Social and cosmopolitan Social and cosmopolitan liberalism

CHARLES R. BEITZ*

Over the course of 20 years the subject of international distributive justice has changed from being a topic of interest only in a fairly narrow band of academic political theory and international relations to being a subject of both greater academic legitimacy and more conspicuous practical importance. This is a development much to be desired. But it is important to keep it in perspective. International political theory stands in relation to the growth of the global political economy roughly where the political theory of the nation-state stood in relation to the development of the industrial economy in the mid- nineteenth century. Now, as then, revolutionary changes in economic and political structures are taking place whose outcomes cannot be clearly discerned. It required most of a century for the political theory of the democratic state to catch up with political–economic change. International political theory is still in its early stages, and is not likely to develop much more rapidly. Any political theory, whether of the domestic or of the international polity, will have at least two dimensions, corresponding to what we might call political and economic justice. In this article I shall be concerned with the second of these. I shall aim for what is not quite a synthetic overview, but rather an account of what seems to me to be a central contrast among theories of international distributive justice. The contrast divides what I shall call social from cosmopolitan liberalism. As a first approximation, social liberalism holds that the problem of international justice is fundamentally one of fairness to societies (or peoples), whereas cosmopolitan liberalism holds that it is fairness to persons. Many people believe that social liberalism is the more attractive of these alternatives. I do not agree. The purpose of the article is to say why.

* I gave one version of this paper as a talk at the Workshop on Justice and the Global Economy at the University of Warwick and another at the Harvard University Seminar on Ethics and International Relations. I am grateful to both audiences for comments, and particularly to Simon Caney for his written remarks later. I regret that I have not been able to respond satisfactorily to all of the comments. Portions anticipate the Afterword to the new edition of my book, Political theory and international relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 1999).

International Affairs 75,  () ‒  Charles R. Beitz

The contemporary setting I begin by recalling, very briefly, the critically important elements of the con- temporary setting of international distributive justice. For many readers, these will be familiar truths, and I recite them mainly because no discussion of the subject with pretensions to practical interest can do without them. There are four main points.

Global inequality and The degree of inequality in life prospects that occurs at the global level is very great, and greater than anything in the domestic political experience of most citizens of the industrial democracies. Just the orders of magnitude are enormous: nominal per capita GNP is about 57 times as great in the 25 countries the World Bank classifies as ‘high income’ as in the 49 countries it counts as ‘low income’—or, to put the same fact another way, 57 times as great for the wealthiest 15 per cent of the world’s population as for the poorest 55 per cent. Looked at in terms of purchasing power, GNP per capita in the low income countries is roughly 5 per cent of what it is in the US. The average under-5 mortality rate (possibly the best indicator of overall child ) in the low-income countries is 20 times what it is in the high-income countries. It is not uncommon in the poor countries to find rates of under-5 malnutrition of 30 per cent to 40 per cent—though it can be as high as 84 per cent (in Bangladesh) or 63 per cent (in India), which account for about one in six of the world’s population.1

Increasingly complex interdependence The economic interdependence that was much remarked upon in the 1970s has become substantially more prominent in the intervening two decades. It is reflected particularly in an unprecedented openness of domestic societies to the influence of economic forces beyond their borders. As recent experience emphasizes, the transnational flow of capital can cause local currencies to collapse; transnational movements of labour can reproduce in rich countries— for example, in ‘global cities’ like London, New York, and Hong Kong—the economic and social inequalities found in the poor countries; changes in the trade regime can bring about a redistribution of wealth and income within as well as between domestic societies. The extraordinary openness and fluidity of international capital markets, which is a development primarily of the years since the end of the gold standard in 1971, combined with the absence of any international capacity to or regulate international capital flows, has undermined

1 World Bank, World development report 1997 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Selected World Development Indicators, Tables 1 and 6; UNICEF, The state of the world’s children 1996, Table 1, Basic Indicators (on-line edition; http://www.unicef.org/sowc96/swc96t1x.htm).

 Social and cosmopolitan liberalism the political and economic foundations of the domestic , resulting in diminished provision for those at the lower end of the income distribution in wealthy countries.2 We live in an increasingly global market for goods, capital, and labour, and this fact has consequences for the autonomy and the justice of state institutions and domestic societies.

