Abstract
In the first part of this paper I address the choice between the principles of justice and of humanity as a way of grounding cosmopolitan proposals. I make a conceptual clarification about the humanity approach before giving an argument for promoting justice as the foundation of cosmopolitanism, drawing on work in moral psychology, economics and experimental philosophy. In the final part of the paper I give some reasons for being cautious about the conclusion of the practical argument.
I am grateful to Tom Campbell, Bob Goodin, Nic Southwood, Daniel Star and Brett Calcott for comments on earlier drafts of this paper; and to audiences at the International Global Ethics Association 2008 and the Australasian Association of Philosophy, Australian Division 2008, for helpful questions and comments, notably Gillian Brock, Samantha Brennan, Pablo Gilabert, John Cusbert, Wolfgang Schwarz, and Daniel Star.
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Notes
- 1.
Carens, Joseph. 1987. Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders. The Review of Politics 49: 251–273.
- 2.
Held, David. 1992. Democracy: From City-States to a Cosmopolitan Order? Political Studies 40: 345.
- 3.
There is at least popular discussion along these lines, but as Campbell notes in his “Questioning Cosmopolitan Justice” (published in the present volume), the proposal for world government is not particularly feasible, and as such lacks prominent advocates. But see, Cabrera, Luis. 2004. Political Theory of Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Case for the World State. London: Routledge.
- 4.
Pogge, Thomas. 2002. World Poverty and Human Rights. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ch. 8. Many of these proposals are also concerned with more broadly cosmopolitan ends.
- 5.
From the 2003 Development Assistance Committee Report, when the United Nations’ target was 0.7% of every country’s Gross National Income (GNI). Five countries met or exceeded the targets, while four were at or below one fifth or the required amount. See: Singer, Peter and Tom Gregg. 2004. How Ethical Is Australia? An Examination of Australia’s Record as a Global Citizen. 22. Melbourne: Black Inc.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Pogge, Thomas. 2005. World Poverty and Human Rights. 1. Ethics and International Affairs 19/1: 1–7.
- 8.
Kleingeld, Pauline and Eric Brown. 2006. Cosmopolitanism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmopolitanism/. Accessed 23 October 2008.
- 9.
Caney, Simon. 2001. Review Article: International Distributive Justice. Political Studies 49: 974–977; 977.
- 10.
Pogge, Thomas and David Miller. 2003. Cosmopolitanism: A Debate. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5: 86–91.
- 11.
Barry, Brian. 1982. Humanity and justice in global perspective. In Nomos XXIV: Ethics, Economics and the Law, eds. J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman, 219–252. New York: New York University Press.
- 12.
Shapcott, Richard. 2008. Anti-Cosmopolitanism, Pluralism, and the Cosmopolitan Harm Principle. Review of International Studies 34: 185–205.
- 13.
Campbell, Tom. 2007. Poverty as a Violation of Human Rights: Inhumanity or Injustice? In Freedom From Poverty as a Human Right, ed. Thomas Pogge. 55–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press (with UNESCO). See also his essay in Chapter 8.
- 14.
Pogge, Thomas. 1992. Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty. Ethics 103/1: 48–75: 54; and Pogge, Thomas. 1993. Cosmopolitanism. In A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, eds. Robert Goodin and Philip Pettit. 312–331. Oxford: Blackwell.
- 15.
Campbell, Tom. 1974. Humanity Before Justice. British Journal of Political Science 4: 1–16; Campbell, Tom. 2006. Rights: A Critical Introduction. 157–170. New York: Routledge.
- 16.
See also, for a similar response: Goodin, Robert. 1985. Protecting the Vulnerable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- 17.
Another way to frame this issue, rather than as a dichotomy between the backward-looking assigning of culpability and the forward-looking focus on capacities, is in terms of perfect versus imperfect duties. You might think that justice is a perfect duty, e.g. to never cause harm, while humanity is an imperfect duty, e.g. to assist others sometimes. That way of framing the two would have interestingly different implications.
- 18.
On the imperfect duties model, there is a certain kind of voluntariness, namely the option to choose when the duty will be exercised. There is not, however, the option to choose whether it will be exercised at all, which is my concern here.
- 19.
Campbell, Tom. June 2008. Questioning Cosmopolitan Justice. International Global Ethics Association keynote address. Melbourne: Australia. (See Chapter 8.)
- 20.
Respondents were on average 37 years old, 58% were male (a slight male bias), mostly from the US, UK and Canada, and 25% had some background in moral philosophy. 591 (minus 65, for control reasons) justifications were analyzed by the research lab. Respondents were asked to rank scenarios from “forbidden” through “permissible” to “obligatory”, on a scale from 1 to 7 respectively.
- 21.
