moral thing is to do what is natural
- Lgal and political structure should reflect the moral
St. Augustine – nature is sin, nature is corrupt and will corrupt you; we fell from grace; salvation must be found in the supernatural.
Henry Parker, 1606 to 1652
- Parliamentarians are right in the English Civil War
- Relationship between the king and the people is contractural and not natural
- The people form a corporate body which makes a compact with the ruler
- The contract is aimed to provide security and freedom of the subjects
Francis Bacon, 1562 – 1626
- Distinctively modern in their appeal to Bacon: nature is basically a complicated machine. You have to understand which strings to pull, nothing super special about it.
Thomas Hobbes’ account
1. The world of politics is a world of artifice.
  - What the parliamentarians say is right.
  - Artifice – artificial, convention, made up (nomos)
  - We make the political order ourselves, not natural nor supernatural
2. A republic is not viable (you can’t have checks on power)
  - The monarchists are right
  - Without absolute government, you have chaos.
3. War is destructive.
  - Machiavellians are wrong
  - Scheming and power accumulation is not the end goal
  - Peace is the whole aspiration of politics
  - The Leviathan
We do not naturally come to form politicla institutions. Nature is not conducive to human flourishing.
People are not by nature evil (St. Augustine), but they also are not very good to each other.
Hobbes: wants to break everything down into its basic parts. Find individuals bumping into each other, despite being individuated
The state of nature – what are people like
- without authority and without social ties and traditions
- individuated, but not isolated from each other
- extension of the scientific method
No one has natural authority over anyone in the state of nature
- Equality in strength: we can all kill each other – for Hobbes, there is no morality in the state of nature. In the Hobbesian prepolitical realm, there is no one to tell you what is right and wrong. Hobbes is an athiest, he does not believe in God. Morality comes from authority. There is no morality until we come together to establish it.
- Equality in mind: we can all outsmart each other in at least one thing
- Hobbes: this is not good! Including your body…
Hobbes tries to invite laws: conserve yourself! etc. the state of nature is not good.
Even you, the hunkiest guy, will not dominate strength – even you have to sleep. Even you will need to be vulnerable. You can’t outclever everyone – you can always outsmart someone in one thing. Hobbes is scared of everything.
The Hobbesian state of nature: “a world of continual fear, and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The state of nature is a state of war. Any time you are in a state of nature, you are in a state of war – not that you are actually fighting, but the threat of perpetual attack and death. The puzzle: how do we create as tate?
Only by giving up our power to one authority.
The Leviathan is all of us – we are the Leviathan altogether.
Hobbes – the commonwealth cannot just be nice, you must be in awe such that you respect the laws.
Hobbes – you might even be obligated not to allow the state to put you to death quietly

The Gloarious Revolution, 1688-1689

We all hate Catholics
John Locke, involved in an assassination of both King Charles 2nd and his brother James. Has to leave England when it leaves

John Locke, 1632-1704

Locke is the philosopher of the Glorious Revolution
Locke is worried about slavery: what you need to care about is not security, but liberty / freedom. This is what Hobbes misses. Most of us are unwilling to give up most or all of our freedom for security.
For Locke, there is morality in the prepolitical.
The state of nature is neutral, we don’t really run into each other that much – for Hobbes you run into people all the time. Locke, in the real state of nature, you don’t really see people. the only reason you would leave is to preserve freedom (like private property)
You get private property by mixing your labor with something. This is prepolitical, it comes without a politics.
Locke: agrees with Hobbes in that the state of nature is valid; the state of nature is not political.
- What kinds of thought experiments are we doing? A very modern conception, breaking things down to the core elements
Disagrees with Hobbes: the state of nautre is (not) a state of war; the sovereign does not need to be given absolute and arbitrary power, you don’t need absolute power to have some level of power
Life, liberty, and property
With Hobbes, we seek peace; with Locke, we preserve peace.

Jean-Jacques Rosseau, 1712 – 1778

“A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences”
“has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?”
Arts and sicences have only corrupted human morality: civilization is one of the worst things which have happened to human beings.
If we could go back to the state of nature, we would be great – an active life, eating, getting along. Even Aristotle wants to talk about language as distinguishing humans, but huamsn would have gone nowhere without sympathy. It is society which beats sympathy outside of you.
Hobbes – a social construction aspect, morality is socially constructed.
Rosseau does a Hobbes and Hobbes, you didn’t go far enough – all of thesese desires and such you think are natural, are all socially constructed; the state of nature wasn’t a bad place for humans.

“The philosophers who have exmamined the foundations of society have all felt the necesstiy of returning to the state of nature, but none of them has reached it.”

Convince people how bad the state of nautre is, arm them against each other, make their possessions as burdensome as their needs
The contract of subjugation: let us unite in order to protect the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitious, and assure everyone of possessing what belongs to him.
You get the Hobbesian / Lockean contract from an extreme inequality emerging from this devolving of the state of nature, and you bake in this inequality. You were born free but everywhere in chains.

David Hume, 1711 - 1776

Hume: undermine excessive metaphysical and epistemological views
The state of nature shows you which values you think are important for justice: security, liberty, or equality (Rosseau).
We take so much philosophical baggage with us trying to arrive at ultimate principles, but the best you’ll get at are principles of human nature
A mitigated skeptic (not Cartesian) – there are limits on what human reason can know
Reason is the slave to the passions, what you do is you instill good habits, becuase most people act out of habit
Hume’s political aim: quell political factionalism (Torys, divien right; Whigs, parliamentarians)
Social contract theory has no basis in historical fact; governments are based on conquest, why would we believe that political legitimacy is based on universal reason.

Lecture 2: Deontology vs Consequentialism

Immanuel Kant, 1724 - 1804

The hero of deontology
Kant: one major failing of all previous moral theories is that they are grounded on something external to the will – e.g. happiness, divine perfection, instincts, etc.
- These are all heteronomy – you are not the author of your own moral law
Autonomy – favored by Kant, opposite of heteronomy
What we want is a moral theory where we give the laws to ourselves; consequences ofactions are irrelevant to morality
Morality is concerned only with the shining diamond, a good will
On Hume’s account, people are driven to act solely by heteronomyous impulses (sentiments and tradition) – Hume says that weare driven by our emotions, and reason is a slave to the passions; reason is just calculation
How do I best get to these things? Reason becomes a slave to the passions. – Hume
Kant, something has gone wrong. This would make morality and justice impossible. You cannot have these things if youa re driven by your sentiment.
For Kant, morality and justice are only possible if individuals are free to act in accordance with principles of reason and not driven to action by heteronymous impulses. You have to be free to have done otherwise.
pace – ‘peace be with’, in contradiction with
In order to have morality and justice, persons must be both rational and free.
Kant is concerned with cause and effect. Hume denies the rational justification of causality.
In the phenomenal world, causality reigns; in the noumenal, where things are themselves, we don’t know – but this is where freedom exists.
Can you hold someone morally responsible if they could not have done otherwise.
We have to find morality in freedom.
Three propositions of morality
- In order for an action to have moral worth it must be done from duty
  - Just having acted in the correct manner is not enough to call an action a moral act.
- An action from duty has its moral worth not in the purpose to be attained by it but in the maxim in accordance with which the action is decided upon: morality of action is based on the principle and not the effects it has.
  - Stealing is wrong because it is wrong and not because it has bad effects
- …
Human will – has ends, it has intentions – not merely reactive.
Problems: there are no unquestionable examples of people who act strictly out of duty
Imperatives: commands of the will. Imperatives are either hypothetical or categorical.
- Hypothetical imperatives: means to an ends. If you want to get to the store, you must take the bus.
- Categorical imperatives: commands of reason, not of the will. You must not steal. They are done for themselves. Comes from the thing itself. The lifeguard ought to save drowning children, because that is part of being a lifeguard itself.
Moral imperatives must be categorical imperatives.; morality is based on categorical imperatives
First formulation of the categorical imperative: “act only ina ccordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” Ask yourself, could that maxim become universal law? Must be applicable to all rational beings and not in contradiction with itself.
Question – how are these duties different from something like Aristotelian virtue ethics.
Two kinds of ends: subjective (ends of hypothetical imperatives, conditional) and objective (ends of categorical imperatives, unconditional and absolute)
Second formulation: “act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means”
Rational nature is distinguihsed from the rest of nature by the fact that we set ends for ourselves.
Hypothetical imperative: Do not torture animals because you will go on to torture humans / be a bad person.
Kant is one of the founders of race – race can justify slavery, different rationalities.
The end-in-itself is rational nature; an ability to set ends for itself
Respect for dignity is epitomized in a ‘kingdom of ends’
Kant is starting to think that it’s not just our family members, mebmers of our nation, etc. – but all humans have dignity.
- Kingdom of ends – a limitation of each person’s freedom so that it is compatible with the freedom of everyone, insofar as this is possible in accord with a universal law.
- Reason, freedom, and moral accountability are intimately related.
- To rule in a way in which a parent controls this child is despotism.
Coming to the age of reason – Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.”
Third formulation: act in accordance with maxims that can at the same time have as their object themselves as universal laws of nature. Acting in accordance with the moral law is not acting from an external standard, but in acting in accordance with a law we legislate to ourselves (autonomy) – rational nature.
When you give a law to yourself, it comes from without autonomy: you no longer have a parent imposing paternal law on you.

The Story

SOical contract theorists: subjects are bound to respect a regime’s authority when they consent to it in return for improvement over the state of nature
Hume’s objection: social contract theory is a dangerous fiction, vicious circular reasoning. People start revolutions.
Kant’s reply: stop thinking about the social contract with this metaphysical baggage, but with reason: the social contract is a heuristic deivce, similar to the categorical imperative, whose function is to reveal to us our political rights and duties.
- Armchair theoriizing: we can see the obligations entailed from it as dictates of reason
- Ends up looking a lot like Rousseau

Two ways of reading Kant

Utilitarian and commutarian

Hellenistic Philosophy

Aristotle and St. Thoomas Aquinas
Epicureans: pleasure is the greatest good.
Stoics: overcome your emotions. Pursue self-control. Kant is kind of a stoic. Utilitarianism is a revolt of the epicureans.

