By David Miller
I want to begin with a thought experiment proposed by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer in a much-cited article from the 1970s.[1] Singer asks the reader to imagine walking past a shallow pond and seeing a small child who has fallen in and is in danger of drowning. He assumes, and we would surely all agree, that the passer-by should jump into the pond and carry the child to safety even though this might ruin the clothes he or she was wearing. Indeed it would be morally wrong not to do so. Singer argues that this shows that we are committed to the following principle: ‘if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it’.
But Singer goes on to argue that accepting this principle would create for us quite demanding obligations towards people living in distant places. Suppose that rescuing the child would cost us £250 – the exact figure doesn’t matter – to replace the clothes that are now ruined. And then suppose that the following day an appeal letter arrives in the post asking you to donate £250 in order to save the life of a famine victim in a faraway place. (Bengal, experiencing a severe famine at the time, was the example Singer used.) Suppose there is no question that if you donate the money a life will be saved. Then, says Singer, you have as strong a moral obligation to write the necessary cheque as you had to pull the child out of the pond. The fact that the child is right there in front of you while the famine victim is thousands of miles away cannot make a moral difference – so long as it is within your power to save the life of the latter.
Most people, I believe, when presented with Singer’s two cases, are likely to disagree. They would willingly accept that in the case of the drowning child, there is indeed a strong moral obligation to go to the rescue, so long as the cost is moderate. Anyone who later reported that they had walked past a pond in which a child was drowning, but they had decided to save their new suit at the expense of the child, would rightly be severely blamed. But in the case of the famine victim, people are likely to say that while it would be a praiseworthy act of charity to send the money – and perhaps that everyone who could afford to do so should set aside a portion of their income for general charitable purposes – there was no obligation to donate in this specific case. It should be left to the person who receives the letter to decide.
But if we want to avoid being impaled on Singer’s hook, we have to be able to explain why the two cases are different. Singer is right about one thing: it can’t just be a matter of the physical distance that separates the vulnerable party from his or her potential saviour. But the distance matters nonetheless, because in the pond case it’s the fact that I directly confront the drowning child, together with the fact that there is no-one else around to help, that makes saving the child my responsibility. I have been singled out by physical circumstances as the person who bears the obligation to rescue, whereas in the famine case, the person I might save is one among millions, and I am also just one among millions who might write the necessary cheque if they chose. There has been no assigning of individual responsibility.
The pond case is actually quite exceptional, not only because most of us will pass our lives without ever being called on to perform a rescue of that kind, but also because here a responsibility is created instantaneously between two people who are otherwise strangers to each other. In the usual run of things, moral responsibilities arise out of ongoing relationships, such as those we have with family, friends, or work colleagues. We take it for granted that we owe them things that we don’t owe to people at large. The responsibilities are simply part and parcel of what it means to be a friend or colleague, or to belong to a family. Suppose, for example, that a friend calls you to say that it’s an emergency, his car has broken down and he needs to get to the airport at once: can you give him a lift? You would, I hope, feel obliged to do that for a friend, whereas you wouldn’t do that for a random stranger who asks you – or at least, it would be seen as a great favour, not something required of you, if you did.
It would be possible to dig a little deeper here and ask why our morality has this shape, why our moral responsibilities grow out of relationships in this way. But instead I want to investigate whether and how the story so far can be extended so as to include obligations to our compatriots. Because some critics will accept that relationships matter in the case of family members, friends and colleagues, but deny that the same applies to the millions of people who belong to our nation but whom we will never know or meet in person. Nations are what the sociologist Benedict Anderson called ‘imagined communities’ – we think of them as communities, but only because of what we learn indirectly about our compatriots, through the mass media in particular.[2]
If we ask what exactly it is that binds the members of a nation together, a short answer was given in a famous lecture by the French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan. According to Renan, speaking at the Sorbonne in 1882, two things make a nation: ‘One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form’.[3] There is more that could and should be added here, but Renan grasps the essential point: that nations exist by virtue of their members’ continuing will to live together, but also by virtue of the culture and other features that they share, including historical memories, that support that desire. This is what makes them into genuine communities and creates a range of emotional attachments – national loyalty, national pride, and so forth – that in turn provide the source from which special moral obligations to compatriots arise.
If we now ask about the content of these obligations, the answer is that in circumstances where the nation’s very existence is endangered – in time of war, especially – they become very extensive, and the cost of carrying them out potentially very great. But in more normal times, they are largely transformed into the obligations of a good citizen: obeying the law, paying taxes fairly, voting in elections, opposing the government when it is acting in ways that are harmful to fellow citizens, and so forth. To these we should add duties to help strengthen the nation when it is at risk of becoming fragmented, which include taking steps to integrate with others who do not share your race, ethnicity or religion.
The more heavily contested question is what is owed to outsiders, people who are not part of the national community. I began by explaining why Peter Singer’s view, that at a fundamental level we owe them exactly the same as we owe to our compatriots, is mistaken. The relationships that support national obligations do not exist globally. But at the same time it would be wrong to suppose that we have no such obligations at all. There are indeed universal obligations that we owe to people simply by virtue of their humanity. For some people, but not everyone, these will have a religious basis. But rather than delving more deeply into their source, I want to focus on their content.
