The Aristotelian Society 133rd session – 2011/2012 23 January 2012 | 16.15 – 18.00
Good Samaritans and Good Government Dudley Knowles
University of Glasgow
The Woburn Suite Senate House (South Block) University of London Malet Street London WC1E 7HU United Kingdom
** non-citable draft paper **
abstract In this paper I review and provide a qualified defence of Samaritanism— Christopher Heath Wellman’s novel approach to the old fashioned problem of political obligation. I outline Wellman’s theory, clarifying the details and defend an amended version against a variety of objections concerning, successively, an alleged conflation of duties of care and beneficence, a difficulty concerning the distinction of perfect and imperfect duties, a problem deriving from the ‘particularity requirement’, and related issues deriving from the international applications of Samaritan values.
biography Dudley Knowles retired in July 2011 as Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He studied for his first degree at Bedford College, University of London, graduating in 1970. After a spell managing a hotel in Glencoe, he studied for a two-year thesis (MLitt) at the University of Glasgow, where he was appointed lecturer in 1973. He remained in Glasgow throughout his academic career. Although he has published on a variety of topics, his main interests have been in political philosophy and its history. He has published three books – Political Philosophy (2001), Hegel and The Philosophy of Right (2002) and Political Obligation (2010) – and edited several more. In retirement, he has continued to work on problems associated with political obligation and is preparing a second edition of Political Philosophy. He anticipates working on the nature and value of political freedom in his dotage.
Good Samaritans and Good Government1 In this paper I review and provide a qualified defence of Samaritanism— Christopher Heath Wellman’s novel approach to the old fashioned problem of political obligation.2 I.
Some Assumptions of the Project. 3(i) Concerning citizens’ duties (political obligations), I sharply distinguish philosophical questions and practical (or political) questions. Thus: ‘Does the fact that one explicitly consents to accept the authority of a political sovereign entail that she has a duty to obey the laws it prescribes?’ is a philosophical question. Suppose the answer to this philosophical question is ‘Yes’. This gives rise to a practical (political) question: ‘Do you or I have a duty to obey Her Majesty’s Government on these grounds?’ Philosophers are good at answering broadly conceptual questions of the first sort. They are no better than anyone else at answering questions of the second sort, despite their ultracrepidarian tendencies. (ii) Minimally, the philosopher should seek to evaluate arguments which demonstrate that Some citizens of some states should accept some prescribed duties. Some philosophers (Hobbes, for one) have argued that All citizens of all (non-failing) states should accept all prescribed duties. There are many intermediate positions. Standardly, the conclusions of such arguments will be of conditional form, requiring that conditions concerning, for example, consent or receipt of benefit, be met (see (i) above). These conditions may be met in the case of some combinations of states, citizens and duties, but not others. (iii) There is a plurality of plausible philosophical arguments in this domain:4 ambitious states will collect philosophical arguments and argue on factual grounds that they address the practical political questions that citizens put concerning their duties; cautious citizens will scrutinise a list of successful philosophical arguments (if they believe there are such) and investigate whether they apply to the circumstances of their political environment. The slogan I adopt to characterize this liberal dialectic is: ‘the state proposes; the citizen disposes’. (iv) Many contemporary philosophers, Wellman included, distinguish questions concerning the conditions under which the state is legitimate (or possesses legitimate authority) from the question of whether the citizen has a duty to obey the laws of a legitimate state.5 The concepts of legitimate state authority and political obligation are evidently different, but I believe that they 1
Earlier versions of this paper were given to a staff work-in-progress seminar at the University of Glasgow, at a meeting of the Northern Political Theory Association in Stirling, and at the Universities of Leeds, Birmingham and Sheffield. I am grateful to colleagues who helped me by queries and challenges on these occasions and to Ben Colburn who gave me written comments. 2 Wellman 1996, 2001, 2004; Wellman and Simmons 2005. 3 I defend these assumptions in the opening chapters of Knowles 2010. 4 As other philosophers have recognized. See Wolff 2000. 5 Along with many other modern scholars who write on this topic. See, for example, Applbaum 2010, Edmundson 1998, Green 1988, Greenawalt 1989, Raz 1986, Sartorius 1981.
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are systematically related: arguments designed to justify political authority may also deliver the citizens’ political obligations. In particular, it is not possible that a state be a legitimate authority yet its citizens have no duty to comply with its prescriptions. Nor do I believe that citizens can have political obligations to a state which is not a legitimate authority. However, in my summary and discussion of Wellman’s position I shall follow his practice and try not to conflate these issues. II.
