Pablo Gilabert

In his important new book National responsibility and global justice, David Miller presents a systematic challenge to existing theories of global justice. In particular, he argues that cosmopolitan egalitarianism must be rejected. Such views, Miller maintains, would place unacceptable burdens on the most productive political communities, undermine national self-determination, and disincentivize political communities from taking responsibility for their fate. They are also impracticable and quite unrealistic, at least under present conditions. Miller offers an alternative account that conceives global justice in terms of a minimum set of basic rights that belong to human beings everywhere. Primary responsibility for securing such rights for an individual lies with his or her state, but in so far as these rights go unprotected, responsibilities for fulfilling them may fall on outsiders. While less ambitious that cosmopolitan egalitarian justice, Miller argues that his own view would nevertheless enable us to articulate what is most morally objectionable about our current world. In this article it is argued that none of Miller's critiques of cosmopolitan egalitarianism is effective, and that while certainly preferable to the status quo, a world governed by Miller's principles is not an attractive ideal.

The conditional analysis of ability faces familiar counterexamples involving cases of volitional incapacity. An interesting response to the problem of volitional incapacity is to try to explain away the responses elicited by such counterexamples by distinguishing between what we are able to do and what we are able to bring ourselves to do. We argue that this error-theoretic response fails. Either it succeeds in solving the problem of volitional incapacity at the cost of making the conditional analysis vulnerable to obvious counterexamples to its necessity. Or, it avoids the counterexamples to its necessity but fails to solve the problem of volitional incapacity.

Do we have positive duties to help others in need or are our moral duties only negative, focused on not harming them? If these positive duties exist, are they strong and strict demands or are they weak and discretionary? Can we say that at least some positive duties of assistance are also duties of justice worthy of institutionalization and coercive enforcement by legal institutions? Can the scope of some of such duties be cosmopolitan or should all of them be circumscribed to what we owe to our compatriots? This paper addresses these questions from a Kantian perspective, and argues that Kant’s practical philosophy provides sufficient resources to develop and defend the claim that there are basic positive duties of justice, some of which have a global scope.