Political Epistemic Moral
Duties
Bachelor Thesis on how to effectively stop
enabling institutions to harm the Global Poor
Charles Battaglini (10360069)
GLOBAL JUSTICE BACHELORPROJECT: POLITICAL SCIENCE, 2014-2015
Lecturer: dr. Luara Ferracioli
18-01-2015
Bachelor Political Sciences
Introduction
In 2009 at the Stanford University Robert Sapolsky stated, the following1: ‘[…] at the end
of the day, it is really impossible for one person to make a difference. And thus the more clearly, absolutely, utterly, irrevocably, unchangeably clear it is that it is impossible for you to make a difference and make the world better, the more you must. You guys are educated you are privileged, you are well connected, you are enormously lucky if you are sitting here at this juncture and thus what I means is, there is nobody out there who is in a better position to be able to contain a contradiction like this for your entire life and use it as a moral imperative. So do it! And good luck and have good life in the process!’
But how to solve this contradiction, how can we apply to our moral duty and have a good life in the process? When we see the state of our world, when we see the poverty, the harm, the death and the contradiction in our life. When we see all the work that should be done, how can we change the world and lead a good life in the process? How can we improve the world when we hear the scream of those who have everything while the dying remains silent and far away? Isn’t it far simpler and far better and far easier to stay in our carapace of wealth, cry a good time when we get hit by terrorism and the effect of poverty, hit back and retreat to our shell?
Recently, I was approached by someone asking me to give money for animals. I answered him that I already gave money to three charity organizations. However, couldn’t I give more money? Shouldn’t I dedicate my life to fulfill my moral imperative of bettering the world? But how would I have a good life in the process? And is it enough to give everything you have when millions of people sustain the harm done to the Global Poor? Who is accountable, who has the ideas, who has the solution?
In this thesis I will try to solve Sapolsky’s contradiction, I will prove that we can fulfill our moral obligations and that we can in the meantime have a happy life. In the first part I will define the concepts, show the problems we face, after which I will propose a solution. I will state that the most cost efficient way to improve the world is to vote in order to stop harmful institutions. Later I will discuss some critics and show that voting isn’t enough, that some people are required to do more. That the ones who have the networks, the knowledge, the education have a more stringent duty to act in order to make the world better.
Concepts
I will begin this thesis by clarifying the concepts. The first concept to clarify is the “global poor”, although some people find it very clear; I will still define this concept to avoid possible confusion. Following the universal declaration of human rights we might define a poor individual as one who does not have access “to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care”2. On
the other hand there are us, the global ‘rich’. I define us as the citizens living in rich Western democracies. There are two important things to note about this definition that are essential for the rest of my argument. Firstly, I only include citizens of a liberal good working democracy in the term ‘us’ or ‘we’, who share a collective responsibility for what their government does in their name3. However, citizens who are excluded of voting, like children or patients with mental
disabilities, would be excluded as well from moral obligations in this paper. However being poor in liberal democratic country does in no way exempt the actor from moral obligations. I state this for two reasons. Firstly, poor people in Western countries often possess some basic protection that is enough to protect their human rights. Secondly, I will state further that the accomplishment of human duties isn’t bound to financial ability. Most important is that those people have the possibility to act morally (this comes with the assumption that people are moral agents and can act morally) and to vote.
The second bundle of concepts that is important to define is Fulfillment, Non-fulfillment and violation of human rights. Human rights violations involve both the non-fulfillment of a human right and a certain causal responsibility of human agents for this non-fulfillment.
2 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, G.A. Res. 217A (III), art. 25, U.N. Doc. A/RES.217(III) (Dec. 10, 1948). http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/b1udhr.htm
3 Pogge, 2011: 1 and Miller, 2008: 384-386. Although Pogge shortly discuss the point of national responsibility, David Miller have written a much more extensive and in depth article about it. He shows in his article National responsibility and global justice (2008) that peoples are responsible for the policies implemented by their governments. He adds that in order to be responsible peoples should have their human rights protected. But he states that citizens of a theocracy, which rights aren’t violated, are, just as citizens of democratic countries, responsible for their governments (384-386). However I think that people, in order to be made accountable should have an direct way to influence policies, by choosing their representative. People like Manin, which we will discuss later, states that we don’t have real de iure ways to determine which policies will be chosen in a representative democracy. But even if he is correct I think having a real influence is enough, even if at the end voting perhaps won’t determine policies it will have a real influence. However in theocracy this influence is much more restricted. But this is a discussion for another paper.