Utilitarianism

Most influential moral doctrine in the English speaking world until about 1970.
Until 1971, when John Rawls decimates it (althouguh it’s back now)
Presents itself as being objective, in the sense that we can all see the results and judge them.
It is a doctrine that appeals to us as we are and therefore can influence our actions
Utility-based, not rights-based
Value of something – measurable utility (marginal utility)

Return to Hume

Utilitarian objection to Kant: the notion of autonomy. Rises out of Humean skepticism towards most moral and political principles.
Hume’s skpeticism: humans are creatures of habit, not reason; reason is the slave of the passions.
Humans are moved to act out of emotion and custom, not reason.
Differences in thinking about autonomy: Kantian, you did not respect peoples’ autonomy. You acted like a parent. You punish and you reward, treating people like children. Humean reply: But do people even have autonomy? Nah.
Utilitarian: we are all about consequences and figuring out what gets people to do the thing which needs to be done.
Knowledge and rationality – certain fetishism by Kant. Don’t go to Kant if you want to be a social activist. Kant tells you what the morally right thing to do – you’ll have to do things which are inconsistent with autonomy.

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

Natural rights are nonsense upon stilts
Greatest happiness principle: act so that you can produce the greatest aggregate happiness for all sentient beings

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

Unhappy with Hedonistic calculus: introduces lexically ordered goods
Mill does not dismiss notion of rights – rights (rules) are based upon promotion of utility
Mill is Bentham’s godson – Bentham is “utterly mean and gorveling as a doctrine worthy only of swine”
The problem with utilitarian – how to measure and classify
Mill’s harm principle: the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

Karl Marx (1818 - 1883)

Problems with capitalism: capitalism deforms and exploits workers; distorts reality; is becoming obselte
With Katn and the utilitarians, their political philosophy is based on their morality – morality si what you grounds your politics
Marx: morality is a bourgeois concept – it’s very Rousseauan and Thrasymachian, always there to maintain the mode of production. Here to maintain the lord-serf relationship.
Marx thinks he’s being very scientific, and is making a host of moral claims which lie untouched.
Marx expands Rousseau’s inisght about unnatural inequalities
Kant and the utilitarians are very individualistic – Marx is not so much communitarian as he is a structuralist: not only how structures have different outcomes – you can’t just put really good people into the ruling class; there will be certain outputs. Structures make you what you are.
Realm of freedom – what is freedom? Freedom begins only where labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends – humans have been laboring just to survive. Moments of actual freedom are when we are not doing it for survival; these are the few moments of real freedom. Society should strive to have maximum freedom (leisure?)

Marxist Criticism of Kant

Marx and Kant are in agreement that freedom requires a rational society and that in such a society people will be treated as ends in themselves.
For Marx, people are not born fully formed, rational individuals – they must begin so by freeing them from capitalist society. Communities shape individuals.
For Marx, societies based on exploitation and alienation inevitably produce deformed individuals – individuals who cannot act in accordance with reason.
geist (Hegel): comes to know itself
A rational society must come first (a socialist society). For Marx, no socialism means no kingdom of ends.

Peter Singer (1946)

We do not have to be superheroes in order to do a lot of good in the world
Doing a tremendous amount of good does not require that we put ourselves in jeopardy but we live in the right ways.
Singer is going back to appealing to our moral intuitions to tell us how the political should look like
We have obligationss to folks who aren’t part of our society
Singer is very individualistic – you make donations, you do these things, etc.
You don’t need to change the entire structure in the way Marx is talking about to do a lot of good.
We can talk about who is to blame, but even if you think you are not to blame, you still have moral duties to do things?
It should not matter how close I am to the person, and also it does not matter if there are many other people who can help me.
Proximity – if you think being based on proximity is wrong, then this is very tricky; you commit yourself to a lot of things.
The problem of the commons – am I less obliged to help if there are many other people who can help? Should I judge how much I should contribute given my cost?
Singer: you must do good, regardless of your intentions – where do you put the moral weight – being effective or wanting to do the right thing?
Singer is suspicious of structural accounts, not because he thinks they’re worng, but because you get a cop out when you appeal to the structure. Each one of us can do a little bit of good. Very mcuh focusing on the individual.

From Marx and Mills to Rawls

Lecture 3: Peter Singer

1946, Australian philosopher
Is a utilitarian, believes in effective altriusm
Individuals can do a lot of good in a global context, we just choose not to.
Trolley problem:
- On a trolley, if you pull a lever, the train switches tracks and kills one person instead of five. Do you pull the lever?
- Is inaction an action?
- Put the trolley problem together with the doctor’s problem: you have five patients who need organ transplants, and you have a healthy patient who comes in for a checkup. Do you kill the healthy patient to save the five? Hippocratic oath and Kantian ethics say no. Is consent necessary?
Singer hates these setups, (as every good philosopher should)
No patience for trolley problems – misunderstands what utilitarianism is about.
Trolley problem is posed as an objection against utilitarianism – sacrifice someone if it maximizes the good. Phillipa Foot comes up with this: give you the trolley problem and it’s supposed to be an easy one to illustrate what utilitarianism is so intuitively appealing. (Funny how it’s become this sort of moral dilemma.) Singer: these things are bizarre. Utilitarians are saying you can sacrifice a little bit to go a long way. With global justice, you can do a tremendous amount of good.
We distinguish between duty and charity. For Kant you have obligations out of duty and of charity (beneficence – makes you a good person, but you’re not morally obligated to do so)
Impartiality by proximity and the size of others – you can’t use partiality as a means for not helping other folks.
Duty vs charity
One objection: it implies that we morally ought to work full time to increase the balance of happiness over misery. But Singer says that we must retain enough capital for self-reproduction.
Marx thinks he is giving you an economic system: capitalism, communism. Altogugh all political organizatinos have an economic base. It would be hard but possible to have a monarchy with a capitalist base. There are many folks who care about distributive justice – how to you distribute the goods of society. Marx thinks that the outcome will have nice distributive justice but is focused at the level of production. Wat is important is that you make the working class a central figure. Peter Singer has a world that looks very Marxist but his point of emphasis will be closer towards consumption – how you spend your money.
- Singer is trying to be a certain kind of realist
- Singer might say that he is not ideological – able to choose any political interface, a sort of pragmatist
St. Augustine – natural right for redistribution
Thinking globally vs thinking systemically. Other folks might point more locally.
Free rider problem: we cannot have free riders vs. free riders are the ‘cost of doing business’ – individual vs systemic viewws
What do we owe to all peolple?
If you don’t pull the child out of the pond, you’re not uncharitable, but a moral monster

John Rawls, 1921 – 2002

Easily oen of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century
- Maybe also Wittgenstein and Heidegger
After John Staurt Mill, utilitarianism took over, political philosophy took over, and most people were doing ethics
1971 A Theory of Justice, response to utilitarianism. Already a backlash, but gives a political philosophy view
Three principles
- Take seriously the idea that political legitimacy depends on the consent of those ruled
- Respect basic liberties of individuals
- Account for excessive inequality and radicalism
The synthesis
- Hobbes and Hume are right: We ought to minimize risk. This is the central insight of Hobbes and Hume.
- Locke is right: certain basic liberties are non-negotiable
- Marx is right: Gross inequality is a threat to both liberty and security
- Kant is right: the social contract is a heuristic device which reveals political rights and duties
Reflective equilibrium:
- Our principles should be based on principles, which coincide with our intuitions.
- We have an intuition that racism is wrong. If a law condones racism, then we need to see if it is because our laws are inconsistent with our principles. Otherwise, we need to either change our pirnciples or change our intuitions.
- A difficult balance between principles and intuitions. It’s a negotiation.
- Principles come out of your intuitions and kind of check your principles.
- This is really how we operate: we have intuitions and principles that we like, and it’s nice when they cohere.
- Kind of a Kantian fetishism of reason which allows for principles to detach themselves from intuition
- We should constantly participate in the reflective equilibirum because it helps provide a check on our dogmatism
- Rawls is not talking about justice among your friends; he’s talking about what the basic structure of society should look like
Basic structure: the way in which major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation. How do we allocate advantages to particular people? So how should we set it up?
The Original Position is Rawls’ state of nature – no metaphysical baggage, no lions and tigers and shit; trying to generate the idea of fairness – what rules you choose for the game before you start playing. You can’t retroactively write the rules of the game you’re in once you play it.
Criticism – Rawls assumes that most of us are risk averse. You don’t want to set up society so that 1% of people have 99% of the wealth. You wouldn’t want that because it’s irrational. (We can borrow from utilitarian game theory for this.) Some folks are super risk-averse, but we are ignoring those.
Two principles (first has priority over the second):
- Liberty principle: everyone should have the same basic and non-negotiable liberties: freedom of religion, association, speech, the right to vote, hold public office, etc. All the things Lockeans put forth. You don’t know if you are or aren’t religious. In a sense, it is very anti-utilitarian and pro-civil rights. About individuals and minimum protections
- Difference principle: responding to the problem of inequality raised by Rousseau and Marx. Not a principle of redress. Can have the function of redressing past injustices, bu t it is not a principle of reparations. Expresses a conception of mutual reciprocity. Focused on distribution, not production. We have the stuff, how do we distribute it. We can’t have perfect equality. But we have to make the least well off better off.
  - Reaganite trickle-down economics?
  - It’s not that inequalities themselves are the issues, but that it keeps certain people below a threshold.
  - Kind of nodding his head at Rousseau and Marx, but not really.
  - Whatever inequalities which exist need to benefit the worst off – also nodding to Locke, certain people are born with natural endowments which make them better off.
  - What worries Nozick is that what an effort towards equality becomes a sort of brutish leveling
  - Natural endowments are not earned. Rawls’ brother died from a respiratory illness Rawls gave to him, he just had a better immune system. Even things like natural endowments are arbitrary from a moral point of view. This is why somethig like the difference principle is the best compromise. Folks have natural endowments – keep them from dominating other folks in society. The difference principle gives you the best of both worlds, between the Marxist and the libertarian view.
  - How much obligation do we have to develop natural endowments?
A criticism of the move of the veil: what kind of episteme do you need to even start out with the veil?
The ghost of the subject remains in the original position. You can’t get rid of the subject.
In deciding that we must write the rules of the game before we play the game (i.e. to rid ourselves of subjectivity), Rawls has already written the rules of a different game after he has started playing that game. He has laready valued a certain kind of disemobided view from nowhere.

