Are citizens responsible for global wrongs?

ABSTRACT

This essay critically assesses Christine Hobden’s argument in Citizenship in a Globalised World that democratic citizenship is an important vehicle for the attainment of global justice. The first section examines Hobden’s claim that cosmopolitan consequentialism justifies citizenship in separate states. I argue that for this argument to succeed, it needs to elaborate a connection between relational equality for individuals and the self-determination of political groups. The second section scrutinizes Hobden’s account of the collective culpability of a democratic citizenry for their state’s wrongful actions. I argue that it is difficult to make sense of collective culpability: we are better off focusing on the personal culpability of individuals for contributing to collective wrongs.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• global justice
• Self-Determination
• Collective Responsibility

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Anna Stilz

Anna Stilz is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University. Her research focuses on questions of political membership, authority and political obligation, nationalism and self-determination, rights to land and territory, and collective agency. Stilz is the author of Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton, 2009) and Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford, 2019), as well as many journal articles.