Boundaries and Allegiances.

Barry, Christian

Samuel Scheffler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 221 pp., $29.95 cloth.

Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought is a collection of eleven of Samuel Scheffler's previously published (and slightly revised) essays. Although the essays cover a broad range of topics, including the relationship between Rawls and utilitarianism, the role of the concept of desert in liberal theory, and the work of Bernard Williams, this review will focus on Scheffler's treatment of a question that animates most of the essays in this volume--namely, "how, at a time when people's lives are structured by social arrangements and institutions of ever-increasing size, complexity, and scope, we can best conceive of the responsibilities of individual agents and the normative significance of individual commitments and allegiances" (p. 2). Scheffler, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, has been one of the most talented and productive moral philosophers in the analytic tradition for the past two decades, and the essays in this volume are characteristically thoughtful, subtle, and well written.

A few facts suffice to illustrate the significance of questions of normative responsibility. Some 826 million people lack adequate nutrition, 968 million lack safe water, 2.4 billion lack basic sanitation, 880 million lack access to basic health services, and about 11 million children under age five die each year from preventable causes. These consequences of extreme poverty persist in a period of unprecedented opulence. Many well-off people are aware of widespread deprivations, and know that they can help remedy some of them. Many among the well-off believe that all people everywhere are of equal worth. In most contexts they will assert that people ought to prevent serious suffering when they can do so without significant cost to themselves. But these same people contribute little to relief efforts, and do not actively pressure their governments to alter their economic policies toward poorer countries.

These facts spur us to ask at least three different questions. First, why do the well-off do so little, and demand so little of their governments, while remaining confident that they are morally decent people who generally fulfill their responsibilities to others? Second, are well-off people and the governments that represent them meeting their responsibilities to the global poor? Third, what kinds of changes in the behavior of well-off people and their governments could bring about substantial improvements in the lives of the global poor?

Some theorists, such as Peter Unger and Peter Singer, have argued that the well-off are not doing nearly enough, and that while their attitudes toward these global deprivations can be explained--people are imperfectly rational, sometimes act for self-interested reasons, and tend, often unconsciously, to interpret and apply their moral values in ways that will not threaten their own interests--they cannot be justified. The appropriate aim of moral theory, then, is to encourage greater responsiveness to the claims of distant others by liberating people from the psychological "distortions" in their understanding and application of their values, urging them to recognize that their intuitive responses may not be reliable ethical guides and rebutting specious arguments for the status quo. Thus freed, the well-off will recognize that they and their governments manifestly are not doing enough to help the poor. They will act on their moral values, and substantially benefit the global poor by increasing private contributions to poverty relief organizations. (1)

In Boundaries and Allegiances, Scheffler offers an alternative answer to the question of why the well-off do so little and a less-than-conclusive answer to the question of whether they are doing enough; he has almost nothing to say about the kinds of behavioral and policy changes that might benefit the poor. Resistance to claims of distant others, he argues, can result not only from non-moral motives or psychological distortions, but also from the tensions between these claims and other important ethical values. Some of these values are embedded in what he refers to as the "common-sense" or "restrictive" view of responsibility. According to this view, people's normative responsibilities are limited in important ways: "Individuals are thought to be more responsible for what they do than for what they merely fail to prevent, and they are thought to have greater responsibilities toward some people than toward others" (p. 4).

Taken together, these two distinctions--the first between negative and positive duties and the second between special and general responsibilities--collaborate to "limit the size of the agent's moral world" (p. 38). Special positive duties to one's associates take precedence over general positive duties, negative duties to associates take precedence over negative duties to strangers, and both positive and negative duties to one's associates are less easily overridden by considerations of cost to oneself than are duties to strangers. In addition, Scheffler suggests, positive duties to associates may even allow us to override negative duties that would otherwise seem to carry greater weight: "It may be thought, for instance, that circumstances can arise in which I would be required or at least permitted to harm some person, or to violate his property rights, in order to provide a badly needed benefit for my brother or my child, even though it would be wrong for me to do the same thing in order to provide a comparable benefit for a stranger" (p. 53). The common-sense conception thus allows people to justify their resistance to general responsibilities by "invoking their weightier special responsibilities to their families, communities and societies" (p. 6).