Charles Beitz (1949)

Rawls is talking about social justice, which is mainly domestic justice
Charles Beitz, comes along and is moved by Rawls, but what does this say about international justice?
By the time Rawls ends A Theory of Justice, …
Rawls is very smart but trying to find principles of justice and feel she has to set the boundary somewhere to do theorizing. What do we do for global justice, though?
Rawls: one can extend the interpretation of the original position and think of the parties as different nations who need to choose the fundamental principles to adjudicate conflicting claims among states. Rawls: you’d have similar stuff, basic minimal ideas the same for countries as in the original position between individuals in a state.
Some issues: Rawls assumes that nation-states are self-sufficient, which neglects issues of natural resources. Very ideal theory. With ideal theory you can critique it on its own grounds, or you can go the nonideal route.
Even if we stick with ideal theory, different nation-states have different natural resources. These look a lot like natural talents; you have them, but you didn’t really earn them, so you need to factor them into the difference principle.
Rawls is resistant to a global difference principle. Rawls does not think we should have a global distributive system. Because stratres are self-sufficient. When things are self-sufficient, you don’t have a scheme of cooperation. On the other hand people within a nation need cooperation. All the advantages that arise in societies are not schemes of mutual cooperation. Different countries need resources even for domestic justice.
From a nonideal perspective, nation-states are not self-sufficient: they have different international relations.
Big question – what is unique about global justice and relations?
Contractarian principles usually rest on the relations in which people stand in a national community united by common acceptance of a conception of justice. It is not obvious that these contractarian principles (the Contract) holds up across different nations.
Is the current global system interdependent? If so, can we apply Rawls’ two principles of domestic society? This is a very radical ideal.
Under the international veil of ignorance:
- We want freedom of movement. I should be able to move. Or should I? Cultural appropriation, etc.
Rawls doesn’t like this: don’t use the original position for the globe.
What causes people to move.
Hobbes is laughing: there is no centralized authority in the international system.
Are soceities autarkic (self-contained) in which international justice is a non-issue? Can we even have international justice? We’re very good at developing domestic justice, but we don’t have a good way in the international realm to develop a conception of justice.
Is it really true that there is no centralized authority internationally vs domestically, if not formally politically but latently?
When Rawls eventually does talk about international justice, he talks about peoples, not states.
Do the utilitarians end up winning? Singer didn’t even talk about states. Beitz wants to say – there’s a sense in which we still have states, but the relationships / structures that create inequality now go beyond states. We have multinational actors going beyond states. Less pragmatic and wants to see if we could use something like the global original position not because we’re going to get practical solutions but that we could at least get principles of justice so we could say what would a just world look like? Liberty principle: protect human rights, protect and fulfill human rights of those in your territory. Difference principle: structures of trade which benefit the states that are thre least well off.
Some loosening of the liberty principle, but you can extend the original principle to the international level, and in doing so you get principles of justice, but they don’t necessarily map out how to get global justice.
Beitz engages in some sort of ideal world: before you try to fix the world, ask what fixed means
Formal colonization is over, but are we living in a more just world?
- How are the advantages distributed?
- Are the people who pulled out the rare earth metals to make our phones better or worse off? Beitz thinks they’re worse off.
Singer might say this is why we shouldn’t purchase computers and iphones, etc. Beitz wants to figrue out how we make inequalities benefit the least worse off. Less programmatic, which can be somewhat problematic.

Lecture 4: Brian Barry

Brian Barry (1936-2009), professor at Columbia University and London School of Economics
Brian Barry could have been Rawls
Merging political science with analytic political philosophy
The three questions
- Is it morally obligatory to behave humanely, or simply laudable?
- If it is morally obligatory, what implications does it have, if any, for the obligations of rich countries to aid poor ones?
- On what criterion can we determine how much sacrifice the rich countries should be prepared to make?
Humanity: some duties of humanity exist. If you don’t have to do much, there is some sort of an obligation. You are morally obligated to have done that
Why might the drowning child not apply to international aid?
- The child is not responsible for their plight, but it seems countries are responsible for their problems.
- Maybe we should bite the bullet. What if the child is just an idiot? Do you get what you deserve?
- Mayb eI have a narrow bound, I only need to rescue people in a narrow reach – otherwise it becomes too demanding and we don’t do anything.
- Response: well surely we should still do seomthing
Barry: in general we are always seeking for ways to not to our moral duty.
Barry’s move: you agree ith th edrowning child? Yeah? Can you maek the analogy to the international level? Yes (although here are three objections
The rich have some obligation on humanitarian grounds – how much sacrifice is required? Problem of the obligation of humanity in general, not just particular to the international context. Although we don’t know exactly, you may suffer a fair amount of inconvenience.

C. D. Broad

It is impossible to determine the exact change in threshold, but we can state upper and lower limits which are not too far apart.

John Passmore

At this point, we have a principle of humanity but not talk ed about justice.
Bracketed justice so far but now talking about justice
Philosophy of language
Are we not trying to pack too much into the concept of justice and the correlative concept of rights? Is it wrong to act in certain ways is not the same question as whether it is unjust so to act.
We need to be very precise about what justice is so that it keeps its force. We can’t just use everything and call it an injustice.
not paying back a parking ticket of rparking in a disabled spot is an example of justice but not humanitarianism
We’ll leave it as two separate spheres: humanitarianism and justice
Everyone has someone to say about Rawls – they claim they are not Rawlsians, but they are Rawlsian
Analytic philosophers, kill the master – they’re all Rawlsians but they all go after that guy
Rawls views justice as reciprocity
- Justice as fidelity: honoring contracts – conservative view of reciprocity, you’re supposed to do what is expected of you. I break certain norms, I put a gun to your head and force you to do shit
- Justice as requital: far return, beyond contracts. Not cheating anybody. Are you being fair in your pricing.
- Justice as fair play (Barry likes): If one benefits from some cooperative practice, one should not take benefits while failing to do their part.
Those who benefit the most from society are the real free riders,
Rawls has oneo f the better systems of justice: not justice as fidelity or requital necessarily, but just meeting the bar of justice as fidelity isn’t really enough. Doing what’s expected of you perpetuates domination. Justice as requital – give people market price. Justice as fair play: everyone has to do their part in the scheme.
Can we understand the drowning child case as a case of justice and not mere humanitarianism?Maybe we have an unarticulated assumption that the child belongs to our community; maybe
Rawls: we should think of justice as fairness. At first it seems obvious, but what Rawls wants to have is a notion of justice in which competing notions of the Good can fit. We often conflate justice as our conception of the Good, but justice is broader. Overlapping consensus.
Hume tries to give you a moral psychology
Reciprocity in the proper sense is justice.
Fidelity, requital, fair play – each one backs off the next one, maybe even a sort of Hegelian sequence?
Fair play interpretation: how do you explain the drowning child? there are unarticulated contextual assumptions and norms in that community calling for low-cast rescue if we ever find ourselves in need of rescue.
Beitz extends the difference principle because the network of international trade is extensive enough to draw all countries into a cooperative scheme.
Beitz: we have a community, a scheme, etc.
Barry’s revolt (even though he is more left-wing than Beitz) – trade does not constitute a cooperative scheme of the relevant kind
A society is a scheme of social cooperation, we can generate principles of justice.
Beitz is saying we should redo the scheme, but that doesn’t make it unjust – you can’t make the scheme more extensive.
Barry: the world doesn’t constitute a single cooperative partnership in the required sense.
Reparations justice?
Colonialism: not that people are entering a scheme, but that you are taking your stuff: justice is not justice as fair play, but as restorative justice.
Weaponization of the scheme
The scheme has norms baked into it but because the powerful use fidelity or requital to benefit themselves, not fair play, etc.
This is why Rawls says we can’t take the DP global: is there is a scheme?
Schemes are quasi-insurance schemes
Barry – there are relations between schemes, but these relations do not constitute a scheme.
We are not concerned with improving the benefits of rich countries per se

Justice as Equal Rights

General rights are anterior to special rights.
General rights are human rights
Special rights are products of special schemes
We came up with a little scheme
General rights come before special rights – lexical priority matters
Justice as reciprocity needs a prior assignment of rights before it can get off the ground – even if it failed, we can fall back upon this idea of justiceas equal rights.
Natural resources fit requirements for being the subjects of general rights, not special rights, so everyone has an equal right to enjoy these benefits. This is a very old idea, even Lockean.
However, treating natural resources as collective international property seems like a reintroduction of colonialism.
If third world countries control their own resources, let them. Here is where we can get the idea of restorative justice.
Someone must have done something to get a special right.
Libertarians leave Barry here: just becuase you inherit something odesn’t mean that you don’t have it anymore
Questions of property: at some point claims of inheritance become part of common heritage
What is the sort of theory of property being espoused here?
Hume’s moral psychology: if someone kills your brother, you don’t forget it – people kill people and that sticks with them, resentment lingers – if you’re used to following authority and it works fine, then it works fine and follow it.
For Barry, it’s not about getting everything back to its right place, but what reason to we have to radically redistribute.
International INstitutions, INternational Taxation – we need to create the scheme to make decisions and carry them out.
Reformist-progressive, not radical; redistribute proceeds among poor countries
We started with the humanitarians, now starting on justice: justice as fair play isn’t going to get us the smame kind of redistributino as with singer, but if we have justice as equal rights, that would justify a lot of redistribution..
The tax has to be progressive, not regressive.
Treat international distribution as charity but domestic justice as duty

