The Ethics of Nationality - David Miller (Summary), Sintesi del corso di Etica

Scarica The Ethics of Nationality - David Miller (Summary) e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Etica solo su Docsity! The Ethics of Nationality – David Miller We can easily consider from the idea of nationality the fact that nations are ethical communities. In acknowledging a national identity, we are also acknowledging that we owe special obligations to fellow members of our nation which we do not owe to other human beings. To better analyze the topic, we have to distinguish between ethical universalism and ethical particularism, two competing accounts of structure of ethical thought (not of its content). 1. Principles of ethical universalism specify what each person must do towards other agents and what he may claim in return from them. Since the principles are to be universal in form, only general facts about other individuals can serve to determine my duties towards them. The fact that Tom is my brother (or other relational facts) cannot, on a universalist view of ethics, count in determining my duty towards him at the basic level. In other words, no ethical universalist can allow ‘because he is my brother’ to stand as a basic reason for action. 2. Ethical particularism is simply the opposite of this. It holds that relations between persons are part of the basic subject-matter of ethics, so that fundamental principles may be connected directly to these relations. ‘Because he is my brother’ can count as a basic reason for the particularist, but this does not mean that I am bound to behave towards him as convention dictates that brothers should behave towards one another. How might we try to explain and justify particular ethical commitments? There are two ways in which universalists typically try to accommodate our sense that special relationships and special loyalties matter to us ethically: 1.1 First, we might argue that, in order to realize the values that lie at the base of our ethical theory most effectively, it makes sense for each agent to pursue those values in relation to particular other agents rather than the whole universe of agents. In our case the value is “relieve the needy”, but there are many possible relievers and many people in need, so there is a problem of coordination. As Singer said, I am likely to know in detail what members of my family need, and I can get resources to them easily. So, we require conventions, that we can call “useful convention” (‘Help members of your family first’) as a method of getting from universal duties to particular ones. The idea is that, if everyone acts on the convention in question, all of us together will end up better discharging a duty that is universal in form. 1.2 Secondly, each of us is empowered to create special relationships of various kinds, establishing particular sets of rights and obligations. The simplest case would be a contract, that is justified from a universalist perspective because it is seen as valuable for people to have the moral power to enter such agreements. The argument can be extended to relationships within the family portraying it as voluntary associations: I am entitled freely to enter such associations, and once I have become a member I am subject to the rules and obligations of membership. So the conclusion is that it is valuable from a universal point of view for people to have the moral power to bind themselves into special relationships with ethical content. How do particularists try to account for universal duties? 2. According to their vision, we are tied in to many different relationships— families, work groups, voluntary associations, religious communities, nations— each of which makes demands on us, and there is no single overarching perspective from which we can order or rank these demands. In case of conflict we simply have to weigh their respective claims, reflecting both on the nature of my relationship to the two individuals and on the benefits that each would get from the help we can give. There still remains a fundamental gulf between ethical universalism and particularism. One way of expressing this is that universalists believe in ethical impartiality, whereas particularists believe in ethical partiality. Impartiality means something like ‘applying the rules and the criteria appropriate to that context in a uniform way, and in particular without allowing personal prejudice or interest to interfere’. For example a father may deal impartially with his children, but this doesn’t require him to dole out the same treatment to his neighbour’s children as he gives to his own. The ethical particularist is not an advocate of partiality. He will agree that ethical conduct must be impartial, but he will simply deny that impartiality consists in taking up a universalist perspective. Thus, if I am a member of group G, then I must act towards all the other members of group G in certain ways, and that will require me to be impartial even if I happen to like Elizabeth more than John; and so forth. But I am not required to act in the same way towards people who are not members of G, and doing so, I am not displaying partiality. next to you’ make sense when, as far as we know, each is equally in need of help, and each equally able to provide it. But the international picture is very different from this. I conclude, therefore, that attempts to justify the principle of nationality from the perspective of ethical universalism are doomed to failure. The consistent universalist should regard nationality not as a justifiable source of ethical identity but as a limitation to be overcome. Nationality should be looked upon as a sentiment that may have certain uses in the short term—given the weakness of people’s attachment to universal principles—but which, in the long term, should be transcended in the name of humanity. Thus, Sidgwick, representing the utilitarian brand of universalism, contrasted the national ideal with the cosmopolitan ideal. The latter was the ideal of the future’, but to apply it now ‘allows too little for the national and patriotic sentiments which have in any case to be reckoned with as an actually powerful political force, and which appear to be at present indispensable to social well-being. We cannot yet hope to substitute for these sentiments, in sufficient diffusion and intensity, the wider sentiment connected with the conception of our common humanity.’ Here is a consistent universalist, not trying per impossible to demonstrate the moral worth of nationality, but arguing that practical ethics must, for the foreseeable future, bow to the force of national sentiments. Nothing I have said so far is intended as a critique of universalism in itself. A universalist approach to ethics might still be the correct one. What I have been trying to dispel is the comforting thought that one can embrace universalism in ethics while continuing to give priority to one’s compatriots in one’s practical reasoning. The choice, as I see it, is either to adopt a more heroic version of universalism, which attaches no intrinsic significance to national boundaries, or else to embrace ethical particularism and see whether one can defend oneself against the charge that one is succumbing to irrational sentiment in giving weight to national allegiances. The particularist defence of nationality begins with the assumption that memberships and attachments in general have ethical significance. Because I identify with my family, my college, or my local community, I properly acknowledge obligations to members of these groups that are distinct from the obligations I owe to people generally. These loyalties, and the obligations that go with them, are seen as mutual. This doesn’t mean that the relationship is one of strict reciprocity. For various reasons it may not be possible for the person whose interests I promote to return the favour in kind. A good example is provided by the medieval Jewish communities described by Michael Walzer. Members of these communities recognized an obligation to provide for one another’s needs, but needs in turn were understood in relation to religious ideals; this meant, for instance, that education was seen as a need for boys but not for girls; that food was distributed to the poorest members of the communities on the eve of the religious festivals; and so forth. In other words, the interests are interpreted in the light of the community’s values. The act of making a contribution is not a pure loss, from the point of view of the private interests of the person making it, because he is helping to sustain a set of relationships from which he stands to benefit to some degree. They mark out sets of people who are already well disposed to one another in certain respects, and this makes it easier to create formal practices for mutual benefit. Thus, a group of neighbours may decide to form a shopping collective or share a school run. How far, then, can these arguments be applied to nations? Does it make sense to regard nations as communities which generate rights and obligations in the same way as communities of a more immediate sort? Can the particularistic arguments I have been deploying serve to defend obligations to compatriots? People would no doubt say, first of all, that they had a duty to defend their nation and its ancestral territory, in other words to preserve the community’s culture and its physical integrity. But if asked to be more specific about the content of those special responsibilities, it would be hard to elicit any determinate general answer. This reminds us of the abstract character of nationality, its quality of ‘imagined community’. Whereas in face-to-face communities there is a clear understanding of what each is expected to contribute towards the welfare of other members, in the case of nationality we are in no position to grasp the demands and expectation of other members directly, nor they ours. So, although at any time it may be possible to say roughly what the obligations of the members of nation A are, these obligations in their particular content are an artefact of the public culture of that nation. We set out to show that particular ethical obligations could legitimately be derived from membership in a national community; normally we would expect such obligations to be independently derived. But although this shows that we cannot derive the obligations of nationality simply from reflection on what it means for a group of people to constitute a nation in the first place. I have so far claimed that the ethical implications of nationality differ from those of lesser communities in two main respects. The potency of nationality as a source of personal identity means that its obligations are strongly felt and may extend very far—people are willing to sacrifice themselves for their country in a way that they are not for other groups and associations. But at the same time, these obligations are somewhat indeterminate and likely to be the subject of political debate; in the best case, they will flow from a shared public culture which results from rational deliberation over time about what it means to belong to the nation in question. However, to grasp the full force of the obligations of nationality, we need to consider what happens when national boundaries coincide with state boundaries, so that a formal scheme of political cooperation is superimposed on the national community. In this case people will have rights and obligations of citizenship as well as rights and obligations of nationality. Rights and obligations of the first kind stem simply from their participation in a practice from which they stand to benefit, via the principle of reciprocity. As citizens they enjoy rights of personal protection, welfare rights, and so forth, and in return they have an obligation to keep the law, to pay taxes, and generally to uphold the co-operative scheme to a very large extent, their obligations of nationality are discharged through the state, provided that the latter pursues the right kind of policies. It would, however, be a great mistake to suppose that, once a practice of political co-operation is in place, nationality drops out of the picture as an irrelevance—that we simply have the rights and obligations of citizens interacting with other citizens. The bonds of nationality give the practice a different shape from the one that it would have without them. Let us try to imagine how the rights and obligations of citizenship might look if the citizens were tied to one another by nothing beyond the practice of citizenship itself, and were motivated by the principle of fairness. They would insist on strict reciprocity. In other words, each would expect to benefit from their association in proportion to his or her contribution. The point that I want to underline here is that there are strong ethical reasons for making the bounds of nationality and the bounds of the state coincide. Where this obtains, obligations of nationality are strengthened by being given expression in a formal scheme of political co-operation; and the scheme of co- operation can be based on loose rather than strict reciprocity, meaning that redistributive elements can be built in which go beyond what the rational self- interest of each participant would dictate. Does the ethics of nationality not entail moral indifference to outsiders (not isolated individuals, but people who are themselves members of national communities)? In general, in considering relationships to outsiders, we should not think that our only relationship to them is of one human being to another, I should not forget that between me and Tanzanian there is a link as part of our nations.