Comments on: Language requires what?

By: Samuel Freeman

Samuel Freeman — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 02:44:40 +0000

Chris Bertram construes certain selected paragraphs in my book Rawls, as implying that the coercive power of the State is necessary for language, a conclusion which he rightfully says is absurd. I believe that a careful reading of the paragraphs in question does not lead to his conclusion. First, like Rawls, I do not rely upon the loaded term ‘State’ (commonly used among global cosmopolitans to criticize socially-based conceptions of justice), but instead use the term ‘society,’ ‘political society,’ ‘people’ and so on. (“States,” or better governments, are but the political representatives of society and its members.) Second, Chris Bertram says, “As for the absurd claim, it simply follows by transitivity (if x is necessary for y and y is necessary for z, then x is necessary for z).” But I do not say that political authority is necessarily coercive, which is needed to infer the “absurd claim”; instead I used the word ‘invariably,’ which applies to normally unchanging but potentially changeable factual contingencies. (I say, (as quoted above) “social relations, unlike global relations, are coercively enforced. Social cooperation…invariably involves political cooperation, and with it the political enforcement of basic social rules…” Rawls, p. 421) Third, for what it’s worth, I have argued elsewhere that coercive enforcement is not the reason that distributive justice is socially based: “My position (which is also Rawls’s I believe) differs from Nagel’s in that it does not hinge on coercive legal enforcement, but rather on the need for cooperative social and political institutions that legislate and sustain (whether coercively or not) the cooperative institutions of distributive justice.” (‘Distributive Justice and the Law of Peoples,’ p. 314 of my Justice and the Social Contract)
Roughly, my position is that central to society, or social cooperation (in Rawls’s sense), is a framework of social and economic institutions, normally legally specified (including rules of property, sales, gifts and other transfers, contracts and agreements of all kinds, etc.) that secure possessions and make economic production, distribution, and consumption possible, as well as political institutions that enable a society to change existing rules and legislate new ones, and adjudicate disputes. Whether or not a coercive mechanism is needed to enforce these rules depends on peoples’ willingness to abide by legislative and adjudicative decisions—thus, as Chris Bertram notes, coercive enforcement may not be required for social cooperation. In either case, compliance with the rules of basic social institutions, even if generally voluntary, is unavoidable for the members of a society, since these rules are inescapable and structure their daily lives in innumerable ways (unlike members of other societies, whose lives are structured by their own system of basic institutions). Next, I see distributive justice in terms of the principles that are needed to specify, regulate and/or critically assess the complicated system of rules that makes the institutions of property and economic production, trade, distribution and consumption possible. Since these institutions are for the most part cooperative social institutions I see distributive justice as largely socially based as well. The argument relies in large part on the role of reciprocity in social cooperation and citizens doing their part to maintain cooperative institutions. It also relies to some degree on the profound influence of society and social cooperation (which I discuss in the other paragraph Chris Bertram quotes from my book above), though that is perhaps a separate argument, and I’m not as convinced now that it plays as central a role in arguing for the social bases of distributive justice.
I hope this note clarifies somewhat my position. I appreciate Chris Bertram’s and others’ remarks, and regret that I do not have more time to reply.

By: Doctor Science

Doctor Science — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 04:34:30 +0000

engels:

Perhaps fittingly given your screenname, your definitions seem a trifle 19th-century-European to me.*g* From a USan POV, liberals and conservatives both “emphasize* the socially embedded nature of humans”, while libertarians strongly reject social embeddedness as a premise. I mean “libertarians” in the sense of “people who call themselves libertarians”, not just philosophers.

I agree that what USans call “liberals” are what Europeans call “social democrats”, but the latter term unfortunately has no resonance on this side of the Pond. I don’t know if USan conservatives are mostly what Europeans call “Christian democrats”, nor do I understand the nuances of the implied social/Christian contrast in the two groups of “democrats”.

*spelling changed to stress that I’m talking about USans

By: bianca steele

bianca steele — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:26:17 +0000

I know this is an academic blog, but it’s hard to keep practical politics from slipping in between the cracks, even though it degrades the debate. I think it might be useful to distinguish between how “liberal” is used by academics and how it’s used by citizens. When we’re talking about libertarians, however, this distinction gets fuzzier, because libertarians and academic philosophers both tend to be ultra-rationalistic. Hence the debate over which side of the line the premises rightfully reside on: the idea is that you really can start with a single premise and everything follows from that. (Saves time anyway.)

Whereas I’d be happy to define a liberal as someone who accepts the traditional definition of liberalism but refuses to accept the conclusions that antiliberals insist must follow from those.

Rather than saying libertarians are those who believe what matters is that people are individualistic, etc., I’d start by saying libertarians believe what matters can be most usefully thought of by starting from the idea that people are individualistic, etc., and also believe this starting place requires them (in order to be consistent) to hold to a thoroughgoing libertarianism.

By: engels

engels — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:16:04 +0000

DS: sorry, I see you didn’t say anything about ‘liberals’ so that part of my comment was misdirected. However, I do think you are labelling a certain set of ideas ‘libertarian’ that most people would call ‘liberal’, and perhaps this is because of the American tendency to use ‘liberal’ to mean roughly ‘social democrat’.

By: andthenyoufall

andthenyoufall — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 19:35:34 +0000

To deny that such co-operators are engaged in “social co-operation” properly speaking is just a bit weird.

Well, they are certainly cooperating, just like we would be cooperating if I held down someone we don’t like while you punched him in the face. But could it be that there’s a distinction between activities which are cooperative simply, and activities which are cooperative in a special way (perhaps their indispensability to life in society) that creates obligations of justice? I agree that this is a slippery distinction, but it isn’t weird, illogical, or dishonest.