Articulation of international institutions and regimes Both a cause and a result of intensified economic interdependence has been the articulation of an increasingly complex network of international economic, finan- cial, trade, and environmental arrangements. Broadly speaking, these develop- ments have had two important kinds of consequences—first, the elaboration of an increasingly rich body of international norms bearing mainly on states and on regional and international organizations; second, the establishment of an impres- sive if not always effective array of capabilities for collective at the inter- national level. Some examples of the latter are the World Bank’s capacity to provide structural economic assistance, and the associated leverage to impose economic and political conditions on domestic policy; the ability of regional economic organizations like the Asia-Pacific Economic Organization (APEC) to coordinate economic policy; the evolving system of international labor standards; the trade regime embodied in the World Trade Organization (WTO) with its unprecedented enforcement capabilities and strict new intellectual property rules; and the proposed climate regime, with differential targets for reduction of industrial pollution for economies at different levels of development.

Development of international civil society International civil society is composed of networks of domestic and transnational non-governmental associations, frequently organized along functional lines, whose growth and vitality have been abetted by the rapid development of global communications technology and of the global media. The reason I believe this is noteworthy is that the elements of this emergent global civil society—transnational non-governmental organizations, domestic-level voluntary associations, social movements, religious organizations—have a capacity for significant independent action in world politics. They may be particularly salient as agencies for the formation and advocacy, in both domestic and international contexts, of norms for the conduct of states. Possibly the most familiar and long-standing example is the International Committee of the Red Cross and the various associated organizations whose influence has been critical to the advance of the law of war.3

2 For a concise discussion see Ethan B. Kapstein, ‘A global : and the world economy’, World Policy Journal 15: 4, Winter 1998/99, pp. 23–5. 3 This is well discussed by Martha Finnemore in National interests in international society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).

 Charles R. Beitz

These facts—the extent of global inequality and absolute poverty, the increasing vulnerability of domestic societies to external influences, the growth of international capacities for and governance, and the rise of a global civil society—describe a world that is not usefully envisioned in the traditional terms of the political theory of the nation-state. If, as seems obvious, it would be fantasy to speak of an emerging world , it would also be misleading to describe the international environment as a realm of states knit together by an array of mutual-assistance schemes in which any individual state may partici- pate, or not, as it wishes. There is a global political economy with an emergent institutional structure and a system of norms and practices to govern it. For most states, it is costly, if at all, to withdraw from this structure. The structural and normative features of the international realm have consequences for the well-being of individuals and groups. The question is what a political theory that takes account of these empirical circumstances would be like.

Social and cosmopolitan liberalism To bring this question into focus, I would like to describe two alternative responses to it, which I shall call social liberalism and cosmopolitan liberalism. Social and cosmopolitan liberalism represent the most interesting alternative philosophical conceptions of international political theory. Social liberalism is a progressive, internationalist descendant of a family of views I once called ‘the morality of states’4—that is, of the moral conception of international relations we inherit from the modern tradition and from the international thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cosmopolitan liberalism in one sense is a more ancient view, since its central idea arguably derives from the Stoics. In another sense it is distinctively modern, representing the application to the global level of the individualist moral of the Enlightenment. Social liberalism embodies a two-level conception of international society. It conceives of the international realm as an order of societies organized as states. There is a division of moral labour between the domestic and international levels. State-level societies have the primary responsibility for the well-being of their own people, while the international community serves to establish and maintain background conditions in which just domestic societies can develop and flourish. The agents of international justice are states or societies, and its object is to establish a political equality of states, each committed to and capable of satisfying the legitimate interests of its own people. Some will recognize this as a generalized description of the view of international relations taken by in his Oxford Amnesty Lecture, ‘The law of peoples’.5 Rawls’s view is distinctive and provocative, and I believe

4 In Political theory and international relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), part II. 5 John Rawls, ‘The law of peoples’, in Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley, eds, On human : The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993 (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 41–82. On the international distribution of income and wealth, see esp. pp. 76 and 228 n. 52.

