Henry: Nagel, Brettschneider, & Shelby

In "The Problem of Global Justice," Thomas Nagel provides a nice account that helps to differentiate certain liberal thinkers we have encountered throughout the semester.

Nagel outlines the differences between the cosmopolitan and political conceptions of justice. On the cosmopolitan conception, "the demands of justice derive from an equal concern or a duty of fairness that we owe in principle to all our fellow human beings" (Nagel 119). Because we have a duty of fairness to everybody regardless of their nationality, the duty of justice extends globally. On the political conception, "justice is something we owe through our shared institutions only to those with whom we stand in a strong political relation (Nagel 121). On this account, our duty of justice is contingent upon whether we have an "associative obligation" (Nagel 121) to someone. Consider our duty of care: we may say that I have a duty of care to my sister but not to Camille's sister. Likewise, we might say that I have a duty of justice to my fellow Americans but not to those in Rwanda (as Sambhav hinted at earlier in the semester). Thus, as Nagel writes, "morality is essentially multilayered" (Nagel 132).

Nagel himself asserts that "there are also noncontingent, universal relations in which we stand to everyone, and political justice is surrounded by this larger moral context" (Nagel 131). He defines the contents of these relations as "basic human rights against violence, enslavement, and coercion, and... the most basic humanitarian duties of rescue from immediate danger" (Nagel 131). According to Nagel, "those rights, if they exist, set universal and prepolitical limits to the legitimate use of power, independent of special forms of association" (Nagel 127). Brettschenider rejects any appeal to these kinds of prepolitical rights in an account of justice. He would dismiss Nagel's account of human rights as an epistemic theory that appeals to "a nondemocratic procedure-independent standard" (Brettschneider 19). Nagel in particular seems keen to appeal to Kantian accounts of morality, writing that "a criterion of universality of the Kantian type clearly supports [basic human rights]" (Nagel 131). According to Brettschneider, Nagel "must demonstrate that this standard is more fundamental than democracy" (Brettschenider 19). After all, Brettschenider writes that "some notions of divine justice might conflict with comprehensive Kantian theories, yet both might still be reasonable" (Brettschneider 19). According to Brettschenider, if we care about democracy, we cannot simply defer to Kant to settle our moral disputes (as much as Professor Hurley might want to).

Nagel also clarifies that "someone who accepts the political conception of justice may even hold that there is a secondary duty to promote just institutions for societies that do not have them" (Nagel 121). Tommie Shelby falls into this category. While Shelby largely subscribes to Rawls's political conception of justice, he also believes that certain natural duties hold outside of our civic obligations. Shelby touched on this in his discussion of work when he visited our class on Zoom. He writes that "the duty of justice is a moral requirement all are bound by. It demands, most fundamentally, that each of us respect and support just institutions, particularly those that lay claim to our allegiance and from which we benefit" (Shelby 57). Thus, Shelby believes that we have certain prepolitical duties that exist outside of our civic obligations, one of which is the duty of justice.

Thus, Nagel's account exposes the fault lines between a couple of different liberal thinkers we have studied. While Nagel, Shelby, and Brettschenider all embrace a "multilayered conception of morality" (Nagel 133), they diverge in regard to how we should understand the content of our basic human obligations.