Do We Owe More to Fellow Nationals? The Particular and Universal Ethics of Bosanquet’s General Will and Miller’s Public Culture

Abstract

There are significant similarities between Bosanquet’s ethical function of the state and Miller’s defence of nations as communities that generate duties. Bosanquet’s references to the state are predominantly to the nation state (1917a: p. 295), and Miller argues that there are good reasons for states and nations to coincide. More to the point, there are essential similarities in the reasons why these two thinkers believe in the ethical significance of the nation state. Many of their arguments in defence of the state or the nation, respectively, are based on the particularist nature of communities in principle and the nation state in particular. The state, for Bosanquet, has ethical significance because it embodies the general will and the latter can exist only in specific communities with shared experiences and established traditions. The general will is anchored in specific communities, institutions and practices and the state is ‘the largest body which possesses the unity of experience necessary for constituting a general will’ (Bosanquet, 1917a: p. 272). Miller’s commitment to particularist ethics is explicit. Particularism, for him, works on the assumption ‘that memberships and attachments in general have ethical significance’ (Miller, 1995: p. 65). National membership, however, supersedes in ethical significance other memberships for two reasons: existence of public culture and national self-determination.