Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought

328 Pages·2003·2.06 MB·English

by  Samuel Scheffler

Boundaries and Allegiances. Problems of
Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought
Samuel Scheffler

Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New
York
© Samuel Scheffler 2001 First published 2001
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data: Boundaries and
allegiances: problems of justice and responsibility in liberal thought
/Samuel Scheffler.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Liberalism. 2. Justice. 3. Responsibility. 4. Globalization. I. Title.
JC574.S34 2001 320.51—dc21 00-064988 ISBN 0-19-924149-X
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For Adam and Gabe
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Contents
Introduction 1

1 Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes, and
Liberalism in Philosophy and Politics 12

2 Individual Responsibility in a Global Age 32

3 Families, Nations, and Strangers 48

4 Liberalism, Nationalism, and Egalitarianism 66

5 The Conflict between Justice and
Responsibility 82

6 Relationships and Responsibilities 97

7 Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism 111

8 The Appeal of Political Liberalism 131

9 Rawls and Utilitarianism 149

10 Justice and Desert in Liberal Theory 173

11 Morality Through Thick and Thin: A Critical
Notice of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy 197

Index 217

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Introduction

The revival of English-language moral and political
philosophy in the late 1960s and early 1970s took place
1
against the backdrop of intense social conflict and rapid
social change. The social and political controversies of that
era were reflected in the topics that captured the attention
of moral and political philosophers writing at the time.
During a period of widespread protests against the Vietnam
War, philosophers turned their attention to issues of civil
disobedience, conscientious objection, and the morality of
warfare. With sexual mores undergoing a radical
transformation and feminism emerging as an increasingly
important social force, philosophers produced a significant
body of work on the ethics of abortion. As political activism
increased among black Americans in the wake of the civil
rights movement, philosophers started to address questions
of affirmative action and preferential treatment. With the
welfare state in the ascendancy throughout the western
world, distributive justice became one of the central
preoccupations of philosophical theorizing, especially after
the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. And with
the United States and the Soviet Union locked in a global
ideological struggle, moral and political philosophers in the
Anglo-American tradition debated the justice of capitalism
and socialism, and displayed a renewed interest in Marx and
Marxism.
The resurgence of interest in moral and political philosophy
continued unabated through the end of the twentieth
century. But by the last decade of the century, social and
political conditions had changed dramatically in various
respects, and those changes too were reflected in the
writings of philosophers. With the end of the Cold War, the
rise of nationalism and identity politics, and the increasing
pressure—much of it technology-driven—toward greater
globalization of the economy, some of the topics that had
preoccupied philosophers in the preceding decades began to
receive less attention, while new topics emerged to take
their place. As the conflicts surrounding the war in Vietnam
faded into memory, less work was done on civil disobedience
and the morality of warfare. With the collapse of the Soviet
Union, interest in Marx and Marxism waned, and fewer
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discussions were cast as contributions to the debate
between capitalism and socialism. Instead, a great deal of
work was devoted to exploring the foundations of liberal
thought and debating the merits of rival versions of liberal
theory. In addition, philosophers began investigating the
suddenly pressing challenges to liberalism posed by
questions of gender and by a variety of positions—such as
nationalism, communitarianism, and multiculturalism—that
emphasize the importance of particularistic allegiances and
identifications. At the same time, philosophers'
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sensitivity to globalizing pressures was reflected in increased
attention to issues of international justice, cosmopolitanism,
and the 'law of peoples'.
Although philosophers in the analytic tradition sometimes
exaggerate the intellectual autonomy of their subject, there
is nothing either surprising or unwelcome about the
tendency for work in moral and political philosophy to be
influenced by the moral and political concerns of the larger
culture. Of course, philosophy has its own methods and
traditions of thought, and philosophical inquiry differs from
other forms of intellectual investigation in significant ways.
Nevertheless, philosophers belong to the broader culture
and are, perforce, participants in the conversation of that
culture. On the one hand, their work is bound to be
influenced—in ways they are not always in a position to
identify—by the problems and circumstances of the culture
