Richard Vernon: Cosmopolitan Regard: Political Membership and Global Justice

Abstract

We live in a time of ‘‘cosmopolitan regard,’’ when there is widespread acknowledgement that every person has moral importance. At the same time, most of us affirm and practice particular regard for our family, friends and compatriots, despite knowing that in our contemporary world, every day, many people, in many places, are treated like nothing. Are cosmopolitan and particular regard fated to be irreconcilable features of our moral lives? Are the grounds for our moral duties to our fellow citizens fundamentally different from, and potentially in conflict with, the grounds of our moral duties to others with whom we share no political association? What is required in the way of political morality by cosmopolitan regard? Does it require symmetry between our particular and universal obligations? Under what conditions may asymmetrical accounts of obligation be justified? Richard Vernon’s book makes an elegant contribution to debates in contemporary political philosophy about the moral basis of our political societies and its implications for the duties we have to those who fall outside of our associative universes of belonging. One of those implications that should interest readers of this journal is that the legitimacy of our particular regard for the members of our own bounded political associations is conditional on making good faith efforts to fulfill our cosmopolitan regard for outsiders, including the establishment of an international criminal justice system to hold accountable those who pervert state power and commit crimes against humanity. Vernon adopts a contractualist framework for thinking about the justification and legitimacy of our particular political associations. The idea of a social contract in the history of political philosophy has served the functions of explaining and justifying the state and political association, the basis of political obligation, as well as the scope and content of principles of justice, or what claims members of a political society can legitimately make on one another. Two quite divergent positions regarding the content and scope of our moral duties may be generated by appeal to the social contract idea. Contractarianism (Hobbes 1994; Gauthier 1986) is committed to viewing agreement between rational, self-interested persons seeking mutual advantage through social cooperation as