Articles by Robert Jubb

Panel at the ECPR General Conference, Reykjavik, 25-27 August 2011. Abstract below. Paper proposals to be submitted online through the ECPR website by 1st February 2011. Please contact Avia Pasternak, University of Essex (aviap@essex.ac.uk) or Rob Jubb, University College London (r.jubb@ucl.ac.uk), or see the ECPR website ()http://www.ecprnet.eu/conferences/general_conference/Reykjavik/) for further details.

This panel invites normatively-focused papers on the nature of participation and complicity in global injustices. Almost all global injustices that concern scholars of international political theory today - from the environment crisis, to unfair international trade conventions, exploitative global labour chains, and global economic injustice more generally - are of a collective nature: they are wrongs that are created and maintained by the coordinated and uncoordinated actions and omissions of individual and collective agents across the globe. Indeed, according to tne common line of argument, the way to identify the agents who are most responsible and liable for these and other global injustices is by focusing on patterns of participation in them: e.g. the participation of individuals and states in an unjust global basic structure, or the contributions of corporations and individual consumers in developed countries to exploitative labour conditions in developing countries. It may well be the case that patterns of participation in global injustices should play a central role in determining which agents are responsible to resolve these injustices, as well as the scope of their responsibility. However, patterns of participation in global injustices are extremely varied and complex. Individuals and collectives may be participating in activities which indirectly lead to unjust outcomes without their knowledge; they may end up being involved in injustices committed by others simply by virtue of sharing certain institutions with them. Their participation is often coerced or at least unavoidable. These empirical facts raise questions about the nature of participation in global injustices, and about the responsibilities and liabilities that different types of participation generate. For example, are citizens of developed states equally responsible and liable for all of their governments’ unjust acts towards developing states? Can collectives other than states be agents of global injustice? Which ones, and in what different ways? And how do responsibility and liability get assigned to their members? We invite papers that address these and related questions on the nature of participation and complicity in global injustices.

Sen’s purpose in this comparatively short chapter seems to be to draw a distinction between principles of justice that focus on institutions and those that focus on behaviour and so on consequences, and then condemn “institutionally fundamentalist” principles for failing to take account of what actually happens. This distinction is supposed to be illuminated or perhaps even typified by a contrast Sen begins the chapter with, between the policies of two figures from Indian history, Ashoka and Kautilya. Ashoka, having seen at firsthand the horrors of coercion and violence during a campaign to extend his empire, apparently renounced the normal means of exercising power and instead exhorted his subjects to behave virtuously in a way that Sen reads as showing that he equated moral knowledge and moral motivation in a rather simplistic way. Indeed, as Sen notes, part of the reason that the political order did not totally collapse once Ashoka gave up on enforcing his will through force seems to have been that the administrative reforms implemented by his grandfather’s advisor, Kautilya, had a life of their own. The idea appears to be that focussing on institutions exhibits Ashoka’s utopian idealism about the possibility of spontaneous moral reform whereas focussing on behaviour and its consequences is more like Kautilya’s pragmatic acceptance of human fallibility.

This contrast though, is a different one from the one between institutions and consequences as the relevant units of moral assessment. Since, as Sen makes clear, Kautilya’s reforms were institutional reforms, it could hardly be the same one. The reason for this is that what one thinks are the relevant units of moral assessment and how one thinks about the possibilities for human motivation are two, perhaps related, but nonetheless clearly distinct questions. Blain I think has already mentioned that Sen’s reading of Rawls in this kind of area may not be entirely sympathetic, but there seem to me other cases where this claim borders on the bizarre. Hobbes, for example, is in Sen’s typology an institutionally-focused theorist, as his focus on the figure of the Sovereign presumably justifies. Yet Hobbes is clearly not of the view that human moral motivation can be improved by moral education in anything like the way that Sen presents Ashoka as being. A focus on institutions rather than behaviour or consequences in stating principles of justice may be for a number of reasons. One is that institutions provide and in a certain sense are stable patterns of coordinated behaviour enforced through sanctions, and so can constrain human behaviour in ways that ensure that it remains within at least an acceptable set of outcomes. This, for example, seems to be Hobbes’ reasoning. Not only does that depend on views of human behaviour that Sen at least implies are anathema to institutionally-focussed theorists and so demonstrate the failure of his attempt to align views of human behaviour with the focus of principles of justice, but it also casts doubt on the way that Sen wants to exclude institutional theorists from having a concern with consequences.

This is, on Sen’s account, not a symmetrical exclusion. Theories which focus on realization may take account of the ways in which the consequences they are supposed to be focussing on are produced; the means to these ends can be incorporated into their assessment. The effect of this definition is to make the struggle that institutionally-focussed theories face more difficult by allowing their opponents access to all the resources they can draw on without any parallel expansion of the tools they can make use of. The way Hobbes, though, thinks about the value of institutions is clearly dependent on their consequences. It is not clear that the consequences have any existence independent of the institutions - part of Hobbes’ case is clearly that the only way out of the State of Nature is through a near-absolute sovereign - but neither is it as if the institutions have virtues independent of the production of those consequences.

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