Livia: Nagel on Responsibility

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Thomas Nagel’s The Problem of Global Justice considers the limits of distributive justice on a global scale. One key idea that Nagel speaks to is the notion of responsibility. Nagel claims that each individual in a society is given a role in the “collective life” of a society (129). Such a role imposes upon individuals both a responsibility for society’s actions and a responsibility to obey law and conform to norms. Thus, if a society creates certain inequal circumstances, we are collectively responsible for such a scenario. Due to this responsibility, individuals must ask themselves whether they should accept society’s actions. Typically, this active engagement by individuals has a moral component (129).

The demands which citizens place upon the state and vise vera create the positive obligation of justice. Critical to Nagel’s political conception, however, is that these obligations “reach no father than the demands do” (130). Of course, individuals posses a “minimal humanitarian morality” that governs how we regard others. However, this standard does not ask for individuals to make others ends their own, but relieve them from extreme threats or obstacles to their freedom (131). Further, human rights, Nagel argues, create an additional obligation upon individuals to do something. These human rights, however, do not impose a duty of distributive justice upon individuals. In totality, individuals obligations are most fervently to the society they are governed under. Their responsibilities typically do not take a global level.

I find Nagel’s presentation of responsibility quite troubling. It appears to him, that beyond grand human rights violations, individuals (and societies) have no global obligation to help establish distributive justice in other societies/countries. However, many societies and individuals[1] are complicit in create distributive injustices within other countries in the first place. For example, consider the country of Belgium and their history of colonialism in Rwanda. Not only did the Belgian people exercise massive human rights violations against the Hutu and Tutsi people, emphasizing the stratification between the two groups that would later lead to genocide, but they also completely transformed the self-providing, agriculture based society into a market agricultural system that focused on the privatization of land and efficacy of forced labor. Such an economy implemented large scale cash cropping, with an emphasis on the production of coffee and vegetables. This focus on large scale cash crops largely impacted Rwanda’s economy when coffee prices collapsed in the late 1980s, strongly hurting their economy. Given the large role that Belgium played in creating inequality at a social and economic level within Rwanda, it is hard to believe that Belgium does not have a responsibility to rectify such harm. This rectification must go beyond the mere secondary obligation of calling out human rights violations that Nagel proposes.

 

 

 


[1] There is a distinction between individual and collective responsibility. But, the lack of a global obligation remains true for them both.

Comments

  1. Ella SmithApril 27, 2023 at 12:42 AM

    Super interesting post, Livia. I think that Rwanda is an excellent example for demonstrating how human rights violations are often tied into less distinct violations of justice, which is essential to understanding Nagel's account. However, I think Nagel would have an answer to your question on whether or not Belgium would have to rectify the harm imposed through their manipulation of Rwanda's agricultural economy. In providing an account of the constraints on a sovereign power, Nagel claims that, "People engaged in a legitimate collective enterprise deserve respect and noninterference... So respect for the autonomy of other societies can be thought of as respect for the equality of peoples, taken as moral units in their own right" (135). When referring to autonomy, Nagel is referring to "allow[ing] [individuals], and to some degree enabl[ing] them, to collectively help themselves" (135). Thus, Nagel would likely say that Belgium's economic manipulation of Rwanda's agricultural economy did not respect Rwanda's autonomy as a society, and therefore this act actually was a human rights violation.

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