partiality will benefit some children more than others, and, likewise, partiality
towards compatriots will disadvantage some individuals relative to others – for
example, Swedes in relation to Somalis.
In his book Equality and Partiality(1991), Nagel is pessimistic about resolving
this problem, but his argument about sovereignty does suggest a way forward. He
advocates dualism against monism: in this context a dualist is someone who argues
that morality has more than one level while the monist maintains that there is but
one level (dualism is not in fact the best term because there may be more than two
levels) (Nagel, 1991: 122). Political institutions, Nagel argues, create ‘contingent,
selective moral relations, but there are also noncontingent, universal relations in which
we stand to everyone, and political justice is surrounded by this larger moral context’
(1991: 131). Those universal relations are equivalent to the duties owed by parents
to all other parents (and their children) and take the form of respect for the ‘most
basic human rights against violence, enslavement, and coercion, and of the most basic
humanitarian duties of rescue from immediate danger’ (Nagel, 1991: 131).
Nagel advances an interesting response to the charge that national boundaries
are morally arbitrary. Cosmopolitans pick up on a point made by Rawls in A Theory
of Justicein which he argues that a person’s native endowments – intelligence,
physical strength, good character – are from a moral standpoint arbitrary and
should not determine the distribution of natural resources. If a person’s natural
abilities and resources should not affect distribution between citizens of a state then
why should it be thought legitimate for a state to benefit from its natural resources?
Indeed, given the role that natural abilities play in a person’s sense of their identity
it seems more legitimate for individuals to benefit from the exploitation of those
abilities than for nations to be advantaged. Having huge gas reserves may have
done wonders for Russian self-confidence but possession of those reserves is not
essential to Russian identity. Nagel argues that Rawls’s objection to arbitrary
inequalities only has force because of the societal context: ‘what is objectionable is
that we should be fellow participants in a collective enterprise of coercively imposed
legal and political institutions that generate such arbitrary inequalities’ (Nagel,
1991: 128).Justice between generations
We have discussed the distribution of resources between peoples across national
boundaries, but there is another dimension to global justice: distribution between
generations over time. In everyday political debate this is most often raised in the
context of resource depletion and population growth. In Chapter 16 we discussed
Garrett Hardin’s ‘lifeboat ethics’: Hardin argued that the world’s population was
increasing at a rate which threatened the possibility of anything approaching a decent
life for future generations. His concerns dovetailed with arguments over international
aid: the human right to procreate and liberal migration policies were to blame
for dangerous population growth. Sen also discusses population growth but argues
that the key to slowing growth is to empower women, and once again this shows
that politics matters: we need to grant people political rights and ensure the
spread of democracy if we are to tackle economic problems (Sen, 1999: 211–13).496 Part 4 Contemporary ideas