 Social and cosmopolitan liberalism it repays close study. In structure, motivation, and detail, there is nothing quite like it. (Rawls has expanded the Amnesty Lecture to be a short book—as I write, still in manuscript—which in my view is destined to become a central text in international political theory. I regret that I cannot comment on the longer manuscript here.) There are, however, various other positions that might be regarded as extensionally similar and might therefore also be classified as forms of social liberalism. These include John Vincent’s view in Human rights and international relations6 and David Miller’s in On nationalism.7 I stress that this is, at most, a family resemblance; forms of social liberalism vary in both their normative content and philosophical foundations. Nevertheless, in one or another form, I believe that social liberalism is probably the majority view among political philosophers who have thought about international political theory. Cosmopolitan liberalism is the main theoretical alternative. To clarify ideas, let me begin by saying what this view is not. For one thing, cosmopolitan liberalism is not a view about the best institutional structure for international politics. It does not necessarily hold, for example, that states should be sub- ordinated to a global political authority or a world government; it is agnostic, so to speak, about the proper political constitution of international relations. Cosmopolitan liberalism is also not a view about how persons should understand their individual identities and loyalties. The cosmopolitan liberal need not, for example, say with Diogenes, ‘I am a citizen of the world’,8 at least if this is meant to deny that reasoning about individual conduct might legitimately be influenced by loyalties or responsibilities to family, group, or country. Regarded as a philosophical conception distinct from both institutional and individual cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan liberalism, as I conceive it, is a doctrine about the basis on which institutions and practices should be justified or criticized.9 It applies to the whole world the maxim that choices about what policies we should prefer, or what institutions we should establish, should be based on an impartial consideration of the claims of each person who would be affected. In contrast to social liberalism, cosmopolitan liberalism accords no ethical privilege to state-level societies. It aims to identify principles that are acceptable when each person’s prospects, rather than the prospects of each society or people, are taken fairly into account. Because it takes individuals as basic and accords no privilege to domestic societies or states, cosmopolitan liberalism effectively extends to the world the

6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 7 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 8 Diogenes Laertius, Diogenes, in Lives of eminent philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1925), vol. II, bk. VI, p. 63. 9 In an earlier paper, I distinguished between ‘institutional’ and ‘moral’ cosmopolitanism. The distinction here between individual cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan liberalism might be seen as a sub-division of the second of these ideas. It is intended to make clear that the subject-matter of interest involves practical judgement about policies and institutional structures, not about individual conduct. The latter raises further questions which I do not take up here. The earlier distinction occurs in ‘Cosmopolitan liberalism and the states system’, in Chris Brown, ed., Political restructuring in Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 123–36.

 Charles R. Beitz criteria of distributive justice that apply within a single society. Like any political doctrine that aspires to practical effect, cosmopolitan liberalism is constrained by political realism; this means that it must both recognize the institutional limitations of the states system and take advantage of its institutional capacities. However, it must regard the reform of institutional structures, both domestic and international, as an instrument for the satisfaction of the just interests of individual persons rather than for the improvement of societies per se. Views of this kind have been advanced by Thomas Pogge, Henry Shue, briefly by Philippe van Parijs, and, 20 years ago, by me.10 The gap between these views, in practical terms, may not be as great as it appears. As Rawls argues, in the world as we have it, social liberalism would be committed to a programme of international redistribution both to assist poor societies to develop their economies and to provide mutual aid in cases of acute distress—though he emphasizes that these requirements do not arise from considerations of distributive justice, strictly speaking, but rather from an ideal conception of international society as consisting of decent, self-governing domestic societies.11 And, as I have suggested, any plausible cosmopolitan liberalism would be restrained in its practical aspirations by the limited capacity of the present international system to absorb change and by a realistic appreciation that sustained improvements in standards of living require structural and cultural modernization in domestic societies. So, in practice, these views may tend to converge. The theoretical difference, however, is large. I have tried to emphasize this by suggesting that social liberalism privileges domestic-level societies by according them an independent ethical status, whereas cosmopolitan liberalism takes the well-being of individuals as fundamental and interprets the values of society as derivative. Thus, in Rawls’s construction of a ‘law of peoples’, principles for the conduct of foreign relations are chosen in an ‘’ in which the parties represent societies (or ‘peoples’), not individuals. He writes that the law of peoples ‘asks of other societies only what they can accept once they are prepared to stand in a relation of equality with all other societies…’.12 This fact affects both the basis and the scope of the reasoning for international principles. The basis of the reasoning is the self-interest of the societies which are represented—a self-interest identified, roughly, with their capacity to develop and sustain decent, self-governing domestic institutions. The scope of the reasoning is limited to principles for societies—or more accurately, for their political embodiments as states. Principles for other types of agents must be seen as extensions of principles for states. Consequently, there is

10 Thomas W. Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), chs 5–6; Henry Shue, Basic rights, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Philippe van Parijs, Real for all: what (if anything) can justify ? (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 223–8; and my Political theory and international relations, part III. 11 Rawls , ‘The law of peoples’, p. 76. 12 Ibid., p. 80; my emphasis. The passage continues: ‘...and once their regimes accept the criterion of legitimacy in the eyes of their own people’.

