Duties to nations
This
handout is a draft.
According to a view referred to as statism, there are duties of justice that we have to fellow
citizens of our state that we do not have to people in general. Someone who
holds this view might think (a) there are only duties of justice within the
state, or (b) there are some duties of justice globally but there are extra
duties of justice within the state.
David Miller accepts statism and tries to explain why we have such extra duties
by appealing to shared national identity.
Special
duties
Miller distinguishes between special
duties and general duties.
I am not entirely sure what is the best way to define ‘special duties’.
But here is the one which I shall work
with:
Special
duties = duties that
you have to some person or group but not to everyone.
Special
duties and nations
According to Miller, if you are
involved in a relationship to a person or a group, because of an attachment to
them, you have a special duty to do X if and only if the following conditions
are met:
(i)
The
relationship is intrinsically valuable.
(ii)
Duty
X is essential to the relationship.
(iii)
The
relationship is not inherently unjust. (Injustice is not essential to the
relationship.)
Miller thinks that if a person is part
of a national community, and has an attachment to this community, then these
conditions are met for some duties. The person has duties to support other members
and duties to ensure the continuation of the community, for these duties are
essential to this kind of relationship. And this, he thinks, can explain why we
have duties of justice within the state which we do not have to do globally.
Intrinsic
value
X is intrinsically valuable either if
X has value but no value as a means to an end; or else, even if X has value as
a means to an end, X has some other value as well.
In other words, there is some value
which goes beyond any instrumental value.
Miller says that national groups are
intrinsically valuable. Why does he say this?
He appears to commit himself to the
following principle or one very much like it:
If
a person experiences something as intrinsically valuable, there is justification
for thinking that it is intrinsically valuable (unless a compelling argument
can be given to show that the experience is misleading).
On the basis of this principle, he
says that given that members experience national groups as intrinsically
valuable, so there is justification for saying that it is intrinsically
valuable. The experience detects the intrinsic value.
(The principle above allows for a lot
of intrinsic value claims to be justified. Although Miller does not say so, one
might think that the only alternative to this principle is the extreme position
taken up by Hume: that there is no intrinsic value; that we just project value
onto the world. This would mean that nothing is intrinsically valuable, not
even persons. It is unclear whether there is any plausible position in between
this extreme and Miller’s principle.)
An
objection to Miller’s account
An objection to Miller’s account of
why we have extra duties within states is what about people within the state
who do not identify with any national group. One cannot expect them to do
duties that arise from attachment to a national group because they do not have
the attachment to begin with, yet they will be expected to do various duties
just as much as other citizens (see Child 2011).
References
Child, R. 2011. Statism, Nationalism and the
Associative Theory of Special Obligations. Theoria 58: 1-18.
Miller, D. 2005. Reasonable Partiality
Towards Compatriots. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8: 63-81.