at large. On the other hand, their work is itself a
contribution to that culture, and may have effects outside of
philosophy that can also be difficult to identify. All of this is
especially evident in the case of moral and political
philosophy, and certainly work in these areas that was
thoroughly insulated from the changing circumstances and
predicaments of human societies would have little to
recommend it.
This book is a collection of eleven essays, ten of which were
written during the 1990s. The eleventh was written a few
years earlier. Not surprisingly, all of the essays reflect
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characteristic philosophical preoccupations of the period in
which they were written. They deal with a cluster of related
issues and themes, and the continuities among them are
sufficiently strong that it seemed to me to make sense to
bring them together within the covers of a single volume. At
the most abstract level, the main topic of this volume is the
capacity of liberal thought, and of the moral traditions on
which it draws, to accommodate a variety of challenges
posed by the changing circumstances of the modern world.
Almost all of the essays are concerned, in one way or
another, with what might be thought of as questions about
the distribution of responsibility. That is, they are concerned
with questions about how, at a time when people's lives are
structured by social arrangements and institutions of ever-
increasing size, complexity, and scope, we can best conceive
of the responsibilities of individual agents and the normative
significance of individual commitments and allegiances.
Some of the essays are primarily concerned with the role of
individual desert in liberal theorizing about the justice of
large social institutions. Others focus on the nature of
people's special responsibilities to their families,
communities, and societies, and assess the compatibility of
such responsibilities with liberal ideas of justice and equality.
Still others deal with the possibility of developing a liberal
conception of justice that acknowledges the normative
significance of social and global interdependencies, while
reaffirming the values of personal life and the continuing
importance of ideas of individual responsibility.
The first essay, 'Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes, and
Liberalism in Philosophy and Politics', considers the relation
between contemporary liberal
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theories and liberalism as a position in American political
life. In American politics, the term 'liberalism' is associated
with a cluster of ideas and policies that, taken together,
represent only one strand of liberal thought more broadly
construed. At the time when this essay was written, the
Soviet Union was in the process of disintegrating, thus
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providing liberalism in the broader sense with what was
widely perceived as a kind of political vindication. Yet
liberalism in the narrower sense had not been faring well in
the American political arena. The essay was written in 1991,
toward the end of a twelve-year period during which the
Republican party controlled the American presidency. During
that period, many of the social and political programmes
favored by American liberals were eliminated or scaled back,
and the very word 'liberal' was treated by the Republicans as
a term of derision. In Great Britain, where the relevant
political parties and outlooks go by different labels, a similar
ideological change nevertheless took place during roughly
the same period. The essay observes that the conservative
attack on the liberal position in American politics traded on a
perception that the policies associated with that position
tend to undermine traditional notions of individual
responsibility. Although many defenders of those policies
would argue that this perception is unfounded, the essay
points out that the concept of desert has a limited role to
play in contemporary versions of liberal theory and, in this
respect at least, such theories themselves rely on a reduced
conception of individual responsibility.
The essay goes on to argue that liberal theorists' scepticism
about desert may derive partly from the influence of
naturalism within contemporary thought, an influence that
reflects the enormous intellectual prestige of modern
science. Without claiming that such scepticism is unfounded,
the essay nevertheless suggests that liberal theorists may
underestimate the human significance of the attitudes that
find expression through judgements of desert. To the extent
that that is so, it argues, there is a tension between
philosophical accounts of liberalism and some deeply
entrenched ideas about responsibility. However this tension
may be resolved at the level of philosophical reflection, the
essay concludes that the political prospects of American
liberalism may in part depend on the capacity of liberal
politicians to identify themselves with conceptions of
individual responsibility that differ in some important
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respects from the ones embodied in contemporary liberal
theories. In light of this speculation, it is interesting to note
that, when the Democratic party recaptured the American
presidency in 1992, it did so after an election campaign in
which it emphasized traditional notions of individual