 Social and cosmopolitan liberalism pressure to regard international organizations as voluntary associations of states, which are bound by the same ethical considerations as those that constrain states taken separately. Because cosmopolitan liberalism is individualistic in a way that social liberalism is not, it is not constrained in either respect; the justification of its principles takes account of the interests of individual persons, and their scope may extend directly to international institutions and other actors as well as states. Moreover, while social and cosmopolitan liberalism may tend to converge in application to questions of policy, the convergence is not likely to be complete. Although I cannot argue it here, I would note that the difference in the foundations of these views seems to influence thinking about several matters of great practical importance. These include the range and character of societies to whose members we have distributive obligations, the content and scope of the doctrine of human rights, and the ethical requirements that bear on international institutions, regimes, and practices, as distinct from the individual states and societies that make them up.

For and against social liberalism As I observed earlier, social liberalism almost certainly represents the majority view among philosophers who have thought seriously about international justice. Of the many reasons why such a view might be appealing, I shall consider three, and try to explain why I do not find any of them persuasive.

Differences between domestic and international societies Many people believe that the circumstances of international society are sufficiently different from those of domestic society that familiar ideas about distributive justice cannot be carried over. They hold that there is no such thing as international distributive justice, strictly speaking, because there is no international society in the sense in which we speak of domestic society.13 I would like to concentrate on an argument once made by Brian Barry— even though I doubt he would hold to it today—because it helpfully concen- trates attention on those aspects of the international environment that might seem to distinguish it from domestic society in respects that bear on matters of justice.14 Barry’s idea, following Rawls’s account in , is that

13 I have already observed that Rawls regards the international community as a community of states, with its norms expressed in international law, and with each state seen as the political embodiment of a separate society of individuals, each with a distinctive history and culture. Similarly, Michael Walzer writes that we cannot ‘tell a story of engagement and responsibility’ at the international level analogous to that which (he thinks) can be told about domestic society, so that ‘ordinary moral principles regarding humane treatment and mutual aid do more work than any specific account of [international] distributive justice’ in explain- ing why we should care about international inequality or poverty. Walzer, ‘Response’, in David Miller and Michael Walzer, eds, Pluralism, justice, and equality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 293. 14 Brian Barry, ‘Humanity and justice in global perspective’, in Democracy, power and justice: essays in political theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), pp. 434–62. This paper appeared originally in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, eds, Ethics, economics and the law, Nomos 24 (New York: New York University Press, 1982), pp. 219–52. Citations here refer to the 1989 version.

 Charles R. Beitz domestic societies may be regarded as practices characterized by a sharing of sacrifices and forbearances from which everyone stands prospectively to benefit. Justice is about the terms on which a fair sharing of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation might take place. An essential element of this view of society as a cooperative scheme is the division of labour, in which individuals specialize in the development of their productive abilities and share the results through trade in goods and services. Today, of course, the division of labour is global, and this leads to the familiar argument by analogy that whatever requirements of justice apply at the domestic level should apply at the global level as well. Nevertheless, Barry holds that the analogy is incomplete. A network of global trade, even if very extensive, would not be enough to secure the analogy; justice of the sort involved in Rawls’s theory (Barry calls it ‘justice as fair play’, a sub-category of ‘justice as reciprocity’) ‘arises not from simple exchange but either from the provision of public goods that are collectively enjoyed … or from quasi- insurance schemes for mutual aid…’.15 Barry grants that ‘rudimentary organs of international cooperation’ like the United Nations and the World Bank may obscure the contrast, but thinks ‘the extent of increased cooperation that would really be mutually beneficial is really quite limited...The conditions for reciprocity—that all the parties stand prospectively to benefit from the scheme—simply do not exist.’16 A possible reply is that the benefits from international cooperation are greater than Barry allows, even—or perhaps especially—for the rich countries.17 But this misses the point. For scepticism about whether cooperation is advantageous for those who are favoured by existing inequalities could arise as plausibly in domestic as in international society—a point familiar from the libertarian critique of Rawls’s views of domestic justice.18 What this shows, I believe, is that the underlying conception of social justice as resting on considerations of mutual advantage is incomplete. And it is not precisely the conception that animates Rawls’s theory: indeed, in working out a conception of distributive justice within society, Rawls abstracts from existing inequalities to define a baseline from which we measure the prospects for fair cooperation. The