Special responsibilities are for many people "one of their bedrock moral convictions, a rare fixed point in a world of rapid moral change" (p. 83). Indeed, they serve "to define a large portion of the territory of morality as it is ordinarily understood. The willingness to make sacrifices for one's family, one's community, one's friends is seen as one of the marks of a good or virtuous person, and the demands of morality, as ordinarily interpreted, have less to do with abstractions like the overall good than with the specific web of roles and relationships that serve to situate a person in social space" (p. 36). This theme will be familiar to readers of Scheffler's earlier book, The Rejection of Consequentialism (1982), in which he argued that plausible moral conceptions must attach significance not only to impartial considerations of the welfare of others but also to agents' special concern for their own major activities, projects, and commitments. So while each of us can recognize that we are but one among many--and that our well-being and that of those close to us is of no greater intrinsic importance than the well-being of others--plausible moral conceptions must recognize that we also unobjectionably view the world from within a web of our own interests, identifications, and commitments, which are given special weight in our deliberations.

In his current volume, Schemer denies that people's particularistic commitments and allegiances put them beyond criticism. He also makes clear that he does not think that such commitments trump all important general responsibilities. He does not indicate, however, whether he thinks that a recognition of the particularistic commitments and responsibilities of well-off people provides a credible excuse for their failing to contribute much toward improving the living conditions of the global poor. Many who accept the importance of special responsibilities have forcefully denied that they shield us from the claims of the global poor. One can acknowledge weighty special responsibilities toward significant others and yet believe that their scope is limited in important ways. One can claim, for instance, that it may be okay to spend most of my disposable income on my child, but not be morally acceptable for me to bribe admissions officers to admit her to school or to support legislation simply because it benefits her at the expense of less privileged children. As Scheffler puts it, "Behavior that is seen in one special setting as an admirable expression of parental concern ... may be seen in another setting as an intolerable form of favoritism or nepotism" (p. 123).

It might have helped if Scheffler had distinguished clearly between questions concerning the persons to whom such responsibilities are owed, the domains of activity in which these responsibilities apply, and the weight that these responsibilities ought to be given against the interests of others within the domains in which they apply. These distinctions are no doubt significant for determining whether well-off persons are doing enough to alleviate global poverty. Most cosmopolitans claim that the well-off are not doing enough in this regard, not because they do not themselves give enough to charity, but because they acquiesce in and support the efforts of their state's officials who use their superior bargaining power to shape the rules in international forums to their advantage. Scheffler does not discuss these views in much detail, I think because he is overly concerned with defending core aspects of the commonsense view against the radical challenge of consequentialist and "extreme cosmopolitan" views that "deny that relationships and affiliations can ever provide independent reasons for action or generate special responsibilities to one's intimates and associates" (p. 7). This is unfortunate; while few are actually tempted by these radical or extreme views, many would benefit from more careful consideration of moderate views that acknowledge the importance of special responsibilities while denying the role that they currently play in policy-making. Most cosmopolitans do not plead with the well-off to part with their financially valuable assets. Rather, they present (often detailed) proposals for foreign policy and global institutional reform.