Following the conceptualization of Thomas Pogge I state that human rights can give humans four distinct kind of duties: ‘duties to respect human rights, duties to protect (secure access to the objects of) human rights, duties to provide (secure access to) the objects of human rights, and duties to facilitate human rights fulfillment’.4 However there is also the duty not to contribute to
human right violations. Human right violations are in his terms: ‘crimes actively committed by particular human agents who should be identified and then be persuaded to change their ways or else stopped’.5
According to him we should not make a distinction if human rights are violated by institutions or by humans. In both case there is a crime that is committed and should be stopped. If we have the power to stop those crimes but we let those violations happen we fail to fulfill our duty to protect. However, he states that we do not only fail to protect but we also contribute to harm ‘There exists a supranational institutional regime that foreseeably produces massive and reasonably avoidable human rights deficits. By collaboratively imposing this severely unjust institutional scheme, we are violating the human rights of the world‘s poor’.6 So we are all
accountable for human rights violations done to the Global Poor.
The violation of human rights to which we contribute with our institutions can be compared to slavery. Slavery is a violation of human rights, the direct actors responsible for those violations were slave owners, and they did the beating and exploiting of human lives. The slave-owners can be compared to dictators today. They are directly responsible for harming human lives. However, the fact that slave-owner could treat slaves the way they did was only because of institutions, because of the fact that slavery was legalized. Today institutions enable dictators in the same way to violate human rights. However, citizens with the right to vote were culpable for maintaining the institutions that enabled slavery. Nowadays it is the same. We are still culpable for the sustaining of laws that harm the global poor, so we are culpable for harming the global poor.
There are several questions that arise with the last statement. Firstly. What are those institutions? Pogge sums up several rules, laws and trade agreements made by western countries that harm the global poor by sustaining dictators, and giving them an unfair economic disadvantage. The second question is: are we really harming the global poor or do they do it themselves? Some people adhere to the Domestic Poverty Thesis, which states that the persistence of severe poverty has purely local causes. In another paper, Pogge rejects this theory
4 Pogge, 2011: 8
5 Pogge, 2011: 18 6 Pogge, 2011: 20
by stating that, although domestic factors indeed contribute to the persistence of severe poverty, those contributions depend on features of the global institutional order.7 The following question
could be to what degree global institutions contribute to harming the global poor. Even though I think they contribute in a huge way, this question is irrelevant to this paper. If we contribute to the violation of human rights we should stop, it doesn’t matter whether we are contributing to starvation a little bit or a lot. Either way we are contributing to the death and suffering of people. Agents like dictators in those countries who could contribute a great deal should be held morally accountable, but so should we. The point is that all kind of contribution, no matter how small they are, are a violation of human right and a morally reprehensible crime. So I will not focus on the question how much we contribute to harm, but only on the question how should we stop this contribution.
What to do?
Pogge states that we should abolish those harmful institutions. In a democracy the opinion of citizens clearly matters, they also have a direct way to choose the policymakers and to punish them when they fail to apply their promises. However, Pogge states that ordinary citizens lack the resources to really change those institutions that are harming the global poor.8 His
solution is for citizens of rich western democracy to compensate for a share of the harm by supporting effective international agencies or nongovernmental organizations. In other words, he states that we can contribute to harm if we compensate for the harm we have inflicted9.
It seems that there is some intuitive problem with this solution. The solution of Pogge can again be looked at with the slavery analogy. It is comparable to authorizing slavery with the only difference that we repay all the harm that is done to slaves. However if we don’t abolish slavery, slave owners will only continue to buy and harm new slaves. We can give all our money to poorer countries so they can buy food, but if we don’t stop dumping our products and food in that region, the money is just going to come back to Western rich countries. We can support NGO’s that try to free political prisoners all we want, there will only be new prisoners if we sustain our support to regimes that violate human rights. We can give peoples all the resources we want, their rights will still be violated if we don’t change our institutions. Pogge is only curing the symptoms of poverty without curing the disease.
7 Pogge, 2007: 12
8 Pogge, 2011: 24 9 Pogge, 2011: 32
Beside that we also begin to harm ourselves. By working to compensate for the harm done while we still contribute and harm the global poor we end up harming ourselves. If we try to fully compensate for the harm done, each household should in Pogge’s view give 2.9% of her incomes to the Global Poor in order to eradicate severe poverty10. However, if we maintain harm
done by institutions the 2.9% won’t be enough to eradicate severe poverty because in the meantime we maintain severe poverty. So it would be much more costly to eradicate poverty and if we maintain the 2.9% level, it is like throwing some part of our incomes away which we can’t use again, which means we inflict some minor harm to ourselves.
Thirdly, Pogge states that we should support effective international agencies and non-governmental organizations. The problem here is that it is very difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of such organizations and there are as many agencies as there are problems. Beside that there are a lot of NGO’s that solve problems for which we aren’t accountable, like a volcanic eruption. Finally there is also the possibility that because international agencies benefit from third world problems they won’t solve them effectively so these would still be necessary for us to comply with our moral obligations. So how should we choose what NGO’s we support and how do we ensure that they won’t create more harm than good?
Voting as an solution.