Lecture 5: Brian Barry and Goodwin

Brian Berry, essay comes after questions on how to take justice – everyone is a Rawlsian; Barry is an egalitarian liberal, many problems we face are a problem of not having equal opportunity
Prof Wirts: if it’s morally obligatory, you’re talking about justice.
Barry comes out of tradition of philosophy of language where we want to be very clear and if there is a distinction to be made, then let’s make it
I don’t need such a heavy duty weapon as justice to pull the drowning child out of the pond.
Passmore: a thin notion of justice, let’s not pack too much into the concept of justice. We can say some things are wrong without saying that they are necessarily injustices.
Justice as fidelity (follow contracts), justice as requital (contract has to be fair), justice as fair play (it’s ok to require more from people, depending on the distribution of goods)
Recast the drowning child problem – but now it looks very weird. You pull the child out of the pond because we have an expectation that I could drown and someone wants to pull me out. It doesn’t seem to work.
Cooperative schemes don’t need to be extensive – you owe some things, but not as many things; the world does not constitute a single cooperative partnership; a scheme of international redistribution cannot plausibly be advantageous to rich countries.
Justice as equal rights. General rights are prior to speical rights – justice as reciprocity needs a prior assignment of rights before it can get off the ground.
Natural resources fit all the requirements for being subjects of a general right, and everyone has an equal right to enjoy their benefits.
Inheritance is used to justify lineage of resource property. But also, with time, inheritance becomes part of common heritage; claims to inheritance attenuate
For Barry, justice is about symbolism and power, truth and reconciliation – you have to recognize what happened was bad – power of control
Consequentialism + humanitarianism; Kantian + Rawlsian + liberals + rights-based.
Humanity is a question of doing good; justice is a question of power, power as in control, autonomy, self-determination. I am the author of my own destiny.
Power – allows for differing natures of the good
Paternalism
Who decides what promoting happiness and reducing misery is? What is the concept of the good? The downside of paternalism is that you can’t use parental authority to control your child. Justice requires you to take your hands off.
Humanitarian view: donor countries
International vs domestic institution funding – should there by a difference by justice?
International institutions
To talk about what I ought to do with what is mind makes no sense until we’ve established what is mine in the first place.
We cannot talk about humanity unless we have a baseline set by justice.
Roger Nett (1921 - 2011)
- “The Civil Right We Are Not Ready Fo: The Right of Free Movement of People on the Face of the Earth”, 1971
- Part of a basic debate about what are human rights, basic rights, civil rights?
- The right to free movement is a civil right
What is the aim of morality’s scope?
- Universalism: everyone and everything should be captured under our moral scope. Kant is a moral universalist.
  - Liberalism tends towards universalism
  - General duties – we have a broad, possibly infinite set of duties. It just keeps on growing.
- Particularism: our unbounded community
  - Limit the scope to a bounded community. There ways in which universalists and particularists can extend rights to the same set of people.
  - Special duties: we owe some things to certain people that we do not owe to everyone.
  - Communitarians tend to be particularists.
  - Global communitarianism? Singer
- The question is if the movement was out (universalist) or inwards (particularist)
- General duties tend to trump special duties
- Special duties, for liberals, tend to come out of contracts.
- Maybe there is someone specific who is supposed to save the child.
- Universalists tend to promote impartiality
- Hume – all morality is based in sentiment. Partiality is the source of this – it’s descriptive, this is what motivates you to do the good thing.
- Particularism has different positive or negative sources.
- Maybe a defense of particularism: we are always particualr, standpoint epistemology, so it’s actually in bad fatih to pretend to be universalist.
Michael Walzer, communitarian response to Rawls: all liberals care about distributive justice, but – how is that group constituted?
Hannah Arendt: the rights to have rights
What we do with regard to membership structures all our other distributive choices: it determines with whom we make those choices, from whom we require obedience and collect taxes, to whom we allocate goods and services.
If you demand things from people, you have to give them other things
Global libertarianism – anarchy; global socialism – one world government. Without those two, distributive justice presupposes a bounded world in which distributions take place.
A group of people committed to dividing, exchanging, and sharing soical goods, avoiding sharing power with anyone else.
Admission and exclusion are at the core of communal independence; that is what the meaning of self-determination is.
Seattle doesn’t have an independence from Washington D. C.
Walzer, we do have an obligation to mutual aid, but not for justice
Joseph Carens, 84 ish but gets published in 87
- Borders have guards and guards have guns
- When someone points a gun at you and tells you to go away, that’s coercion.
- What justifies the use of people against ordinary and peaceful people?
- On what moral grounds can liberals keep people out?
- You can be a libertarian liberal, a Kantian-Rawlsian egalitarian liberal, or utilitarian liberal – all part of the liberal family and tend to universalize.
- What do libertarians say about open borders? You cannot violate liberty of association.
- We have to go global, what do Rawlsians say? We don’t know about place of birth or membership in one particular society rather than another.
- State sovereignty is morally constrained by principles of justice
- Rawls is already mad: principle principle doesn’t apply globally. Carens says stfu.
- Under the original position, freedom of movement is a basic liberty which people should have
- Utilitarian – “aliens” have to count too. So a utilitarian cannot be in favor of closed borders.
Objections
- Liberal theories cannot deal with non-citizens. Roger Nett: let’s historicize this.
- Only illustrates the inadequacy of liberal theory – should we all become particularist communitarians?
Robert E. Goodin, 1950
- A liberal who thinks that the it is wrong to give priority claims to our compatriots.
- But boundaries matter
- We have special responsibilities for and should give priority to compatriots as the best way of discharging general duties.

Lecture 6: Robert E. Goodin

Utilitarians and Kantians agree that moral principles and moral agents should be universalized; everyone should be treated the same.
Polymarchian view is bad
The issue is that we ordinarily acknowledge various special duties
Randomness can be fair
When reflecting upon the case of compatriots, most people think that sometimes we’re supposed to be more scrupulous in our treatment of nonnationals than in our treatment of known compatriots
- We cannot take away foreign property.
- We cannot dam or divert rivers flowing across international boudnaries… etc.
Standard explanations for this phenomenon
- Special relationships magnify preexisting moral duties
  - It is wrong to let people starve, but it is especially wrong to let our kin and compatriots starve
  - Magnification must be symmetrical in positive and negative directions
  - But in examples, we don’t see the same kind of magnification w.r.t. negative duties.
  - However magnification isn’t really carried out wholly
  - If anything, our negative duties towards nonnationals (rather than compatriots) are magnified.
- Special relationships multiply preexisting moral duties
  - Contracts come in: you have no rigtht o inhabit a room in my house, but I am duty-bound if we sign a lease
  - Multiplication produces more new duties in each new direction
  - Reduction of negative duties
  - Special relationships tend to have a tendency to strengthen positive duties while weakening negative ones. (!!!)
- Speical reltionships are the product of a mutual-benefit soceity, which strengthen and weaken preexisting moral duties
  - This view is a competitor – it can eactually explain what is happening pretty well.
  - It is permissible to impose hardships if some positive good comes of doing so
  - You give up some of your freedoms for a collective good
  - Those outside of our mutual benefit society do not bear any of our burdens but also do not have claim to the benefits we produced for ourselves
  - A version of this Rawlsian view of a cooperative scheme for mutual benefit
  - Mutual-benefit soceity logic requires that people’s benefits from society be proportional to the contributions they have made to the production of those benefits.
  - So who is inside the club and who is outside it?
  - Insurance schemes
  - Resident aliens are often net contributors to society, but are denied its full benefits.
  - There are people which you want to exclude but the logic says you should, but there are people who you want to include but the logic says you shouldn’t
Assigned Responsibility model
- Brings together the universalist and the particularist
- Special duties are merely devices whereby general duties get assigned to particular agents
- General duties are pursued more effectively if they are subdivided and particular people are assgiend special responsibility for particular parts of the general duty
- Families are essentially social operations
- National boundaries perform the same function: statesa re assigned for special responsibility and for protecting and promoting the interests of their citizens
- States are like lifeguards, a doctor that has been assigned to you, what they are supposed to be
The useless and the helpless: states have to deal with them, regardless of whether they are a net benefit or not
Boundaries and the distribution of resources – special responsibilities are a mere administrative device, should be asigned to agents capable of discharging them effectively; sufficient resources should be given so each state agent can effectively discharge those responsibilities
Does a commitment to respecting state sovereignty require one to be a particularist?
Is it possible to say that we do not have special duties to our conationals without falling into an open borders position? i.e. can we be universalists without being cosmopolitans?
Miller – one of the smartest nationalists in Mendoza’s opinion
Pogge – the arch-cosmipolitan
If ywe just stick with negative duties, rich countries owe a huge amount to the Global South
Universalists tend to be cosmipolitans and particularists tend to be nationalists.