responsibility and played down its commitment to some of
the policies that are said by conservatives to undermine
responsibility.
Whereas the first essay suggests that contemporary
naturalism poses a threat to some traditional ideas about
responsibility, and that this threat creates difficulties for
liberalism both in theory and in practice, the second essay,
'Individual Responsibility in a Global Age', considers a
growing threat to a
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different aspect of our thinking about responsibility.
Common-sense moral thought sees the duties of individual
agents—what might be called their normative
responsibilities—as limited in certain significant ways.
Individuals are thought to be more responsible for what they
do than for what they merely fail to prevent, and they are
thought to have greater responsibilities toward some people
than toward others. These restrictions serve, in effect, to
limit the size of the individual agent's moral world. Although
they may seem so basic to moral thought as scarcely to
require comment, I argue in this essay that the seeming
naturalness of these restrictions is supported by a complex
phenomenology of agency, and by a largely implicit
conception of human relations as consisting primarily in
small-scale interactions among independent individual
agents. Yet these aspects of our self-understanding are
under growing pressure from a variety of global
developments that have served both to highlight and to
reinforce the extensive interdependencies of modern life.
Up to a point, these developments appear to support a more
expansive conception of individual responsibility. This essay
argues, however, that there are deep reasons for doubting
whether a radically expansive conception of individual
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responsibility could ever replace the common-sense
conception. The more significant effect of an emphasis on
global interdependencies, it argues, may be to raise doubts
about the very practice of treating the individual agent as
the primary bearer of normative responsibility. Since there is
no obvious alternative to that practice, however, such an
emphasis may in the end pose a general threat to our
deployment of the categories of normative responsibility.
The essay also argues that the competing tendencies in our
world toward greater political and economic integration, on
the one hand, and greater communal identification and
fragmentation, on the other, serve both to intensify and to
reflect the conflict between more and less expansive
conceptions of normative responsibility. In this way, these
tendencies may be viewed as symptomatic of the instability
in our current thinking about responsibility.
The third essay, 'Families, Nations, and Strangers',
examines in greater detail one aspect of that instability, and
emphasizes the way it is both reflected in and exacerbated
by the conflicting tendencies toward global integration and
communal identification. This essay discusses the status in
moral thought of 'associative duties', which are duties that
the members of significant social groups and the participants
in close personal relationships are often thought to have
toward one another. Associative duties occupy a central
place in ordinary moral thought, but they remain
controversial in various respects, and this essay explores
two different objections to them. The voluntarist objection
views associative duties as potentially burdensome, and
says that they are legitimate only when they arise from the
voluntary choices or actions of those to whom they are
ascribed. The distributive objection, by contrast, sees them
as providing additional benefits, in the form of increased
claims to one another's assistance, to the participants in
otherwise rewarding groups and relationships,
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and regards them as potentially unfair to outsiders and non-
participants. The voluntarist objection is reflected in some
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common criticisms of 'ascriptive' or 'essentialist' claims of
identity, and also in liberal objections to various forms of
nationalism and communitarianism. The distributive
objection features in a familiar justice-based critique of the
morality of affluence; it questions the extent to which the
members of affluent families, groups, and societies are
justified in giving one another's interests priority over the
interests of those who are less fortunate. Whereas the
voluntarist objection is rooted in an ideal of freedom and
autonomy, the distributive objection is rooted in a principle
of equality. To the extent that we share these values, both
objections may seem to us to have some force. Yet most of
us also believe that our family relations and social affiliations
can be a source of responsibilities that do not derive solely
from choices we have made, and so associative duties
continue to be seen as a central component of moral
experience. The upshot, I argue in this essay, is that both
associative duties and the values that generate objections to
them exert some influence within our moral outlook.
Accordingly, there is the potential for genuine conflict in our
thinking about the extent of our responsibilities to different
individuals and groups. In so far as the simultaneous