15 Ibid., p. 446. There is a valuable discussion in Chris Brown, International relations theory: new normative approaches (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 170–77. 16 Barry, ‘Humanity and justice’, p. 447. In rejecting the premises of the analogical argument, Barry is not necessarily rejecting its conclusion. The aim of his article was to deny that a satisfactory account of distributive justice can be derived from the conception of justice which he calls ‘justice as reciprocity’ and identifies, incorrectly in my view, with the view taken in Rawls’s book. Barry’s own view about distributive justice, in its latest version, would seem to produce a conclusion about the international realm similar to that reached in part three of this book. See his Treatise on social justice, of which two volumes have been published so far: vol. 1, Theories of justice (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 236–7 and 246–8 (on Rawls) and ch. 10 (on social justice generally); vol. 2, Justice as impartiality (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), ch. 3 (on justice as impartiality). 17 The recent literature on international collaboration is illuminating. The locus classicus is Robert O. Keohane, After hegemony (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), esp. ch. 11. 18 For example, , Morals by agreement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), pp. 250–57. Barry recognizes this in his discussion of Gauthier’s theory in Justice as impartiality, pp. 42–3.

 Social and cosmopolitan liberalism baseline is one of equality: principles of justice are acceptable when it would be reasonable for ‘equal moral persons’ to accept them without reference to their actual social positions and economic endowments.19 To proceed otherwise would bias the theory arbitrarily in favor of the status quo. If this is true in the domestic case, why should it not be true in the international case as well? Why not also evaluate principles of international justice with reference to a baseline of equality? Framing the question this way leads to a different conception of the ethical significance of the international basic structure than what might be inferred from what I said 20 years ago in Political theory and international relations—though perhaps not from what I now believe I intended to say. We do not begin with an actually existing structure and ask whether it is reasonable for individuals to cooperate in it. Rather, we begin with the idea that some type of structure is both required and inevitable, given the facts about the extent and character of the division of labour, and work towards principles the structure should satisfy if it is to be acceptable to individuals conceived, in Rawls’s phrase, as free and equal moral persons. These principles describe ‘an ideal form of the basic structure in the light of which ongoing institutional and procedural processes are constrained and adjusted’.20 There is no reason to believe, ex ante, that what exists today will resemble this ideal very closely. What, then, should we infer about international justice from our evidence about the growth of global economic interdependence and of a global regula- tive structure? On the one hand, it now seems wrong to say that these facts explain in any very specific way the content or justification of principles of international distributive justice. For the justification of international principles does not depend on the extent of existing patterns of international interaction or the details of the institutions that organize them. On the other hand, if there were no international basic structure—if, for example, there were no appreciable international capital flows, little trade, no international economic institutions, and only rudimentary forms of international law—then we would not find principles of international distributive justice of any practical interest. It could be said in this counterfactual world that the world economy is something most people can realistically avoid, and in any case that there is no structure of institutions or pattern of practice to which regulative principles could possibly be applied. What the facts about interdependence and the global structure demonstrate is that this cannot be said about the actual world as we have it today.21 This world contains norms, institutions and practices at various levels of political organi- zation—national, transnational, regional, and global—which apply to people

19 Rawls, Political liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 277. 20 Ibid., p. 284. 21 I am indebted here to Pogge’s discussion in Realizing Rawls, p. 241. I believe the remarks in the text are consistent with the formulation in my ‘Cosmopolitan Ideals and National Sentiment’, Journal of Philosophy LXXX, no. 10, 1983, p. 595.