Lecture 7: David Miller

Kantian universalist obligations vs particularism, special duties
Robert Goodin – you can have general duties and particular duties, we assign responsibility to particular people for specific duties
The nation-state is like a lifeguard – distribution/instrumentalization of the general order
A “liberal-nationalist” – you can only actualize liberalism within a bounded community
Metaphyiscally nationalist
Miller presents a good, honest case for nationalism.
Miller and Goodin’s political worlds look similar, but their reasoning is different.
Goodin doesn’t think that national boundaries are morally significant, but that they are instruments for general principles.
Miller: what we owe to our compatriots may be more extensive than the duties we owe to strangers, simply because they are compatriots.
Goodin tries to go from the universal to the particular, and Miller goes from the particular to the universal
You can have a particularist view of immigration: immigrants help our society. A lot of folks assume a particularist view and say immigrants bring crime and harm the economy, opposition is that in fact they do… but in a universalist view where everyone has freedom of movement.
Most people have some sort of a particularist view – make the country stronger, etc.
Under the most prominent ethical theories
A universalist believes that deeper significance to boundaries is a sort of moral error – an intrusion of irrational emotional attachments and Humean fervor into an arena which ought to be governed by reason.
The moral subject is seen as the abstract individual (the unencumbered self), possessed of the general powers and capacities but not fundamentally committed to particularities (particular people, groups, practices, etc.)
- e.g. under the Rawlsian veil, various particular features become abstracted, you end up with an unencumbered self
This is unattractive – starting political theorizing from an unencumbered self is unattractive – loses touch with how we actually think about such issues.
- Miller shows that we are naturally encumbered.
Most philosophers end up being universalists, you messed up at the beginning – Rawls is the biggest culprit here. Pretend you detach yourself from all of these different areas, you become a void of an individual
If an ethical theory remove the subjective view, what claims can it make on the subject?
- Ethical theory must relate to the actual experience of agency.
- Impartial reason dictates I should perform this action, that action – but why does that give me a reason to perform it?
- Neo-Humean (?)
Consider a second view of ethical agency in which the subject is already deeply embedded in social relationships. The subject is partly defined by these relationships. To divest oneself from these commitments would be to change one’s identity.
Sometimes we value things because we didn’t choose them, even more than those which we cannot choose – there are things which are handed down to me
A radical break – the things which make you you tend to be things you inehrit, and the things you pick tend to be things you have to change.
For the ethical particularist, we should replace the abstract individual with the embedded individual.
Pride of place, among constitutive attachments to those not voluntarily acquired.
You can’t be neutral on a moving train – if you’ve stayed neutral, you’ve made a “moral truth”
Something about having compatriots yields special duties which arise becuase you are a member of this group.
Do I have a higher moral obligation to something that I didn’t choose?
It’s not a normative as much a descriptive account. What motivates people is their commitment to particular groups.
Universalism can generate surrogates for national attachments but not the genuine article of nationalism
- Can’t we thinka bout it as a mutual benefit society? This targets states but not nations. When we think about particularist groups, a lot of people don’t really reflect on the group. Goodin isn’t actually getting at the nation. In the mutual benefit society, you have a boundded community which can look like a nation – an insurance scheme.
- In the assigned responsibility model, you don’t need a nation to have a lifeguard. Nationality has no place in this picture.
Is the nation salvagable?
What are nations? – nationalism in the 20th century has been bad. National boundaries are different from state borders. Although the nation-state parallel arises later. Nation is language, race, religion, etc. which come to form nationhood. A state can include more than one national grouping, so people sharing a national identity can live under two or more state.
Nationality is essentially a subjective phenomenon, constituted by the shared beliefs of a set of people. A shared belief that each belongs with the rest, and that the association is not merely transitory nor instrumental but comes from a long history of living together. Part of a national history
Whether a nation exists depends on whether its members have aprpopriate beliefs, it doesn’t matter if those beliefs are true.
Set of beliefs, what is our story?
“This isn’t who we are” – well, who are we? What does it mean to be American.
There’s a vagueness to all these things
Each member recognizing a loyalty to the community, expressed in a willingness to sacrifice personal gain to advance its interests.
Can you exit a nation? Not that it’s not doing as much good for me, but it’s doing deep harm for me.
The nation is something you enter and exit with high difficutly – you can’t just enter and exit as you wish.
Benedict Anderon, *Imagined Communities: Reflectingo on the Origin andt he Spread of Nationalism” — Nations are myths, it’s mostly just vry pernicious
Miller – what if all of your rational beliefs turn out to be false? Even the storyw e tell ourself about ho the nation came about is false,
Background is essential in the building of a nation
Can we separate nationality from ethnicityw ithout collapsing the former into mere adherence to a set of political institutions?
The national story doesn’t necessarily need to be a positive story. It is still part of the story.
Miller is a borderline socialist
Can someone be nationless?
The nation as the object of allegiance is not necessarily in worse shape than other possible objects.

Lecture 8: Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty

Thomas Pogge (1953)

Becomes kind of problematic - should you teach the work of sexual harrassers?
Pogge is writing in a post cold war context – this is the Peace of Nichius – we can start reshaping the world in different ways. People in the early 90s are very excited, bring in Clinton from Reagan and Bush
Feasible to think about global institutions
Persons should be citizens of political units, without any single political unit being dominant and occupying the traditional role of state.
Anti-Westphalian view: Westphalia, the state is the highest position.
If you are a cosmopolitan, you are committed to
- Individualism – the individual is the fundamental unit of concern, social groups are composed of individuals. You don’t, say, owe something special to your family just because it is a family; families are comprised of individuals. Being able to exit relationships is good.
- Universalism – the status of ultimate unit of concern attaches to every living human being equally – not merely to some subset.
- Generality – you are of equal concern, but you should also hold me in equal concern.
Pogge resists the cosmopolitan concept of the “global citizen”
Two distinctions: legal vs moral cosmopolitanism (we are moral cosmopolitans), institutional vs interactional conception
Miller even considers himself a moral cosmopolitan.
Almost everyone takes an institutional conception of justice.
On an interactional view, one opposes slavery on the basis that they have a positive dutiy to protect or rescueothers from enslavement.
For an institutional view, the right constrains legala and economic institutions; you are perpetuating a negative state of affair
The institutional view: you should not harm folks, you’re not giving charity. Institutional ways of thinking ends up giving you more responsibility, not less.
Are you morally responsible? Institutions can be set up in tricky ways – it’s really easy to find bad people, but actually you might be responsible even if you don’t know.
Provides ideal theory which seems to be able to be applied to non-ideal contexts
We do have an international scheme.
Pogge is, like Singer, a consequentialist.
Institutional view boradens the circle of those who share responsibility for certain deprivations and abuses
Marx and morality – the moral follows from the political
The problem with a purely institutional view is that human rights seem to exist only when and where there are already schemes of global cooperation
Our negative duties trigger obligations
Does our shared responsibility for justice extend beyond our national institutional scheme?
Relativist/local objection to extending responsibility for justice.
- “exporting democracy” / colonialism / cultural relativism / can we do anything about this
Pogge: we have populated international dynamics with human artifacts, they are predictable, and there are externalities proliferating in global circulation.
For cosmopolitan morality, concentration of sovereignty at one level is not defensible anymore.
Objection: we should focus on domestic schemes. Pogge: it might be harder – we shouldn’t make a fetish of state sovereignty.
Not proposing a world state, but rather governmental authority/sovereingty dispersed vertically, not just among states, but neighborhoods, towns, counties, provinces, states, regions, etc.
- Objection: Hobbesian, you presuppose a sovereign. Pogge: this is nonsense. The US does not have a top-down sovereignty, there are multiple checks on each other and we still have sovereignty. Why not disperse it vertically?
- Objection: There are certain vertically indivisible governmental functions, e.g. immigration whichform the core of sovereignty. Any political unit exercising these core functions is already dominant. What is the ride to exclude or admit?
Pogge wants a stronger global structure.
Why disperse sovereignty?
- Peace and security. You can’t eliminate elimination of weapons of mass destruction voluntarily
- Reducing oppression. Many states use their sovereigtny in obscene ways.
- Global economic justice. There’s no other way to do this. States have too much power which just has to be checked. How are you going to force states to get goods?
- Ecology
The authority to make decisions should rest with a democratic political process in a unit which is
- as small as possible
- includes all legitimately affected people
- balances first and second considerations
Principles which ought to govern geographical separation of political units
- Inhabitants of any contiguous territroy can join an existing political unit if their population is willing to accept them as members
- Inhabitants of any contiguous territory of reasonable shape can form thesmelves
Borders are malleable, they can be redrawn – they serve to reflect organizations of sovereignty.
A minimal anarchist tendency here.
Borders aren’t irrelevant, but they aren’t fixed either.

Lecture 9: Law of Peoples

Pogge, what does it take to be a cosmopolitan? Individualism, universalism, etc.
Joseph Carens, Charles Beitz, etc. – took John Rawls and applied it to the global scale.
Under the original Position, individuals are primary agents; wealth states are required to redistribute some of their wealth by an international difference principle
Rawls says: you guys are all wrong.
Two basic principles of justice are designed for the basic structure of society
- Some people tried to applyt ehv eil of ignorance to personal conduct, etc. – how I should act
- Rawls designed the original psoition to define the basic structure of society
- Not the governance of private associations, not for relations between states – against Pogge, Beitz, Carens
The Law of Peoples, 1999. There is a kind-of international basic structure. It is international but not cosmopolitan.
- International = relationships between nation-states
- Cosmopolitanism is focused on individuals.
Peoples vs state – Rawls prefers the word ‘peoples’
You have representatives who serve as agents of international justice
Committed to a view of pluralism – Plato’s Cave is very nice when only one person leaves the cave. What if 5-6 people escape and they see the Good and come back to the cave? And they all say different things which are right but different? There are different, competing, and equally valid views of the Good. You don’t have a God’s-eye view of things – we have no epistemic access to the Good as such.
The views of all well-ordered societies need to be respected in an international original position
Rawls is suspicious of a world government, it’ll lean towards despotism and endless fighting by groups seeking independence.
Demanding ‘global’ liberalism (which most cosmopolitans aim for) is too intolerant, it doesn’t respect pluralism.
- Interesting statement: societies do not need to be liberal to be ‘well-ordered’
- Liberalism can be overly imbued with Western values – it sounds so good to us because … we saw the Sun, etc.
- Illiberal societies are not going to disappear anytime soon.
- Pogge dodges the world government suspicion but demands global liberalism
Peoples: Are comprised of individuals ruled by a common government, bound together by common sympathies, firmly attached to a common conception of right and justice.
- Trying really hard not to say nations, because that’s Miller, he’s not a nationalist
- It sounds like a nation, but it’s not
- People differ from states because peope do not necessarily have traditional sovereign state powers but strive towards them.
- e.g. indigenous communities in the US
- e.g. Palestinians in the West Bank
- The details aren’t as important as what Rawls is trying to make us see – peoples will try to become states
- Trying to make sure that some people don’t get left out in the global position
Well-ordered societies
- Society vs state
- We are supposed to respect well-ordered societies
- Maintain morally acceptable relations with outside societies – not expansionist or prone to welfare
- Maintain minimally decent political institutions – respect human rights
Outlaw soceities – threat to peace and can be confronteda s a matter of self-defense
Burdened societies – want to be well-ordered but don’t have the resources to build institutions to do so
Decent peoples are not liberal but well-ordered
- Kazanistan: An Islamic state where only Muslims can hold the high office
Outlaw – an outlaw to whom or what? What is the Law? We have a moral obligation to go in and fix it. When it gets to genocide, you are now an outlaw state and you need to do something to stop genocide.

