No Borders, No Bystanders:
Developing Individual and Institutional Capacities for Global Moral
Responsibility 1
Neta C. Crawford, Boston University
Scholars of world politics and international ethics have long posed questions
about our responsibilities to distant others and offered visions of what we owe each
other as citizens of the world. Yet there is a gap between cosmopolitan ideals and our
ability to consistently see and act with moral vision. How can we see distant and
different others as persons for whom we should care? What capacities do individuals
need to enhance to be better moral actors? What institutional supports, arrangements,
and conditions could help individuals develop their moral capacities and facilitate
collective moral deliberation and more just outcomes?
In Basic Rights, Henry Shue argues that certain rights are basic in the sense that
when those rights — security and subsistence — are guaranteed, other rights can be
enjoyed. When basic rights are not guaranteed, then other rights can be enjoyed only
precariously.2
Basic rights are both negative and positive in the sense that to be
guaranteed, we must avoid harming others, but we must also act in positive ways to
provide subsistence and security.
In "Mediating Duties," Shue suggests that because
humans are causally tied to others in the globe as never before, there is no reason, other
I thank Charles Beitz, Robert Goodin, Ann Ferguson, members of a workshop on
institutional responsibility at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in July 2007, and
participants in seminars at the University of Toronto in September 2007 and Cornell
University in October 2007 for comments.
2 Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1980) p. 30.
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than limited individual resources, to circumscribe our moral concern to compatriots.
Because individuals cannot provide for all others in need, Shue argues that we must
design institutions that do so: "among the most important duties of individual persons
will be indirect duties for the design and creation of positive-duty-performing institutions
that do not yet exist and for the modification or transformation of existing institutions
that now ignore rights and the positive duties that all rights involve." Shue focuses on
institutions in part for efficiency reasons. "Such duty –respecting institutions can at
least partly coordinate the activities of those claiming their rights and those doing their
duties. There is no reason this cannot be done across national borders."3
The trouble is getting individuals to design institutions that promote security and
subsistence, and for that to occur, many more individuals than do so now must see the
provision of these rights as urgent priorities. This is the problem that Shue sets out in
"Mediating Duties" when he says: "The world is full of foreigners. Most of them are
strangers to me, and I have every reason to doubt that most of them have ever given
me a thought. Is there some reason I should give thought to them?"4 Indeed, if we give
thought to fate of most of the world's inhabitants, the facts of existence are harsh.
Thousands of people, many of them children, die each day for lack of safe drinking
water. The global rise of sea levels will eliminate several low-lying islands and with them
the homes of thousands of people.
Millions suffer and die from multi-drug resistant
tuberculosis and other curable illnesses.
The lives of billions of the world's poor are
more miserable and shortened compared to the lives of those with means in developed
countries. Sometimes large numbers of civilian deaths in war can be excused if those
3
4
Henry Shue, "Mediating Duties," Ethics vol. 98, no. 4, (July 1988) pp. 687-704: 703.
Shue, "Mediating Duties," p. 687.
2
deaths are a "necessary" and unintended consequence of military actions that were
intended to accomplish a legitimate military end. These brutal conditions existed before
my birth and will likely persist for the foreseeable future absent any fundamental change
in the organization of the world economy or in the resources the world's rich send to the
world's poor.
I am saddened by these facts, but am I obliged to do anything about them? In a
sense, are we not all bystanders to forces and situations beyond our immediate
circumstances?
As Shue rightly suggests, individual capacities are limited and he
focuses on institutional reform because he wants to allow for individuals to have some
respite from what would be burdensome duties. "[W]e are all entitled to some off-duty
time whether it improves performance on the job or not. . . . I am only invoking the
familiar point that the duties of ordinary people must be less demanding than the
performance of saints and heroes because duty bearers are themselves right-bearers too
and may justifiably choose not to be heroes."5 How is it that humans with resources can
be transformed from bystanders to heroes, albeit ordinary heroes who can see others as
deserving of empathetic and respectful care?
I take two conditions as given — the increasing but incomplete globalization of
the world economy, and our increasing but incomplete political and cultural connection
to distant others. These real and perceived connections often lead to moral dilemmas of
both an everyday sort, such as what kind of coffee to buy or whether do donate to
Oxfam or Save the Children, and the exceptional variety, for instance how to respond to
what might be an unfolding genocide.
How should we understand individual and
collective moral responsibility in this incompletely cosmopolitan context? What do we
5
Shue, "Mediating Duties," p. 697.
3
owe different and distant "others"? How ought we act as "global citizens"? While some
moral visions are more and less likely to promote justice and the well being of others, I
cannot myself alone devise that system. I cannot hope to suggest a program that will
either be agreed to by all or that will fit all sorts of situations. I cannot answer the
question: If we are to act to help others, how should we do so? Different situations will
have different requirements.6
The particular attitudes, practices and institutions that
are required for justice can be rooted in principles but must be applied to particular
circumstances. Global moral responsibility, for that is what it is, ought to preserve the
self and others' autonomy and agency, but in any instance of the effort to be
responsible, the program will have to be worked out in a way that is sensitive to the
details of the case and which engages the participation of those affected.
Which is not to say that the immediate situation of many could not be improved
through relatively easy and immediate steps.
Although many problems are complex,
some, if not many, reforms are likely to be obvious and perhaps easy to achieve once
the need becomes manifest and the political will develops to enact them. But why is
need not manifest and political will lacking? What kinds of individuals and institutions are
more likely to be able to see moral problems and address them in ways that are just and
compassionate? All I can hope to do is to suggest ways to enable the process of taking
moral responsibility — prerequisites for moral responsibility.
I outline prerequisites for moral responsibility in a world without firm political
borders and with increasingly porous moral boundaries. The first set of prerequisites is
the development of individual emotional and cognitive capacities for moral vision and
For instance, situations of ongoing injustice may require different remedies than
situations where the injustice or harm was perpetrated long ago and what remains are
structural disadvantages in a context of relatively fair or just institutions and practices.