 Charles R. Beitz largely without their consent and influence the material circumstances in which they live their lives. I believe that this complex, multiple-level arrangement consti- tutes a ‘basic structure’ within Rawls’s sense of the phrase. This fact explains why the argument by analogy is well founded in the empirical world, even if not in the counterfactual world imagined earlier. Moreover, the global structure is evolving and the direction of its future development is to some extent open to political choice. This means that there is a practical as well as a theoretical reason to take an interest in principles of international distributive justice.

Sources of backwardness primarily domestic One might agree, as a matter of principle, that moral considerations establish a global minimum, but hold, as a matter of practice, that there is little that can be done at the international level to ensure that the minimum is achieved. The argument would be that sustainable improvements in standards of living can only occur as a result of a society’s domestic economic and social advancement, and that the primary impediments to this are more likely to lie in its own culture and traditions than in either its natural resource endowments or its position in the international political economy.22 If this were right, the distributive responsibilities of outsiders, if any, would be secondary to the responsibilities of the members of poor societies themselves to bring about their own improvement.23 Indeed, if the determinants of a society’s level of well- being are primarily internal and non-economic, then concern about the international distribution, either of natural resources or of overall wealth—and a fortiori about measures to change it—might be seen as fruitless. This position combines two empirical conjectures, the first involving the relationship between a society’s natural resource endowments and its national wealth, and the second, the relative significance of a society’s wealth and resources, as opposed to its position in the world economy, for the well-being of its people. These matters are complicated and here I can only offer two brief observations. First, the question of the importance of natural resource endow- ments for national wealth is unsettled. On the one hand, with the exception of the oil states, today’s developing societies as a group seem to be less well endowed with natural resources than were today’s industrialized societies at a similar stage of development. Moreover, tropical societies (taking location as a resource) tend to have significantly lower rates of and lower levels of well-being (measured, e.g., by per capita purchasing power or life expectancy) than those in the temperate zones. On the other hand, resource- rich developing societies tend to have lower rates of economic growth than resource-poor ones, perhaps because the easy availability of exportable natural resources reduces incentives for industrial investment and trade in manufactured

22 Rawls adopts such a position in ‘The law of peoples’, pp. 74–7. 23 Rawls writes: ‘The obligation of wealthier societies to assist in trying to rectify matters is in no way diminished, only made more difficult.’ Ibid., p. 77.

 Social and cosmopolitan liberalism goods.24 In the present state of knowledge, it would be difficult to draw confident conclusions about the importance of resource endowments for social development. Second, the claim that a society’s domestic social and political character is a more important determinant of individual well-being than its international economic position presupposes a capacity to distinguish between domestic and international influences which may be impossible to sustain. For one thing, a society’s engagement in the world political economy, including its financial as well as trade relations, may, through its domestic social, economic and political effects, aggravate rather than alleviate the local conditions that impede the society’s improvement. For example, whether integration into the world economy leads to reduction of corruption or to expansion of employment depends on the case.25 Beyond this, one must recognize the domestic signifi- cance of the emerging network of international institutions that organize and regulate the world political economy. We need look no further than the impact of conditions placed on foreign aid or economic adjustment assistance to see that these institutions have consequences for the internal as well as the international distribution of benefits and burdens. Even if domestic factors are determinants of social development, they may be necessary rather than sufficient; the capacity of a society to develop, and the direction of its develop- ment, are also influenced by the characteristics of the global structure. So there is a reason for concern about the justice of this structure even after the influence of local factors is conceded. Having said this, it is important to consider what would follow if the empiri- cal conjectures turned out true. Not, it seems, that there are no international principles of justice. Suppose that a poor society’s government is corrupt or oppressive, or resists cooperation with international development efforts aimed at improving the well-being of its people. And suppose, consequently, that no feasible scheme of international assistance would be likely to succeed in raising the society’s standard of living. If there were such a case, then, arguably, other societies would not be morally required to contribute their own resources to help the poor society to develop. But to explain this, we need not say that there are no such duties in the first place, or that they are secondary to those of the members of the society in question. A better and simpler explanation would be that under the circumstances, acting on the duty would not accomplish its objectives. If this is true, then the fact that poverty may have primarily local sources does not argue against a cosmopolitan view of distributive justice.