Samaritanism: The Background. In a series of publications Christopher Heath Wellman has developed a novel defence of the theses that (i) just states may be legitimate (thus countering anarchism in all its forms—political and philosophical, weak and strong) and (ii) all citizens of just states have a political obligation to obey the law. We dub his account ‘Samaritanism’, in accordance with his own favoured terminology. Wellman’s defence of these theses invokes what he calls a Samaritan duty—a duty of care for others. A common element of Wellman’s arguments, both for the legitimacy of state coercion and for the proper attribution of political obligations to the citizens of the just state, is the familiar Hobbesian claim that the condition of anarchy, life in a State of Nature, would be intolerable. The state provides citizens with the very great benefits of peace and social stability through the rule of law and does so in a way that is not unreasonably costly. The costs may be great, but the benefits of stability far outweigh them. These net benefits could be secured only by a just state with coercive powers. These claims concerning the evils of the State of Nature are speculative but plausible. My own guess is that they apply more perspicuously to the circumstances of state failure than to the aboriginal position—to Somalia rather than Arcadia. But this is a guess about a factual matter. Since I have a distaste for finding out the facts, I shall not swap stories with the anarchist. I shall work on the assumption that the state, and only the state, brings the benefits of peace and stability. Wellman describes this as the ‘descriptive component’ (Wellman 2001, p.743) of a benefit theory of political legitimacy. I shall take it as the grounding factual assumption, immune to philosophical challenge, but possibly false. So the conclusion of the Samaritan argument, if successful, will be conditional, of the form: ‘if life in the State of Nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, then . . .’. III.
The Samaritan Account of State Legitimacy and Citizens’ Duties. The basic norm is given in an account of Samaritan duties, and The common understanding of samaritanism is that one has a duty to help a stranger when the latter is sufficiently imperilled and one can rescue her at no unreasonable cost to oneself’(Wellman 2001, p.744). A standard example of a Samaritan duty is that of the bystander who can rescue the drowning infant by wading into a couple of feet of water. Notice that in this case we confidently speak of a Samaritan duty. The bystander does wrong if she doesn’t rescue the child. Philosophers may disagree over whether this moral duty is a perfect duty (failure to comply with which may be sanctioned by punishment) or an imperfect duty (failure to comply being 2
pathetically and shamefully immoral, hopefully a source of persisting feelings of guilt, but not liable to penal sanctions, legal or otherwise), but I shall return to this issue later. In many municipal jurisdictions the citizen has a legal duty of care, with failure entailing a liability to punishment if she fails to rescue the child because, for example, she claims that this would have soiled her Armani trouser-suit. The state is not justified in coercing me on the grounds that this coercion is to my benefit. For the liberal, such an argument would be impermissibly paternalistic, Wellman believes. Rather the state is justified in coercing me and you in order that other citizens should not stand in peril of the State of Nature. We are to see the state as exercising a Samaritan duty of care—a duty to coerce each citizen in order to benefit every other citizen. (In 1996, Wellman analyses the state’s Samaritan duty in terms of its possession of a liberty-right, but this is too weak on any interpretation of ‘liberty-right’—whether that be construed as a Hohfeldian privilege or a negative claim-right.) The particular form that benefit takes is that citizens are rescued from, or are guaranteed security in face of their imperilment by, the State of Nature. Likewise, citizens have a Samaritan duty to each other to prevent their falling into a State of Nature, and this duty is expressed by their acceptance of a duty—a political obligation—to support the just state. There is a wrinkle to this latter argument that I should explain. We can grant that all citizens have a duty of care to each other, yet query whether that duty should take the further form of accepting a duty to support the state. It may well be the case that a just and effective state is the only means of avoiding the horrors of the State of Nature, yet the state could operate in a just and effective manner without my particular support. Since we must not suppose that disobedience or free-riding is infectious, my acceptance of a political obligation is not necessary for the protection of my vulnerable fellow citizens. At this point, Wellman introduces considerations of fairness. It is fairness, as explained in modern times by Hart, Rawls and Klosko, that requires all citizens to shoulder the Samaritan burden.6 The Samaritan duty of care thus does double duty: it vindicates the authority of the state that protects its citizens from the State of Nature by coordinating their several Samaritan duties, and it validates as a political obligation the Samaritan duty each citizen owes to his fellows and fulfils by supporting the just state. Thus each citizen is both rescuer and rescued. Each party is a man from Samaria and a Jew, saviour and victim both. In Wellman’s political world, each citizen, as both threatening and the target of threats, has a Samaritan duty of care to each other citizen—which duty they fulfil by recognizing a political obligation to maintain and support a just state, which state then has a fiduciary duty to execute that duty of care. As Wellman tells us more than once, this account is the new kid on the block, a novel theory of state legitimacy and citizens’ duties. Can it be defended as 6
This is Hart’s formulation of the principle of fairness: ‘When a number of persons conduct any joint enterprise according to rules and thus restrict their liberty, those who have submitted to these restrictions when required have the right to a similar submission from those who have benefited from their submission’( Hart 1955, p.185). This is Rawls’s gloss: ‘We are not to gain from the cooperative labours of others without doing our fair share’ (Rawls 1972, p. 112). For an elaborate defence of a fairness account of political obligation, see Klosko 1992 & 2005.
