Liberalism beyond borders

Social Philosophy and Policy

Volumn 24, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 206-233

  Lomasky, Loren E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

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EID: 34247501841     PISSN: 02650525     EISSN: 14716437     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0265052507070094     Document Type: Review

References (31)

1. See Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, in H. S. Reiss, ed., Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 93-130.
2. See Christopher Morris, An Essay on the Modern State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
3. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
4. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
5. See, for example, Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979);
6. and Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
7. The difference principle is, of course, the principle that in a just society, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, section 13.
8. See, for example, Peter Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972): 229-43;
9. and Larry Temkin, "Thinking about the Needy: Justice and International Organizations," Journal of Ethics 8 (2004): 349-95.
10. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 16.
11. But see also John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 53 n. 7, for a partial retraction of this characterization.
12. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 102.
13. I make this objection in "Libertarianism at Twin Harvard," Social Philosophy and Policy 22, no. 1 (2005): 178-99.
14. Rawls himself may have been implicitly reconsidering the applicability of this conception when, in the revised edition of A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), he omitted without explanation the "share one another's fate" sentence. Possibly, his own later work on international justice had persuaded him to moderate this aspect of the theory, but that is speculation.
15. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 37.
16. "Good fences make good neighbors" stands at the opposite extreme.
17. A third respect in which they might differ is if the social contract is stipulated to be tacit or hypothetical, perhaps entered into behind a veil of ignorance. No further attention will be paid to these complications.
18. This is not a theorem of the abstract theory of rationality but rather presupposes a certain view of human nature. Only if people by and large place higher value on being left alone to advance their own projects than they do on meddling with the projects of others will they subscribe to an order of mutual forbearance. Classical social contract theories attempt in different ways to embed mutual and reciprocal willingness to forgo meddling into their accounts.
19. Strictly speaking, this claim should bear a ceteris paribus qualifier. If the transaction between A and B incorporates infliction of a material harm on C, then principles of self-defense legitimate C's acting so as to block the arrangement. In this respect, international transactions do not differ from domestic ones.
20. Selecting an appropriate term to refer to those states in which per-capita income hovers perilously close to the destitution line is difficult. Speaking of them as "developing countries" blissfully ignores the key problem that most are conspicuously failing to develop. "Third World nations" was lamentably vague when the Soviet Union pretended to be a functional regime and is just plain innumerate now. "Burdened society" seems to suggest an external burdener; "failed state" is pessimistic and abruptly final. I shall for the most part, then, unimaginatively speak of poor and wealthy countries.
21. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 77.
22. The 1948-49 Berlin airlift comes close.
23. Denunciations of the degrading nature of working conditions abroad are especially suspect when offered by parties such as labor unions who stand as competitors to these foreign enterprises.
24. It might be objected that coercion by the state is needed to overcome what decision theorists call an "assurance problem." Citizens, it is claimed, might individually have some desire to act philanthropically, but they will contribute only if they are confident that others will also contribute. Without some mechanism affording assurance to each citizen of the similar compliance of the others, the philanthropic preference will go unrealized. Mandated tax contributions thus not only bring about a valuable result but also give effect to the predilections people already hold. The story, although not impossible, is far-fetched. That many people really do strongly desire themselves and their compatriots to be taxed more heavily so as to swell foreign-aid budgets seems to be confirmed neither by opinion polls nor by the observed politics of national budget-making. Nor is it evident that most people's charitable impulses are so strongly contingent on the behavior of others. It is an open question whether an order of privatized international aid would be hobbled by widespread tendencies to free-ride, and it is best answered by putting the hypothesis to the test.
25. Another important reason is that while economies as a whole will benefit from increased openness, there will always be some parties disadvantaged by widening the scope of competition. If they are politically potent, they may be able to block agreement.
26. See Thomas Pogge, "'Assisting' the Global Poor," in Deen K. Chatterjee, ed., The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 260-88.
27. French opponents of the proposed European Constitution successfully engineered its May 2005 referendum defeat in part by decrying its "extreme Anglo-Saxon liberalism." Despite whatever other grounds on which their appraisal of the proposed constitution was misjudged, they accurately diagnosed the intrinsic opposition between the welfare state's forced redistributions and the fundamental precepts of political and economic liberalism.
28. See, for example, the authors cited in note 5 above.
29. I develop a fuller response to the implications of morally arbitrary borders for trade and migration in "Toward a Liberal Theory of National Boundaries," in David Miller and Sohail Hashmi, eds., Boundaries and Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 55-78.
30. Nor would it likely pass muster with courts either in the United States or in the European Union.
31. I say "not likely" because, for example, a net contributor may become a net subtractor by committing a crime and then consuming resources of the judicial and penal systems. This is true for both citizens and immigrants; in fact, citizens may be more likely to become net subtractors, insofar as one available cost-cutting sentence that can be employed against alien felons is deportation.