24 As Gustav Ranis concludes from a comparison of East Asian and Latin American cases, ‘[t]he problem is not that more natural resources (like more foreign capital) cannot be good for you—but that instead of being used to ease the pain of change, they are likely to be used to postpone change.’ ‘Toward a model of development’, in Lawrence B. Krause and Kim Kihwan, eds, Liberalization in the process of (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), p. 100 (emphasis in original). 25 See Andrew Hurrell and Ngaire Woods, ‘Globalisation and inequality’, Millennium 24: 3, 1995, pp. 447– 70, and Stephan Haggard and Sylvia Maxfield, ‘The political economy of financial internationalization in the developing world’, in Robert O. Keohane and Helen V. Milner, eds, Internationalization and domestic politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 209–39.

 Charles R. Beitz

Burdens of irresponsible domestic policies Assume, for the sake of argument, that the most plausible cosmopolitan theory of international justice resembles an extension of Rawls’s theory with a global difference principle. Someone might object that such a theory unfairly burdens societies which have been responsible in the conduct of their economic life, and unfairly benefits those which have not. For example, imagine that for several generations society A has carried out an effective policy controlling population growth while simultaneously saving and investing a significant portion of its current economic product. Both productivity and the per capita domestic product have increased significantly and standards of living are correspondingly higher. Meanwhile, society B has done neither; it has not taken effective steps to control the growth rate of its population and, partly as a result, the rate of savings has been relatively low. Standards of living are therefore lower than in society A; we might even suppose that society B has high rates of poverty and child mortality—rates that might have been reduced if the society had practised a level of economic and demographic discipline comparable to that of society A.26 Under these circumstances it may appear that cosmopolitan liberalism would favour redistribution from A to B—or perhaps from some wealthy society, say society C, to B rather than to A—since, under our assumptions, standards of living in society B are not only less favourable than those in A but, at least in relative terms, are getting worse. But redistribution in favour of society B may seem unfair, because it would require the members of A to accept a sacrifice that would not have been necessary if B had been governed as responsibly, over time, as had A. Does the prospect of such a case count in favour of social liberalism? I believe the answer is no. Note, as a preliminary matter, that the case depends on a simplifying assumption: namely, that the factors that explain society B’s failure to choose policies responsibly are largely internal—matters of culture and religion, perhaps—rather than aspects of its involvement, historically or in the present, in the world political economy. For reasons already discussed, this is a non-trivial assumption. But suppose that there could be a pure case of a society whose domestic culture had been the chief obstacle, historically, to its responsible governance. What should we say about such a case? Whatever we say, it should be consistent with what we would say about the parallel case in domestic society. But what is the parallel case? It might seem to be the case of individuals whose unwise or imprudent choices in the past explain their relatively disadvantaged present circumstances—for example, the lazy student, the profligate spender, or the chain-smoker. We recognize a division of responsibility between society and the individual, and cases like these seem to fall within the region in which individuals are held responsible for their own circumstances because those circumstances are the results of their

26 I am grateful to John Rawls for suggesting this case to me.

 Social and cosmopolitan liberalism voluntary choices. Of course, it can be ambiguous, even in cases like these, as to the extent of an individual’s responsibility for his own condition (there might, for example, have been non-voluntary influences on the individual’s choices— family environment, genetic endowment, and so forth). But setting this important ambiguity aside, there is the more basic point that these individual cases are ones in which relative disadvantage accrues to the individual whose choices brought it about. This is unlikely to be true in cases like that of society B, where it would be more realistic to regard those who suffer the consequences of unwise choices about policy as the innocent victims of these choices rather than as their perpetrators.27 Seen in this light, the parallel seems more like that of offspring who suffer the adverse consequences of the irresponsible or imprudent choices of their parents—the children of the indolent alcoholic or the spendthrift who does not save. In such cases, we are reluctant to say that the offspring are responsible for their own condition. Here, instrumental considerations seem more prominent in our reasoning. In some cases, social policy intervenes to block or offset the adverse influence of bad parental choices; and when it does not, the reason is either that there is no effective means of intervention or that a policy of intervention would create a perverse incentive in other cases. Either way, in contrast to the case of the individual who inflicts his own wounds, consider- ations about responsibility do not diminish the weight of the ethical concern about the well-being of the offspring, even though they might influence the practical consequences drawn from it. The question is why we should not regard the case of society B as similar. By hypothesis, the condition of its people today would be improved if its government had undertaken responsible choices about economic development and population growth in the past. Also by hypothesis, it is not reasonable to hold the present generation, at large, accountable for policies that were in fact chosen either by elites or by their forebears. Accepting these hypotheses, it seems that the appropriate international conduct would, as in the case of the offspring of irresponsible parents, be determined by instrumental considerations associated with the well-being of individuals in the society rather than by con- siderations of responsibility applied at the social level. If, for example, an inter- national agency were to withhold aid from a government that refused to adopt a reasonable population policy, the most plausible rationale would be either that withholding aid might induce the government to change its policies or that providing aid might remove a disincentive for other in similar circumstances to act responsibly. It would not, I think, be that members of other societies which had pursued more enlightened economic and population

