Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy

Liberalism has difficulty with the fact of state borders. Liberals are, on the one hand, committed to moral equality, so that the simple fact of humanity is sufficient to motivate a demand for equal concern and respect. Liberal principles, on the other hand, are traditionally applied only within the context of the territorial state, which seems to place an arbitrary limit on the range within which liberal guarantees will apply. This difficulty is particularly stark in the context of distributive justice; state boundaries, after all, often divide not simply one jurisdiction from another, but the rich from the poor as well. Allowing these boundaries to determine distributive shares seems to place an almost feudal notion of birthright privilege back into the heart of liberal theory.¹

This difficulty has led many philosophers to argue that some revision of liberal theory is necessary. These proposals frequently involve either the demand that liberalism focus on previously neglected particularistic commitments, or the demand that it abandon such local concerns and endorse a cosmopolitan vision of distributive justice. What I want to do in this article is identify a different way in which liberalism might deal with the worries created by the fact of state borders. My argument is that a globally impartial liberal theory is not incompatible with distinct principles of distributive justice applicable only within the national context. This is true, however, not because we care more about our fellow countrymen than we do about outsiders, but because the political and legal institutions we share at the national level create a need for distinct forms of justification. A concern with relative economic shares, I argue, is a plausible interpretation of liberal principles only when those principles are applied to individuals who share liability to the coercive network of state governance. Such a concern is not demanded by liberal principles when individuals do not share such links of citizenship. What a principle demands changes depending upon the context in which it is applied; that we owe distinct things to fellow nationals need indicate not partiality toward those nationals, but rather a more sophisticated understanding of what impartiality really demands.

In making this argument, I appeal both to John Rawls's theory of justice and to a principle of autonomy I believe underlies contractarian theories such as Rawls's. I do not think that the usefulness of what I say here depends upon the wholehearted acceptance of either of these; I use Rawls's theory as an egalitarian one amenable to the approach I defend, but nothing in my strategy prevents its use by those more opposed to Rawlsian theorizing. The strategy I employ seeks to endorse the idea that we can defend principles of sufficiency abroad and principles of distributive equality at home—because these principles can be understood as distinct implications of impartial principles in distinct institutional contexts. That is, the solution of the difficulty noted above is to be found not in a search for justified partiality, but in the interpretation of impartiality itself. Or so, at any rate, I argue. As a way of introducing my argument to this effect, I will introduce three distinctions.

I. Three Preliminary Distinctions

Relative and Absolute Deprivation

We can begin by noting that there are two quite different ways of evaluating the moral status of someone's bundle of resource holdings. We could, in the first case, look simply at that bundle in isolation from those held by others. In some situations, this sort of analysis seems sufficient to demonstrate that something morally problematic has occurred. If someone faces a situation of drastic poverty and deprivation, and we are confident that her situation is created or remediable by human agency, then it seems we might be able to articulate a moral duty toward that person—without yet looking at how her bundle stacks up to those of others. The moral shortfall of her situation is found simply in how little she has, not in how much less she has than others.

The analysis of poverty often takes this form. We can understand such an analysis of a bundle of...