The latest short interview at Philosophy Bites is with Anthony Appiah on the subject of cosmopolitanism (see also here). It's 15 minutes on a range of interesting topics, starting with a statement from Appiah on why it is important, morally, that as humans we share a common biology, and ending with the distinction he defends between the basic obligations we have to all human beings everywhere and our freedom, indeed entitlement, to care more about some people than others.
In this post I want to discuss a question Appiah touches on in the middle of the interview (start eight and a half minutes in): it concerns the extent of our obligations to distant others who need our help, people suffering, people in desperate straits. He rejects any maximizing moral approach to this issue. If you ask too much of those who are able to help, he says, it just won't work. They won't feel they can do that much. We should set our expectations at a level at which they are more likely to respond and do something effective; and that level is given by some notion of the basic needs that must be met in order for anyone to lead a decent life, rather than by the aspiration of securing the best possible thing for everyone.
I agree with the argument that morally too much should not be asked or expected of people. This is not only because asking too much won't work, though it won't. Sometimes a moral appeal has to be made even when you think it won't work. It can be that the moral appeal is all you have, the only hope, and doing or saying nothing at all would be a shameful response to a situation of urgency before you. Nonetheless, in terms of the general expectations we have of one another, to demand too much of people is to ask them to give up their own lives: not necessarily in the sense of being willing to die for others - though that risk may on occasion be what is needed in coming to the aid of others - but in the sense of being willing to sacrifice their personal aims, their concerns, their loves, their resources, their time. This is not a reasonable moral demand to make. Each person is entitled to some space for his or her own life; and, given the extent of the world's injustices and of human suffering, exorbitant moral demands, upon those who are in a position to do something for others in grave need or peril, are easy to put together. But each person can only do so much while continuing to lead a life that is meaningfully their own.
Yet how much is enough? Appiah says at one point that, in terms of the needs of others, we have certain baseline obligations and that they're quite demanding; he says, 'we should be doing more than we are'. I agree with that, too. I don't know if there's any precise way of answering the question of how much each of us owes morally to others, to humanity at large. But there are reasons for thinking that, even if you set the benchmark moral expectation, as Appiah wants it, in a non-maximizing way, many, possibly most, people will still fall short of it - as he concedes in a general way that we are falling short. The reasons why are not hard to find. The entirely legitimate concerns of nearly everyone are demanding enough - concerns about looking after themselves, about their families and others close to them, about work, children, rest, education (in the broadest sense), leisure, friends, illness - and the needs of distant strangers are, precisely, distant, while the sense of being able to make a difference is not always clearly perceived.
This provides the core rationale of what I'll call, for short, the 'socialist' idea, going on to explain what I mean by it. This idea is that morality is not enough. (In wrong-headed versions of the idea, that claim is put more strongly to say that morality is irrelevant. But the stronger claim is wrong.) Morality is not enough, it is necessary but not sufficient, because the extent of possible human need may always outstrip the uncoordinated results of individual moral effort, leaving some to live lives of unrelenting misery or hardship, others to die unrescued, or what have you. The socialist idea is that we, as a community, renounce this state of affairs, that we sign up to a code according to which people do not die unrescued or live lives of penury, so far as we can help it.
The commitment is to forms of public intervention - by the community, by states, and now, on a global scale, by the institutions of world governance - in order to ensure that each person's entitlement to a basic minimum of respect for their rights and provision for their needs is met. Whether this should take social-democratic forms that merely moderate the political economy of capitalism, or should be based on models of socialist economy conceived as supplanting capitalism altogether, is a controversy I do not go into here. But the commitment in any case involves an interventionist public ethic and not just an unrestrained capitalism and the spontaneous moral efforts of (mostly) self-interested individuals.
Most of us know the experience of being able to do more when we have bound ourselves to do it by some will-strengthening device or mechanism and being able to do more when we act in concert with others. Ensuring that everyone on this planet has what they need to lead a decent life according to their lights is an enterprise worthy of our species, a moral goal to be reinforced by a worldwide political commitment.