Sometimes it appears that Scheffler thinks that only a radically nonrestrictive view of responsibilities could yield substantial improvements in the life prospects of the global poor. But this is empirically implausible. Evidence suggests that even seemingly insignificant concessions and policy changes by the developed countries can make a substantial difference in the lives of millions in the developing world. Oxfam estimates that $40 billion, 0.1 percent of world income, would be sufficient to secure universal primary education, basic nutrition, reproductive health, family planning, and safe water and sanitation for all. (2) There is considerable evidence that slight differences in the interpretation and enforcement of intellectual property rights can have significant effects on people's gaining access to medical, agricultural, and information technologies that can significantly improve their lives. (3) In a recent speech, for example, Mike Moore, director general of the Word Trade Organization, cited a study that estimated that freer trade in agriculture and cuts in industrial country tariffs would produce gains for India alone of more than $11 billion, raising India's national income by 4.4 percent. (4)

Scheffler does claim that arguments for global justice "must engage with, and identify difficulties or limitations in those notions of responsibility that appear to legitimate such resistance" if they are to be "persuasive" (p. 83). Proposed requirements of global justice will be "compelling" only if it "proves possible to devise human institutions, practices and ways of life that take seriously the equal worth of persons without undermining people's capacity to sustain their special loyalties and attachments" (p. 129). Since Schemer never discusses actual or possible institutional arrangements, it is hard to tell what this is intended to rule out. But it is also important to note how slippery the use of the predicates "persuasive" and "compelling" is in this context, since both have descriptive and justificatory connotations. People can be, and often are, unpersuaded and uncompelled by persuasive and compelling arguments. The real question is whether the fact that people may be unlikely to find moral requirements persuasive or compelling really counts as strong evidence against the requirements. Moral and political theorists are interested, surely, not only in developing principles for the critical examination of prevailing modes of behavior and social organization, but also in motivating people to act on them. But why shouldn't we suppose that these two goals would often be in significant tension with each other? Why, in cases where principles conflict with prevailing motivations, must they be revised to make it more likely that they will be adopted? Establishing a strong link between justification and motivation risks limiting moral philosophy, as Robert Goodin has recently put it, to "the role of philosophical anthropology--mapping without comment the social practices we find around ourselves." (5) But even a good philosophical anthropologist will note that proposals for institutional and policy reform put forth on behalf of the global poor are found compelling by the majority of humankind--just not by those with all the wealth and power.

While Scheffler does not address this line of criticism directly, he does suggest that at least some of these fears may be misplaced, since there is sufficient tension among our beliefs to enable us to criticize many of our attitudes by examining them in the light of others. Indeed, he claims that many have become skeptical of the common-sense view and look at it as "a mandate for those who are already rich in resources to turn their attention inward, and largely to ignore suffering and deprivation in the rest of the world" providing "the moral equivalent of a tax shelter" (pp. 58, 85). Scheffler, however, never really indicates just how convincing he finds such objections--and the kinds of behavior, policy-making, and social institutions that can be criticized on this basis. Would, for instance, proposals for increased aid and social services, reduction of tariffs on textiles and agriculture, less restrictive copyright protection, granting of licenses to developing countries for essential medicines, substantial debt relief, and even international levies on Internet usage or non-renewable resource extraction be so demanding as to make it impossible for us to live up to them? Can widespread resistance to such proposals among the public officials and citizens of high-income countries be justified on grounds of the special claims of our near and dear and compatriots? It would have been helpful if Scheffler had given some indication of the kinds of institutions that would engender conflict between our special and general responsibilities.

As much as the common-sense view seems natural to us, Scheffler reminds us: "This sense of naturalness does not exist in a vacuum. It is supported by a widespread though largely implicit conception of human social relations as consisting primarily in small-scale interactions, with clearly demarcated lines of causation, among independent individual agents." And this implicit conception, Scheffler argues, seems less than adequate in a world in which people's lives "are structured to an unprecedented degree by large, impersonal institutions and bureaucracies" (pp. 38-40). Scheffler does not specify the kinds of institutions he has in mind here. Does any social system that involves significant levels of interaction undermine the common-sense conception? Or is this only true of social systems that involve coercively enforced standing rules and social institutions? This lack of clarity is problematic. His idea seems, however, to be a familiar and important one, namely, that as we come to coexist under shared rules and institutions (e.g., markets in capital and labor, systems of property rights, trading regimes, and constitutive features of the nation-state), we begin substantially to affect each other's livelihoods in ways that are difficult to predict. Merely following commonsense notions of interpersonal morality may blind us to ways that our conduct jointly affects others, particularly when mediated by complex systems of social rules.

