Abstract
Samuel Scheffler has recently argued that some relationships are non-instrumentally valuable; that such relationships give rise to “underived” special responsibilities; that there is a genuine tension between cosmopolitan egalitarianism and special responsibilities; and that we must consequently strike a balance between the two. We argue that there is no such tension and propose an alternative approach to the relation between cosmopolitan egalitarianism and special responsibilities. First, while some relationships are non-instrumentally valuable, no relationship is unconditionally valuable. Second, whether such relationships give rise to special responsibilities is conditional on those relationships not violating certain moral constraints. Third, these moral constraints arise from within cosmopolitan egalitarianism itself. Thus the value of relationships and the special responsibilities to which they give rise arise within the parameters of cosmopolitan egalitarianism itself. The real tension is not between cosmopolitan equality and special responsibilities, but between special responsibilities and the various general duties that arise from the recognition, demanded by cosmopolitan egalitarianism, of a multiplicity of other basic goods. Indeed, even the recognition of special relationships itself gives rise to general duties that may condition and/or weigh against putative special responsibilities.
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Notes
Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Parenthetical page numbers in this paper refer to pages in this book.
As an example of “extreme cosmopolitanism,” Scheffler refers to Martha Nussbaum’s article “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” reprinted in Joshua Cohen, ed. For Love of Country? (Boston: Beacon, 2002), pp. 4–17. As an example of extreme “communitarianism,” Scheffler refers to Alisdair MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” The Lindley Lecture, Lawrence, Kansas, 1984. We do not address the question here of whether MacIntyre and Nussbaum would find Scheffler’s reconstruction of their position accurate.
Scheffler uses the expression “reduction” to refer to previous interactions and “derivation” to refer to general egalitarian considerations (see chapters 6 and 7 of his book, respectively). For the sake of exposition, we use the term “derivation” only. A good account of the nature of the partialist stance involved in special relationships is presented by John Cottingham in the following two sentences. “Those picked out for special treatment are specified not in terms of some descriptive (and therefore universalizable) quality or feature that they possess, but in terms of some particular relationship which they have to the agent. Thus, in the fire case, my decision to favour my child is based simply on the fact that she is my daughter: there is a non-eliminably particular, self-referential element in my rationale for selecting this child rather than some other.” John Cottingham, “Partiality, Favouritism and Morality,” The Philosophical Quarterly 36.144 (1986), pp. 357–73, at 358–9. Cottingham also discusses the scope of different kinds of partialism, finding that only some are really justifiable (e.g. nationalism does not, but familism does, seem to be a necessary component of a flourishing life for most agents).
Robert E. Goodin, “What Is So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?,” Ethics 98 (July 1988): 663–686, at 678.
Scheffler also considers what he calls “the voluntarist objection,” which says that special responsibilities may involve the oppressive imposition on individuals of burdens they did not voluntarily accept to shoulder. This objection is based on the notion of autonomy, and leads to rejecting any associative duty that does not stem from relationships chosen by rather than ascribed to agents (pp. 4–5, 62–4, 105–7, 110). We do not treat this objection here.
The genuine tension includes also the value of autonomy mobilized by the “voluntarist objection.”
Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 249–274.
Korsgaard’s own example of a state-conditional value is that of an extraordinarily beautiful painting: the beauty of the painting may be valuable for its own sake, but this value may be dependent on there existing conscious beings in the world who could actually appreciate its beauty. The state-conditional value of the painting’s beauty does not mean, however, that it is only of instrumental value (as an instrument for causing pleasure in conscious beings’ minds, for example). See Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends, pp. 264–265.
The horns (a) and (b) represent two different ways of encoding moral constraints in the moral justification of special responsibilities. Korsgaard herself chooses (a). See Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Lectures 3 and 4. For an example of an account of the moral status of special responsibilities endorsing (b), see Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), chapter 2. As will become clear, our argument in this paper does not depend on choosing between (a) and (b).
Scheffler acknowledges that we at least have some minimal responsibilities “toward other people simply as such—to avoid various forms of mistreatment, for example, and also to provide limited forms of assistance in certain contexts” (p. 48). As we shall see, however, genuine prima facie special responsibilities can indeed lie in tension with prima facie general responsibilities; the point is that this tension arises from within the framework of cosmopolitan egalitarianism.
Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
This means that Scheffler’s defence of special responsibilities is quite different from more common ones referring to the trumping character of relational facts. Scheffler’s view would, for example, be the object of Williams’s famous “one thought too many” objection (focused on ridiculing demands that agents provide more grounds than a reference to the fact of a relationship to another agent when they choose to favour that agent as opposed to a stranger). See Williams, Moral Luck, p. 18. For a useful discussion of Williams and Scheffler on this count see Christopher Heath Wellman, “Relational Facts in Liberal Political Theory: Is There Magic in the Pronoun ‘My’?” Ethics 110 (April 2000), pp. 537–62.
See, e.g., David O. Brink, “Utilitarian Morality and the Personal Point of View” The Journal of Philosophy LXXXIII.8 (1986), pp. 417–38; and Goodin, “What Is So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?”
See chapter 2 of Scheffler’s book. The tensions between local and global responsibilities as addressed by Scheffler are discussed in an illuminating way in Elizabeth Ashford, “Individual Responsibility and Global Consequences,” Philosophical Books 44.2 (2003), pp. 100–10.
The difference in weight between negative and positive duties for the arguments regarding global justice is systematically discussed in Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), especially chapter 5. See also David Miller, “Reasonable Partiality Toward Compatriots,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8.1–2 (2005), pp. 63–81.
There is, for example, no mention of special relationships in the list of “primary goods” presented by John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, rev. ed. 1999), pp. 54–5. Other liberal egalitarians have, however, recognized the importance of such goods and see them as primary. See, for example, Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), chapters 5 and 6.
On this point, see Wellman, “Relational Facts in Liberal Political Theory.”
This is the insight in Rawls’s remarks that “the right and the good are complementary” and that “the just draws the limit, the good shows the point.” See John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 140–1. See also Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, second edition), p. 174.
See Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights. In a more recent article, Pogge provides updated data. In the 15 years since the end of the Cold War, “billions of people have suffered greatly from poverty-related causes: from hunger and malnutrition, from child labor and trafficking, from lack of access to basic health care and safe drinking water, from lack of shelter, basic sanitation, electricity, and elementary education. Some 18 million people have died prematurely each year from poverty-related causes, accounting for fully one third of all human deaths. This 15-year toll of 270 million is considerably larger than the 200 million death toll from all the wars, civil wars, genocides and other government repression of the entire 20th century combined.” “By shaping and enforcing the social conditions that foreseeably and avoidably cause the monumental suffering of global poverty, we [the global rich] are harming the global poor... we are active participants in the largest, though not the gravest, crime against humanity ever committed.” Pogge, “Real World Justice,” The Journal of Ethics, 9.1–2 (2005), pp. 29–53, at 30–1 and 33. Scheffler acknowledges the importance of the problem of global harm in his “Reply to Ashford, Miller and Rosen,” Philosophical Books, 44.2 (2003), pp. 125–34, at 127.
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The authors would like to thank the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture for a team grant in support of the research leading to this paper.
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Abizadeh, A., Gilabert, P. Is there a genuine tension between cosmopolitan egalitarianism and special responsibilities?. Philos Stud 138, 349–365 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-006-9046-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-006-9046-z