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moral reasoning — for empathy, respect, and context sensitive deliberation. The second
set of prerequisites entails the development of collective or social capacity, namely
institutions that support individual moral capacity and a robust set of public spheres and
institutions with procedures for publicity and accountability.
Many scholars have
focused on enumerating rights and corresponding duties, and more recently others have
suggested ways to democratize international institutions so that they become more
transparent, inclusive and accountable.7
While agreement on rights and duties and
appropriate institutional reforms are essential, I argue that attention to what used to be
called individual moral development is as important as those institutional reforms.
Individual capacities to recognize when others rights have been violated or need
protection, and the ability to deliberate about the ways to achieve justice, is an essential
precondition for the achievement of a more just world.
Moral Bystanders
What do we owe each other as humans living on the same planet?
individuals, the answer used to be quite simple — not much.
For most
The answer for states was
essentially the same: for centuries, the dominant understanding of obligation in world
politics was characterized by the notion that moral boundaries were co-terminus with
state borders. Intervention among equals was neither desired nor required. States were
moral containers and intervention was supposed to be exceptional, reserved for cases
See, for instance, Rodger A. Paine and Nayef H. Samhat, Democratizing Global Politics:
Discourse Norms, International Regimes, and Political Community (New York: SUNY Press,
2004); Ann Florini, The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2005); Heikki Patomäki and Teivo
Teivainen, A Possible World: Democratic Transformations of Global Institutions (London:
Zed Books, 2004).
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where a state's security or sovereignty was at risk. The international institutions created
in the twentieth century — the League of Nations and the United Nations — epitomized
the Westphalian order nominally begun in 1648 in that they assumed both national
identity and sovereign equality. Even the League of Nations Mandate system and the
United Nations Trusteeship system, set to govern the relations of great powers to
dependencies, presumed that, one day, all states would be equal.
The UN Charter
imagines government by states and conceives of intervention as the exception. Yet the
Charter is ambivalent in some respects, when in its opening lines it says "we the peoples
of the United Nations."
Similarly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights assumes
that human rights are to be protected and exercised within states. In all those contexts,
states are considered the responsible agents of international politics. It was possible to
argue that there was virtue in being a moral bystander. The virtue, of course, was the
protection of "state sovereignty." The invocation of state sovereignty was a call and
license for bystandership, where bystanders are understood to be neutral, uninvolved,
and not responsible.
Yet, more recently, notions of sovereignty and responsibility have turned on their
head as cosmopolitanisms of various sorts have become increasingly dominant.
Domestic responsibility, defined as democracy and respect for human rights, is now
understood by many as a prerequisite of sovereignty. States that act irresponsibly are
said to forfeit their sovereignty. Intervention in those cases is desired and required. Only
a decade after the end of the Cold War, the notion of legally justified intervention as a
self-interested act to preserve international peace and security had given way to
intervention as a moral obligation to others. This is most clearly seen in the language of
the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty report, The
6
Responsibility to Protect: "sovereignty implies a dual responsibility: externally – to
respect the sovereignty of other states, and internally, to respect the dignity and basic
rights of all the people within the state. In international human rights covenants, in UN
practice, and in state practice itself, sovereignty is now understood as embracing this
dual responsibility. Sovereignty as responsibility has become the minimum content of
good international citizenship."8 The Responsibility to Protect was thus a watershed in
articulating the nascent view.
Thinking of sovereignty as responsibility, in a way that is being increasingly
recognized in state practice, has a threefold significance. First, it implies that the
state authorities are responsible for the functions of protecting the safety and lives
of citizens and promotion of their welfare. Secondly, it suggests that the national
political authorities are responsible to the citizens internally and to the international
community through the UN. And thirdly, it means that the agents of state are
responsible for their actions; that is to say, they are accountable for their acts of
commission and omission.9
This view of responsibility implies an obligation to intervene: "sovereign states
have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe – from
mass murder and rape, from starvation – but that when they are unwilling or unable to
do so, that responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states."10
In
2004, the UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
articulated a more comprehensive right to intervene. The title of the report emphasized
responsibility: A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.
In signing the Charter of the United Nations, States not only benefit from the
privileges of sovereignty but also accept its responsibilities. Whatever perceptions
may have prevailed when the Westphalian system first gave rise to the notion of
State sovereignty, today it clearly carries with it the obligation of a State to protect
International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICSS), The
Responsibility to Protect (Ottowa: International Development Research Centre, December
2001), p. 8.
9 ICSS, The Responsibility to Protect, p. 13.
10 ICSS, The Responsibility to Protect, p. viii.
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the welfare of its own peoples and meet its obligations to the wider international
community. But history teaches us all too clearly that it cannot be assumed that
every State will always be able, or willing, to meet its responsibilities to protect its
own people and avoid harming its neighbours.
The High-level Panel suggests that the responsibility to protect devolves on to
multilateral institutions when individual states fail to act to prevent or halt ongoing
abuse.
"And in those circumstances, the principles of collective security mean that
some portion of those responsibilities should be taken up by the international
community, acting in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to help build the necessary capacity or supply the
necessary protection, as the case may be."11 When states or international institutions,
such as the United Nations or NATO, fail to act to prevent or halt genocide we say they
have failed. Similarly, social movement activists exhort individuals to take actions that
have positive consequences across borders.
Human beings today thus live at a crossroads of moral concern. For much of the
last century, humans have thought of themselves as citizens of states, with their moral
obligations and the obligations of states to outsiders ending at state borders.12 If there
are hard physical and moral boundaries in the world, I can remain a bystander to the
suffering of those beyond the border. If political, moral and identity boundaries are not
so hard, I am no longer a bystander. Indeed, moral concern has gradually broadened to
encompass others, outside the state. Today, most of us can see both possibilities —
United Nations, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Report of the
Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (UN 2004) p.
17.
12 And even then, love of country entailing sacrifice does not come naturally.
Tremendous state resources must be spent to inculcate citizens in patriotism and to
mobilize their participation in wars and other national efforts.
