Collective responsibility and the scope of justice

Abstract

The paper examines Thomas Nagel's ‘political conception’ of justice that holds that the requirements of socioeconomic justice apply only among those persons who are subject to the authority of the same political institutions. The paper has two aims. The first aim is to clarify the theoretical motivation for Nagel's theory, which it identifies in what it calls the ‘responsibility thesis’, i.e. that inequalities may be considered as unjust only if some agents are responsible for them, and to reconstruct the account of collective responsibility that, together with the responsibility thesis, may support his substantive conclusions. The second aim is to show that Nagel's conclusions must be rejected even if the account of collective responsibility that may support it is correct. This is so, first, because the responsibility thesis cannot be defended, and second, because even if the thesis is assumed to be correct, it does not succeed in restricting the scope of the requirements of justice to fellow citizens of particular nation states. In light of Nagel's own account of the link between legitimate authority and justice, the standards of the latter ought to apply to the state system as a whole, and not to particular states, taken separately.

• responsibility
• global justice
• inequality
• legitimacy
• Thomas Nagel
• state system

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the ECPR General Conference in Bordeaux, 2013, September 4–7, and at the Institute of Philosophy in Budapest, 2015, November. I benefited greatly from the audiences at these events. Special thanks are due to my discussants, Laura Valentini and Attila Mraz. The two reviewers of this journal also made very helpful criticisms.

Notes

1 Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders: A global political theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Kok-Chor Tan, Justice, Institutions, and Luck: The Site, Ground, and Scope of Equality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

2 Different versions of this view are offered by Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); and Andrea Sangiovanni, ‘Global Justice, Reciprocity, and the State’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 35, no. 1 (2007): 3–39. Beitz and Sangiovanni reach different substantive conclusions because in Beitz's view the relevant cooperative relations obtain globally, while in Sangiovanni's view the benefits reciprocally produced within nation states are normatively special and therefore only they give rise to egalitarian distributive requirements.

3 Michael Blake, ‘Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 30, no. 3 (2001): 257–96; and Laura Valentini, ‘Coercion and (Global) Justice’, American Political Science Review 105, no. 1 (2011): 205–20. These accounts are different to the extent that in Blake's view the morally relevant coercion is only the one currently exercised by nation states, while Valentini holds that there are other forms of coercion as well that trigger duties of distributive justice.

4 Thomas Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, no. 2 (2005): 113–47, at p. 120.

5 For a non-exhaustive list of some of the most influential criticisms, see Arash Abizadeh, ‘Cooperation, Pervasive Impact, and Coercion: on the Scope (not Site) of Distributive Justice’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 35, no. 4 (2007): 318–58; A. J. Julius, ‘Nagel's Atlas’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 34, no. 2 (2006): 176–92; Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel, ‘Extra Rempublicam Nulla Justitia?’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 34, no. 2 (2006): 147–75; Andrea Sangiovanni, ‘Global Justice, Reciprocity, and the State’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 35, no. 1 (2007): 3–39; and Miriam Ronzoni, ‘The Global Order: A Case of Background Injustice? A Practice–Dependent Account’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 37, no. 3 (2009): 229–56.

6 Julius, ibid., and Cohen and Sabel, ibid.

7 Abizadeh, ibid.

8 The Problem of Global Justice’, p. 127. Other versions of the political conception need not be committed to this egalitarian understanding of the content of the demands of distributive justice. The political conception is first and foremost an account of the ground and scope of the requirements of justice, and as such it is in principle separable from any account of their contents. Therefore, my criticism is relevant for those adherents of it, too, who reject Nagel's view on content. (I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify this.) Nonetheless, as most participants in the global justice debate on either side accept some form of egalitarianism, I will continue my discussion in this manner for the sake of convenience.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., p. 128.

11 Ibid., pp. 128–29.

12 Cf. the discussion in Nagel, ‘Justice and Nature’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 17, no. 2 (1997), 303–21.

13 See Dan W. Brock, A. Buchanan, N. Daniels & D. Wikler, From Chance to Choice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 66–75. More recently, it was suggested by Elizabeth Anderson that ‘there can be no injustice without an agent who is (or was) substantively responsible for it—someone obligated to avoid, correct, or bear the costs of the injustice’ and that acceptance of this thesis is one of the features that distinguishes her favored conception of egalitarianism from luck egalitarianism. See Anderson, ‘The Fundamental Disagreement between Luck Egalitarians and Relational Egalitarians’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40, sup1 (2010): 1–23, at p. 5.