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giving a satisfactory answer to the philosophical question as this was formulated at the beginning of this paper? IV.
Duties of Rescue and Duties of Care. In a sharp critique of Wellman’s line of argument, A. John Simmons has pointed to the oddity of Wellman’s construal of the Samaritan duty. Throughout Wellman’s exposition of his argument he adverts to both the state and its citizens as responsible for the rescue of citizens from the perils of the state of nature. This conceit gains credibility from the example of dire emergency which Wellman uses to illustrate his thesis. In Wellman 2001 we have Alice (in 2005, Beth) rescuing Beth (in 2005, Amy) from imminent death by using Carolyn’s (in 2005, Cathy’s) car to take her to hospital, and this scenario is purportedly analogous to the relations between state and citizens and between citizens and fellow citizens in a just state as explained above.7 It really is strange to attribute to the state and (derivatively) to citizens the duty to rescue other citizens from the perils of the state of nature as though the state of nature were some imminent disaster to which we are prone, as though only the state, or (for the metaphysically squeamish) only the state now conceived as a collective composed of responsive citizens, can rescue us.8 Simmons expands his point by contrasting on the one hand, general duties of charity, beneficence, or indeed justice, as responses to pervasive conditions of dire need with duties of rescue in desperate circumstances on the other. (Roughly, it is a duty of rescue which explains why the good citizen rushes to resuscitate the fellow who has collapsed on the pavement; it may be a duty of charity, beneficence or justice which explains why a society, which the good citizen supports, organizes its public services to ensure that there is an ambulance with paramedics on hand to assist both of them just in case the need arises.) He concludes by asking us to ‘Notice that the very idea of institutions administering such a duty [of rescue, in emergencies] by collection [of taxes?] and distribution [of the taxes thus raised into rescue services?] makes no sense in this case’. He tells us that Wellman’s Samaritan duties are a ‘curious hybrid’ of rescue and charity—which they are, since ‘the emergency is not really properly described as an emergency at all’ (Simmons, in Wellman & Simmons 2005, pp. 184—5). In all this, Simmons is surely right; there is a clear whiff of philosophical artifice about Wellman’s construction which contrasts smartly with both his and standard examples of duties of rescue and care. This challenge calls for careful investigation. Thus we should consider whether we are dealing with two very different kinds of duty here—from which a sterile hybrid has been created. This is an alternative picture: we have one duty, 7
Thus: ‘The vehicle required to save Amy is Cathy’s car, and the vehicle required to save my compatriots is our state; but Beth’s duty is to drive this car, and my duty is to obey the legal commands of my state’ (Wellman, in Wellman and Simmons 2005, p. 31). 8 Simmons writes ‘Wellman seems in the end to be employing a version of a duty of rescue (or mutual aid) that is quite idiosyncratic and morally suspect. The duty actually used in his arguments concerning a duty to obey the law is not the same as the moral commonplace to which Wellman appeals in his examples [the duty to rescue folks in immediate danger]; and indeed the specific form of Wellman’s duty seems to be inspired primarily by his argumentative needs, not by independent reasons to believe such a duty exists’ (Simmons in Wellman and Simmons 2005, pp.182—3). I share Simmons’s suspicions, but this isn’t yet to convict Wellman of error. Simmons, to be fair, goes on to articulate several grounds of objection.