11
8
individuals and states might limit their moral concern and action to citizens within
borders or we might care about and act with equal concern toward (at least some)
outsiders. Where until recently, humanitarian intervention was considered a rare
benevolent act we might today blame ourselves, and others, when we don't help distant
strangers in great distress. We can also imagine that intervention can be paternalistic or
self-interested, and a violation of others rights. Thus, we need a way to see, deliberate,
and act. Yet, if humans have glimpsed a vision of global moral responsibility, we do not
yet always have an understanding of what to do, much less the will, and the means to
enact that concern. How shall we know when to act, how to act, and when to stop
acting? Put differently, as Robert Goodin asks, how can we "motivate political
morality?"13
Moral Responsibility
Policymakers frequently invoke responsibility without offering a definition.
Scholars tend to talk of prospective and retrospective moral responsibility in respect to
obligations that arise from moral duties.14 By prospective moral responsibility I mean the
expectations we have about how we should act in particular situations and the
institutions that we put in place to ensure responsible action.
By retrospective
responsibility, I mean the act of looking back at what we have done and assigning praise
Robert E. Goodin, Motivating Political Morality (London: Blackwell, 1992).
See for example, Toni Erskine, "Introduction: Making Sense of 'Responsibility' in
International Relations — Key Questions and Concepts," in Toni Erskine, ed., Can
Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations
(New York: Palgrave, 2003) pp. 1-16.
13
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or blame according to how well prospective responsibilities were met.15
Taking
responsibility retrospectively entails both acting responsibly in the present and looking
backward.
If in looking backward we find wrong, we should expect individuals and
collectives to change those practices that brought harm if they have not already done
so, and to make repair.
Christian
Barry
offers
a
distinction
between
moral
responsibilities
and
responsibilities of justice. Moral responsibilities, he argues, are "held directly to other
agents." Responsibilities of justice, "such as those to institute and uphold just
institutions, to ensure that they are complied with, or to bring remedy to hardships when
they are lacking, are held only indirectly to other agents insofar as they are affected by
social rules."16 For Barry, appeals to justice call on agents to change the rules, while
appeals to moral responsibility call on actors to change their behavior within existing
rules.
I agree with Barry that individual agents have moral responsibilities and that one
must also be concerned about institutions and how they might or might not be just or
create the conditions that foster justice. Nevertheless, agency and structure cannot be
easily separated. Unjust institutions and practices are more likely to product unjust
outcomes no matter the best intentions of individuals or collective agents. On the other
hand, agents with well developed moral capacity are more likely to produce institutions
and develop social practices that are just. Or as Martha Nussbaum states, "institutions
See also Robert Goodin's distinctions between task responsibility for what one should
do, and liability responsibility, which assigns credit or blame for what someone has done.
Robert E. Goodin, Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995).
16 Christian Barry, "Global Justice: Aims, Arrangements, and Responsibilities," in Erskine,
ed., Can Institutions Have Responsibilities?, pp. 218-237: 220.
15
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do not come into being unless people want them, and they can cease to be if people
stop wanting them. . . ."17
Thus, my conception of responsibility includes institutional design, as well as
individual moral responsibility. In other words, while it is vital to talk about individual
moral responsibility, there are some activities that we can only undertake as members of
collectives and through institutions.
Whether acting alone or as a member of a
collective, pre-existing beliefs, practices, and relations of power affect the options and
abilities of individual and collective actors. Understanding and acting on our moral
obligations to others depends on both individual capacities and on the background of
social institutions — including the prevailing system of beliefs and the distribution of
resources and opportunities. Thus, while the recent attention to institutional design for
democracy is welcome, scholars of world politics should also attend to individual
capacities for moral vision and deliberation and the ways institutions can enhance
individual capacities.
In what follows I am concerned less with specific moral responsibilities than with
the idea that we need the capacity to figure out what those responsibilities are and how
to implement them. This is in part because I think it is extremely difficult for humans, by
themselves, to figure out the scope of their negative and positive moral responsibilities
and how to enact them. Once we recognize that something is required of us, we have to
overcome the hurdle of akrasia, any weakness of will, to act. Robert Goodin suggests
several strategies for getting people to act morally, even if their first impulse is to act
self-interestedly.
Goodin admits however that his strategies "start from the fact that
Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006) pp. 409-410.
17
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people have certain firmly held moral intuitions."18 Indeed, "All of those strategies. . .
implicitly assume that there is already something in people's motivational make-up — a
'sense of morality' — to which we can appeal when trying to motivate moral beliefs and
moral behavior."19
Humans must determine their moral responsibilities in dialogue with others who
will be, in some cases, participants in the co-creation of a just world, and in other
instances, the beneficiaries of benevolence.
What I suggest below are some basic
prerequisites for building more responsible actors and social institutions.
At both the
individual and collective or institutional level, I suggest a parallel set of capacities as
prerequisites. To be morally responsible, individuals and collectives must be able to see
clearly how their actions affect others, they must be able to empathize, they must be
able to reason or deliberate, and they must be able to act.
I am not saying that
individuals and collectives entirely lack these capacities now; rather I am arguing that
these prerequisite capacities can and should be deliberately enhanced.
Individual Capacity Prerequisites
Most of us assume that individuals are self-interested rational actors who will look
to better their circumstances if they can. The question becomes, how humans define
their "self" and their "interests." Narrow definitions of self and interests lead to a harsh
Hobbesian
world
that
recreates,
in
some
respects,
the
state
of
nature.20
Goodin, Motivating Political Morality, p. 153.
Goodin, Motivating Political Morality, p. 156.
20 Onara O'Neill suggests however that "Today we have moved so far beyond the earliest
State of Nature that there can be few, if any, distant strangers whom we can coherently
see as living beyond the pale or limes of justice (and perhaps some other forms of moral
18
19
12
Communitarianism assumes that humans are primarily moved to act kindly, or at a
minimum, justly toward one another because of their pre-existing affective ties.
