PATERNALISM AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

Abstract

Abstract:Contemporary global governance is organized around an odd pairing: care and control. On the one hand, much of global governance is designed to reduce human suffering and improve human flourishing, with the important caveat that individuals should be allowed to decide for themselves how they want to live their lives. On the other hand, these global practices of care are also entangled with acts of control. Peacebuilding, public health, emergency aid, human rights, and development are expressions of this tension between care and control. There is a concept that captures this tension: paternalism. Drawing on our moral intuitions, I argue that paternalism is the attempt by one actor to substitute his judgment for another actor's on the grounds that such an imposition will improve the welfare of the target actor. After discussing and defending this definition, I note how our unease with paternalism seems to grow as we scale up from the interpersonal to the international, which I argue owes to the evaporation of community and equality. After exploring the implications of this definition and distinguishing it from other forms of intervention, I consider how different elements of paternalism combine to generate different configurations. Specifically, I point to five dimensions that are most relevant for examining the paternalism found in contemporary global and humanitarian governance: the tools used to restrict another actor’s liberty (force versus information); the scope of the interference (wide versus narrow); the purpose of the intervention (prevention of harm versus emancipation); the source of the paternalizer’s confidence (faith versus evidence); and the mechanisms of accountability (internal versus external). These different elements often correlate historically, suggestive of two ideal types of global paternalism: strong and weak. Contemporary global and humanitarian governance is largely the weak variety: force is severely proscribed, interference is relatively restricted, the paternalizer’s confidence has epistemic roots, and accountability to local populations remains a noble but rarely practiced goal. I further speculate that a major reason for this difference is the effects of liberalism and rationalization. I use this taxonomy to suggest how two different global efforts to improve the lives of those peoples living in what were perceived to be unstable and illiberal territories — the civilizing missions of the nineteenth century and the peacebuilding operations of the post-Cold War period — exhibited different kinds of paternalism. I conclude by reflecting on the ethics of international paternalism.