Cushman, Fiery, Liane Young and Marc Hauser. 2006. The Role of Conscious Reasoning and Intuition in Moral Judgements: Testing Three Principles of Harm. Psychological Science 17: 1082–1089.
- 22.
Ibid. 1085.
- 23.
And it is – see e.g. Bennett, Jonathan. 1983. Positive and Negative Relevance. American Philosophical Quarterly 20:183–194; Singer, Peter. 1979. Practical Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Hare, Richard Mervyn. 1981. Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- 24.
Of course, it would be desirable to have more experiments corroborate this result.
- 25.
One way to block this premise is to deny the causal efficacy of Pogge’s argument. If people do not believe themselves to be culpable in the way he says they are, then they are unlikely to feel the guilt or shame that might motivate them to take remedial action.
- 26.
Therefore the caveats given in the discussion over norms of fairness later in this section also obtain here.
- 27.
Fehr, Ernst and Bettina Rockenbach. 2003. Detrimental Effects of Sanctions on Human Altruism. Nature 422: 137–140.
- 28.
Ostrom, Elinor, James Walker, and Roy Gardner found that in a 25-round public goods game, individuals would fine non-contributors even though the cost to them accrued as a benefit to the group as a whole. See Ostrom, Elinor, Walker, J., and R. Gardner. 1992. Covenants With and Without a Sword: Self-Governance is Possible. American Political Science Review 86: 404–417.
- 29.
Fehr, Ernst and Simon Gächter. 2000. Cooperation and Punishment. American Economic Review 90: 980–994.
- 30.
Fehr, Ernst and Bettina Rockenbach. 2003. op. cit. 140. See also: Tyler, Tom. (1990) 2006. Why People Obey the Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- 31.
In these games, the first player is given a certain amount of money, from which she proposes some proportion to a second player. If the second player refuses the offer, both players receive nothing. Assumptions of self-interestedness predict that the first player will keep as much as possible for herself, while the second player will accept anything above zero. As it turns out, the median offer of the first player is about 50% of the total amount of money, and the second player typically rejects anything below 30%. Experimenters take this to refute the assumption of purely self-interested behavior, in favor of established norms of fairness (Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. 2006. Social Preferences, Homo Economicus, and Zoon Politikon. In Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, eds. Robert Goodin and Charles Tilly. Oxford: Oxford University Press).
- 32.
See, for example, Colin Camerer and Richard H. Thaler. 1995. Anomalies: Ultimatums, Dictators and Manners. Journal of Economic Perspectives 9:209–219; Werner Güth and Reinhard Tietz. 1990. Ultimatum Bargaining Behavior: A Survey and Comparison of Experimental Results. Journal of Economic Psychology 11: 417–449; Alvin E. Roth, Vesna Prasnikar, Masahiro Okuno-Fujiwara, and Shmuel Zamir. 1991. Bargaining and Market Behavior in Jerusalem, Ljubljana, Pittsburgh and Tokyo: An Experimental Study. American Economic Review 81: 1068–1095.
- 33.
These included five groups of foragers, four groups of horticulturalists, four pastoral herding groups, and two farming groups. Ethnographic details can be found in (Henrich, Joseph, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, Richard McElreath, Michael Alvard, Abigail Barr, Jean Ensminger, Kim Hill, Francisco Gil-White, Michael Gurven, Frank Marlowe, John Q. Patton, Natalie Smith, and David Tracer. 2005. “Economic Man” in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Behavioural Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 28: 795–855).
- 34.
Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. 2006. op. cit. 178.
- 35.
Nisbett, Richard. 2003. The Geography of Thought. New York: Free Press.
- 36.
Ibid, p. xvi.
- 37.
Dispositional attributions are those invoking a person’s character or innate tendencies, and situational attributions are those which appeal to context and environment. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency people have to attribute a person’s failing to the “kind” of person they are, rather than to their situation. Morris, Michael, and Kaiping Peng. 1994. Culture and Cause: American and Chinese attributions for social and physical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67: 949–971.
- 38.
Ortner, Sherry. 2003. East Brain, West Brain. New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9804E5DA163BF933A15757C0A9659C8B63. Accessed July 18, 2008.
- 39.
Peng, Kaiping, Shaun Nichols, John Doris, and Steven Stitch. (Unpublished manuscript). Discussed in Doris, John, and Alexandra Plakias. 2007. How to Argue about Disagreement: Evaluative Diversity and Moral Realism. In Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. 323. Cambridge: MIT Press.
- 40.
Nisbett, Richard. 2003. op. cit.
- 41.
Peng et al. 2007. op. cit.
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Lawford-Smith, H. (2010). Feasibility Constraints and the Cosmopolitan Vision: Empirical Reasons for Choosing Justice Over Humanity. In: van Hooft, S., Vandekerckhove, W. (eds) Questioning Cosmopolitanism. Studies in Global Justice, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8704-1_9
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