(In my previous comment I very cleverly put “melodrama” tags around the phrase “language itself,” but the formatting vanished them. The intent was ironic.)

By: engels

engels — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:59:07 +0000

people are primarily atomistic, independent actors with largely voluntary associations, that’s a libertarian premise

Most people, I think, would call that a liberal premise, especially, eg., some Marxists for whom the term ‘liberal’ is a pretty serious insult. I think your idea that ‘liberals’ must emphasise the socially embedded nature of humans, etc, comes from using the term ‘liberal’ to mean roughly ‘social democrat’, which is a rather idiosyncratic North American usage.

By: djw

djw — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:13:30 +0000

Well, that would redefine a great many philosophical liberals who come to social democratic conclusions as libertarian. It’s a premise libertarians are going to have to share. (I have problems with it, too, but it’s just not correct to argue it’s fundamentally libertarian in some existential way).

By: Doctor Science

Doctor Science — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:13:14 +0000

djw:

It’s not only libertarians who have libertarian premises. IMHO any time you start by assuming that people are primarily atomistic, independent actors with largely voluntary associations, that’s a libertarian premise, whether you think of yourself as a libertarian or not.

By: novakant

novakant — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:50:03 +0000

Thanks for the clarification SamC, I’m only able to follow these debates from the sidelines. Still, this terminology seems rather counter-intuitive to me, since one has to label a lot of people anti-cosmopolitans, who would commonly be called cosmopolitans, as opposed to, say, FP realists, nationalists or jingoists.

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:07:11 +0000

Thanks for the clarification, Chris. Since I still think you’ve got the argument wrong on any charitable reading I’ll skip that part. But, I was just curious about the way that in this post, and some others recently, you’ve seemed to put the “anti-cosmopolitans” on one side with you on the other. (I think the “anti-cosmopolitan” tag is also a bit wrong here, and that the debate here is better seen, in Jon Mandle’s terms, as between modest and strong cosmopolitanism, and that a truly anti-cosmopolitan position would be much more nationalist or realist than anyone we’re talking about here is, but that’s a different argument.)

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:45:56 +0000

Matt, my position in that volume was that the realization of a single value – capability for democratic citizenship – has a different distributive upshot in different contexts such that inequalities matter more among co-citizens than then do between citizens of different states. To that extent, my position there resembles Blake’s focus on rational autonomy (though not his claims about coercion). My view wasn’t that collective self-subjection to coercive structures is the decisive consideration.

Have I changed my views? Well in one sense yes (all the time!). But in another sense no, I still think that distinct subglobal political entities in which people exercise distributively fateful choices are important for the realization of certain values.

However, I don’t see why I should accept bad arguments (if that’s what they are) just because they purport to support conclusions a bit like mine. Would Freeman jump into bed with Richard Miller or Richard Rorty just because they (like him) think that borders are morally significant?

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:26:18 +0000

Chris,
Have you changed your position as to cosmopolitanism a large degree since your wrote your paper for the Brighouse and Brock volume? I ask because in several posts lately you say things like “anti-cosmopolitans like Freeman…”, but your position in that volume wasn’t, as far as I could see, really that different from the Rawlsian view that Freeman here supports. If you’ve changed your mind, have you done it somewhere in print we can see? I’d be curious to see the reasoning.

As for trade, international trade works, as far as regulation goes, in a way that’s quite different from intra-national trade between countries. The sorts of laws one must deal with are very different, as the the people and types of things one must deal with. All of this is heavily mediated through state governments in a way that makes it quite different from intra-national trade. That’s often not clear to people who don’t much deal with the law in this area, but if you do you soon see that they are really importantly different actions, and it’s the mediation via state governments that’s important. (This goes back to Kieran’s point, one I wished to highlight, that w/o the modern state there wouldn’t be an international basic structure, such as it is.)

By: Sam C

Sam C — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:13:41 +0000

Terminological point: cosmopolitanism, as used in these post-Rawlsian debates, is the position that obligations of justice hold between all the individuals in the world, and that nation-state boundaries are morally irrelevant. The Rawlsian anti-cosmopolitan position is that those boundaries mark a real break in our obligations: we have demanding individual-to-individual redistributive obligations to fellow-citizens, but much less demanding state-to-state obligations globally. The exact relation of either of these positions to Kant is unclear to me.

By: novakant

novakant — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:22:54 +0000

anti-cosmopolitans like Freeman

I haven’t read Freeman, but from what has been excerpted here, I don’t think it’s correct to call him “anti-cosmopolitan”. If that label was justified, then we would have to call Kant “anti-cosmopolitan” too, yet he was one of the founders of modern cosmopolitanism. He had a sophisticated view on the matter, weighing the pros and cons of different approaches – you get that with Kant and indeed with all good philosophers – and he ultimately roots for an implementation that might not be in tune with some of the current thinking on this subject, but there is no doubt that he was a cosmopolitan and Freeman simply seems to follow in his footsteps.

By: Chris Armstrong

Chris Armstrong — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 10:06:06 +0000

I agree with the more important of Chris’s conclusions. The discussions above reaffirm that what we mean by social cooperation, and also by coercion, are very slippery and many differences of degree apply between different contexts. But Chris’s conclusion, which seems to me right, is that none of this helps Freeman because he NEEDS to be able to draw a bright line around the kind of coercion the state exercises to support his rejection of global distributive justice. And this just seems to be implausible, despite the arguments of Blake, Risse et al (if I read him correctly, at the same time as presenting a sophisticated account of the distinctive nature of state coercion, Risse admits this himself). And even if the kind of coercion the state exercised WAS in some way truly distinctive, the simple fact remains that that coercion affects, and is exercised against, non-citizens too. I don’t think Freeman ever gets to grips with this last point, which is why I also agree with Chris that the brief critique of cosmopolitanism is not a high point of an otherwise excellent book.