14 Justice applies […] only to a form of organization that claims political legitimacy and the right to impose decisions by force, and not to a voluntary association or contract among independent parties concerned to advance their common interests’, Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, p. 140.

15 Nagel's view is not that only inequalities created directly by political institutions are matters of justice. His view is that arbitrary inequalities generated by social processes are matters of justice too, but only as long as the processes unfold within shared political institutions. The thought appears to be that the state has an obligation not to sustain or let such inequalities stand within its dominion, as well as not to establish them in the first place. Thus, he writes, ‘even within a state, through economic competition for example, some members […] may impose serious consequences on others without any implication that the others are asked to accept or authorize the actions that have those consequences. Citizens are not expected to treat each other equally in private transactions. But the broader legal framework that makes those actions possible and that legally sustains their results is subject to collective authority and justification and therefore to principles of social justice: not act by act, but for the system as a whole’, ibid., p. 130.

16 Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, p. 129.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., p. 141, where he writes that ‘I doubt that the rules of international trade rise to the level of collective action needed to trigger the demands of justice, even in diluted form’, and in the same paragraph expresses his doubt that a theory of different levels of collective responsibility can be worked out.

19 Ibid., p. 142. The reference to centralized control is at p. 127.

20 See also Anderson, ‘The Fundamental Disagreement’, p. 5 for this view.

21 Some clarification about this notion of responsibility may be useful here. To say that an agent is responsible for a state of affairs in this sense is to say that the state of affairs is an appropriate basis for morally evaluating the agent, and for making various moral consequences for the agent, such as blame, praise, reparations, bearing certain burdens etc. appropriate. Obviously, the fact that the conditions of responsibility attribution are satisfied in a particular case does not, in itself, say anything about what the appropriate moral consequences are in that case. The range of moral consequences, if any, that are made appropriate by the agent's responsibility for a state of affairs depend on what kinds of morally relevant features (if any) the state of affairs in question has. Thus, this notion of responsibility is morally neutral. See Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 248–49. This idea of responsibility is backward-looking, and is to be distinguished from forward-looking or ‘task-responsibility’ that is about the obligations that particular agents have towards others.

22 As the text of the pervious footnote makes clear, being responsible for something in the attributability sense does not by itself imply blameworthiness, since the moral appraisal that is warranted by responsibility attribution may be any one of blame, praise, or neutrality. An appraisal of blameworthiness suggests that the state of affairs that is the basis of appraisal has some morally wrong-making property. I will return to this point later.

23 It should be noted that Nagel approvingly refers to Ronald Dworkin as another representative of the political conception (ibid., pp. 120–21), and Dworkin does provide an account of corporate responsibility that is consistent with the one discussed here (see reference in footnote 26 below). This may give some indirect support for the interpretive strategy adopted here.

24 Philip Pettit, ‘Responsibility Incorporated’, Ethics 117 (2007): 171–201.

25 See also Anna Stilz, ‘Collective Responsibility and the State’, Journal of Political Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2011): 191–5. Stilz originally developed her account of collective responsibility in her book Liberal Loyalty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), especially pp. 173–208.

26 This is Stilz's term, ‘Collective Responsibility and the State’, p. 193. See also Ronald Dworkin's discussion of corporate responsibility in Law's Empire (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 168–75, and Pettit, ‘Responsibility Incorporated’, p. 194. It is important to stress that in relying on this example, it is not suggested here that the problem of collective responsibility can arise only in the context of remedial responsibility for harm. To the contrary, throughout the paper my focus is whether collective responsibility attribution can be relevant for identifying inequalities as unjust.

27 It should be noted, though, that this response to the ‘responsibility shortfall’ is not the only possible one. If we find that there is an outcome that we have independent reasons to find morally problematic, and which is produced by several agents in such a manner that a ‘responsibility shortfall’ is present, we may conclude that the relevant agents have a duty to constitute a collective agent that is capable of addressing the problem. In fact, as I discuss below, in other contexts Nagel endorses such a strategy. See also Ronzoni, ibid., and Stephanie Collins, ‘Collectives’ Duties and Collectivization Duties’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 2 (2013): 231–48, for similar points.