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broadly described as a duty of care, and a spectrum of cases attesting more or less danger, risk, need and urgency. At one (familiar) extreme I may rescue the drowning child; at the other, I may pick up a banana skin I notice on the street. Somewhere in between, I may take out my spade and clear the ice from the pavement in front of my house (and perhaps theirs’) to help my elderly neighbours. Likewise a state official, an air-sea rescue officer, may abseil from a helicopter to lift an injured mountaineer in great peril and at the other extreme a government may vote moneys to fund the air-sea rescue service. A duty of care is more akin to charity than general beneficence since it is a response to some element of need or necessity rather than a general concern with the promotion of some other’s good. I may or may not respond to an opportunity to improve your well-being, irrespective of how well off you are. A person may not be in need or in danger for me to do them a good turn— slowing down my car to let their car cross the traffic, say, when I see they want to turn right from a side road. But then we would not say that in these circumstances I exercise a duty of care. My beneficence is more of a kindness or a courtesy. So we should consider how far we are exercising a duty of care in the circumstances that Wellman envisages. The concern that motivates my acceptance of a political obligation to support the state is that others should be protected from the hazards of the state of nature. Given the account of the state of nature that I accept, I seek this protection for myself and support a similar provision for others. Through the state I endorse the same provision for all of us. Of course, this isn’t a matter of rescue—to this degree, Wellman’s talk of rescue is hyperbolic. But the citizen, insofar as he is acting to procure the security of others, is indeed exercising a duty of care. The real lesson we should draw from the Hobbesian scenario is that civility is fragile. Even in settled Western democracies, it can appear to be only skin deep. In my lifetime there have been riots in Los Angeles, Newark and Washington, in Brixton, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool, in Paris and Zurich.9 These may have their origins in political protest, but as soon as the police retreat, shop windows are smashed, white goods are looted and the premises burned. Carrying this knowledge with us, we shall accept the state as legitimate and endorse a regime of citizens’ duties just as soon as we express a concern for others as well as ourselves. For all that the conceits of ‘emergency’ and ‘rescue’ look contrived, there is no fallacy or sharp practice here. Rather we have an attractive addition to the Hobbesian apparatus for those who reject ethical egoism and acknowledge a duty of care for others. Thus far my argument has been developed in explanation of the citizens’ political obligations. Simmons’s challenge directs us to a further worry. He does not believe that an institution, such as the state, is a proper subject for a duty of care. The very idea of an institution exercising such a duty ‘makes no sense’ he tells us (Wellman & Simmons 2005, p.184).10 Like many philosophers, he is suspicious of the metaphysics of institutions. I have no such qualms, but if one insists on the motives of the state being reduced to the reasons which may be attributed to its citizens we should notice that Wellman’s proposal looks more 9
And for the 2011 draft of this paper, add Croydon, Tottenham, Hackney, Birmingham and Manchester (again) to include the summer 2011 riots in England. 10 In similar fashion, elsewhere he tells us that it makes no sense to direct feelings of gratitude towards an institution (Simmons 1979, pp.187—8). This is a neat example of the fecundity of bad arguments.
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plausible rather than less, since the basic principle affirms that the Samaritan duty is incumbent upon all citizens. But whether or not we reduce the state to its component citizens, we should accept that there is no problem attributing Samaritan duties to institutions quite generally. That is the raison d’être of the Health Service, public education, the Fire Brigade, and some branches of the armed forces, amongst other civic agencies. V.