Elizabeth Anderson

What is wrong with inequality?
it is unjust when it is accidental, caused by morally arbitrary factors
Nozick pushes back against this
Relational egalitarians claim that inequality is unjust when it disadvantages people, when it reflects, embodies, or causes inequality of authroity, status, or standing
Camps disagree on how to conceive of equality
- Equal distribution of non-relational goods among individuals (cosmopolitans – luck egalitarianism)
- A kind of social relationships between people – authority, status, standing (Rawls – relational egalitarian)
Different families
Going behind the veil of ignorance – who substitutes for what parties?
Different conceptions of the good – tolerance?
There is no international difference principle, you can’t have that because that would be trying to turn everyone into Family C
Difference principle: arbitrary differences sohould not be allowed to determine distribution unless the inequality maximally benefits the least advantaged members of society
The difference principle has to applyto cooperative schemes, it’s not a cooperative scheme in the same way that domestic societies are.

The international veil of ignorance

You are a peoples’ representative; you know the reasonably favorable conditions which make democracy possible, but you do not know your natural resources, level of economic development, etc.
Principles of the international basic structure
- You can’t ask for a difference principle
- Peoples are free and independent, and this is to be respected by other peoples
- Peoples are to observe treaties and undertakings – i.e. hold up to your contracts
- Peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them
- Peoples are to honor human rights
- Peoples are to observe the duty of nonintervention
- Peoples are to honor human rights
- Peoples are to observe the duty of nonintervention, except in extreme cases – you can’t intervene whenever something you don’t like happens.
- Peoples have a right to self-defensive, but not to instigate war for other reasons
- Peoples must observe specified restrictions in the conduct of war
- Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavorable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime – you need to get burdened societies to a minimally decent level
Private note – liberalism holds within itself a self-negating gesture, which is that under liberalism one must tolerate anti-liberalism / illiberalism.
What counts as intervention?
Does Rawls offer a geneological type explanation for how things came to be?
Is liberalism superior to illiberalism?
Is pluralism incompatible with liberalism?
Core human rights
- Right to subsistence, security, property, formal equality before the law.
- Peoples cannot engage in acts like slavery, genocide, religious persecution, starvation, or mass murder – you become an outlaw state when you do this
- There are limits on international toleration.
Rawls: if you’re an illiberal state, we don’t like you, but we can tolerate you – but if you become an outlaw state, we need to change you
No one likes the Law of Peoples – everyone hates it, but for Rawls: if everyone is attacking me, I’m in the right spot.
Inequalities in the international scheme are due to internal rather than external reasons – a lto of emphasis is put on the peoples themselves.

Is Law of Peoples a betrayal of liberalism?

Seems to give legitimacy towards inegalitarian regimes
Decent societies might deprive wome nof education – it’s not good, but you need to tolerate it under liberalism.
In the international original position, peoples are represented by the dominant group and dissenting voices seem to be out from the start.
It seems to me like Rawls has no balls

Lecture 10: Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy

Rawls should have probably gone another direction
Universalism: impartiality (general duties, cosmopolitanism, liberals tend to be universalists), particularism: partiality (special duties, we owe some things to certain people that we do not owe to everyone, e.g., nationalism; communitarians tend to be particularists)
Can and how do liberals justify partiality?
Miller is a liberal nationalist – you hav eto have the nation first
A second attempt

Michael Blake

We can defend principles of sufficiency abroad and principles of distributive equality at home because these principles can be understood as distinct implications of impartial principles in distinct institutional contexts.
There’s no real tension here between being impartial and being partial; different contexts require different things.
Coercion rather than cooperation is the sine qua non of distributive justice
Sine qua non – the thing without which there is nothing, the essential thing.
The mere fact of material inequality globally greater than what is allowed byt ehd ifferece pirnciple is morally equivalent to denying the right to vote
Liberal equality does not allow for those who don’t share the state to be affected by their qualities – even more so when citizenship is the result of morally arbitrary features.
State borders are not morally irrelevant.
There is no coercion or cooperation at the global level which is as significant as in states.
Rawls’ problem is that he thought the issue was a cooperative scheme from distributing benefits of a cooperative position
That’s not why we need to have an original position, but because of the coercive element.
Blake is marginally famous, not like Beitz and Pogge, why we should have this cooperative scheme
The domestic original position – if you read Rawls, he should have been concerned with coercion, how do you justify coercion? Liberals are concerned about autonomy principally – all this stuff about equality is important insofar as it respects autonomy.
The more coercion you have, the more soceity demands equality.
At that point, if you said borders of the state were arbitrary, you go full Carens, open borders… but Blake says that even if they are arbitrary, they are morally relevant via coercion.
Relative vs absolute deprivation (compare with luck and relational egalitarianis) – there is a threshold to decent human functioning, beneath which the possibility of atuonomous human agency is removed. In a certain sense death is the ultimate result.
You cannot appeal to the holdings of others – you all are required to act; it doesn’t matter what you have.
Relative deprivation (maps more onto relational egalitarian view) – the moral gravity of the case might increase as the gap between resource holders and resource lackers grows
Liberalism concerns itself with absolute deprivation abroad and restricts concern for relative deprivation locally.
You need to help out absolute deprivation
Coercion matters if it challenges autonomy.
Is exploitation a form of coercion? Is exploitation coercive? Reframing: Is exploitation an invasion of autonomy?
If someone is in absolute deprivation, it is coercive if I do not unconditionally help them to get out of absolute deprivation.
Shared citizenship gives rise to a concern with relative deprivation which is absent in the international realm. What looks like partiality is actually an implication of an impartial principle
Goes to Aristotle’s Neomachean ethics: a wrestler milo eats a lot; what is good for MIlo might not be good for a smaller guy. What appears to be giving each individual partially, it is rather an impartial principle for giving each what is owed.
Noninstitutional and Institutional Theory
- Noninstitutional Theory: abstracts away which institutions we currently have – what do we want if we start from scratch?
- Institutional Theory (Conservatism): Don’t ask how we should have developed the world, but what the various institutions we have now must do for their powers to be justifiable.
- We should at least try to justify institutions
Teh fundamental principle: All individuals should have access to goods and circumstance swhere they can live as rationally, autonomous agents, and can pursue plans of life in accordance with individual conceptions of the good.
Crippling social norms like caste systems are violations of autonomy.
Coercive practices and institutions should be justified or eliminated
Coersion at the domestic vs stat elevel – you need a justification at the national level which you aren’t finding in the internationa llevel
This is what motivates the original position – you can take Bezos and redistribute to other people because they are under a coercive scheme. Something about state coercion is different.

Joseph Raz’s Conditions of Autonomy

Everyone thinks Raz has autonomy correct
Person has appropriate mental capacities tof rormulate personal rpojectrs and pursue them
Enjoy an independent range of options
Indpeendent, subject to the anti-will of another throgh control
WHat happens when someone coercively removes options / denies mya bilityto live my own life fromt he inside,t to build myself in the world
What sorts of consideraitons could justify partiality / an impermissible violation of autonomy?
For someone like Blake, in order for a random person to coerce you, they have to give a good story why. Paternalism is ok if it’s allread
There is no international coercion in the ame wy that states have power – the very ability to pursue our plan sappears impossible na deq=
International legal institutions do not engage in cooperative pra;felse, etc.
A strate is inherently ocncerisv
For Blake, this is a question – the cops execute the coersion.
Rawls principles of justice hold within a set of individuals who share coercive political institutions, since those institutions stand in need of justification through th euse of public reason.
Laws of the Poeple is where Rawls goes wrong – coercion is very intertwined, but you see the difference really when you get to the international level. Rawls kept talking about cooperation.
Two Autarkic States – Borduria and Syldavia. Borduria is well off, Syldavians are not well off – but purely becuase of morally irrelevant factors, and they are entirely isolated from one another.
- Syldavnians are less well-off than Bordurians; Bordurians may give their wealth to Syldavians more out of supererogation than of obligation.
- A luck egalitarian rejects this, but a relational egalitarian accepts this.
- Beitz and Pogge – Yes, but this changes once trade and iplomacy begin to take place. These links then comprise a cooeprative scheme for mutual benefit.
- Imagine now that after lotrs of trading, the Syldavians improve slightly and the Bordurians improve a lot more. Can we condemn trade and diplomacy for allowing this degree of material inequality?
- Barry’s intuition – within states, we have gngoing coercion in a way in which you don’t have without – trade is a matter of offers rather than of threats
Blake is trying to show you that we can have a cooperative scheme for mutual benefit, and it doesn’t feel like the justice principle requires that we share across nations.
Justice and fairness: the just thing is to act on climate change because it acts against our autonomy. But when we come together, there is a question of fairness – who can do what, and how should we do it.
Distributive justice requires for there to be coercion in the scheme.
For Blake, the folks he is arguing against are Beitz and Pogge who think that cooperation itself creates a demand for the difference principle to operate at the global level.
Respecting people’s autonomy. Are there ways in which one nation can invade the other’s autonomy even if it isn’t strictly coercive?
If you coerce another body, you need to provide justification.
We are under no obligation to maximzie the world’s welfare, but we are under an obligation to avoid denying the conditions of autonomy to all human beings. We are non-utilitarian.