27 This, for two reasons. First, the legacy of irresponsibility likely stretches over several generations, so that the present generation could not be blamed for the history of imprudent choices. Second, choices of policy were likely made by elites without the informed participation of citizens in an effectively functioning democracy, so that neither previous generations nor, perhaps, the current generation could reasonably be held accountable for them.

 Charles R. Beitz policies would be treated unfairly if resources were devoted to individuals whose government’s irresponsible past choices had caused or exacerbated or failed to improve their present disadvantaged condition. What is plausibly objectionable about policies directing international resources to societies whose unfavourable conditions result in some measure from bad local decisions is not that these policies are unfair to people in other societies whose governments have behaved more responsibly. The problem is that such policies are inefficient—a point that any cosmopolitan view could readily accept. So I do not believe that the prospect of a case like that of societies A and B is a challenge to cosmopolitan liberalism. If anything, the challenge goes in the other direction. We hold individual persons responsible for the consequences of their own decisions because persons have a capacity for identity over time—the person who made a decision at one time and who suffers the consequences at a later time is the same person. But societies are unlike individual persons in this way. Their memberships change over time as a result of births and deaths, arrivals and departures; and their decision-making pro- cesses (especially in non-democratic societies) empower some people to make decisions that affect others without their consent or participation. So it is hard to understand societies as having responsibility for their own conditions in the same way as individual persons do. And without this idea, it is hard to see how social liberalism can be coherent.

Conclusion I have considered three reasons why social liberalism might seem more attrac- tive than the cosmopolitan alternative as a way of thinking about international distributive justice, and I have tried to explain in each case why the reasoning is not persuasive. This hardly amounts to a comprehensive critique. For one thing, there are also various other reasons why social liberalism might be attractive. These include, for example, considerations about the value of membership in sectional associations, or put differently, about the importance of group loyalties in con- ceptions of individual identity. In a more extended discussion, these consider- ations would need attention.28 A more basic question left open here concerns the meaning of what I have referred to, with deliberate vagueness, as the ethical privilege accorded to the state (or society or ‘people’) by social liberalism. What, exactly, does this privilege amount to, and why should we care about it? The question is important because the answer will determine the scope and nature of the divide between social liberalism and the cosmopolitan alternative. Some might think, for example,

28 There are brief comments in the Afterword to the new edition of Political theory and international relations. Also see Brian Baxter, ‘The self, morality, and the nation-state’, in Anthony Ellis, ed., Ethics and international relations, Fulbright Papers 2 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 113–26.

 Social and cosmopolitan liberalism that states should count for something in moral reasoning because states are the most effective political mechanisms for protecting human rights, which are themselves pre-eminently cosmopolitan values. If one took this view, then the distinction between social and cosmopolitan liberalism would collapse—the former would be a special case of the latter because the privilege accorded to the state would itself have a cosmopolitan justification. On the other hand, perhaps states should count for something for a different kind of reason—for example, because they define arenas within which self-government is possible, or because they enclose communities with cultures whose survival has independent value. On such a view, social and cosmopolitan liberalism might turn out to be distinct philosophical positions from top to bottom. There are intimations of both views in the recent literature of social liberalism. Until we have a better understanding of the relationship of sectional and cosmopolitan values in social liberalism, any critique must be incomplete. I believe, however, that the inconclusiveness of the reasons we have considered for preferring social liberalism illustrates the general difficulty in sustaining a view that depends upon a deep distinction between the domestic and the inter- national. The distinction fits uncomfortably with the individualist egalitarianism implicit in our moral culture and with the facts about contemporary international life. This is why it requires a defence. Social liberalism depends upon such a distinction, but a persuasive defence is more elusive than it appears.

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