Perfect or Imperfect Duties? This is the place to take up an issue flagged earlier concerning perfect and imperfect duties. Wellman is quite clear that the Samaritan duties are perfect duties and thus enforceable. Let’s agree for the purpose of argument that the duty to rescue the drowning child is a perfect duty. Many will insist that, if there is a Samaritan duty to clear the ice off the pavement in front of one’s house, it is not a perfect duty; it is a thoughtful and charitable act, best understood as (or derived from) an imperfect duty to look after one’s neighbours (if one accepts that the language of duty, as against, say, the virtue of neighbourliness, is appropriate to the case). The distinction between perfect and imperfect duties is not crystal clear. At its heart is the thought that a perfect duty is fully specified and enforceable in principle: we know who has the duty, what is the content of the duty and to whom it is directed, and in consequence we are able to enforce the duty in case the dutybearer fails to comply. By contrast, an imperfect duty may not have a specified content, nor may it be clear to whom it is owed. In such a case the duty bearer will have a permissible discretion, so it will not be effectively enforceable. Do we need to decide whether the Samaritan duty to protect one’s fellow citizens from the state of nature is a perfect or an imperfect duty? It looks as though we do, for this objection is lurking: Suppose we view this crucial duty as an imperfect duty. In this case, although we recognize a duty of care, it will not be a duty that is enforceable in the way that the state standardly enforces the duties it prescribes—in law and with threat of sanction. This thought threatens to incapacitate the Samaritan account of both the duties of the state and the duties of the citizen. Let us consider first the Samaritan duty of the state towards its citizens. I claimed earlier that if one employs the Samaritan argument to explain the legitimacy of the state, the legitimate state is best seen as a state which has a duty to protect its citizens rather than a liberty right (however construed). There will be a minimum specifiable content to this duty—to do whatever is necessary to guarantee the security of citizens—but it is notoriously unclear how this is to be spelled out. Is it a matter of the state protecting minimal negative rights to person and property (the Night-watchman State), or does security require a good deal more than this? The classical texts don’t tell us, although Hobbes’s account of the ‘Incommodities’ of war is capacious. The whole infrastructure of a peaceful civil condition is compromised in the state of nature: he mentions industry, agriculture, transport, education, science, arts and letters as all vulnerable.11 Thus one may fairly conclude that it is the duty of the state to do whatever is necessary to facilitate these civilising activities. And to whatever level of specificity one charts the Samaritan duty of the legitimate state—as the Night-watchman State or the Welfare State or all stages in 11
Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch13, p. 186 [62].
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between—one can further ask how this duty is to be enforced against the state. There is certainly no standard model of enforcement upon which one might call, though one might infer, following Hobbes, that legitimacy lapses when the state fails, or, following Locke, that rebellion will then be permissible. Whether these considerations are sufficiently strong to yield a perfect duty, I cannot say, but I cannot see that it matters either. To my mind I see no incoherence in attributing to the state an imperfect Samaritan duty to create and support the medley of perfect and imperfect duties (still to be specified) which is required to protect the citizens. We reach a similar conclusion if we investigate the Samaritan duties of the citizen. Broadly this is a duty of care to fellow citizens to guarantee their protection by supporting the state which is the effective security mechanism. Again, just what this duty of care requires will be controversial. Minimally, and formally, it can be specified as the (perfect) political obligation to obey the law, but the content of just law is still open: it could be the minimal duties imposed by Night-watchman state or maximally the compulsory funding of a Welfare state. (For your interest, my view is that justice or near-justice, being the virtue of states, operates as a necessary but not sufficient condition on both the legitimacy of state authority and the validity of political obligations.12) And there may well be imperfect duties in addition, for example the duty of citizens to bring up their children to be good citizens in turn or the duty to volunteer for military service in time of (just) war. Again, it is plausible to construe the Samaritan duties of the citizen as an imperfect duty of support, which is further spelled out as a regime of constitutive perfect and imperfect duties of the citizen. I suspect that the insistence that the duties of the citizen are ‘perfect and enforceable’ (Wellman in Wellman & Simmons 2005, p.30) stems from the thought that the legitimate state exercises formidable coercive powers which are recognized by the citizen as the instrument for effecting his Samaritan duties. But these coercive powers enforce the law; they do not directly enforce the citizens’ Samaritan duty to support the state, as Wellman mistakenly supposes. This latter duty will generally include a specific duty to obey the law, but this will be conditional on the law’s proper service of Samaritan ends. If the citizen fairly judges that the state is enacting laws that threaten rather than protect his fellow citizens, he may well conclude that his Samaritan duties counsel civil disobedience. VI.
The Particularity Requirement. Critics of Wellman have questioned whether Samaritanism meets the ‘particularity requirement’. The ‘particularity requirement’ is a critical instrument fashioned by Simmons to undermine any theory of political obligation as entailed by a natural duty—to promote happiness or justice, say. The particularity requirement has it that when we address the problem of political obligation we seek an account of ‘those moral requirements which bind an individual to one particular political community, 12
On my account, justice operates as a compendious constraint, comprising (i) respect for personal rights and liberties (ii) constitutional justice, i.e. democracy in some shape or form (iii) commutative justice, i.e. due process of law and just punishment (iv) distributive justice, i.e. fair allocation of benefits and burdens (v) international justice, i.e. just war principles, fair trade, the global redistribution of income and wealth. See further, Knowles 2010, pp. 71—6, 155—9.
