Coercion, Responsibility and the Scope of Justice: A critique of Nagel’s anti-cosmopolitan account By Attila Gergely Mráz Submitted to Central European University Department of Philosophy In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Supervisor: Professor Zoltán Miklósi CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary 2010 Abstract This thesis offers a critique of the influential anti-cosmopolitan position put forward by Thomas Nagel. This position holds that duties of egalitarian justice exist if and only if there is a coercive political authority these duties can apply to, and the effects coercively imposed by this authority can be attributed to those coerced by it. As there is no global authority fulfilling these conditions, the scope of justice is not global on this account. After a brief contextualization of the scope-debate, I offer a twofold criticism of Nagel’s account. First, I argue that the existence of the required kind of political institutions cannot be a sufficient condition for the existence of robust egalitarian duties. Second, I show that even if egalitarian duties arose as Nagel suggests, the account given for their generation would not entail that their scope is restricted. Finally, I argue that even if the account of the generation and anti- cosmopolitan scope of these duties were right, the reasons Nagel accepts for leaving the state of nature also serve as reasons for establishing a global coercive authority to which egalitarian principles would apply on his account. Thus, it is shown that Nagel’s central normative premises are false, but their truth would not yield his desired conclusion either; and due to his assumptions concerning the state of nature, a consistent interpretation of his account should conclude that there is a duty to realize egalitarian justice globally. CEU eTD Collection Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Zoltán Miklósi, for his helpful comments, suggestions, objections and all the inspiring conversations we had on the topics discussed here. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank Orsi Reich and Anna Réz, in alphabetical order, for the support they gave me in matters professional and otherwise while I was working on my thesis. My gratitude to them can hardly be overstated for all they did to help me become a student of philosophy, and much more importantly, for their friendship. I hope I will grow up to be their colleague one day. I dedicate this thesis to A. K., who did not exactly make it easier for me to write it, nor anything else eventually, but who made life during the period of writing definitely much more worth living. (In the end, it was all the fault of Global Justice—but that’s no complaint.) CEU eTD Collection i Table of Contents Introduction............................................................................................................................1 1. The Scope of Justice: Contextualizing the Debate...............................................................5 1.0. Introduction .................................................................................................................5 1.1. Social cooperation, interaction and the scope of justice ................................................6 1.2. Pervasive impact and the scope of justice.....................................................................8 1.3. Coercion and the scope of justice ...............................................................................11 1.4. Conclusion.................................................................................................................15 2. Legitimacy, Responsibility and the Scope of Justice .........................................................17 2.0. Introduction ...............................................................................................................17 2.1. Reconstructing the argument, preliminary remarks on Nagel’s dualism......................17 2.2. Justice, responsibility and legitimacy .........................................................................20 2.3. Conclusion.................................................................................................................33 3. Nagel’s States of Nature and the Scope of Justice .............................................................34 3.0. Introduction ...............................................................................................................34 3.1. Nagel’s conception of the state of nature....................................................................34 3.2. The second-order state of nature.................................................................................37 3.3. Conclusion.................................................................................................................48 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................49 References............................................................................................................................52 CEU eTD Collection ii Coercion, Responsibility and the Scope of Justice Attila Gergely Mráz Introduction The aim of this thesis is to provide a critique of Thomas Nagel’s (2005) anti-cosmopolitan account of the scope of egalitarian distributive justice: I argue that it fails to establish that the right scope of egalitarian justice is national. My critique addresses two specific aspects of Nagel’s theory. First, I investigate into the implicit theory of citizens’ responsibility for state action and that of political legitimacy, as conceived by Nagel, and the role they play in his argument for a restricted scope; I argue that these considerations cannot provide sufficient support for Nagel’s account of the generation and scope of duties of egalitarian justice. Second, by means of a detailed scrutiny of Nagel’s conception of the state of nature, I show that Nagel’s rejection of a duty to establish a global political community where duties of egalitarian justice would emerge on his account is unfounded, given his own assumptions concerning moral reasons to stay out of the state of nature. Nagel’s account has recently received ample criticism in two major respects. On the one hand, it has been argued that his account, even if normatively correct, does not yield empirically as restricted a scope as he intended (see e.g., Ypi, Goodin & Barry [2009], or even Cohen & Sabel [2006] who leave substantial parts of Nagel’s theoretical argumentation largely untouched). This line of criticism mainly concerns the correctness of Nagel’s empirical presuppositions. On the other hand, a strand of criticism more theoretical in focus has questioned or denied the normative relevance of coercion, an important but not specific element in Nagel’s theory, in triggering or generating duties of justice (this line of criticism siding Nagel simply with, e.g., Blake’s [2001] account). CEU eTD Collection My aim is to further the debate about the right scope of justice in favor of a global scope by criticizing Nagel’s account on two grounds not tackled by either line of extant criticism. First, I criticize the normative premises specific to his account of the generation and scope of egalitarian duties. In particular, I question the relevance of citizens’ responsibility for state 1 Coercion, Responsibility and the Scope of Justice Attila Gergely Mráz action to the generation and scope of these duties. Second, I reject Nagel’s account by showing that Nagel’s conclusions do not follow under coherent interpretations of his normative premises, regardless of the truth-value of his empirical premises. To the best of my knowledge, criticism on these grounds has been relatively sparsely, and not systematically, presented to date. The structure of my thesis is as follows. In Chapter 1, I will contextualize the Nagelian account by a brief, selective critical presentation of the debate on the scope of justice. Providing an avowedly biased overview, I will analyze and criticize some of the prevalent anti-cosmopolitan arguments for determining the scope of justice on grounds of social cooperation or interaction, pervasive impact, and coercion, so as to highlight the normatively interesting differences between these theories and Nagel’s account. My aim in this chapter is not to provide an exhaustive inventory of all the possible anti-cosmopolitan positions, but rather to emphasize the differences between Nagel’s theory and those theories which share at least some of its important fundamental assumptions. In Chapter 2, I will focus in on Nagel’s theory, analyzing his concept of political legitimacy and the concept of responsibility figuring in his implicit account of citizens’ responsibility for state action. The aim of this chapter is, first, to provide a charitable interpretation of Nagel’s argument for the national scope of justice, with special emphasis on the analysis of his responsibility-condition, a necessary condition of the emergence of egalitarian duties on his account. This condition requires citizens’ authorship of, or responsibility for, coercively enforced policies. Second, my aim is to show that the existence CEU eTD Collection of a legitimate coercive political authority which fulfills Nagel’s responsibility-condition is insufficient both for the generation of egalitarian duties of justice, and for the restriction of their scope. My argumentation, as declared above, will concern exclusively