I argue for another solution. Because we live in a democracy and because we have political autonomy, we should use this autonomy to abolish those institutions. Pogge treated this possibility but he quickly rejected it, which he did too quickly in my opinion. Pogge firstly states that ordinary citizens find it prohibitively costly to acquire the necessary expertise and to form alliances to rival corporate influences that defend harmful laws and institutions.11 Here he omits
to note that we have political parties with the knowledge and the will to spend time in order to change those institutions. Ordinary citizens won’t be required to acquire knowledge and form alliances; they only have the duties to vote for the political parties that want to abolish those institutions.
Later Pogge acknowledges the power of voting, even though he still excuses the citizens who feel powerless and even though he seems to understand that citizen thus may reject the responsibility for the persistence of poverty. He also states that this excuse doesn’t apply to the majority of citizens, because they simply don’t prioritize the world poverty problem, so they
10 Pogge, 2011: 32
don’t pressure their government to change policies that enable harm to the global poor.12 This
argument doesn’t hold for two reasons. First of all this argument fails since we are not talking about what people do, but about the moral duties for citizens of democratic countries. So we aren’t speaking about what they are doing but about what they should do!13 Pogge states that
American voters aren’t willing to vote against harmful institutions, so we shouldn’t try to solve the problem by voting.14 However American households also don’t give 2.9% of their incomes to
protect the Global Poor. So if we conclude that people will always act like they now do, neither Pogge’s solution nor mine is effective.
There is a second argument why Pogge’s criticism about voting doesn’t stand, that is related to Pogge’s conclusion about our moral duties. Namely, he concludes that people should compensate for the harm they have done to the global poor. However, since people don’t think global poverty is important enough to ask politician to stop sustaining harmful institutions, why would they think global poverty is important enough to sacrifice a part of their wealth for the global poor? An answer could be that the criticism expressed earlier only applies to a group of the citizens, while the duty to compensate can be applied to individual agents. I retort to this by stating that one citizen can’t solve the world poverty and that to do so would be so prohibitively costly for one person that he or she may feel powerless and reject the responsibility to do so.
Contrary to Pogge I state that voting to pressure political parties so they change harmful institutions isn’t too demanding, so people can’t evade this responsibility with this argument. Secondly I think voting in order to abolish harmful institution is an effective way to fulfill our negative duties. Because that way we effectively stop harming the global poor instead of compensating them. We abolish slavery instead of merely giving slaves food and shelter.
Republican and Libertarian view on voting
They are two other important way of looking at civic duties in the moral philosophy that are relevant for this discussion, the republican way and the libertarian way of Jason Brennan. Beside these two positions there is the position that voters don’t have any real influence on
12 Pogge, 2011: 31
13 The question of how should we reach this is also important. I’m writing about a realistic ideal, but we shouldn’t stop at the creating of an ideal, we should try to implement it. But how can we change human behavior, how can we teach people to act morally. I think education and empathy have a great role in this, people should learn to look from the point of another, to look from the point of view of the Global Poor. But the question how we reach the ideal is a thesis in itself, so it is a good subject from further researches.
policy, this view is held by the French philosopher Bernard Manin. We will first look at the republican opinion about those moral duties, then the critics of Jason Brennan and finally we will debate on the question whether voting is enough to stop violating the rights of the Global Poor.
The Republican tradition of civic duty is an important one. According to Will Kymlicka there are two camps in modern civic republicanism. First the Aristotelian camp that sees civic virtue as intrinsically valuable for the participant, and secondly the instrumental view that sees political participation as necessary for our democratic institutions. Both parties could accept voting as a moral duty, but for reasons other than the one I endorse.15 The republican sees
voting as a positive act. Either because it is the human nature or because it is necessary to sustain our democratic system. I, however, see voting as a negative duty not to impeach harm, so voting isn’t, in my view, an intrinsic duty needed to do good, it is to impeach harm. In other words, in a perfect world with only democratic regimes who protect human rights, republicans would still argue that individuals should be politically active, whereas in my view, there won’t be any harmful institutions which we should stop so there wouldn’t be any duty to be politically active.
Libertarian critics.
In his book, The Ethics of Voting, Jason Brennan argues for an extrapolitical view on civic virtue. He defines civic virtue as what makes one a good member of a community. He adds to this that civic virtue requires that one engages in activities that contribute to the common good.16
Civic virtue isn’t the same as human duties; however Brennan’s argument which he uses for extrapolitical civic duties can also be used against political human obligations. His criticism is more directed towards the duty to vote than towards the duty to act morally. In other words, we are not debating the content of the common good but the way we achieve it. Through voting or through another way.
Anyway, Brennan’s position is that voting can sometimes be an obstacle to the common good instead of improving it. He distinguishes several arguments in favor of a political definition of civic duty; the he rejects them and shows why his extrapolitical view is better. First he discusses the Public Good argument that relies on a notion of debt to the society that should be repaid, by being politically active. This argument states that a good working society is a common good. So each citizen of that society should contribute, or repay what they have gained by being
15 Kymlicka, 2002: 294
politically active. However, the discussion here isn’t about repaying some common good, it is about stopping harm. But we can reverse the argument, by instead of starting with a common good, a good working world system, which we have to repay for; we start with an imperfect world, a world system with harmful institutions, for which we have to pay in order to make it a common good. We can make a little analogy with the tram. Brennan starts with a world in which we already have the tram and we have to pay to maintain it, I start in a world without the tram in which we have to pay to create it.