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set of political institutions, etc. . . [W]e need a principle of political obligation which binds the citizen to one particular state above all others, namely the state in which he is a citizen’ (Simmons 1979, pp.31—2). Since these things are obviously true, we need to see how this requirement finds its cutting edge. Simmons argues (against Rawls, notably) that if we identify our political obligations with our obligation to obey just government we shall find that, although we do have an obligation to obey our own government, supposing it to be just, we do not capture the particularity of the obligation we owe to our own government, since we equally have an obligation towards any and every other just government: ‘the obligation in question would not bind me to any particular political authority in the way we want’ (Simmons ibid). Exactly the same challenge can be put to the argument from Samaritanism. If the legitimacy of the state is grounded in its Samaritan duty to protect citizens from the state of nature, why doesn’t that duty extend to the citizens of other states as well? If the political obligations of the citizens are grounded in their Samaritan duty to support the state that can protect their fellow citizens, why do they not have an equal duty to support other states engaged in citizen protection, or to protect directly the citizens of other states? Of course, the answer to these questions may be: ‘They do; states and citizens do have these wider duties of care’, but then it looks as though the Samaritan account has failed to capture the particular character of state legitimacy and citizens’ duties. These are good questions, to be tackled directly, but before I do so we should revisit the particularity requirement itself because the dialectic charted by Simmons and reported respectfully by those who endorse it (and this includes Wellman) strikes me as odd. Simmons presents the requirement as a wolf in sheep’s clothing: it’s sheep’s clothing because it is so blindingly obvious that the enquiring citizen seeks to discover the source of the legitimacy of her state and the source of her obligations to it (if any, of course); it’s a wolf, because it looks to have surprisingly sharp teeth, capable of savaging any account that grounds legitimacy or political obligations in a natural duty—to promote happiness, or justice, or to care for others. I confess: I do not recognize the power that is touted for this argument. Whether what is at stake is the legitimacy of one’s government or the validity of one’s obligations to it or, as I see it, both of these things, the central issue concerns the soundness of the conclusion one delivers after examining these questions. It is surely beside the point that the principles one uses to come to a conclusion can be used to reach further conclusions. If so, one must in consistency accept them. It is a different story, of course, if the further conclusions are unpalatable. Then reductio beckons. But as the inference is sketched, the suggestion that one might have a duty to support all just states on the grounds that they exercise a duty of care for their citizens does not look threatening. All the interesting questions will concern how one should support a just state that is not one’s own and how the nature of that support differs from the support one gives to one’s own state. It is in any case an open question whether the argument one offers to ground one’s support of the state that is necessary to protect fellow citizens can be extended in the way suggested. Matters would be different if one had argued for a general principle of this form:
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Citizens have a Samaritan duty to support all governments that exercise a duty of care towards their citizens and then used this principle to justify support for one’s own government, understanding that, as a matter of fact, it exercised the specified duty of care. Although this would be an interesting line of argument, (and it may well be worth pursuing) that is not how the Samaritan argument worked, as I presented it. The argument began with the statement of a common problem faced by a (generally territorially) circumscribed group of people—fellow citizens who threaten and are all threatened by each other in a state of nature. As fellow citizens of the UK (supposing that this is what we are) this is our problem which we solve by recognizing a Samaritan duty to each other.13 In my judgement the ‘particularity requirement’ does not pose a significant problem for natural duty theorists because it is a fundamental feature of the dialectic of these approaches that they begin with a scenario in which there are states and citizens in place, facing a demand that they unearth the moral principles (if there are any) which govern the relations in which they stand to each other, as it were, from the inside. In this respect, invocation of the State of Nature is potentially misleading, since it introduces the thought that deliberation is conducted as though there were no state—or no people, in Rousseau’s sense of a people that has to be created by the Legislator14—in place. By contrast, we are concerned with a moral relation that is internal to the state, so we ask, of our own state, whether it (and hence its demands) are legitimate, and we ask further, of ourselves and our fellow citizens, what are the obligations we bear to the state and to each other in point of our common citizenship. That is how we frame the problem of political obligation. This does not mean that we must forbear questioning the legitimacy of other states and the relations in which their citizens stand to the state and each other. Of course we can do this, and when we do we shall employ the same principles which govern our relationship to our state and our fellow citizens. But we shall not be asking about our political obligations to these foreign states and their citizens, nor about the legitimacy of any authority they might claim over us or our fellows. These are all questions concerning normative international relations rather than sovereignty. Indeed it is because, as Simmons states, ‘we need a principle of political obligation which binds the citizen to one particular state above all others, namely the state in which he is a citizen’ that we frame the problems of legitimacy and political obligation in this fashion. Consider this analogous problem: we wish to determine the grounds upon which children should respect their parents. (Imagine you have a horrible, disrespectful, child to deal with.) We propose this answer: children should respect their parents if and only if 13
In just the same way one could defend Rawls’s account of political obligation as required by a natural duty of justice against Simmons’s criticism. Here the problem is also localized or particularized at the point of formulation: it concerns how a population that faces the circumstances of justice should coordinate their efforts to create a basic social structure which achieves a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens that are achieved by social cooperation. The answer to this problem is the just state towards which citizens with a sense of justice recognize a political obligation. 14 Rousseau, J.-J. The Social Contract, Bk.II, Ch.7. (Many editions).
