Equal Respect in Political and Economic Associations

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I argued that coercion accounts fail to provide compelling reasons to believe that duties of distributive justice to non-compatriots are either less weighty or less demanding in content than duties to compatriots. Now, some philosophers who affirm that duties of justice are owed to persons across state borders base their view on an account of justice that takes its requirements to be largely uniform between persons and not affected by their membership in political or economic associations. Others maintain, on the contrary, that membership affects the requirements. Call this thesis membership dependence. Membership dependence holds that the requirements of justice between persons are affected by associational membership either because the content of the duties is in some part membership dependent, or because the strength of the duties is. Membership dependence is affirmed by some egalitarian liberals as a pivotal thesis in an argument in defense of the claim that duties of distributive justice to non-compatriots are not egalitarian, even though duties to compatriots are. Call this non-compatriot non-egalitarianism. Coercion accounts are versions of non-compatriot non-egalitarianism. One strategy for rejecting non-compatriot non-egalitarianism is to reject membership dependence.KeywordsDistributive JusticeMoral DutyEconomic AssociationPolitical AssociationGlobal JusticeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.