Because of the belief that humans look after themselves and the members of
their community first, some argue that the way to figure out what is just is to assume
what John Rawls called an "original position" where one is blind to one's own particular
circumstances and interests. In the original position, according to Rawls, without any
knowledge of their starting point or certainty about where they will end up, individuals
are likely to choose a social rule or arrangement that is the most just.
This is an
operationalization of Kant's categorical imperative — to treat others as ends and to only
enact those laws to which you yourself could be bound.21 The chief complaint of
communitarians against cosmopolitans is the abstracted nature of the individuals
supposed in this view.22 They argue that it is impossible for individuals to abstract
themselves from their own circumstances. Critics of Rawls and the cosmopolitans who
rely on his model, sometimes stop there, asserting that because it is neither possible nor
desirable to forget the self and one's community, global justice is therefore impossible.
Toni Erskine responds to these criticisms by suggesting a model of "embedded"
cosmopolitanism.23 By this she means that we cannot ignore that people are born into
concern)." Onora O'Neill, Bounds of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), p. 197.
21 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971);
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Charles Beitz, The Theory of International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979).
22 There are many who make this complaint. For a summary and discussion see O'Neill,
Bounds of Justice, pp. 120-121 and Toni Erskine, "'Citizen of Nowhere' or the 'Point
Where Circles Intersect'? Impartialist and Embedded Cosmopolitanisms," Review of
International Studies vol. 28 (2002) pp. 457-478.
23 Left neo-cosmopolitanism most closely resembles the ancient Stoic idea that humans
are citizens of the world. For example, the World Social Forum proclaims that "another
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and live in communities, but that they are also members of many communities, "a web
of intersecting and overlapping morally relevant ties."24 I agree that it is impossible to
completely abstract the self from one's circumstances and to assume an original
position. And neither is such abstraction desirable. Like Erskine, I think pre-existing ties
matter; in any case, they cannot be avoided and there are many of them. But why do
these ties and our actual position in the world matter? What do we get from those ties
other than (potential) relations of affection and material interests we might like to selfinterestedly protect and enhance?
Our communities of origin matter because we acquire our first normative beliefs
and the ability to reason about our moral responsibilities within these communities, and
within them we learn how to engage in moral reasoning. The pre-existing social world
that individuals are born into and live in not only entails webs of more or less dense
interaction, but it is the nursery of our moral knowledge, moral language, and emotional
capacity. We often assume that adult humans come as fully formed moral agents and
that our capacities for moral reasoning, our "moral development" is fixed at one "level"
world is possible," and its Charter calls for a vision of "planetary citizenship." Left neocosmopolitans stress the fact of human interdependence on a planet of limited resources
and interconnected global environmental effects. Their vision is in opposition to the
homogenizing cultural effects and the impoverishing effects of global capitalism. Left
neo-cosmopolitanism thus not only envisions a human community but is committed to
changing what they argue are global systems of exploitation so that the world can be
more just and peaceful. What is neo- about these left cosmopolitans is the fact of their
simultaneous "rooted-ness" and global concern. Specifically, Sidney Tarrow observes
that, "What is 'rooted' in this conception is that, as cosmopolitans move physically and
cognitively outside their origins, they continue to be linked to place, to the social
networks that inhabit that space, and to the resources, experiences, and opportunities
that place provides them with." Sidney Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) p. 42.
24 Erskine, "'Citizen of Nowhere' or the 'Point Where Circles Intersect'?" p. 474.
14
or another.25 But it is important to ask, as Barbara Herman does, how our understanding
is different if we don't take moral development and moral capacity as a given. Herman
suggests that humans develop "moral literacy" which she describes as "a capacity to
read and respond to the basic elements of the moral world."26 As Herman argues, we
can be more or less literate and this moral literacy is a prerequisite to moral
responsibility. As Herman suggests, we lose a great deal if we leave moral development
unexamined.
The tendency in modern moral philosophy to think about the developed system of
moral motivation as if it were just a robust minimal moral capacity has made it hard
to see how central moral learning is to a system of moral motives, or to appreciate
the active or normative role moral theory should play in our view of moral
development. The formation of motives and motivational structures is the business
of morality, of what we might call its "department of education". It's clientele is not
restricted to children. If we think of moral education as finished with primary skills
acquisition, it can be hard to see that it is part of the nature of moral character that
it remain open to change.27
Morality is not simply a checklist of manners, but how we react to and treat
others, as Barbara Herman suggests. "Moral education, where it is something beyond
inculcating a list of 'dos and don’t's,' involves the creation of a sense of self and other
that makes shared moral life possible."28
Scholars talk about the development of this sense of self and other in various
ways. Many simply call these capacities empathy, Jürgen Habermas variously describes
empathy
and
moral
feeling,
and
Arne
Vetlesen
describes
"concern"
and
See Lawrence Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, 2 volumes (San Francisco:
Harper and Row, 1981) and, for a critique of Kohlberg, see Carol Gilligan, In a Different
Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
26
Barbara Herman, Moral Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) p.
97.
27 Herman, Moral Literacy, p. 104.
28 Herman, Moral Literacy, p. 130. Many philosophers have discussed moral education,
including Aristotle, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Adam Smith, Kant, and Richard Rorty.
25
15
"attentiveness".29
Humans develop feelings of respect and compassion for others.
"Moral feeling," Habermas argues, plays a role in the "constitution" or understanding of
moral phenomena: humans would not understand what is moral without such feelings.
"We would not experience certain conflicts of action as morally relevant at all unless we
felt that the integrity of a person is threatened or violated. Feelings form the basis of
our perception of something as moral." Habermas argues that a lack of moral feeling is
an incapacity, while those who have moral feeling are able to engage in moral reasoning.
