Liberal democracy and cosmopolitan duty.

• Author: Goldsmith, Jack L.
• Position: Symposium on Treaties, Enforcement, and U.S. Sovereignty

INTRODUCTION I. THE INSTITUTIONAL TURN IN COSMOPOLITAN THEORY A. From Individual to Institutional Duties B. The Relevance of Plausibility Constraints II. LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND COSMOPOLITAN DUTY A. The Source and Significance of Weak Cosmopolitan Sentiments B. A More Realistic View of the Democratic Process III. TOWARD A MORE REALISTIC COSMOPOLITANISM A. Education B. Alternatives to Liberal Democracy C. A More Realistic Cosmopolitanism 1. Institutionalism 2. Instrumentalism 3. Civil society 4. National interest 5. Double standards CONCLUSION INTRODUCTION

The widespread enthusiasm for liberal democracy has many sources. Liberal democracy is the form of government most suited to liberal premises about the moral freedom of the individual. (1) It is the best political mechanism for controlling political agents. (2) It decreases the likelihood of internal armed conflict, and increases protection for other basic human rights. (3) It promotes international security because democracies rarely if ever go to war with one another. (4) It effectuates broader forms of international cooperation. (5) It may even be required by international law. (6)

It is against this background that I want to examine a prevalent form of criticism targeted at the United States--the world's most powerful and, in some respects, most vigorous liberal democracy. The criticism is that the United States acts wrongly, or unjustly, when it fails to take affirmative steps that would help other nations and their peoples. In particular, the United States is frequently criticized for failing to sign or ratify treaties (such as the Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court) that many believe would increase the welfare of non-Americans, and for failing to intervene in countries (such as Rwanda) to prevent atrocities.

This criticism comes in two forms. One focuses on U.S. national interest, and maintains that the welfare of U.S. citizens would be enhanced in the fairer, safer, and more prosperous world that would result from increasing assistance to others. The basic claim here is that the United States harms itself and its citizens by not ratifying certain treaties and by failing to intervene more frequently and with greater intensity. I have no quibble with this form of argument, which in my view properly focuses on what is best for U.S. citizens, on leaders' information errors, on means-ends rationality (and related issues like unintended consequences), and on democratic-process pathologies such as time inconsistencies and interest group capture.

A second form of criticism focuses on the United States' cosmopolitan duties. It maintains that the United States should ratify global treaties and intervene more vigorously to stop human rights abuses, even if doing so would lower net U.S. welfare. This argument emphasizes that the United States should act to help peoples and nations outside the United States, even when the actions would not survive a U.S.-focused cost-benefit analysis. The argument does not try to clarify the U.S. national interest. It maintains that the United States should focus less on the interests of its own people, and more on the interests of all humanity.

The cosmopolitan duty argument plays a prominent role in recent cosmopolitan thinking in philosophy. (7) It also underlies the charge of U.S. unilateralism, especially when the purported unilateralist action is the United States' refusal to ratify prominent global treaties. More broadly, the cosmopolitan duty argument is frequently made in conjunction with the national interest argument, even though the two arguments are analytically distinct. Often, the national interest argument is motivated by, and is a cover for, cosmopolitan duty concerns.

This essay critiques the cosmopolitan duty argument. My thesis is that underappreciated theoretical, practical, and moral factors limit the duty of liberal democracies to engage in cosmopolitan action. The institutions needed to make liberal democracy work cannot easily generate cosmopolitan action. The problem is not just the absence of democratic support for cosmopolitan policies. Constitutional and collective action hurdles, and other difficulties, constrain cosmopolitan action as well. Cosmopolitan argument must be bounded by institutional and moral constraints that arise in the domestic-democratic sphere. We cannot even have a coherent ideal of liberal democracies' cosmopolitan duties unless we understand these realistic limits on what liberal democracies can do.