28 Pettit discusses the debunking view under this description, see op. cit., pp. 180–1.

29 Ibid., pp. 181–2. The problem was originally described under a different name in a specific legal context in L. A. Kornhauser and L. G. Sager, ‘The One and the Many: Adjudication in Collegial Courts’, California Law Review 81 (1993): 1–59. See also Christian List, ‘The Discursive Dilemma and Public Reason’, Ethics 116 (2006): 362–402.

30 List and Pettit argue that it is not only majoritarian aggregation rules that lead to inconsistent results, but any aggregation rule that derives group decisions automatically according to some simple function from the relevant judgments of its members. See Christian List and Philip Pettit, ‘Aggregating Sets of Judgments: An Impossibility Result’, Economics and Philosophy 18 (2002): 89–110.

31 This is not to say that sometimes individual members and especially those occupying important roles in the group could not be separately and individually responsible for their actions. The point is that sometimes this could prove insufficient.

32 ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, p. 128. Construing the ‘in the name’ condition as referring to claiming authority is also supported by the reference to legitimacy in the text quoted in footnote 11.

33 See Stilz, ‘Collective Responsibility and the State’, p. 204. Nagel speaks of the ‘normative engagement’ of those in whose name coercive rules are being imposed. See ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, p. 129.

34 Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, p. 129.

35 Ibid.

36 Nagel makes it clear that those (such as would-be immigrants) against whom the rules are simply enforced but not in their name are not owed justification. He suggests this is the case because as would-be immigrants are not asked to accept and uphold these rules, their role is entirely passive, whereas those ‘in whose name’ rules are enforced are expected to actively cooperate—their will or agency is also implicated (pp. 129–30). He seems to imply that coercion without justification is morally problematic only if active engagement is expected of the coerced. I will return to this point below.

37 Stilz makes the distinction between blame-responsibility and task-responsibility, which corresponds to backward-and forward-looking responsibility. She makes it clear that even when a collective agent is blame-responsible for a wrong, it is possible for many of its members to be only task-responsible to correct or compensate for the wrong. See ‘Collective Responsibility and the State’, pp. 194–5. Scanlon's distinction between responsibility as attributability and substantive responsibility is similar; see footnote 18 above and the accompanying text.

38 ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, p. 133.

39 There are several theorists who, inspired by Kant, hold that political institutions are necessary enabling conditions, even among well-motivated and reasonable persons, of honoring the negative rights of others. See for example Japa Pallikkathayil, ‘Deriving Morality from Politics: Rethinking the Formula of Humanity’, Ethics 121, no. 1 (2010): 116–147. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 135; Arthur Ripstein, ‘Authority and Coercion’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 32, no. 1 (2004): 2–35, Anna Stilz, ‘Collective Responsibility and the State’, Journal of Political Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2011): 190–208 at pp. 199–203; and Jeremy Waldron, ‘Kant's Legal Positivism’, Harvard Law Review 109, no. 7 (1996): 1535–66.

40 ‘[T]hough the obligations of justice arise as a result of a special relation, there is no obligation to enter into that relation with those to whom we do not yet have it’, Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, p. 121.

41 Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, p. 248 (emphasis added).

42 See also fn21 above.

43 See also Thomas Christiano, ‘Immigration, Political Community, and Cosmopolitanism’, San Diego Law Review 4, (2008): 944–8.

44 It may still be the case that the presence of backward-looking responsibility gives special, additional reasons for agents for correcting morally problematic inequalities for which they are responsible. But these additional reasons depend on the inequalities being independently problematic. (I thank an anonymous referee for this journal for bringing this point to my attention.) Let me also emphasize at this point that my criticism of the responsibility thesis does not impugn deontological conceptions of justice in general, because it is not committed to the idea that states of affairs (e.g. inequalities) can be unjust non-derivatively. It is only committed to the weaker claim that inequalities can be morally bad non-derivatively, and thus provide reasons for actions to appropriately positioned agents such that a failure to act on those reasons would constitute an injustice.

45 Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, p. 127. A revised version of the political conception might hold that arbitrary inequalities are morally bad everywhere yet they are unjust only where the conditions specified by the responsibility thesis obtain. Substantively, this would cede most of the ground to the cosmopolitan, since it would imply the existence of at least pro tanto reasons to create the kind of global collective agent that could mitigate inequalities everywhere.