So the question relevant to both situations is: how do we pay? Brennan firstly argues that lots of people support the common good without being politically active.17 He uses the example
of Phyllis the Physician. Phyllis is a genius who is on the verge of creating a remedy for, let’s say, Ebola. Everyone would agree that Phyllis compensates a lot for the harm done to the global poor. Even if our institutions still harm the global poor by extracting resources from them and forcing them to live in poor sanitarian conditions, Phyllis’ invention will still benefit the global poor and diminish the harm done to them, because even if the sanitarian conditions are poor they will survive Ebola thanks to the new medicine.
Secondly he argues that there is some opportunity cost to voting.18 Let’s say Phyllis made
his discovery on the same day he could have voted. In addition to this let’s imagine that if Phyllis had left his invention to vote, it would immediately have rotten, and years of labor would have been destroyed. So the choice was either to vote or to create his new medicine. In this case the cost for the global poor of Phyllis’ voting would have been way bigger than the opportunities.
Pogge could have seen the creation of the medicine as a big enough compensation for the harm done to Global Poor. However even if Phyllis’ medicine compensates for a lot of harm done, Phyllis will still be harming the global poor afterwards. Firstly because the patent laws could impeach the global poor the access the reasonably priced medicine, the patent wouldn’t reach them. But even if Phyllis will distribute the patent freely, Ebola isn’t the only harm done. Institutions enable corruption, famine, dictators etc… It would be too strong to state that Phyllis failed to fulfill his duty to protect the Global Poor. He actually had no time to vote and if he had voted his whole medicine would be destroyed. In such a case it is justifiable if Phyllis doesn’t vote. However if Phyllis had taken a break to make a walk in the park and had walked by a voting station, he should have entered to vote. The point is that the cost of voting is so low that people virtually never have a good enough reason not go voting. If Phyllis had been a doctor curing patient of Ebola in West Africa the cost of voting would have been much higher and he would
17 Brennan, 2011: 51
have been off the hook, because the cost he and his patients would bear if he would have voted would be much higher than the benefits.
But now to another example, that of the philosopher Eggop. This professor is constantly writing on how harmful institutions are. He tries to convince people to vote against harmful institutions, but because he is constantly writing and debating he can’t miss the time necessary to vote. We can agree that Eggop is actively changing the institutions, so he is trying to efficiently change the institutions. We could say that trying to activate people to vote is a kind of being politically active so and that would excuse not voting. Some people would say that he achieves more when he continues writing than if he spends time voting. However if the whole world would be pro active against harmful institutions and constantly writing about it instead of voting it wouldn’t change anything. Writing and trying to convince people is good but by voting you know for sure that at least one person has voted for the moral good policy. But the question here is what is better, increasing the chance that a lot of people would vote for good policies or making sure that at least one person has voted for the good solution. In this case it all depends on how much influence you have and how costly voting would be.
A second point from Brennan is the idea of division of labor. Some people promote the common good directly, by being politically active, others promote it in their own way.19 This
could work, if there were no opponents to change harmful institutions. Without opponents even one voter could be enough to ensure laws against harmful institutions to pass. However, as Pogge states, some citizens engage in cost-effective lobbying to sustain those institutions, ordinary citizens would find it prohibitively costly to challenge the power of the lobbies.20 This is
why the more citizens fulfilling their duty the better it is for the Global Poor.
Epistemic duties
Brennan’s last point is that voters must be justified in believing that the candidate or the policy they vote for will promote the common good; otherwise they must abstain.21 There are
two statements in this sentence, first that people should vote in order to promote the common good. And second that voters should justify their believes that they sustain the common good by voting. I partially agree with Brennan’s first statement. I wouldn’t argue that people, who vote against the common good, or in favor of harmful institutions, should abstain. However, because I accept the premise that by enabling harm on others we fail to act according our moral duty, I
19 Brennan, 2011: 54-55
20 Pogge, 2011:24 21 Brennan, 2011: 129
state that people who don’t vote against harmful institutions are acting immorally. They should still be granted the right to vote because without it we would act against our one moral law, because we would harm them in preventing them to use of their freedom of speech.
The second point is a lot harder to argue for. Brennan states that voters, which can justify their votes, are morally superior to voters that can’t. But what is the threshold for a justified voting choice?22 Let’s imagine Henk and Ingrid, Dutch citizens entitled to vote. However, they
aren’t interested in politics at all. Henk is busy working in carwash all the time and Ingrid works at the local mall. The only politician they hear about is Wil, the leader of an extreme right Dutch party who wants to stop help to foreign countries and sustain harmful institutions. However Henk and Ingrid don’t know the content of Wil’s politics. But the two Dutch citizens are eager to fulfill their moral duties so they vote, knowing that Wil is a politician who gets things done. Henk and Ingrid vote for what they perceive will sustain the common good, but by doing so they make things worse. So did Henk and Ingrid act morally good or not?
