Doing more than one’s fair share

Abstract

What duties do people have in the face of noncompliance of others with their duties? The paper defends the duty to take up the slack when slack taking is necessary to assist those in dire need. This duty has been criticized by J. L. Cohen, Liam Murphy and, more recently, David Miller. The duty is defended against arguments that appeal to the structure of the duty to aid, fair shares, responsibility, counterintuitiveness, and perverse consequences. The paper considers the implications of the duty for the case of aiding refugees.

Keywords:

• justice
• fairness
• duty to aid
• migration
• refugees
• noncompliance
• nonideal theory

Acknowledgments

I wrote the first version of this paper so long ago (in 2010) that I fear I may have forgotten all the debts I have incurred along the way. I am indebted to David Miller’s conceptualization of the problem of slack taking; for details, see D. Miller (2011) and to Miles Unterreiner for research assistance. I am grateful for written comments to Simon Caney, Matthew Clayton, Ben Jackson, Matthew Kramer, Seth Lazar, Patti Lenard, Avia Pasternak, Jonathan Quong, Victor Tadros, Alexa Zellentin. I benefited from discussion with the audiences at CELPA, Warwick; Cambridge Political Theory Workshop; Aarhus workshop; and the CSSJ, Oxford. I am also grateful to Carl Knight and the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. I take ‘refugee’ to refer to any person in dire need on account of justifiably fleeing his or her state. My argument applies also on the narrower definition of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees; see Secretariat of the United Nations (1954, p. 150) and Cf. Schacknove (1985).

2. Developing countries hosted over 80% of the world’s refugees in 2012. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2012, p. 2).

3. See Hathaway and Neve (1997, pp. 119–211), Cook (2004, p. 343), Gibney (2006).

4. See Cohen (1981) and Murphy (2000) – esp. ch. 5 – and D. Miller (2011). Their arguments are meant to apply to the full range of duties to aid, not just the duty to aid those in dire need that is my focus here.

5. This can be contrasted with (un)fairness that is merely deflationary. A distribution is fair in a deflationary sense when everyone carries their just burden, even when the problem of substantive fairness does not arise in a given context.

6. See Singer (2002) and Unger (1996). Fulfilling the duty includes empowering those in need to help themselves.

7. I focus on enforceable duties since this is Miller’s focus and because an enforceable duty to take up slack has more teeth than one that is not.

8. I will not try to establish what would count as a reasonable cost to bear for saving someone from dire need and my argument is meant to be compatible with a range of answers. This means that I side-step the problem, if it is a problem, of extreme demandingness. On what might count as reasonable costs, see, for example, Fabre (2006, pp. 44–46) and Miller (2004).

9. As Garrett Cullity has elegantly put it in his insightful book, ‘The grounds for thinking that beneficence requires me to … [take up the slack and save the extra person left behind by the noncomplier] are plain. They are just the same as they would be in a situation in which I also could easily rescue one person: he desperately needs it, and I could easily help’ (2006, p. 75).

10. Murphy’s duty is not constrained by reasonable cost and to that extent he attempts to solve a different problem than I do here. As Paul Hurley has pointed out (2003, p. 841), Murphy’s argument is an ingenious attempt to build a limit into our duties to aid without invoking the claim that such duties are limited in their demandingness.

11. I am grateful to Victor Tadros for this point. For further arguments against Murphy’s position here see Arneson (2004, pp. 35–39).

12. Murphy (2000, p. 92).

13. Cullity (2006, pp. 75–76 and 242 n15).

14. See also Cullity (2006, pp. 75, 76).

15. This is possible because the increase in burdens need not be monotonic. The initial duty to aid may require, say, a (reasonable) sacrifice of friendship, while aiding even more through taking up the slack may not impose any further burdens of this type.

16. This is compatible with associative duties trumping the duty to aid foreigners.

17. I think that only important needs would trigger positive enforceable duties. If even unimportant needs can trigger enforceable duties, then we should not expect people to have much of a claim in any case against being made the bearers of enforceable duties.

18. Miller (2011, pp. 239–245). Cf. Cohen (1981).

19. Miller (2011, p. 243). Miller acknowledges also that the victims’ plight amounts to a human right violation; see both ‘Taking up the slack’ (2011) and his National responsibility and global justice (2007, ch. 7).

20. Miller (2011, pp. 242–243).

21. Miller (2011, p. 239).

22. Cohen (1981, p. 76).

23. See Ogilvie and Miller (2006).

24. Cohen (1981, p. 80).

25. Cohen (1981, pp. 73, 4).

26. Miller (2011, p. 241), Murphy (2000, p. 113).

27. Miller (2011, p. 241).

28. Michael Ridge (2010) has suggested that the duty to take up slack (on which he, ultimately, does not take a stance) can be thought of as something that creates unfairness among the duty bearers for the sake of eliminating unfairness in the distribution of the burdens of noncompliance between the compliers and the victims. I think this view may have some purchase in cases other than those of dire need. In cases of dire need, however, it is not our concern with fairness that leads us, in my view, to place the entire burden on the complier. After all, instead of calculating how much C should bear in comparison with how much V should bear, we need only notice that V is in dire need and C can assist V at a reasonable cost to herself. It might be that the designators ‘dire need’ and ‘reasonably able to assist’ already smuggle in all the relevant information about proportionality of burdens, but these are not straightforwardly comparative categories, so it is not direct concern with fairness that guides us here.

29. Although ‘it does not follow,’ I leave open the possibility that such whipping is permissible if necessary.