Lecture 11: Rawls’ Law of Peoples – Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World

Rawls’ law of peoples
- There is a kind of basic structure, but it’s international – it’s not cosmopolitan
- Agents are not individuals but rather peoples, including liberal and illiberal peoples
- Principles of the international basic structure
  - Peoples are free and independent, and their freedom and independence are to be respected by other peoples
  - Peoples are to observe a duty of nonintervention
  - Peoples are to observe treaties and undertakings
  - Peoples are to observe human rights
  - Peoples are to observe the duty of nonintervention
  - Peoples have a right to self-defense but no right to instigate war for reasons other than self-defense
  - peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavorable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime
Peoples vs nations – what even are peoples?
Rawls failed to understand that there is a global basic structure – Rawls is too commited to a Westphalian world
We need principles to help us distribute the benefits and burdens of the global basic structure
Rawlsian scheme is set up such that you can’t interfere: the international community must step back in cases of intrastate conflict
These folks are not anti-Rawls, but disagree with Rawls failing to apply him into the international realm.
Beitz and Pogge have complained that Rawls betrays liberalism by according legitimacy to very inegalitarian regimes.
Most people blame Rawls putting peoples rather than individuals behind the veil of ignorance.
Principles for individuals as individuals are needed.
We need a fully adequate moral theory of internaitonal relations which includes principles to justify relationships among peoples.
But even on the assumption of peoples behind the veil, Rawls is wrong.

What are peoples?

Buchanan: Rawls means groups that have their own states, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to attribute familiar powers of sovereignty.
Only groups with states ahve such powers, so peoples are groups with their own states.
Rawls’ law of peoples are essentially interstate principles.
Maybe Buchanan just does not appreciate Rawls’ difference between peoples and states.
Rawls’ terms might even suggest that he is talking about all groups, even those without states – which is actually more radical than what Rawls is saying. He can’t mean that by what he is doing.
What is wrong with thinking of peoples as states? States now don’t have the amount of unlimited sovereignty Rawls gives them. Rawls ascribes a lot of power to peoples which states don’t have.
- International law limits the powers of sovereignty; states cannot go to war for arbitrary reasons
- Internal sovereignty of states is limited by human rights

Westphalian World

States have to find a way to relate to one another
In a Westphalian world, states are economically self-sufficient and distributionally autonomous
- External actors do not impede on economic self-sufficiency
States also need to be politically homogenous, unified actors, without internal political differentiation.
- Intrastate conflict sdon’t fall in the context of international law.
Big conflict in the peace of Westphalia is religion: external factors trying to impose religion – your conception of the good. Peace of Westphalia, let’s not impose religion on individuals.
Two things showing Rawls does:
- When Rawls talks about peoples, he is talking about them as states.
- When Rawls thinks about states interacting with each other, it’s very Westphalian, but we don’t live in a Westphalian world anymore.
The Westphalian Rawlsian world
- Most people post-WWII are worreid about war, the economic relations are secondary. This is why so much focus on the state emerges.
- Peace of Westphalia emerges after religious war, not trade issues.
- Coca Cola has killed more trade union activists than the Colombian government: international corporations are important here.

The Global Basic Structure

How are indiviudals insured for a good life?
Rawls: as long as individuals are not living in outlaw states, assumes each state is economically self-sufficient and distributionally autonomous, so a well-governed state can ensure a decent and worthwhile life
Rawls does not consider that negotiations within the parameters of the global structure will be shaped by inequities within the gloal structure
Rawls might reply that more egalitarian principles of global distributive justice transgress the bounds of tolerance by imposing liberal conceptions of distributive justice.
- Beitz and Pogge: we can make societies liberal!
Buchanan: Sure, leave them alone. Not proposing what societies do internally.
If you want to go indiviudals, you already have Pogge and Beitz
If we follow Rawls’ path, representatives would
- ensure the global basic structure’s distributional effects would not impede their society’s ability to achieve their own conception of justice and the good
- choose principles that ensure fundamental equality for their societies
Once we take the idea of the global distributive justice seriously, Rawlsyields three principles of global distirbutive society beyond duty to aid burdened soceities
- Global equality of opportunity – make sure your country and folks can have access to these positions, even if you limit this to certain people. You don’t know where you will end up in this global hierarchy, so states
- Democratic participation in global governance – you would want a principle of participation, you want to be able to participate equally.
- Limit on equalities of wealth among societies – you want global limits on inequalities. If you stick with Beitz and Pogge, you get a global difference principle. From their view, it is obvious because you start from individuals behind the veil of ignorance. When yuo start with peoples
Infeasibility objection: any attempt to frame priciples for distributive justice for the global basic structure is an idle exercise because there is no global governnace institutions.
- For Blake, it is coercion rather than governance or cooperation that is the issue.
- What is good? We’re trying to figure out what we need for justice.
- One doesn’t need for principles of justice to be peerfectly satisfied
- We have some methods to enforce confliance.
- Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
- It would be a mistake that coercion needs to be provided by a single centralized enforcer
Two questions to think about:
- Is the infeasibility objection even worth worrying about?
- How satisfactory are Buchanan’s responses to this objection?
The relation between ideal theory and the ‘real world’
Consensus objection: the main thing that is lacking is that there is not enough sufficient consensus among peoples on the content of global distributive justice principles.

Intrastate Conflicts

The Rawlsian state leaves out intrastate conflicts.
United States is a prime example
Buchanan thinks that most conflicts are intrastate rather than interstate, this happens internally.
Rawls: nonintervention is a better general policy. You’re blinded by your own interests, and you can’t see what is good for other people. A phenomenological point, even.
Westphalian approach: let them do it themselves.
Buchanan: if peple have a right to self-determination or rights of minorities are being transgressed, though, Rawls offers you very little.
But Buchanan deosn’t really help us very much here.
What are the justified conditions of secession?

Conclusion

Rawls’ theory cannot be fixed by adding the assumption that parties know that states are not politically homogenous
it would radically change the character of his theory (what is the eidos of Rawls’ theory?)

Questions

What do we need to do?
Responsibility and liability

To what extent is Marion Young saying something different than Pogge, Beitz, and other cosmopolitans? Young thinks she’s saying something very different
Young died very young fora philosopher
Political institutions are a response to obligations of justice rather than their basis.
Comparison with Blake: political institutions coerce us, so they generate obligations to those of us with shared liability.
Obligations of justice arise by virtue of ‘social processes’ wihch connect people
- Menodza prefers ‘relationships’
Some systemic social processes connect people across the world without regards to political boundaries
- vs. institutional social processes, which is what Beitz, Pogge, etc. focus on
Connection occupies spaces across political boundaries
A social connection model is different from a liability model
It’s harder to blame people when you move away from a liability model. But you want to be abl eot blame people. Seems like you’re letting people off the hook.
Young want sto have it both ways on structural and agent-based views
- Singer looks at agents specifically, despite institutions, you as an individual can save a life if you can put aside 50 bucks a year, etc.
Should philosophy be published in this way?
Do you engage the literature? – yes, you need to do a good literature review.
There are connections which arise from our relations with others.
Nation-State/Westphalian view: ultimately, you are somehow responsible because of your connection with others
- Arbitrary where you draw these obligations
- People stand in relationships with others outside political communities.
Cosmopolitan-Utilitarian model:
- Moral agents have identical obligations to all human beings; a very homogenizing view. Simply on the fact that we are all sentient beings and we have an obligation to minimize suffering.
- Obligations should be based ons omething more than just common humanity
- Locke is the first of the social contract theories to suggest that there are social connections prior to political institutions.
- Hobbes thinks of us as not in relation at all in the state of nature, but Locke says – even before we have politics, we have social connections to each other, we trade, etc.
- Maybe one of the places to push back, this team is full of utilitarians, even if they call themsevles Kantians
- Singer and family
- Pogge and Beitz
Certain social connections can generate moral obligations, which is the truth hidden under the nationalist view which goes beyond the cosmopolitan view – it’s not just based on common humanity
Young is in a certain sense trying to “unfetishize” the fetishism

Onora O’Neill, 1941

Inspired by the cosmopolitan folks
Even when we are not conscious of a political relationship with others, we might have a moral commitment to them by virtue of our actions depending on them to perform or accomplish certain things
i.e. we incorporate expectations into the conditions for our actions
We are all dependent on people doing various things
beitz, O’Neill, Pogge, etc. – are saying that transnational social structures generate structural injustices.
Abuse in the Catholic church is in fact more known because there is a hierarchical structure – blame, liability, etc.