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their parents treat them with tender loving care. We would never be tempted to think that an answer of this kind is flawed in principle because it entails that children should show respect to all parents (other children’s parents included) just in case those other parents treat their own children with tender loving care. That wasn’t the issue in which we were interested (when prompted by the horrible, disrespectful, child), though again, as with the citizen’s duties towards states other than his own, it is a different issue that merits examination. Exactly the same logic of self-reference applies in the case of the state. VII.
Samaritanism and International Duties of Care. We still need to consider the reach of the duty of care that we ascribe to the legitimate state and to the citizens who recognize a political obligation towards it, since as suggested above there may be a reductio in the offing.15 Take first the issue of state legitimacy. Renzo’s point is that if we regard the legitimate state as the agency responsible for a Samaritan duty of care, that duty of care should extend towards whomever is identified as standing in need, whether that person is a citizen or an alien, resident or non-resident. Writing of the state of Italy as a Samaritan agency, he argues that it should direct its efforts wherever it can do most good. If it can rescue more citizens of some other state than Italy (and from a more desperate condition of need), then it should do so. On the other hand, Renzo recognizes that the Italian government does have a special duty ‘to pay special attention to Italian needy with regard to such [redistributive] policies’. Since Wellman’s argument has no explanation of this widely held view, it fails by reductio.16 The same is true for citizens taken individually. If they have a Samaritan duty towards their own fellow citizens, they also have a Samaritan duty to anyone who is in a condition of very great hazard—indeed this is the very point of the New Testament parable: ‘Who is my neighbour?’ asks the legal scholar, and the answer of course is that it is the one who shows mercy to whomever he encounters in great need, whatever their national or ethnic origins (Luke: Chapter 10). If an Italian citizen could rescue the starving citizens of some other state by evading the taxes imposed on him by the Italian state, Samaritanism would seem to offer him a reason not to obey the law. These are powerful arguments, but I do not believe that they undermine the Samaritan position. In the first place, considering the argument for legitimacy, we should notice that the Samaritan duty has a particular content, although as we have seen it is not fully specified. It is the duty to protect one’s fellow citizens from the state of nature. That duty may be more or less capacious: to provide a Minimal State at one extreme or to provide a full Welfare State at the other (depending on how one construes the requirements of justice). But as argued in our consideration of the particularity requirement, it is a duty towards the citizens of one particular state. Specifying the Samaritan duty of the state in this way does not foreclose the question of whether the state should undertake wider Samaritan provision—whether, for example, Italy should intervene to establish security in Kosovo, Somalia or Libya—but the argument for the legitimacy of the Samaritan state is undermined only if this wider 15
This is the issue that is pressed by Massimo Renzo in 2008. The alternative view, for which Renzo has some sympathy, is that we revise our chauvinist intuitions and endorse the extension of Samaritan duties beyond the national domain. 16
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provision is both required by a general duty of care and, through its execution, the state must systematically compromise its municipal duties. The analogous case would be that of a parent who is required to neglect her duty of care to her own child in order to make secure provision for the children of other parents. This prospect is more likely the more capacious the Samaritan duties are held to be. These would indeed be tragic cases, but if there were any such and if one decided that the right thing to do was to compromise the interests of one’s own citizens or one’s own child in order to protect others, I cannot see that this would lead one to reject, in principle, the special duties, rather than to accept that they are pro tanto duties, having a strong and consistent weight but not over-riding in every case. Dilemmas of the same structure may be constructed if one directs one’s attention to the political obligation of the citizen to support a state that protects fellow citizens. Such a state bears a cost, to be collected through taxation. Renzo raises the prospect of the citizen who can successfully evade taxes in order to better fulfil a Samaritan duty to non-citizens which he judges to be more pressing than his municipal duties. Would he be doing the right thing were he to do so? I have very great doubts that persons should be granted such a moral discretion; to claim such a necessarily esoteric discretion has been described as ‘arrogant’.17 But suppose that our Galahad has reckoned matters right. His failure to undertake the ‘common Samaritan chore’ will not undermine the state, but it will mean that he violates his political obligation in point of paying the tax he is due. Does it follow that, in fulfilling a greater Samaritan duty, he must reject his political obligation, tout court? Has the argument from a Samaritan duty to a political obligation been fatally undermined because Samaritanism more widely construed entails the violation of the strictly political Samaritan duty in this particular instance? I don’t see why we should accept Renzo’s conclusion. Once again, we have a dilemma. Resolving the dilemma in favour of esoteric free-lance moralism does not require the denial of the political obligation which has been (ex hypothesi, but dubitably) out-weighed. To reach that conclusion, we should have to accord the political obligation of the Samaritan citizen an absolute force which it cannot be expected to bear.