In other words did Henk and Ingrid have a justified believe that Wil will promote the common good? We can state that they didn’t because if they had acquired a little bit more information they would have known that their believe was in fact unjustified. But the case of Wil is extreme, because he is in fact an extreme right party leader. For more nuanced political parties you need more knowledge to really know which policies they will implement. To know everything about each political parties would be too costly, firstly because there are too many issues that are relevant to impeaching harmful institutions and secondly because the policies that are implemented by political parties are not only dependent on their point of view but also on the coalition they will form and what individual members of parliament they will vote for.
So voters nor political scientists nor politicians can know for sure which policies will be implemented. However, they can approximately know the way political parties will vote. You can be pretty certain that a progressive party won’t support policy abolishing the gay rights. Sometimes you can be wrong, like when in 2012 the Dutch labor party (PvdA) and conservative liberal party (VVD) formed a coalition together. In their campaign the VVD called the PvdA a danger for the Netherlands23. The result was that de labor party authorized many laws that were
22 Brennan, 2011: 133-134
23Here the statement of current Dutch Prime minister about his colleague of the PvdA.
http://www.joop.nl/politiek/detail/artikel/15874_buma_centrum_linkse_coalitie_taboe/. At the end of the campaign it was increasingly clear that PvdA and VVD would have to work together even if they don’t want it: http://www.nrc.nl/verkiezingen/2012/09/08/vvd-en-pvda-willen-liever-niet-samen-maar-iets-anders-lijkt-niet-meer-mogelijk/
viewed by their voters as immoral. Even though the result didn’t promote the common good in the view of the voters, the voters still had a justified believe that they were promoting the common good. So we can state that they act morally.
So there is a minimal epistemic duty24. In our modern world with such different and
accessible sources of information it is almost harder not to know than to know. There are tons of billboard making publicity, accessible sites giving easy and understandable knowledge about different political parties. Moreover I don’t ask people to know precisely the position of each party for each issue, but only to know approximately. For people not to know is mostly a disinterest, a refusal to get the least involved in politics. If you refuse to show the least interest in politics and the way to make a better world you aren’t acting morally.
In summary, for someone to fulfill his moral duties he should vote with a reasonably enlightened believe, in other word he should know there are alternatives and know approximately the position of political parties towards Global Justice, and he or she should know that his vote promotes the restraining of harmful institutions.
Critics on the effects of voting.
Previously I rejected the idea of a financial compensation to the global poor for the harm done by the institutions of rich western countries, because they were ineffective if the harmful institutions wouldn’t be abolished. So I argue in favor of a political duty in the form of voting in order to change those institutions. Later, however, I stated the case of the coalition of two opposite Dutch political parties (PvdA and VVD) to show that voters can never be 100% sure that their political party will implement a specific kind of policy. This is also the position of the French political scientist, Bernard Manin.
He states that elections are undemocratic because the governed are unable to compel those who govern to implement those policies for which they elected them.25 Manin comes to the
conclusion that in a representative the community only endorses the role of judge, instead of ruling indirectly. Therefore the democracy is not a system in which the community governs itself but a system in which policies and decisions are made subject to the verdict of the people.26
24 Levy states in his article (2006) that people sometimes shouldn’t be open minded. He states that when non-expert try to be open-minded and read expert sources, who disagree with their original point of view, they can worsen their epistemic situation.
25 Manin, 1997: 183 26 Manin, 1997: 192
Manin enumerates the possibilities for voters to influence policy. Firstly, representative have an incentive to keep their promises because keeping promises is a deep rooted social norm and breaking it could lead to difficulties in being reelected. He states however that under certain circumstances politicians will prefer to break their promises and try to be reelected by explaining those circumstances.27 In the example of the Dutch parties the PvdA and the VVD,
broke their promises. And they are still working together despite of the criticisms. But even though voters penalized those two parties on the European and municipal elections, voters couldn’t really orient the course of public policy of the national government.
Secondly, citizens can use their freedom of opinion to influence politics. With their opinion, citizens can make politicians hear their discontent.28 However unless citizens group
together to form a serious threat to the power, their freedom of expression isn’t binding.29 For
example, even though people protested against the policy of the PvdA on immigration issues, the coalition partners still implemented constraining rules for immigrants.30
Thereafter Manin discusses the possibility to vote on the basis of retrospective considerations.31 However in representative democracies, voters can’t effectively assign
responsibilities, because the coalition partners can blame each other for the implementation of unpopular policies. Thereby voters evaluate policies differently before or after the implementation. The ones in Power can frame the effect of an unwanted policy as beneficial after the implementations. For example, an austerity norm in time of crisis can be framed afterwards as an effective solution. While it is possible that the norm only aggravates the situations, because the global economy improves it might seem like austerity works. Those already elected thus can
27 Manin, 1997: 167
28 Manin, 1997: 170 29 Manin, 1997: 173
30 In 2013 there were protest against the policy of VVD secretary of state, Fred Teeven, about the policy on immigration. The protest were oriented to the PvdA, because some members of the PvdA were already against the policies (article 1). Finally the policies of Fred Teeven were accepted by the PvdA party heads (article 2). However there were still some discontent in the PvdA (article 3).