Supply Chains, Globalization, Sweatshops

So many things coming from all these different places
IIE’s Can Labor Standards Improve Under Globalization? – 2003
Wake of the anti-sweatshop movement
Everyone is shitting on JC Penny
Subcontracting=
- JC Penny goes to Renzo, who goes to Robillard, who goes to manufacturers / factories, who need vendors and supervisors, under which are workers as independent contractors and producers who make the raw materials, and then you get children and family members in a piecework model
JCPenny is closing odwn – but they’ll tell you that they all have different prssures, JCPenny is competing with Amazon, etc. – we’re not living high on the hog, we are really close to going out of business.
Each position in the cog – competition, it’s not quite my fault.
Epistemic feithism runs throughout the system.
Some economists argue that it’s better to be exploited than to be unemployeed. Raising wages leads to job loss.
What ethicists tell us is that this is an argument against accepting normal market conditions rather than against paying living wages.
Beitz and Pogge – is the way they think of basic structure vs Marion-Young, structures – confluence of institutional rules and interactive routines, mobilization of resources, physical structures, etc. – falls under structures.
Social structures serves as background conditions for individual ctions.
Rules – can be laws or also norms and social habitualities
BUT the metaphor of a structure is problematic, as sort of the ground of the actors. The actors are very much embedded in and part of the structure. The structure is a process.
Is Marion-Young espousing a consequentialist view?
How might the Westphalians push back?
We act with pre-existing knowledge of structures and reproduce / proliferate them.
Counter-finalities: structured social action and interactions often have collective results no one intends
Social structures cannot really be given a ixed definition.
Marion-Young assumes that everyone is well-intentioned and wokring within rules and accepted norms. If someone acts outside of these norms, rules, etc. – it’s easier to know who is responsible.
The target for Young is not sovereignty (even though she is saying something similarly to how Pogge is looking at it), but rather something like Singer.
- Pogge is concerned with the existing nation-state system and trying to build on that – Young is more concerned with “this is how you should understand the basic structure” really
Young seems to think that states aren’t as powerful as we think they are – there are non-political entities which we need to be thinking about.

The Liability Model

You can’t use it to diagnose and understand all injustices
Differentiate victims from perpetrators, etc. etc.
Being victims and perpetrators at the same time – this is true in social connection model.
Consequentialist due to her pragmatism
The problem of consequentialism vs deontology in understanding social justice – ofc we can be Hegelian here, deontology emerges only in a consequentialist backdrop, etc. etc.

Social connection model

Is this actually different from the liability model or did she just not put enough repsonsiiblity?
Some people say Young is not hard enough
Liability model attempts to restore model towards the baseline of normality, but the social connection model questions the baseline / background conditions of action to begin with.
Liability model: backwards-looking, the event happened. Social justice: processes are ongoing and likely to continue.
But maybe looking to forward into the future covers up the past.
Collective responsibility and shared responsibility
Individual responsibility, shared responsibility, and collective responsibility. What is missing is shared responsibility.
Discharged through collective action

Worries

is this just too demanding? Don’t we differentiate degrees of responsibility?
how should we reason about the best ways to reason over our limited time, resources, creative enrgy, etc.

Parameters

Power, privilege, interest, collective ability
An interesting sort of difference principle
Victims of injustice, the Rosseauian will, the Marxist working class
July 30th deadline.

Lecture 13: Associative Duties, Global Justice, and the Colonies

You can’ merely so quickly redress colonialism – there are associative duties.
Non-cosmopolitan view – everyone has general duties, but there are also special duties we owe to particular others.
Associative duties are those that we have to members of an association.
Cooperation and Coercion account
- Beitz, Pogge – cosmopolitans but think cooperation applies to the world
- Rawls thiinks cooperation doesn’t exist robustly in a global sense, what counts as robust
- Blake – it’s about coercion actually
What the non-cosmopolitans feel presents them from falling into cosmopolitanism is the notion of associative duties. They’re going to take the strength of the non-cosmopolitan view and say that because of associative duties, you have a much wider duties to folks than you think you do. Colonialism has reated these kinds of relationships whether you go through cooperation or coercion that generate associative duties.
Nonvoluntary relationships introduce complications – typically people do not choose theirf amilies or their states.
Under colonial rule you have the coercive relationship.
The Mother country not only wants to take the resources of the colonized country, but to deny that the colonized country can have such a relationship with the mother country.
Even if the legal status is different, it doesn’t make it a different sovereign. To say otherwise would be to ‘perversely’ deny that a state could not discriminate unjustly.
- If you look at the out of separate sovereign states, then the question of which duties are owed associatively becomes very thorny.
What counts as the same coercive authority? Do differences in how colonial powers arrange their colonial affairs have impact on associative duties rising from under the coercion account?
Everyone linked by a system of colonial rule has associative duties to one another via being pervasively impacted by the same coercive institutions.
The Blake account seems convincing because coercion seems baked into the colonial relationship.
Cooperaton – individauls are in a joint venture sufficient to ground associative duties
Use a very Rawlsian account of a cooperative scheme – specific kinds of strong reciprocal relations in virtue of their joint engagement in the production of the basic conditions needed to develop and act on a plan of life
Cooperation creates benefits and burdens which become distributed out
Possible objection: cooperation has to be fair. But again suggests that we can avoid incuring duties towards others by dealing with them on noncooperative terms. In fact they are still part of the same scheme.
Secession – under waht conditions can you secede? Whether and on what terms can they be allowed to secede?
Colonizers might be anxious to sever the connection with the colonized, hoping to shed colonial relations. This move turns obligations of justice to fellow citizens by converting citizens into strangers.
You haven’t shed your distributive assocaitve duties even if they secede, even if you have “preiad what you’ve done”
You can continue to have special duties by virtue of the former association
What lingers of colonial ties?
- Restorative reparative justice for violating right of self-determination
- Rectify failures to meet associatively grounded duties during colonization
- Share benefits of cooperative goods created during the period of association to which all parties contributed towards.
Problem of distribution over generations – contribution, grounded duties, etc. left through time.
When we talk about colonies or collectives, are we talking about the collectives as such or collectives as groups of individuals?
Question: Is distributive justice the proper framework to think about the harms and duties owed to the formally colonized?
Maybe a more forward-looking Youngian set up a new structure.
Distributive justice vs relational egalitarian vs luck egalitarian

Lecture 14: Relational Immigration

Immigration restrictions are problematic not based on distributive justice principles, but because they are a way by which the globally affluent exercise power over the globally poor.
Joseph Carens, wrote an essay initially trying to justify immigration exclusions, but looked at it and said liberals cannot justify immigration exclusions.
Citizenship in Western liberal democracies is the modern equivalent of feudal privilege. You don’t do anything to earn it, it’s bestowed upon you.
- “Borders have guards and the guards have guns”
Distributive argument for open borders
- Egalitarian justice requires well-off states ensure that some good G is distributed more equally
- If well-off states adopted less restrictive immigration policies, then G would be distributed more equally
- Therefore, egalitarian justice requires well-off states adopt less restrictive policies towards worse-off immigrants
Basic logic of the open borders case – the good differs, e.g. Carens talks about jobs
Christopher Wellman: “IMmigration and Freedom of Association”, 2008. Very provocative – without denying wealthy societies’ extremely demanding duties, every legitimate state has the right to close its doors to potential immigrants.
What has made this essay very heavily cited? With Carens you can deny it and say feudalism is a bad analogy. Wellman says that moral equality is best thought in terms of relations, not luck. If I have more money than you but because you lost it gambling, then do I owe something for you?
Rawls: I am not a luck egalitarian, it seems like I am a luck egalitarian but I don’t want to be one.
Nietzsche, Kierkegaard – everyone wants to be level, there is a sameness. Wellman – that is a bad way to think about equality.
Moral equality is not simply a matter of having an equal distribution of goods.
- The inequality in questions must be severe enough to warrant attention, e.g. not Bezos vs Gates (Blake: relative and absolute deprivation)
- There must be a relation between unequal parties so one party unfairly benefits from our perpetuates this inequality.
Almost nihilist view that the world is just screwed over, how am I going to be a good person?
Charity vs Justice
Wellman: all egalitarians should be relational egalitarians which doesn’t make sense, don’t go for a sort of naive levelling
A concern for equality does not lead to open borders, according to Wellman
What’s the problem with thinking about distributive justice?
- immigration might not reduce global inequality – most disadvantaged are least likely to immigrate, mass emigration might harm the global poor, immigration can increase inequality because generated surplus is captured by the rich
- assumes demands of distributive equality apply globally
- distributive obligations can be fulfilled in other ways
Why not do the distribution rather than opening borders?
Maybe this is not the case – fundamentally we have a freedom to movement, maybe.
Sharp is trying to say, a distributive argument for open borders has a lot of issues; but what if I gave you an argument that circumvents all of these arguments.

Relational Egalitarian Argument

Distributive inequalities matter insofar as and because they create unequal social relationships. Why does Gates care that he has less money than Beoz
But unequal social relationships exist only where social relationships exist
Inequalities between us and thos ein distant galaxies do not need to worry relational egalitarians.
A relational egalitarian aims to abolish institutions which place people in structured positions of inferiority and replaces them with institutions that enable persons to relate as equals.
Relational egalitarianism: feudal lords vs peasants and masters vs slaves, you can’t rectify the relation, the bad relation is baked into the very opposition.
It’s oging to be inequality of power – usually relational egalitarians are rather looking at stuff, consequences.
You need to fix the power dynamics
A relational egalitarian argument cannot inflate claims on the robustness of cross-border relationships (one slight relationship made huge, e.g. Young) and wihtout denying the relevant relationship requirement – persons share the relevant context of relationships with one another.

Borders

Relational egalitarians should be committed to the cliam that dsignificant disparities in power are pro tanto objectionable.
Being subject to another’s greater power is applicable whenever one is subject to anothe rperon’s greater power int he relevant manner.
Affluent states’ immigration restrictions involve the exercise of unequal power over disadvantaged immigrants.

Unequal Power Complaint

One agent has power over another if they are able to nontrivially constrain the latter’s choices
Egalitarians don’t need to condemn all power disparities, e.g. teacher-student, parent-child, etc.
All of the facts about the power relation must be considered before we make a judgement on it.
Carens was right, he just didn’t express himself very well – it’s not that the Feudal lord has materials over the Peasants, it’s the power relation which matters.
Immigration controls are like a feudal privilege, so you have to abolish the institution.
Sharp’s claim: Carens and Wellman are both right, what they don’t get is that both are relations of inequality, it’s about the power.
Elitopia – elites make all of the decisions and they decide really well, yet something seems deficient about the arrangement because it’s done by these elites. They stand in unequal social relations with their subjects.
it’s not about status either – separate but euqal is wrong because of the relation
Civi Republican View – you’re not a relationa egalitarian, you’re a civi republican in relational egalitarian’s clothes.