I should emphasize at the outset that I do not claim that States are never other-regarding. Such a claim might be wrong, and in any event would be difficult to prove. Nor do I deny that States or other collective entities can be subjects of moral responsibility. My argument is more modest. It is that institutional and related hurdles make it very difficult for liberal democracies to engage in strong (i.e., nontrivial) cosmopolitan action, by which I mean (a) entering into treaties that cannot be justified on local welfare-enhancement grounds, and (b) engaging in humanitarian intervention that is costly to the intervening state in terms of money and lives.

One response to my argument is that if liberal democracies cannot generate strong cosmopolitan action, then we must search for new forms of domestic governance to better serve the ends of international justice. I will examine this claim below. But it is worth noting at the outset that many cosmopolitan theorists avoid this move. One reason why is that plausible superior alternatives to liberal democracy are hard to fathom. Another is that cosmopolitan theorists tend to believe that liberal democracy is the optimal form of domestic governance. Indeed, some claim that there is a conceptual link between liberal democracy and cosmopolitan duty, and that "the domestic aspect of cosmopolitanism is ... liberal democracy." (8) On the whole, cosmopolitan theorists try to have it both ways, maintaining a commitment to liberal democracy and insisting that liberal democracies should act with greater cosmopolitan regard. My argument is that these co-commitments cannot easily be reconciled.

This leaves us in the messy but real world: a world of stark inequality and manifest injustice between nations and peoples that the least bad form of domestic governance (liberal democracy) seems incapable of rectifying in a manner, and time frame, that many would like. The Article does not criticize the cosmopolitan stance per se, however, and does not conclude on this pessimistic note. Rather, the Article suggests ways that cosmopolitan sentiments can be more fully realized by being more realistic.

1. THE INSTITUTIONAL TURN IN COSMOPOLITAN THEORY

   The legal, policy, and philosophical literature is full of claims that the United States should act with greater cosmopolitan regard. The legal and policy literature rarely examines or defends the ascription of strong cosmopolitan duties to liberal democracies. The philosophical literature does, however.

   1. From Individual to Institutional Duties

      Cosmopolitan theory begins with the premise that every human being's life is equally valuable, regardless of group or national membership. Cosmopolitanism seeks to enhance attachments and duties to the community of all human beings, regardless of national or local affiliation, and to attenuate attachments and duties to the nation-state, fellow citizens, and local culture.

      Some believe that cosmopolitan premises require relatively well-off individuals to assist relatively non-well-off individuals, including noncompatriots. (9) In recent years, however, cosmopolitan theorists have begun to reject (or attenuate) the ascription of strong cosmopolitan duties to individuals. They have begun to argue instead that these duties are best viewed as attaching to domestic institutions (e.g., national governments) and, derivatively, to international institutions. The main reasons for this "institutional turn" are that cosmopolitan duties are too demanding for individuals, and that institutions can better achieve international social justice. In short, cosmopolitan theorists use "plausibility limitations" on individual duties as a basis for ascribing cosmopolitan duties to political institutions.

      Martha Nussbaum's recent work provides a clear example. Nussbaum claims that individuals are not capable of generating a "just global order through human psychology alone." (10) Why? Because human beings have an "imperfect and uneven" psychology, "emotions" that "link us to our own sphere of experience," and "critical skills" that are "often undermined from within by fear, haste, and selfishness, and subverted from without by misinformation, competition, and various forms of seduction." (11) In addition, "assigning responsibilities to people one by one is a recipe for a massive collection action problem, and for individual lives that are so consumed with figuring out who owes what to whom that there is no space left for either special duties or the enjoyment of life." (12)

      Nussbaum concludes from these limitations on individual human action that "institutions have to be a large part of the solution," particularly "on the global plane." (13) She writes that "[p]olitical institutions that embody a moral ideal can coerce morally adequate results in the absence of even a single perfect human being." (14) Institutions are also better able than individuals to solve collective action problems, and to ensure "fairness in the distribution of burdens." (15) Nussbaum proposes that national institutions create the following international institutions:

      [A] world court that would deal with grave human-rights violations; a set of world environmental regulations, plus a tax on the industrial nations of the North to support the development of pollution controls in the South; a set of global trade regulations that would try to harness the juggernaut of globalization to a set of moral...