Conclusion. Responsible citizens who have a care for their fellows will generally support the state which acts as a barrier between them and a lifetime of fear and mayhem. In this light, they will assume the duties of the responsible citizen. For sure this argument is not sufficiently water-tight to capture every citizen or to underpin every duty that may be ascribed to them. But it does capture an orientation towards the state and one’s fellow citizens that is displayed by the committed and diligent citizen. And maybe these commitments should be more readily extended to citizens of other states who are hard pressed and in need of help. That thought, generous when actively acknowledged, should not be deemed to weaken the argument. Good Samaritans should support the state, acknowledging both its legitimacy and their concomitant duties.
17
See John Skorupski’s careful discussion of the case of Galahad. (Skorupski, 2010, pp.359ff.) Wellman discusses questions of permissible discretion in Wellman & Simmons 2005, pp.35— 43.
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References Applbaum, I.A. 2010: ‘Legitimacy without the Duty to Obey’. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 38:3, pp.215—39. Edmundson, W.A. 1998: Three Anarchical Fallacies: An Essay on Political Authority. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Green, L. 1988: The Authority of the State. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenawalt, K. 1989: Conflicts of Law and Morality. New York: Oxford University Press. Hart, H.L.A. 1955: ‘Are there any Natural Rights?’. Philosophical Review, 64, pp.175—91. Hobbes, T. 1968 [first published 1651]: Leviathan. Edited and with an introduction by C.B. Macpherson. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Klosko, G. 1992: The Principle of Fairness and Political Obligation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Knowles, D. 2010: Political Obligation: A Critical Introduction. Abingdon: Routledge. Klosko, G. 2005: Political Obligations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. 1972: A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Raz, J. 1986: The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Renzo M. 2008: ‘Duties of Samaritanism and Political Obligation’. Legal Theory, 14, pp. 193—217. Rousseau, J.-J. 1762 : The Social Contract. (Many editions.) Sartorius, R. 1981: ‘Political Authority and Political Obligation’. Virginia Law Review, 67, pp. 3—17. Simmons, A.J. 1979: Moral Principles and Political Obligation. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. ---------- 2005: ‘The Duty to Obey and Our Natural Moral Duties’ in Wellman and Simmons 2005. Skorupski, J. 2010: The Domain of Reasons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wellman, C. H. 1996: ‘Liberalism, Samaritanism, and Political Legitimacy’. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 25, pp. 211—37. ---------- 2000: ‘Relational Facts in Liberal Political Theory: Is There Magic in the Pronoun “My”?’. Ethics, 110, pp. 537—62. ---------- 2001: ‘Towards a Liberal Theory of Political Obligation’. Ethics, 111, pp. 735—59. ---------- 2004: ‘Political Obligation and the Particularity Requirement’. Legal Theory, 10, pp. 97—115. ---------- 2005: ‘Samaritanism and the Duty to Obey the Law’ in Wellman and Simmons (2005). Wellman, C. H. & Simmons, A.J. 2005: Is there a Duty to Obey the Law? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolff, J. 2000: ‘Political Obligation: A Pluralistic Approach’. In M. Baghramian and A. Ingram (eds) Pluralism: The Philosophy and Politics of Diversity. London: Routledge. Dudley Knowles Philosophy, School of Humanities University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ dudley.anne@btopenworld.com
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