The main point to make is that these universal obligations are mainly negative in character: in a broad sense, they are duties not to cause harm. We can begin with the more obvious of these obligations, such as duties not to kill, injure or abuse individual people, but then we should move beyond this to include duties not to take from people what is rightfully theirs (stealing their natural resources, for example), duties not to exploit (forcing them into one-sided trading relationships, for example), duties not to coerce (imposing forms of political authority without consent, for example), duties not to destroy the natural environment on which people depend for their livelihoods, and so on. It is important to list these duties, because what we can then see is that a world in which governments and the people that they serve took seriously the maxim, ‘cause no harm’ would be a very different world from the one we currently inhabit.
But are these negative duties, even if conscientiously fulfilled, sufficient? Is it enough to say that all we owe to people beyond our borders is to leave them alone to sort out their own lives without our unwanted interference? Well, sometimes we find that a special relationship exists with someone who is not a compatriot that requires us to take positive steps to provide a benefit or service. In fact, the example with which I began, rescuing a drowning child, illustrates the point. The duty of rescue is the same no matter what the nationality of the child. It would be monstrous to ask, ‘But is she British?’ before jumping into the pond. But in that case the special relationship created by urgency and physical proximity provides the explanation for the duty.
More often, the relationship that brings positive duties into play comes about in a different way. There may have been an explicit or implicit promise to provide certain forms of aid to an outside group. Some of us may remember the Kenyan Asian crisis of 1968, when the government was rightly criticized for attempting to deny entry to British passport holders who now found themselves threatened by a hostile government. By issuing them with passports, the British state was committing itself to providing the Kenyan Asians with protection in case of necessity, and in the circumstances this meant allowing them to immigrate to Britain. There may also be a duty to help those who have rendered services to the nation without being citizens – for example, the interpreters who supported British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and now find themselves endangered as a result. And there may also be duties of reparation – duties to repair damage caused by not respecting the negative duties outlined above in the first place.
Sometimes a convention may arise whereby states agree to provide each other’s citizens with certain forms of aid, and this can be seen as a form of mutual insurance against disaster. Today when countries are hit by earthquakes, tsunamis or extreme weather events, rescue teams are sent internationally to help the survivors, and although this wouldn’t be regarded as an enforceable duty, it would be regarded as a failure of reciprocity if a country with specialist teams and equipment simply refused to join in a rescue operation. We might expect to see this practice extended as climate change has its predicted effects. And although it is grounded in reciprocity, it goes a step beyond strict reciprocity, because, for example, even countries that are at no risk of experiencing earthquakes themselves will join in the practice and send rescuers when earthquakes strike elsewhere.
Then finally, we should acknowledge what Cicero once called ‘duties of liberality’. These are the duties that arise when it is possible to benefit someone else at virtually no cost to yourself. Cicero, from whom much of what I have said above could also be gleaned, gave as homely examples allowing someone take a light from your fire or water from your freely-flowing stream.[4] Today we might think of allowing others the opportunity to benefit from scientific knowledge or technical advances created by members of the nation. A country that refused to share such human achievements merely out of spite or in order to preserve its position of relative advantage would, I think, be behaving illiberally, in Cicero’s original non-partisan sense.
Even after we have recognized the several different ways in which positive duties to benefit those outside the nation may arise, it is still important to insist that there is no duty to create a universal welfare state. The special duties we have to compatriots and the general duties we have to human beings everywhere have a different character and different sources, and failing to notice the difference – trying to treat everyone as though they were already compatriots – is likely to have very bad consequences.
Despite everything that has been said so far, I can imagine an objection along the following lines: you have conceded that nations, which you have been treating as the source of special obligations, are ‘imagined communities’. So why cannot imagination be stretched so that humanity itself is seen as one enormous inclusive community? One reply to this is that the attempt to do so will always be insincere. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote scathingly about ‘supposed Cosmopolites’ who ‘justifying their love of the fatherland by means of their love of the human race, boast of loving everyone in order to have the right to love no one’.[5] But another reply is that even if it were possible to realise the cosmopolitan dream, we would be in danger of losing something of equal if not greater importance: our experience of human diversity, the richness that comes from living in a world of many contrasting cultures which depend for their survival on a certain degree of closure, each country taking steps to preserve its own distinctive way of life. As Isaiah Berlin once put it, ‘if the streams dried up, as, for instance, where men and women are not products of a culture, where they don’t have kith and kin and feel closer to some people than to others, where there is no native language – that would lead to a tremendous desiccation of everything that is human’.[6]
David Miller is an English political theorist. He is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Oxford and an Official Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. He previously lectured at the University of Lancaster and the University of East Anglia. He is the author of a number of publications, including Social Justice, On Nationality (Clarendon Press, 1995) and Citizenship and National Identity (Polity, 2000).
[1] P. Singer, ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1 (1972): 229–43.
[2] B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
[3] E. Renan, ‘What is a nation?’ in E. Renan, What is a nation?: and other political writings, trans. and ed. M. Giglioli (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 261.
[4] Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. Griffin and E. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 22.
[5] J.–J. Rousseau, The Social Contract and other later political writings, ed. V. Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 158.
[6] N. Gardels, ‘Two Concepts of Nationalism: An Interview with Isaiah Berlin’, New York Review of Books, 21 November 1991, p. 22.