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Closing the Fairness-Practice Gap

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Robert O. Keohane
Robert O. Keohane
Affiliation:
ROBERT O. KEOHANE is Professor of Government at Harvard University and Chair of the Department. He is the author of After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), and International Institutions and State Power: Essays in International Relations Theory (Boulder: Westview Press, 1980).
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Abstract

“My argument in this essay is that the fairness principle can be justified on the basis of an ethical perspective that stresses the importance of consequences in judging human action, and that it has far-reaching implications not just for evaluating state policy but for the design of international institutions.” Keohane's utilitarian perspective seeks to establish generalizable principles of morality for a framework of normative moral rules by which to construct a foreign policy for international cooperation. The author argues that all governments are morally obliged to support international institutions that advocate crosscultural and global public goods to advance the fairness principle. The international community is bound by Western understandings of distributive justice, universal human rights, and indisputable national sovereignty.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 3 , March 1989 , pp. 101 - 116
Copyright
© Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1989

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References

1 For a recent review emphasizing these four topics, See Beitz, Charles, “Recent International Thought,” in International Journal, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Canadian Institute of International Affairs, Spring 1988) special issue, Ethics in World Politics, pp. 183–204Google Scholar.

2 Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951; originally published, 1861) p. 30Google Scholar.

3 Bull, Hedley, Justice in International Relations, Hagey Lectures (Waterloo, Ont.: University of Waterloo Press, 1984) p. 19Google Scholar.

4 Bull, Hedley and Watson, Adam, “Conclusion” to The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) p. 429Google Scholar.

5 Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977) p. 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Wight, Martin, Systems of States, ed. by Bull, Hedley (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977) p. 135Google Scholar.

7 Westermarck, Edward, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, Vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1908) p. 154Google Scholar; quoted in Alvin W. Gouldner, “The Norm of Reciprocity: A Preliminary Statement,”American Sociological Review, Vol. 25, No. 2 (April 1960) p. 171.

8 IbidGoogle Scholar.

9 Assessments for United Nations dues are, of course, based on this principleGoogle Scholar.

10 In part, this principle says: “We are not to gain from the cooperative labors of others without doing our fair share.” See Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971) p. 112Google Scholar. In this discussion, Rawls follows H. L. A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?”Philosophical Review, Vol. 64 (1955) pp. 175–91. Hart's essay is reprinted in Political Philosophy, ed. by Quinton, Anthony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) pp. 53–66Google Scholar.

11 See especially Nye, Joseph S. Jr., Nuclear Ethics (New York: Free Press, 1986) chapter 2Google Scholar.

12 On “nonperfectionist” ethics, stressing consequences, See Wolfers, Arnold, “Statesmanship and Moral Choice,” in Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962) chapter 4Google Scholar.

13 Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977)Google Scholar especially parts III and IV.

14 Nye, , Nuclear Ethics, pp. 19 and 25Google Scholar.

15 Even public goods such as a clean atmosphere do not fully fit the economists' definitions of “public goods.” In the first place, environmentalists talk about “protecting” public goods (e.g., clean air) rather than “producing” them. More seriously, most goods ordinarily referred to as “public” do not meet the economists' requirement of exhibiting “joint ness in supply.” That is, consumption of these goods by some people typically depletes the amount available to others, which means, technically, that the latter are excluded from their consumption. For instance, the atmospheric ozone layer is in fact being consumed by chlorofluorocarbons emitted into the atmosphere. The key point for politics about public goods is that specific potential consumers cannot be excluded from consumption until the good has been fully consumed. This is a characteristic of the public goods that I will discuss; and consequently the main conclusion of public goods analysis—that such goods will be under produced or under-protected through a market system—holds for these “public goods.” For a clear explication of the economists' strict concept of public goods and its implications for international relations, See Snidal, Duncan, “Public Goods, Property Rights and Political Organization,”International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 4 (December 1979) pp. 532–66Google Scholar.

16 A number of institutional arrangements in world politics provide benefits that have the characteristics of “impure” public goods. Potential consumers can be excluded from receiving some but not all of their benefits, or it would be costly to exclude them. For instance, governments that are not parties to particular trade agreements might find that products of interest to them were not covered by these arrangements, but then could still benefit from extension of most-favored-nation privileges to themselves on products on which agreements were reached. My argument about pure public goods should also hold, to a proportionately lesser extent, for these impure public goodsGoogle Scholar.

17 Henry, Nannerl O., “Political Obligation and Collective Goods,” Political and Legal Obligation, Nomos XVII, eds. J. Roland Pennock and John Chapman (New York: Atherton Press, 1970) p. 270, relying particularly on David HumeGoogle Scholar.

18 Snidal, , “Public Goods, Property Rights and Political Organization,” p. 564Google Scholar.

19 Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, p. 12Google Scholar.

20 Rawls argues that each generation must “preserve the gains of culture and civilization” for its descendants. From an environmentalist standpoint, it must also prevent catastrophic losses stemming from contamination by industrial society. See ibid., p. 285Google Scholar.

21 It might also be possible to derive such obligations on the basis of a theory of rights. However, it is even more difficult to establish rights between governments in world politics than within established societies. It is not necessary, to demonstrate obligations to international society in general, to establish that any particular member of that society has a right to a specific action by anotherGoogle Scholar.

22 The first quotation is from Singer, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” in Philosophy, Politics and Society, Fifth Series, eds. Laslett, Peter and Fishkin, James (Oxford: Basil Blackweill/New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) p. 33Google Scholar. Quoted in Fishkin, James S., The Limits of Obligation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982) p. 4Google Scholar. Fishkin's own argument appears on p. 5.

23 It would be possible to put forward a maximalist form of the utilitarian principle, requiring contributions whenever marginal benefits to others exceed marginal costs to oneself; but such an argument would be philosophically questionable as well as politically unrealistic. Only the minimalist prescription of proportionate contribution—as expressed in the fairness principle—is advocated hereGoogle Scholar.

24 Waltz, Kenneth N., Man, the Stale, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) p. 168Google Scholar. Waltz is here drawing on his interpretation of Rousseau. Interpreting Rousseau in many respects very differently, Stanley Hoffmann came to similarly pessimistic conclusions. See Hoffmann, , “Rousseau on War and Peace,” in The State of War (New York: Praeger, 1965) pp. 54–87Google Scholar.

25 For a discussion of organizations, regimes, and conventions, See Keohane, Robert O., “Neoliberal Institutionalism: A Perspective on World Politics,” introduction to Keohane, International Institutions and State Power: Essays in International Relations Theory (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

26 See Keohane, Robert O., “Reciprocity in International Relations,”International Organization, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Winter 1986) pp. 1–27Google Scholar.

27 See Keohane, Robert O., After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar especially chapter 6; Frank, Robert H., Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988) p. 91Google Scholar.

28 The caveat in this sentence that such actions must be motivated by concern for the poorest people in the society, and must have the effect of helping them, is important. The debt crisis and associated plight of poor people in the Third World are as much a result of the extravagance and corruption of their leaders, and capital flight arranged by indigenous elites, as of global financial arrangements. To criticize the latter is not to exculpate the indigenous perpetuation of injusticeGoogle Scholar.

29 For a fuller discussion of the moral strengths and weaknesses of contemporary international regimes, see Keohane, After Hegemony, pp. 247–56Google Scholar.

30 Quoted in the 1988–89 Annual Report of the Environmental Defense Fund, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 11Google Scholar.