"Someone who is blind to moral phenomena is blind to feeling. He lacks a sense, as we
say, for the suffering of a vulnerable creature who has a claim to have its integrity, both
personal and bodily protected. And this sense is manifestly closely related to sympathy
or compassion."30 Moral feelings help us judge when someone has been harmed or when
they need our caring attention.31
These dispositions are not unrelated to the ethic of care as developed by Joan
Tronto in Moral Boundaries. Tronto writes about four elements of care: "caring about,
noticing the need to care in the first place; taking care of, assuming responsibility for
care; care-giving, the actual work of care that needs to be done; and care receiving, the
response of that which is cared for to the care." 32 Tronto then articulates four ethical
Arne Johan Ventleson, Perception, Empathy and Judgment: An Inquiry into the
Preconditions of Moral Performance (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press,
1994).
30 Jürgen Habermas, "Morality, Society, and Ethics: An Interview with Torben Hviid
Nielsen," in Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993) pp. 147-176: 174.
31 Conversely, those who harm must often cut themselves off from their feelings and
experience "psychic numbing," dissociation and doubling. See Robert J. Lifton and Eric
Markusen, The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat (New York: Basic
Books, 1990).
32 Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York:
Routledge, 1993) p. 127.
29
16
elements of care: attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness.
Vetleson suggests a similar understanding of the process of moral concern, arguing that
the "sequence of moral performance is set in motion by an act of moral perception."33
Vetlesen argues that, "The empathy at work in moral perception not only turns on the
ability to see; it also requires an ability to listen. Both seeing and listening mean paying
attention to. They are the characteristics of what might generally be called
attentiveness."34
Of course it is not easy to develop moral feeling and to be attentive to others
who are different and distant from us.
Specifically, ideologies and mythologies of
otherness including racism and social Darwinism, technologies that ease our own labors
and distance us from the immediate suffering of others, and bureaucracies that allow the
work of helping and harming to be divided among many hands, makes it difficult
sometimes to see the other and sometimes easy to harm the other without thinking.
The tasks are thus first to see how we are related to and affect others, and then to feel.
As Lifton argues, we must overcome the psychic numbing and dissociation that allows us
to permit or even perpetrate suffering.35
Closely related to moral feeling, is a set of cognitive capacities that Habermas
calls ideal role taking; actors should be able to step out of their own perspective in order
to see the world from another person's perspective. And if we read Habermas carefully
this form of reason is not divorced from feeling.36
Vetlesen, Perception, Empathy and Judgment, p. 5.
Vetlesen, Perception, Empathy and Judgment, p. 8.
35 Vetlesen, Perception, Empathy and Judgment, pp. 184-185; Robert Lifton, The Nazi
Doctors (London: Macmillan, 1986).
36 Herman argues that Kant should be read this way as well. Herman, Moral Literacy.
33
34
17
Ideal role taking has come to signify a procedural type of justification. The cognitive
operations it requires are demanding. Those operations in turn are internally linked
with motives and emotional dispositions and attitudes like empathy.
Where
sociocultural distance is a factor, concern for the fate of one's neighbor — who more
often than not is anything but close by — is a necessary emotional prerequisite for
the cognitive operations expected of participants in discourse.37
Developed alongside moral literacy, moral feeling, and the capacity for ideal role
taking is a moral language and moral structure.
depends
on
comprehensible
and
meaningful
Private and public moral reasoning
communication
within
and
across
communities. Communication, Habermas argues, is only possible because and to the
extent that actors share a background stock of meaning, "a horizon of shared,
unproblematic beliefs," within a context of social solidarity. Habermas calls this taken for
granted set of beliefs and relationships the "lifeworld."38
We cannot presume that
other's who live under different circumstances share our lifeworld: unless and until
imperial neo-cosmopolitanism succeeds, a plurality of lifeworlds is a given.
If we cannot erase the plurality of practices and normative beliefs we can only
hope to understand our own and others beliefs. But here the lifeworld sometimes gets
in the way of understanding others and the self. Thus, self-knowledge of two sorts —
emotional and cognitive — is a prerequisite to moral responsibility. Emotional
development is the capacity to listen empathetically to others. Geographic distance is
not the primary reason that borders make a difference in our ability to listen
empathetically. Emotional distance is a function of the clash of actual or perceived
Jürgen Habermas, "Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action," in Moral
Consciousness and Communicative Action, pp. 116-194: 182.
38 See Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory
of Law and Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) p. 22.
37
18
differences in moral language — the values and principles that people in their various
communities use to make their moral world.
Cognitive knowledge must include a critical self-consciousness of one's causal,
identity, and normative beliefs and also a self-consciousness about one's social position
and how it was produced.
With respect to the first sort of self-consciousness,
individuals must understand the normative moral structures within which they exist and
from which they reason. These moral structures include the values they hold, the roles
they adopt, and the practices they consider appropriate. This self-reflectiveness about
one's moral knowledge requires a critical perspective on the "lifeworld" or the taken for
granted of our social lives. In other words, the moral person has moral literacy but is
also destabilized and disoriented in the sense that the "normal" is not taken for granted.
They understand that their moral world — their values and their relation to the other —
could be otherwise.
A critical self-understanding also includes the realization that the material world
could be otherwise.
This self-consciousness about one's social position, is simply an
aware that an individual's particular situation is not simply the outcome of their efforts,
but is also both accidental and structurally produced.
Historical structures of wealth
provided or denied certain endowments to individuals with which they could act, while
contemporary relationships can exacerbate or ameliorate inequalities. Like Rawls, I want
individuals to imagine that their social, economic and political position could be
otherwise.
Unlike Rawls, I want individuals to know their personal position and to
understand how their situation, and those around them, was made possible. How was
wealth accumulated?
How was social capital acquired?
Who suffered and suffers so
that others live well? In other words, humans ought to be able to tell and envision
19
different causal stories about their relation to others.39 What is different over the last
150 or so years is that the causal stories we tell increasingly includes distant others.
