Anti-cosmopolitanism, pluralism and the cosmopolitan harm principle

Review of International Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 185-205

  Shapcott, Richard ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 42949123056     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210508007985     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. J. Feinberg, Harm to Others: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
2. See, for example, Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919-1939 (London: Macmillan, 1939);
3. Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 3rd cdn. (It should be noted that both Carr and Morgenthau have their cosmopolitan interpreters;
4. see discussions in Alastair Murray, 'The Moral Politics of Hans Morgenthau', Review of Politics (1999), pp. 80-107;
5. Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community (1997);
6. E. H. Carr, 'Critical Theory and International Relations', Review of International Studies, 23:3, 2321-38);
7. Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin; Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, NC: University of Notre Dame, 1994);
8. Gertrude Himmelfarb, in M. Nussbaum (ed.), For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press 1996);
9. Alasdair Macintyre, 'Is Patriotism a Virtue?', in The Oxford Reader in Political Thought, eds. M. Rosen and J. Wolff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
10. Robert Jackson, The Global Covenant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
11. Nussbaum, For Love of Country, p. 133.
12. C. Beitz, 'Social And Cosmopolitan Liberalism', International Affairs, 75: 3 (1999), pp. 512-99.
13. See also, A. Buchanan, 'Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism', Ethics, 99:4 (1989), pp. 852-82.
14. Walzer, Thick and Thin, p. 8.
15. At the same time, however, Walzer rests his argument about just war on the existence of human rights, and beyond that on certain acts which can shock the 'moral conscience' of humankind. It must be asked of Walzer 'how one can have rights but not citizenship, and a conscience but no memory?'. His position is therefore hard to correctly categorise as entirely anti-cosmopolitan or entirely coherent. See Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (London and New York: Penguin, 1977).
16. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 10.
17. Walzer, Spheres, p. 314.
18. Michael Walzer, Arguing about War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 188.
19. David Miller, 'Caney's International Distributive Justice: A Response', Political Studies, 50 (2002), pp. 974-7 at 976.
20. In another context, however, Miller supports what he calls a 'weak' cosmopolitanism which is much closer to the account developed here: David Miller, 'The Limits of Cosmopolitan Justice', in D. Mapel and T. Nardin (eds.), International Society: Diverse Ethical Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
21. Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979);
22. Peter Singer, 'Famine Affluence and Morality', Philosophy and Public Affairs (Spring, 1972);
23. Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989);
24. Barry Brian, Theories of Justice: A Treatise on Social Justice, vol. 1 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1989);
25. Brian Barry, 'International Society from a Cosmopolitan Perspective", in D. Mapel and T. Nardin, International Society: Brian Barry, 'Statism and Nationalism: A Cosmopolitan Critique', in I. Shapiro and L. Brilmaye (eds.), Global Justice: NOMOS (New York: New York University Press, 1999);
26. Charles Jones, Global Justice: Defending Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
27. Darrel Woellendorf, Cosmopolitan Justice (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2002);
28. Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
29. John Rawls, A. Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).
30. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
31. For a further account of this problem, see Richard Shapcott, 'Conversation and Coexistence: Gadamer and the Interpretation of International Society', Millennium, 23:1 (1994),
32. and Chris Brown, 'The Modern Requirement?: Reflections on Normative International Theory in a Post-Western World', Millennium., 17:2 (1988).
33. See Charles Beitz, 'Cosmopolitan Liberalism and the States System', in C. Brown (ed.), Political Restructuring in Europe: Ethical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1994),
34. and Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
35. Toni Erskine, 'Citizen of Nowhere' or "The Point where Circles Intersect"? Impartialist and Embedded Cosmopolitanisms', Review of International Studies, 28 (2002), pp. 457-78. Although Macintyre claims to be merely describing a position, it is also one that is consistent with his understanding of the nature of the relationship between morality and community.
36. See also Nikolas K. Gvosdev, 'Communitarian Realism', American Behavioural Scientist, 48:12 (2005), pp. 1591-606;
37. for similar categorisation, see also Caney, Justice Beyond Borders.
38. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 9.
39. See Rawls, Law of Peoples, and also the discussion in Leif Wenar, 'Why Rawls is Not a Cosmopolitan Egalitarian', in R. Martin and D. Reidy (eds.), Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia? (London: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 95-113.
40. M. Frost, Ethics in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). The chief difference is that Rawls' account takes the form of 'ideal theory' and distinguishes between states and peoples, whereas Bull and Frost both refer to historical relations between states. Rawls is closer to Frost as well because he emphasises the conditionality of sovereignty upon human rights observance, whereas Bull was famously sceptical of any such doctrine.
