In political philosophy you should play the ball rather than kicking the player, right? Well I agree. But then it gets hard to find a legitimate role for the Mandy Rice-Davies argument. And such arguments sometimes seem appropriate. It seems ok to notice that Hegel might have erred in finding that the local socio-political framework was what _Geist_ was aiming at all along, and that this might represent a kind of dull parochialism on his part. And when Kant isn’t willing to admit barbers to citizenship, but has fewer qualms about wig-makers, and thinks that reason supports him, we suspect something has gone wrong. It isn’t hard to multiply the examples …. Aristotle on slavery anyone?
Generally, I think, one should expect the comparatively liberal people in a society to articulate a kind of weaselly compromise between an impartial perspective and whatever the local chauvinisms and prejudices are. Partly this is psychological: it is hard to believe that uncles, aunts, cousins and neighbours are bad people, so one gives some weight to their attachments and beliefs as legitimate. Partly the pressure is political: in a democratic society winning means building a coalition and that means including the median voter. It is hard to build a coalition in bad faith, to secretly believe that your nation is a rapacious imperial power whilst reaching out to others who believe that it is a great country which (despite mistakes) basically does good in the world. And then there’s the fact that intellectuals who do try to detach themselves from local prejudice, from what the person on the bus thinks and cares about, often seem to lack a necessary reality check and end up saying a lot of crazy stuff that then earns them hostility and ridicule, some of it deserved. You don’t want to be like those guys.
So, for example, liberal Serbs kind of acknowledge that Milosevic did some bad stuff, but urge you to see the context, the other side of the picture. Liberal Israelis loathe the settlers and all their works and feel kind of bad about the Nakba and the occupation, but think of the Zionist project as basically legitimate and good. Liberal Russians might bemoan some of Putin’s excesses, but think that something had to be done about Chechnya. Etc. And, again, you can multiply the examples. Moreover (and it complicates the picture) some of these people might actually be right. In their case, the truth really might lie in the middle.
So, leaving the supporting arguments to one side, for a moment, what sort of conclusions about the world would you expect well-paid American liberal intellectuals to reach when they came to think about global justice? I guess I’d expect the following. I’d expect a good deal of hand-wringing about the relationship between patriotism and universal morality, and I’d expect them to discover a legitimate role for patriotism. They’d find out that it is perfectly permissible to have a limited preference for one’s fellow citizens (especially poor and minority ones) over outsiders. They’d therefore agonize about issues such as immigration but accept the right of states to control their borders, reject the notion that justice requires any kind of global redistributive principle but favour some limited doctrine of “assistance” to those suffering desperate poverty overseas. And I’d expect them, being smart people, to come up with some varied and ingenious arguments to support such conclusions. John Rawls, Michael Blake, Samuel Freeman, Richard Miller, Thomas Nagel, Elizabeth Anderson … even (or especially?) Michael Walzer, end up in the same place. Kind of a coincidence huh? What would Mandy say about that?
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