We live with and by the complex interlock of agents which global trade,
communications, and densely connected institutions have produced. For us distance
is no guarantee of lack of interaction, and we constantly assume that many distant
others are every bit as much agents and subjects as nearby or familiar others, and
hence are beings whose claim to just treatment (and perhaps to other forms of
moral concern) we cannot reasonably settle merely by arbitrary exclusion.40
The self-conscious individual, who is critically aware not only of their normative
beliefs but of their social position will be more aware of the inequalities that made their
present position more or less powerful and which gives them greater or lesser
advantages in ongoing and future interactions.
As Henry Shue suggests, "it is
groundless to think that whatever international distribution turns up over the course of
history is fully just." Indeed, Shue argues, "quite to the contrary, we have lots of good
reasons to think that the existing distributions of wealth and resources are morally
arbitrary at best and the result of systematic exploitation at worst."41
In sum,
individuals need not only an emotional disposition towards others, but specific historical
knowledge of how the present world came to be arranged as it is.
Moreover, this
knowledge must include the understanding that even if a contemporary agreement or
set of relations look to be fair, an instance of what Shue calls internal justice, they may
be rooted in background circumstances that are unjust.
Consider that chains of commodity production and exchange can be told either as
narratives about free markets and equal exchange or as about historical relationships of
the production of desire and capacity. Histories can include narratives of unequal
exchange, extraction by theft, and brutal exploitation of labor.
40 O'Neill, Bounds of Justice, p. 196.
41 Henry Shue, "The Unavoidability of Justice," in Andrew Hurrell and Benedict Kingsbury,
eds., The International Politics of the Environment: Actors,Iinterests and
Institutions(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) pp. 373-397: 386.
39
20
[I]t is perfectly possible for an instance of internal injustice to be the result of
background injustice: someone may in fact accept unconscionable terms in an
agreement because an independent background injustice has, for example, left her
with no good alternatives to the agreement. Without the agreement she will be even
worse off than she will be with the agreement . . . — but the reasons she will be
worse off without the agreement is a prior injustice, independent of the agreement in
question.42
Further, individual capacity must include the capacity for moral reasoning and
collective deliberation. This self-reflectiveness about the moral and material world aids in
ideal role taking. Humans must not only be able to put chains of reasons together for
themselves and to be self-conscious about why and how they value what they do, they
must be able to listen to and to make moral arguments. I suggest that this capacity is
best nurtured by training individuals in what Habermas calls "discourse ethics."
Discourse ethics is a formal "procedure for testing the validity of norms that are
being proposed and hypothetically considered for adoption."43
In this ideal speech
situation, actors eschew strategic action (coercion) and come to an uncoerced
understanding with others. One tries to convince the other through the "force of the
better argument". For Habermas, the key to legitimacy is rational argumentation: "the
claim that a norm lies equally in the interest of everyone has the sense of rational
acceptability: all those possibly affected should be able to accept the norm on the basis
of good reasons.
But this can become clear only under the pragmatic conditions of
rational discourses in which the only thing that counts is the compelling force of the
better argument based upon the relevant information."44 But humans don't come into
the world knowing how to engage in discourse ethics, and like moral literacy, moral
Shue, "The Unavoidability of Justice," p. 387.
Jürgen Habermas, "Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical
Justification," in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1990) pp. 43-115: 103.
44 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 103.
42
43
21
feeling, and self-consciousness about their moral and material world, individuals must be
taught how to engage in moral argument.45
Ideal role taking, adopting another person's perspective, is essential for discourse
ethics because otherwise we cannot know whether the norms we claim to valid for all
those who are affected by them are actually valid (justification). Empathy enables ideal
role taking. Habermas is thus implicitly adding empathy of a particular sort — the ability
to feel as others feel — to his view of communicative competence: "the continued
existence of this communication community . . . demands of all its members an act of
selfless empathy through ideal role taking."46 He argues that "at the very least, empathy
— the ability to project oneself across cultural distances into alien and at first sight
incomprehensible
conditions
of
life,
behavioral
predispositions,
and
interpretive
perspectives — is an emotional prerequisite for ideal role taking, which requires everyone
to take the perspective of all others."47 He goes on to say that:
To view something from the moral point of view means that we do not elevate our
own self-understanding and world view to the standard by which we universalize a
mode of action but instead test its generalizability also from the perspective of
others. It is unlikely that one would be able to perform this demanding cognitive feat
without generalized compassion, sublimated into the capacity to empathize with
others, that points beyond affective ties to immediate reference persons and opens
our eyes to "difference," to the uniqueness and inalienable otherness of the other.48
Finally, individuals must be able to act. This ability to act could be rooted in
habits but it must at times also be a cultivated disposition to stand up against moral
Richard Shapcott argues that hermeneutics is a better approach than discourse ethics.
See his Justice, Community and Dialogue in International Relations (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
46 Habermas, "Morality, Society, and Ethics," p. 154.
47 Habermas, "Morality, Society, and Ethics," p. 174.
48 Habermas, "Morality, Society, and Ethics," pp. 174-175.
45
22
wrongs.
In sum, the prerequisites of moral responsibility include the ability to see, feel,
think and act in relation to another no matter their distance from us.
My argument thus implies an end to the possibility of simple bystandership for
two reasons. First, because it is difficult in fact, in a world of economic interdependence
to say that we are un-connected to others.
This is a restatement of Henry Shue's
argument in "Mediating Duties." As Shue suggests, "we lack sufficient reason to think
that once we leave behind the intimates to whom we have special duties, as well as the
inner circle of genuine friends and meaningful acquaintances, duties to strangers decline
progressively with their distance from us." He thus rejects a notion that our duties to
others decline progressively as we move outward in concentric circles.