41. See Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977);
42. Jackson, The Global Covenant.
43. As Peter Singer notes, this is essentially the position adopted in relation to global warming, by Australian Prime Minister John Howard and US President George Bush: see Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).
44. Henry Shue, 'Exporting Hazards', in P. Brown and H. Shue (eds.), Boundaries: National Autonomy and its Limits (New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), p. 115.
45. See for instance, Miller, Limits; Rawls, Law of Peoples; Walzer, Arguing about War; Jackson, Global Covenant.
46. Rawls, The Law of Peoples.
47. See Hidemi Suganami, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
48. A third principle, Hospitality, could also be included here. Hospitality refers to duties to treat strangers as friends. However it seems that the hospitality principle is derivative of the more fundamental harm principle.
49. Andrew Linklater, 'Cosmopolitan Political Communities in International Relations', International Relations, 16:1 (2002), pp. 135-50 at 150.
50. Nussbaum, For Love of Country, p. 13.
51. Andrew Linklater, 'Citizenship, Humanity and Cosmopolitan Harm Conventions', International Political Science Review, 22:3 (2001), pp. 261-77 at 264.
52. However not all forms of harm are unjustifiable, some crimes require punishment or harming, and some harms are less harmful than others. The issue then is which harms are justifiable and which are not, and which are proscribed, and which are not proscribed but punishable.
53. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, p. 4.
54. See, for instance, the discussion in Ethics and International Affairs, 19:1 (2005).
55. Pogge also introduces the morally more demanding notion that insofar as we are depriving someone of a good we could otherwise supply, without harming ourselves, we are harming them: 'we are harming the global poor if and insofar as we collaborate in imposing an unjust global institutional order upon them.' World Poverty and Human Rights, p. 5. Because the order is unjust it is a deprivation of a good they might otherwise have.
56. Andrew Linklater, 'Citizenship, Humanity and Cosmopolitan Harm Conventions', International Political Science Review, 22:3 (2001), pp. 261-77 at 265.
57. David Miller, 'Holding Nations Responsible', Ethics, 114 (2004), pp. 240-68.
58. Shue, 'Exporting Hazards', p. 121.
59. Ibid.
60. The costs and benefits of any given practice must be consented to under conditions of informed knowledge: 'harms . . . may not be imposed without asking those who will suffer them. The potential victims of the harms might, once fully informed, accept them anyway as the least of the available evils.' Shue, 'Exporting Hazards', p. 125. In the absence of that consent the prima facie argument is that we shouldn't harm them, until consent can be given, and not the other way around, i.e. that we can harm them until they protest.
61. Andrew Linklater, 'The Harm Principle and Global Ethics', Global Society, 20:3 (2005), p. 20.
62. Linklater, 'The Harm Principle', p. 20.
63. Donna Lee Frieze, The Dehumanisation of the Other: Genocide, Film and the Ethical. Ph.D thesis, Deakin University (2005).
64. Linklater, 'The Harm Principle'.
65. The recognition that different cultures and people may interpret harm differently could be said to reinforce the opposition to cosmopolitan universalism. However this would be so only if one accepts a radical incommensurability thesis regarding the impossibility of translation and interpretation; see Shapcott, 'Conversation and Coexistence'. Such a reading would render the possibility of translating the concept of harm beyond our reach. It would make it impossible to identify any circumstances where our actions 'harm' others, by their standards.
66. See Richard Shapcott, Justice, Community and Dialogue in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
67. Quoted in Andrew Linklater, 'Citizenship, Humanity and Cosmopolitan Harm Conventions', International Political Science Review, 22:3 (2001), pp. 261-77 at 263.
68. Linklater, 'The Harm Principle', p. 4.
69. This point has also recently been made by Nagel: see Thomas Nagel, 'The Problem of Global Justice', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33:2 (2005), pp. 112-47.
70. Pogge, World Poverty and. Human Rights. Although working within a Rawlsian framework, Pogge's approach is substantively different from other Rawlsians precisely because he begins with the nature of the harms perpetrated by existing global institutional arrangements.
71. Globalisation makes this harder to determine, which puts the emphasis back onto the global rules within which national decisions are made but which have not been consented to by particular states.
72. It is arguable that Walzer comes closest to this position in his defence of the 'supreme emergency' doctrine which allows states to abandon the doctrine of non-combatant immunity. In this case the survival of one's own community overrides the harm to civilians in another. See Daniel Warner, 'Searching for Responsibility/Community in International Relations', in D. Dampbell and M. Shapiro (eds.), Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).