Michael Blake

Liberalism is premised upon moral egalitarianism, so that no arbitrary fact about persons can serve to justify a difference in the administration of justice. Yet liberalism also traditionally applies its egalitarianism only within the borders of the territorial state, so that arbitrary facts of citizenship serve to place a limit upon the range of such egalitarian principles. I argue that the current ways of solving this dilemma are inadequate; both the partialist and the Rawlsian cosmopolitan approaches to the issue ignore the moral importance of shared political institutions, and thus fail to establish liberalism's coherence. I defend a reworking of liberalism based upon the value of autonomy as the basic justificatory value in political morality. Such a liberalism, I argue, will have different implications in different contexts; a globally impartial liberalism based upon this principle will entail distinct duties between fellow citizens, so that liberalism may legitimately limit some of its distributive guarantees to the context of shared liability to a coercive legal system. This conception is also able to articulate and defend a substantive conception of international human rights, thereby unifying our concern for such rights with our concern for domestic political justice. I close by articulating some directions for future research, including the issues of immigration, secession, and humanitarian intervention.

Mathias Risse, Andrea Sangiovanni, and Kok-Chor Tan have offered some subtle and powerful criticisms of the ideas given in my Justice and Foreign Policy. Three themes in particular recur in their critiques. The first is that the arguments I make in that book rest upon unjustified, arbitrary, or contradictory premises. The second is that the use of coercion in the analysis of distributive justice is a mistake. The third is that the global institutional set represents, contrary to my arguments, an independent first-order site of justice. I address these criticisms, and try to vindicate the methodology of Justice and Foreign Policy in the face of these objections.

Christopher Heath Wellman has argued that freedom of association gives legitimate states a right to close their borders to even the most needy foreigners. I believe Wellman is wrong about freedom of association and thus is wrong about immigration. I use the history of antidiscrimination law to argue that freedom of association is not a simple trump right but is part of a complex package of rights—a package whose contents are in tension and whose use requires moral judgment. This means, I argue, that a proper respect for freedom of association need not entail Wellman’s stark conclusion.

All modern democratic societies claim to be egalitarian. They do not agree, of course, about what egalitarianism demands; the ideal of equality is hardly transparent and can be plausibly understood to encompass any number of social arrangements and values. Thatsomeform of equality is to be prized, though, is uncontroversial. Indeed, it may be true that all political theories that have stood the test of time can be understood as specifying and interpreting the ideal of equality. Whether or not this is true, I think it is hard to deny that democratic political philosophy can generally be understood as egalitarian in character; to know how to treat people as moral equals, on this account, is to know what justice demands of us. We are all, if this is correct, egalitarians now, however much we argue about what such a label truly demands.

This essay attempts to identify the ethical principles appropriate to a second-order political agent—an agent, that is, whose primary responsibility lies not in the implementation of state power, but in the response to and evaluation of that state power. The specific agent I examine is the human rights non-governmental organization, and the specific context is that of humanitarian military intervention. I argue that the specific role of the human rights NGO gives rise to ethical permissions not available to government agents. In particular, such NGOs may have permissions to ignore the motivation of government agents, and support even substantially unjust interventions, where such interventions would have substantial benefit for the defense and preservation of basic human rights. a Footnotesa Previous versions of this paper were presented at Brown University, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. I am grateful to all participants for their questions and comments. Thanks in particular go to the editors of this volume, whose help with this paper has been especially valuable. Responsibility for errors, of course, remains my own.

Rawls's Law of Peoples has not gathered a great deal of public support. The reason for this, I suggest, is that it ignores the differences between the international and domestic realms as regards the methodology of reciprocal agreement. In the domestic realm, reciprocity produces both stability and respect for individual moral agency. In the international realm, we must choose between these two values — seeking stable relations between states, or respect for individual moral agency. Rawls's Law of Peoples ignores the stark nature of this choice by insisting that the only legitimate extension of liberal toleration abroad is the toleration of different forms of political organization. It is this attempt to overcome liberalism's tragic dilemma which, I suggest, has made Rawls's international theory less attractive than his domestic theory. I also suggest that this difficulty is at the base of the further difficulties identified by Henry Shue and Martha Nussbaum in their accompanying essays. Key Words: Rawls • international • toleration • reciprocity • state • Nussbaum • Shue.