If the concentric-circle picture of the ranking of our duties is as misleading as I say,
why does it seem so natural? I suspect that it is because it was once a largely
accurate picture of causality, and it was an accurate picture of causality specifically
when the moral theories that are still our frameworks today in this part of the world
were being worked out. It was not so long ago that if you really wanted to have
much effect in a distant place, you had to go there in order to have it. . . . But now
the concentric-circle image is no more accurate a representation of causality than it
is of responsibility . . . . Perhaps the nearest thing to an accurate representation of
the real circumstances now is one of those irregular spider webs with some very
short strands and some very long strands, such that if something touches one strand
it may send a shock to the farthest side of the web, while if it touches a different
strand its effects may quickly fade away.49
Thus, we are causally connected to and responsible for others prior to and
beyond our ever "giving a thought to them." But the sort of moral development
sketched
here
suggests
that
individuals
will
recognize
a
second
reason
that
bystandership no longer makes sense; namely that prior to, irregardless of, and beyond
this causal connection, we are linked to other beings on this planet by virtue of our
49
Shue, "Mediating Duties," p. 693.
23
common residence in it and our common humanity. In this way, cosmopolitanism implies
an end to bystandership.
Social Capacity: Institutional Prerequisites
The above discussion of individual capacity assumes that there are institutions
that foster and sustain individual moral capacity and that make their exercise more or
less possible.
"Attentiveness, however, does not rise in a vacuum; it needs to be
learned, cultivated, maintained."50 Two aspects of social institutions are relevant here:
those that care for our basic human needs and socialize us into our roles as moral agents
and those that ensure that the within which we deliberate are in fact capable of
fostering deliberation.
Scholars of world politics have paid much more attention to
democratizing the latter institutions of deliberation than to ensuring that the former
institutions — those which care for and educate us, are making it possible for individuals
to become better moral actors.
The development of individual moral capacities is stunted in conditions of
institutional poverty. Before and during our earliest socialization humans must have their
basic biological and emotional needs met.
Our brains, including the capacity for
reasoning, cannot develop without nutrition and basic education.51 Our ability to connect
and empathize cannot fully develop without love and examples of empathy. Thus, the
care of children, from pre-natal nutrition, to early childhood education and through late
Vetlesen, Perception, Empathy and Judgment, p. 9.
Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have written eloquently about the capabilities
required for full human flourishing. These include the physical capacities as well as
emotional and reasoning capabilities. See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New
York: Knopf, 1999) and Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development:The
Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
50
51
24
adolescence is an essential step for the formation of individual moral capacity. As these
children and their parents cannot do this on their own, the provision of basic child
welfare and medical care becomes an institutional capacity and responsibility.
Socialization can only "stick" if there is a human with basic capacities to stick to. Thus,
Joan Tronto's emphasis on care giving is vital not only in and of itself, but because it is
important for creating the conditions of moral responsibility: only the cared for can be
capable of fully participating in responsible moral deliberation.
The institutions that care for and socialize humans are first our families and then,
depending on the social setting, our extended family, neighbors and friends, schools,
religious institutions, and public and private associations.52 These institutions often
reinforce communitarian identities and narrow notions of relations to self and other, but
they are also sometimes the incubators of cosmopolitan identity and moral literacy
broadly conceived. As Nussbaum argues, "a society aspiring to justice . . . must devote
sustained attention to the moral sentiments and their cultivation — in child
development, in public education, in public rhetoric, in the arts."53
The institutions within which we conduct our lives can be more or less supportive
of moral vision and moral deliberation deliberation.54
Institutions can, in other words,
help us see the other, or blind us; they can help us hear the other, or silence and thereby
make us deaf or at least hard of hearing; institutions can provide space to reason, or
they can say nothing is open for discussion; and they can help us organize and act, or
they can constrain our action.
It must be admitted that most institutions prefer a
This web of institutions is thus wider than but inclusive of civil society.
Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, p. 414.
54 See Stephen L. Elkin and Karol Edward Soltan, Citizen Competence and Democratic
Institutions (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
52
53
25
minimum of deliberation of any sort: we should simply follow the rules and hew to
standard operating procedures.
Individual agency, including moral agency, is highly
circumscribed.
Moreover, institutional design often assumes that individual agents come to them
from equal starting points.
But of course institutions and individuals have unequal
endowments and starting points due to pre-existing inequality in historical and
contemporary relations of injustice.
Though I am not sure how this would be done,
institutions can be designed to compensate for individuals who lack the capacity to
engage with equal resources. What I have in mind here is something like the notion of
the "reasonable accommodation" to disabilities which is called for in the Americans with
Disabilities Act or the sliding scales that we see in some fees for lower income
individuals.
Thus, we could lower the barrier to participation for individuals.
But we
must also invest in public education and social services so that individuals who are
members of groups that are historically disadvantaged can have the capacity to
participate. In other words, these historically disadvantaged groups are disadvantaged
for historical reasons — wealth (resources and labor) was taken without due
compensation so that others might become rich.
An eye toward justice and
inclusiveness suggests that resources be redirected to those who labors made
contemporary institutions as rich and powerful as they are.
As Shue argues in Basic
Rights systemic depravations are caused by economic policies and plans that are
designed to produce wealth for some and these depravations can only be eliminated by
"eliminating the strategy that requires them."55 Once we grant that not everyone has
the same starting point, and moreover that our unequal starting points are the result of
55
Shue, Basic Rights, p. 47.
26
systemic depravation, we would be obliged to make repairs that began to ameliorate
past harm and which changed current structures of damaging exploitation.
Theorists of democracy also stress the importance of structuring institutions so
that participation is inclusive and so that institutional procedures and decision are
transparent and accountable.56 Public institutions and the public sphere, locally and
globally, ought to be venues not simply for bargaining or voting, but for moral discourse
and deliberation.
Institutions ought also be structured so that it is possible for
individuals to give testimony about the effects of actions and systems. In other words,
institutions should be venues for both telling and hearing "sad and sentimental"
stories.57 Inclusion is thus about including other forms of communication beyond
"rational" argumentation, as much as it about who is allowed to speak.58 The more
robust these institutions are in this respect, the more likely that moral responsibility will
be understood and practiced.
An example may illustrate the connection between the development of individual
capacities and institutional capacities.