http://nieuws.nl/algemeen/20130427/protest-illegalen-bij-pvda-congres-in-leeuwarden/ http://www.volkskrant.nl/dossier-kabinet-rutte-ii/gemengde-reacties-op-nieuw-asielbeleid-teeven~a3509276/ http://www.elsevier.nl/Politiek/nieuws/2014/2/Binnen-PvdA-opnieuw-protest-tegen-vreemdelingenbeleid-1459910W/ 31 Manin, 1997: 180
freely implement unpopular policies; afterwards they can frame them as positive in the long term or blame each other for the implementation, so each member won’t be punished as harshly by their voters as they should be.32
Manin outs two forms of criticism against representative democracies. Firstly he states that voting can’t directly determine which policies will be implemented. Secondly, he states that voters can’t even have an effective influence on which policy will be implemented. Nonetheless, in the way he shows it, he is right that voters don’t have de iure influence on policy but they do have de facto influence. In other words it is possible with our institutions to imagine political parties who constantly break their promises and implement totally different policies without being punished, but in good working democracies this won’t occur. The PvdA and VVD coalition is an extreme form where parties violate their promises but they don’t break all of them, they divide the agenda and the PvdA fulfilled some promises and the VVD too. So even if once in power parties can virtually implement each policy they want, they still try to keep some part of their promises.
Secondly, public opinion can have an effect. Again, manifestations and discontent aren’t judicially binding but political parties do sometimes try to make compromises. Thirdly, contrary to what Manin states, voters are capable of retrospective voting. Even if the PvdA and the VVD are able to shift the responsibilities of unpopular decisions to each other, they were both punished in the municipal and European elections.
Finally, we are speaking about what moral agents should do and what they are reasonably justified to believe. Let’s retake the example of Henk and Ingrid, let’s say they vote for Wil with a justified believe he would impeach harmful institutions, which he in fact doesn’t plan to do. If Henk and Ingrid see that Wil in fact creates more harm than good, even if he blames his coalition member, they wouldn’t have a justified believe they should reelect him. If they will, if they keep voting for him after he sustained a harmful policy, they are no longer acting morally. So any moral agent would also be obliged to vote reasonably responsively. Why reasonably? Because it makes no sense to keep punishing political parties for mistakes they made long in the past with other party leaders, and we can’t expect voters to know everything about the party they elect, they just have a minimal epistemic duty.
From voters to decision maker
So voters have the possibility to influence policy and have the duty to vote in order to influence policies. However, Manin’s point that voters can’t directly determine policies still
32 Manin, 1997: 180-183
stands. So we can imagine a country in which each citizen acts morally by voting against harmful institutions. However, all the political leaders are corrupt and each party sustains the status quo. In that world citizens indeed won’t have any chance to influence policies against harmful institutions. So if there is no way to vote against those institutions, voting would be an inefficient way to adhere to one’s moral duties.
However this scenario misses an important characteristic of liberal democracies; namely that each citizen can form or be a member of a political party and present him- or herself to the elections. So if all decision makers are immoral agents, moral agents should become decision makers. It could even be a duty for moral agent to become a decision maker.
In other words, if we start from the premise that to act morally implies for citizens of rich liberal democratic countries to impeach harmful institutions, and if a moral agent can only stop institutions by becoming a policy maker, rich citizens of democracies would be morally required to become a decision maker in order to change harmful institutions hence being a good moral agent.
There are three problems with this conclusion, firstly, like Pogge stated it can be prohibitively costly for ordinary citizens to effectively try to change harmful institutions.33
Secondly. It would be chaotic if every citizen tried each hour of each day to become a decision maker in order to change harmful institutions. So is the conclusion that only those who effectively succeed to become decision makers and effectively change harmful institutions are good? Thirdly this conclusion would seem contra intuitive, because some agents could have the will to change institutions but lack the capacities or they can’t compete with other candidates. Would each of these persons be immoral?
The cost for each agent and for western societies if every citizen would have to be a decision maker would be way too demanding to impose on ourselves. However if we only stick to voting without really changing anything we kind of buy our way out of our duty without really fulfilling them. Here we can use an analogy of a man who lies hurt on the road hit by a bus in comparison to our whole nation. We have three options, either we sit around and enunciate the absolute need to help the injured man. We also can all rush to the injured man fighting against each other in order to be the first to perform life saving actions. Finally we can all sit around appointing the person with a high doctor degree to make sure she saves the life of the injured
33 Pogge, 2011: 24
person34. The first option was a comparison to voting, the second to the duty to be as politically
active as we can and the third is the option I chose for.