tendencies toward greater global integration and greater
communal identification raise questions about the
boundaries and distribution of such responsibilities, they
lend urgency to the controversies about associative duties.
The next three essays continue the discussion of associative
duties (or 'special responsibilities', as I prefer to say in the
later essays). In 'Liberalism, Nationalism, and
Egalitarianism', I observe that, although liberalism in one
form or another is the dominant position in contemporary
political philosophy, liberal theories have lately been subject
to vigorous criticism from both globalist and particularist
perspectives. I note that these criticisms are closely related
to the debates about associative duties discussed in the
previous essay, and I argue that, by attending to those
debates, we can see how the globalist and particularist
criticisms point to two different tensions within liberal
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thought. The globalist criticism points to a tension within
liberalism between a conviction that all people everywhere
are of equal worth, and a conviction that the members of a
society are obligated to give the interests of other members
priority over the interests of non-members. The particularist
criticism points to a tension in much liberal thought and
practice between the idea that the free choices of individuals
are the source of the privileges and responsibilities of
citizenship, and the idea that the members of an individual
society constitute a national group whose privileges and
responsibilities are transmitted from one generation to the
next as a matter of birthright. I go on to argue, however,
that the existence of these tensions is not fatal to liberalism.
Instead, the two tensions highlight liberalism's commitment
to diverse values whose joint accommodation is genuinely
problematic, but none of which can easily be abandoned.
This commitment to diverse
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values does not mean, as some critics have suggested, that
liberalism suffers from a kind of theoretical incoherence or,
as other critics have suggested, that it is misguided to seek
a reasoned accommodation among the values that liberals
prize. Instead, the essay concludes that the attempt to work
out such an accommodation is in part a practical rather than
a theoretical task, requiring the modification of existing
practices and institutional arrangements and the
development of new ones. As such, it is a task of an entirely
familiar kind, for the need to accommodate diverse values is
endemic to human practical reasoning.
'The Conflict between Justice and Responsibility', the fifth
essay, deals with the bearing of debates about special
responsibilities on issues of global justice. People sometimes
invoke their special responsibilities to their families,
communities, and societies as a way of justifying their
resistance to claims of global justice and demonstrating that
such resistance is not motivated by mere selfishness. This
essay addresses the question of whether the 'distributive
objection' provides advocates of global justice with an
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effective way of rebutting these appeals to special
responsibilities. After considering several possible rejoinders
to the distributive objection, the essay concludes that the
objection cannot serve as the basis for a repudiation of
special responsibilities. However, the concerns underlying
the distributive objection remain legitimate ones, and the
real force of the objection is to suggest that the tension
between our commitment to special responsibilities and our
commitment to equality is more problematic than we
sometimes like to suppose. In effect, then, the distributive
objection calls attention to the need for better integration
among our values. The essay concludes with a brief
consideration of some of the obstacles, both practical and
theoretical, that need to be overcome if a concern for global
justice is to be reconciled with a commitment to the moral
significance of personal attachments and group affiliations.
Although the third, fourth, and fifth essays discuss the
content of special responsibilities, assess the force of two
fundamental objections to them, review some standard ways
of defending them, and insist on their central place in moral
thought, those essays do not put forward a positive account
of the basis for special responsibilities. Such an account is
developed in the sixth essay, 'Relationships and
Responsibilities', which defends the view that participation in
groups and personal relationships sometimes gives rise to
responsibilities that cannot be reduced to obligations
deriving from promises or agreements, or from any other
discrete interactions among the participants. This essay
begins by arguing that to attach non-instrumental value to
one's relationship with a particular person just is, in part, to
see that person's needs, interests, and desires as providing
one with reasons for action, reasons that one would not
have had in the absence of the relationship. In this sense, to
value one's relationships non-instrumentally is already to
see them as sources of special responsibilities. Of course, to
say that people see themselves as having such
responsibilities is not yet to say that they actually do have
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