It is sometimes hard for North Americans to
understand why poverty persists in Africa. Indeed, it is common to blame Africans for
their own misery — we hear that African culture is not entrepreneurial, or that African
leaders are corrupt, or that tribal loyalties and hatreds trap Africans in a medieval or
barbaric cycle of violence.
How can we expect then an outsider to react empathetically
and respectfully to Africans in need?
These people are different and less than us,
See Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000).
57 On education in sentimentality see Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality, and
Sentimentality," in Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley, eds., On Human Rights: The Oxford
Amnesty Lectures 1993 (New York: Basic Books, 1993) pp. 111-134.
58 See Young, Inclusion and Democracy.
56
27
according to at least one narrative. There is a kind of flatness and fuzziness about these
narratives of "Africa" at the same time that we think we know precisely what to do to fix
Africa's ills. But what if we educated ourselves and our children in a different narrative
— one that emphasized Africa in historical perspective and also illustrated contemporary
relations of power and commodity exchange?
What if many stories were told —
including one starting with the depopulation of Africa through slavery, the arrangement
of the continent's infrastructure for extraction of mineral resources, and contemporary
trade agreements that are structured for the advantage of the already rich.
What if
children and adults heard unfiltered and unmediated Africans analyze their own
situation? How was Ghana and South Africa's gold extracted and where did it go? Who
benefited from the production of those commodities and who suffered and still suffers
so that we in the developed world have gold, or diamonds, or titanium and oil? Who
benefits?
How am I connected to Africans when I give clothes to a charity or when my
family heats its home? In other words, specific historical knowledge and contemporary
testimony can help shrink the distance between us and them so that it is not possible to
tell a simple story of laziness, corruption, or incompetence. It might not be so easy to
endorse solutions that prescribe "austerity," "belt-tightening" or the "private sector."
Our individual capacities must be well developed enough that we can hear and indeed
seek out these different narratives, but our institutions must be developed so that we
foster individual capacities and so that many stories are available and we can argue
about their meaning.
Toward Global Responsibility: No Borders, No Bystanders
28
What does it mean to be morally responsible? Perhaps, in the first instance, and
in the last, it means to be attentive to others — to how I should act and to how I have
affected those others.
There are many reasons why this attentiveness is difficult to
achieve, one of which is the sense that we are not causally responsible for the situations
of others. After all, much of what happened to make them how they are was put into a
chain of causality long ago; sometimes so long ago, it is hard to remember why things
are the way they are. As Rachel Manley writes, "Time shrinks time. Old time becomes
simply a number of things we know, a set of images that are one horizon, like the entire
world reduced to a map and the years to one day. . . ."59 Distance and difference also
shrink, flattening the shape and texture of the others' features and the fullness of our
connection to them. One way to manage the emotional and cognitive distance that
creates borders and moral bystanders is to slow down enough that one is able to make
small what is large, to make close what is distant, and to make real what is abstract.
The function of the individual and institutional prerequisites that I have outlined is to
bring back the texture of the day, to enliven the features of the other, and to make
visible our causal and moral connections to others so that the understanding and
exercise of moral responsibility is possible.
The difficulty with the picture I have just sketched is, however, patently obvious.
How can we see those distant others if our difference from them blind us to our
commonality? How can we see beyond exclusive communal identities such as race or
class or country?
How can we engage others whose beliefs and values are radically
different from our own? I am not sure that we will always be able to do so; in fact there
Rachel Manley, Slipstream: A Daughter Remembers (Toronto: Random House, 2000) p.
68.
59
29
is good reason to believe that we will see more othering, indifference, and violent
conflict before we see less of it. But the reason to stress the development of individual
and institutional capacities for moral vision, deliberation and action is also patently
obvious.
We already have moral capacities and at the same extremely difficult moral
dilemmas that arise out of the facts of our global situation — extremes in income
distribution, global climate change, and wars over ideology and resources. We can only
craft better solutions to these problems — more just solutions — if we increase our
individual and institutional capacities and if more people feel compelled to participate in
ways that take others into account.
When we look back on systems of great injustice, or practices which were
intended to and succeeded in creating great harm — such as the Holocaust, apartheid,
and racial slavery — we often wonder how it is that people could have done what they
did. Or how could the institutions that could have acted to halt the genocide in Rwanda
not have done more? We ask what was wrong with those people and those institutions.
How could those of us who helped all along by not saying anything or doing something
not be complicit? We assume that humans could have done otherwise and chose not to.
Indeed, we know that some individuals and institutions do act responsibly in those
situations — many resisted Nazi rule, fought apartheid, struggled to end slavery, and
urged that firmer action be taken to halt the Rwandan genocide. Samantha Power calls
those who act upstanders.60 Ervin Staub calls those who act in these contexts of
brutality, "heroic helpers." "We cannot expect bystanders to sacrifice their lives for
others. But we can expect individuals, groups, and nations to act early along a
Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York:
Basic Books, 2002).
60
30
continuum of destruction, when danger to themselves is limited, and the potential exists
for inhibiting the evolution of increasing destructiveness."
Staub wants passive
bystanders to become active bystanders — indeed, if we heed him, there would be no
moral bystanders.
This will happen if people — children, adults, whole societies — develop an awareness
of their common humanity with other people, as well as of the psychological
processes in themselves that turn them against others. Institutions and modes of
functioning can develop that embody a shared humanity and make exclusion from
the moral realm more difficult. Healing from past victimization, building systems of
positive reciprocity, creating cross-cultural relations between groups, and developing
joint projects and superordinate goals can promote the evolution of caring and
nonaggressive persons and societies.61
Staub also writes that, "Heroic helpers are not born."62
Nor is the every day
capacity for moral reflection and responsibility of the sort that obviates the need for
heroism.
Our capacities for recognizing human suffering, causal responsibility, and
acting responsibility, and for structuring responsible institutions must be developed:
they are not born.
Ervin Staub, The Psychology of Good and Evil: Why Children, Adults, and Groups Help
and Harm Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) p. 318.
62 Staub, The Psychology of Good and Evil, p. 315.
61
31