Like the doctor in the bus accident case, some people have more skills to stop harmful institutions, so some people have a more stringent duty to be politically active than others. The cost of voting are so low that they can apply to each member of society, requiring them only to be open to the information coming to them. However the costs of dedicating one’s life to change institutions are way higher. But the question now is which tools grant some people a more stringent duty. Since the final objective is to stop harmful institutions to change those institutions you should know how they work and how to change them, but you also need the connection and the position to change them. For example, decision maker already are in a position to change institutions, so they would have the most stringent duty. However, if you are able to change institutions but you don’t know they are harmful is your duty as stringent?
There are two important criterions that improve the stringiness of duty. First there is political power, which I will define as the ability to influence policies in more direct ways. So a member of parliament would have a more stringent duty to act in order to change institutions than a common voter. But political power often increases when you are more politically active and at the same time it gives you more duty to be more politically active.
For example if you become a member of political party, like the Dutch party D66, you will be more politically active then when you, ceteris paribus, don’t. However when you become a member you also have more political power, because you are entitled to vote at a party congresses. If you don’t use your political power you don’t discharge your moral obligations. Because you have more possibilities to stop harming the global poor but you don’t actively use them you keep enabling the harm. But here we come again to the question, when does it stop? Would everyone who is a little bit more politically active, by being an member of a party, be required to go voting and then to make his or her own political proposition and finally try to be an decision maker?
Again, if we answer positively to the previous statement, almost no one would act morally. So we need to establish thresholds and criteria’s for the duty of political activity. The first one is voting, because the costs are very low and no special skills are required to fulfill this duty. So the two criteria’s here are the costs and the skills. Being member of a political party already gives more cost, money and time to search which party you should join. It also requires a little bit more skill; you have to understand what that party stands for. If you are a member the
34 In the case there are no doctor or no one who seems obviously the best candidate, the bus passenger can chose the person who, in their eyes is the best to save the patient’s life.
cost and the skills are very low to go to vote at a congress, it requires only one day and to be able to travel. So an average worker who is free in the weekend and has his own car has a more stringent duty to come vote at a congress than a grandmother who can barely walk. So the duty to be politically active is dependent on the capacities of a person.
Political scientists35
There is another important criterion for the duty to be politically active, namely knowledge. Political Power isn’t enough to change institutions, and being politically active isn’t enough to acquire political power, you need knowledge. The doctor in the bus case can be seen as someone with power and knowledge. Her knowledge gives her the power to be trusted by other people in the bus, to help the injured person. Thereby she also has the knowledge to effectively save the man’s life. Even if the doctor fails to save the patient lives she has a greater duty to act because she knows what is happening and how the human body works. Like a doctor, political scientists have more knowledge about how institutions work and how to change it, so they have a stringent duty to try to change the institutions or to help change them.
However, there is a problem here. We began with the idea that we should change harmful institutions, because by maintaining them we contribute to the harm they inflict. However, a political scientist, by knowing institutions are harmful doesn’t contribute more than someone else. Someone who knows how institutions work, someone with more power to change institutions, doesn’t contribute more than someone else. We can again use the analogy of the doctor. The fact that she is a doctor doesn’t imply that she contributed more than others in the hitting of the pedestrian. In this view it is better to compare politicians with the bus driver, while the political scientist is the one who has a clear view on the road.
So our institutions can be seen as a bus, which is driving on the boardwalk and keeps on hitting pedestrians. Citizens are the passengers, who keep screaming: ‘faster, faster, faster’. The politician is the bus driver who is pushed by the passengers to drive faster and who doesn’t necessarily have a good vision of what happens, so he keeps driving. The political scientist is the one, sitting next to the driver, who sees a new pedestrian being hit every time. A non-politically
35 In this section I will be talking a lot about scientist, experts and intellectuals. With these three words I’m actually talking about the same peoples, namely experts. And by that I mean people who have accumulated a lot of knowledge about one specific subject. Ph.D. graduates, teachers at university, researcher in professional institutes, are in my view experts. Also the subject on what they express themselves should be congruent with their field of expertise. For example the opinion of an expert on the roman writer Catullus doesn’t give more knowledge about questions of global warming. So an expert on Global warming have the duty to express himself on that subject but a classicist doesn’t.
active scientist can be compared to of Eggop who writes books without voting. He is the passenger who sees everything and tries to tell everyone to stop. However no one listens, because everyone keeps screaming: ‘Faster, faster, faster’! To act morally would be for citizens to scream to the driver to drive slower. To act morally for the driver would be to hit the brake. And for the political scientist to act morally would be to make the driver hit the brake to stop.