Indeed, one might argue (though Scheffler himself does not) that recognition of these facts complicates the two distinctions that are given weight within the commonsense view. How, for instance, should a duty to prevent severe poverty in developing countries be conceived? It may seem straightforwardly positive. But if there is evidence that officials acting in my name are using their advantages in resources, knowledge, and bargaining power to exact unfair terms of trade, intellectual property protection, or environmental protection measures from developing countries, we may be more inclined to view it as a negative duty not to contribute to or benefit from unfair practices without taking pains to mitigate their hardships. Similar problems are involved in understanding the nature of special obligations, one class of which, Scheffler holds, are to "others to whom one stands in certain significant sorts of relationships" (p. 36). If my quality of life is truly "a function of a network of institutional arrangements that supports a very different quality of life for people in other parts of the world" (p. 40), my relationship to these other persons appears to be very significant indeed, and my responsibilities to them stronger than to those unaffected by these institutional arrangements.

But Scheffler never really engages with the question of whether our current "network" of institutions is fair, and while he acknowledges that "recent developments" may have undermined confidence in the commonsense view, he also suggests that we may be stuck with it. First, we lack alternative principles that provide "a set of clear, action-guiding, and psychologically feasible principles which would enable individuals to orient themselves in relation to the larger processes, and general conformity to which would serve to regulate those processes and their effects in a morally satisfactory way" (P. 45). Second, a more expansive conception of responsibility may involve "wildly excessive demands on the capacity of agents to amass information about the global impact of different courses of action available to them" (p. 43). Third, it is unlikely that a morality that does not grant weight to the distinctions embedded in the commonsense view will be acceptable to most people.

Scheffler's decision to reflect on the nature of responsibilities without anchoring his thoughts to live political questions concerning these "large scale developments and dynamics" makes these facts appear more troublesome and vexing than they actually are. He leaves the impression that there may well be good reasons for resistance to greater concern for poverty abroad without taking the trouble to engage in detail those who have denied this. He acknowledges the point of "globalist" critics while vaguely hinting that there may be something else that makes the status quo less unacceptable.

We can only begin fruitfully to engage questions of responsibility by considering the kinds of institutional and policy changes that would significantly improve the lives of the global poor, getting a dearer sense of the burdens that these changes would place on well-off persons, and investigating whether such demands are really unreasonable. Such investigations will involve ethical reflection on the design and functioning of global institutions, and the exploration of practically feasible alternative institutional arrangements that engender less-widespread destitution. This will involve complex empirical investigation, and will thus be subject to uncertainty, but it needn't place "wildly excessive demands" on anyone. Approached this way, it seems rather more likely that we can meet the pressing moral challenge of "accommodating global and holistic pressures without doing violence to the values of personal life or threatening our status as moral agents" (p. 10).

(1) Unger claims that in our current life context these values demand, "on pain of living a life that's seriously immoral" that we ought to "give away most of our financially valuable assets, and much of our income, directing the funds to lessen efficiently the serious suffering of others" See Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 134.

(2) Data available at www.oxfamamerica.org/fast/ OxfamFastFactSheet.pdf.

(3) For detailed discussion, see Human Development Report 2001: Making New Technologies Work for Human Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and resources developed by the Consumer Project on Technology at www.cptech.org.

(4) See the address by Mike Moore at the CII Partnership Summit 2001, Hyderabad. Available at www.ciaonet.org/ busserv/wto/speech4.htm.

(5) Robert E. Goodin, "Political Ideals and Political Practice," British Journal of Political Science 25, no. 1 (January 1995), p. 40.

--CHRISTIAN BARRY

Carnegie Council