46 To be specific, it may be coherently held, as some libertarians do, that a state of affairs is a proper object of evaluation by the principles of justice only if there is some agent that is morally responsible for it, i.e. that responsibility is a necessary condition of some state of affairs being unjust. What has been shown to be false is the claim that an otherwise neutral state of affairs can be made unjust by the single fact that some agent is responsible for it, i.e. that responsibility is sufficient for something being wrong. This is not in itself a problem for libertarians, since they take inequalities to pose no problem domestically, either. However, it is fatal for the political conception that regards domestic inequalities as unjust because of the presence of a responsible agent. (I am grateful to reviewer of this journal for pressing me to clarify this point.)

47 Nagel does not deny that would-be immigrants are subject to border coercion. This issue has recently been debated by Arash Abizadeh, who holds that border regimes are coercive and therefore need to be justified to potential immigrants as well, and David Miller, who maintains that border protection is not coercive in the normatively relevant sense and therefore no justification is owed to potential immigrants. See Abizadeh, ‘Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Borders’, Political Theory 36, (2008): 36–65; and David Miller, ‘Why Immigration Controls Are Not Coercive: A Reply to Arash Abizadeh’, Political Theory 38 (2010): 111–20. Nagel agrees with Abizadeh that border protection is coercive, but he sides with Miller in denying that justification is owed to outsiders, given that the regime is not made in their name.

48 Nagel actually oscillates between saying that they are not owed any justification and are simply coerced, and the claim that the fact that border policies respect their prepolitical basic rights is sufficient justification for them. See Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, p. 130. But then it is not clear why the latter, lower threshold of justification does not also trigger the ‘normative engagement’ of the agency of the outsiders, with all the suggested implications.

49 While it is clear that in the background of the political conception is the general contractualist idea that that justification is owed to each person who is subject to the effects of coercive rules, Nagel links this thought specifically to the idea that citizens in whose name the rules are made are in some sense responsible for these effects. It is this thought that I explore here. (I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer of this journal for pressing me to clarify this point.)

50 Ibid., p. 128.

51 I am assuming that dissenting individuals may bear backward-looking responsibility in these cases not in their individual, private capacity but as constituent members of the collective, ‘the people’ in whose name the rules are made. I thank Attila Mraz for suggesting this possibility to me.

52 I am grateful for an anonymous reviewer for this journal for pressing me to clarify the relation between this problem and the responsibility thesis.

53 See also Stilz, ‘Collective Responsibility and the State’, pp. 198–9 n17, and p. 205. She reads Nagel's position in a way that is similar to the one offered in this paragraph.

54 It might still be correct that those who bear the burden of correcting some injustice has special standing to demand justification for the actions of the agent whose potential injustices they are morally required to correct. Thus, employees of a corporation may have special standing to demand that it does not commit harms for which they may be liable. But this special standing may pertain only to the strength of the demand for justification rather than to the content of justification. I am grateful to Attila Mraz for proposing this idea to me.

55 See e.g. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 201–30; and Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 31–63. Possibly, Nagel might avail himself to a conception of legitimacy that distinguishes it from authority. On some authors’ understanding, legitimacy is simply the permissibility to use coercion, without a corresponding obligation on the part of the coerced to obey, whereas authority includes such an obligation. See e.g. Allen Buchanan, ‘Political Legitimacy and Democracy’, Ethics 112, no. 4 (2002): 689–719. But Nagel nowhere makes this distinction.

56 Thomas Christiano, ‘Immigration, Political Community, and Cosmopolitanism’, p. 940. Christiano argues for a conclusion similar to mine.

57 The argument so far has assumed that Nagel is right that justification for the effects of institutions is owed only to those whose agency they normatively engage, and that he is mistaken only about whose agency is engaged in this way. But the assumption is in fact highly dubious. We do not normally think, for instance, that only those are owed compensation for harms who were somehow involved in producing them; quite the contrary, it intuitively seems more urgent morally to compensate the harms of those who in no way were responsible for them. Suppose a corporation is responsible for some significant harm, and that among those suffering the harm are some of its own employees. It does not appear to be the case that the corporation's employees ought to enjoy any kind of priority in compensation simply in virtue of the fact that they share responsibility for the harm (though it might be that their claim of justification for the acts of the corporation is stronger, see n54 above).