It would be good if the whole bus tried to hit the brake, but the citizen sitting on the back seat of the bus can’t make the bus stop as easily as the politician or the political scientist. So politicians and political scientists have a clearer view on the situation and have a more direct access to the brakes, hence they are more accountable for the death of each new pedestrian. Because of this clear view the task of social scientist becomes to protect human values.36
There are many possible criticisms against a politically active scientist, first of all we can state that they primary task would be to have a clear view, to accumulate knowledge and that he or she should focus all their energy on that purpose. Second we can state that scientist can instead of acting inspire other people to act. Thirdly we can see it as the task of the citizens and the politician to ask the scientist, instead of vice-versa. And finally there are also problems whether knowledge will be neutral and scientist would have enough time to be politically active and make researches.
The second critic is that the political scientist can try to convince the passengers instead of hitting the brakes. In other words intellectuals can write and try to inspire citizens instead of being active in politics. The problem is that scientist and intellectuals provide too much information on a specific level so it would be reasonable to except from ordinary citizens to accumulate it. We can’t give scientist the duty to inform the public without giving the public the duty to get informed and giving the public the duty to get informed would be too costly. Of course it is good if scientist make their research accessible to public, of course it is good if the public tries to inform themselves, but it isn’t their duty to know everything about politics. Even if the public has a minimal epistemic duty, I don’t see reading books written by scientist as a minimal form of accumulating knowledge. People should have the required knowledge to be free in their choice, in other words they should know there are other choices they can make and why they could make other choice.
36 Easton, 1969: 1052.
David Easton, the former president of the American Political Science Association, have written a stirring article on this subject. He states that the intellectual historical role has been to protect human values. Without that they became mere technician mechanics for tinkering society.
Next to that, reading a non-expert, scientific article can diminish the epistemic situation of ordinary citizens. Some controversial books, easily accessible to non-expert can be minimally competent. There are two classes of claims in controversial articles and books, type-one claims are uncontroversial and advanced as evidence for the arguments, but type two claims are controversial and constitute the main argument of the book. However type one claims can gathers correct empirical prove about a subject that prime facie supports type-two claims, but this doesn’t necessarily apply. However as non-expert you can’t easily assess if the type-two claims are correct or not. Missing the complex argumentation that confutes the causal link between the type one and two claims, non-experts can wrongfully accept the type two-claim.37
Levy illustrated this point with a controversial book on global warming. He states three possible outcomes for the reading of the book. The first possibility is you are convinced by the book, you are convinced that the type-one arguments are important but you still know you are no expert and there are perhaps other type-one arguments who refute the type-two conclusion. So you still can’t correctly justify your position on global warming. Secondly, if you aren’t convinced and you keep you previous believes, you still lack the required knowledge to justify your position, but you have accumulated more knowledge against your believe. So your epistemic situation became worse. Thirdly you can suspend your position because having equally pro and cons about a subject you can’t rationally choose a position because you have equal information about pro’s and con’s for a position. So finally your epistemic situation doesn’t improve and beside that you become unable to choose a position.38
Same for Politicians, their stronger impact gives them of course a stronger duty to get informed but the width of information is so huge, how can they know where to start? Can you ask a blind man to read a book that can teach him to see? No, so you should bring him the knowledge he needs. So instead of expecting the decision maker to come ask for knowledge in the pool of intellectuals, specific intellectuals should go to specific decision maker. To let the decision maker come to the scientist and let him search in wide pool of scientific research can worsen their epistemic situation. Like Levy states, non-experts can more difficultly divide the correct and incorrect arguments and can form a false believe in false two-type argument on basis of correct one-type39. But decision makers can’t adopt the third outcomes of Levy’s
example, because they have to make decisions and have to take a position. So it is imperative that decision makers get the full expert arguments so they don’t get misled by minimally correct
37 Levy, 2006: 57-58.
38 Levy, 2006: 57-59. 39 Levy, 2006: 58-59, 64.
arguments. This is why experts, having made a productive debate, should present decision makers with the full length of the pro and cons for arguments to help them choose a correct position.
But why do scientists have the duty to only improve politician epistemic situations and not those of common citizen? Levy states that more knowledge can lead to a worse epistemic situation, so that is why ordinary people don’t have the duty to acquire more knowledge. Concerning ordinary people I would agree with him, making the good party choice doesn’t require too much knowledge, that’s why they only have a minimal epistemic duty. But making good policy decision is way more effective; decision makers have a way more stringent duty to change institutions since a wrong decision could greatly worsen the position of the Global Poor. Beside that the subject about which they should make decision needs expertise. Like in the bus driver case they should have expertise in order for them to see the harm they are enabling. So they do have a stronger epistemic duty, however, being non-experts they can still fall in the same pitfall as ordinary citizens. So they should become experts and know all the pros and cons of the decision they make, but the only who have those knowledge are the experts. So scientist should share their knowledge with decision makers instead of letting politicians trust minimally correct argumentations. So the variable that increases the stringency of the duty to be politically active is knowledge and political power.
Problems with political active scientists
There are however two problems with active political scientist, related with knowledge. The first one is that we need people to accumulate neutral knowledge. However, being politically active in a party can create a bias in the way the scientist makes his research. Secondly some scientists aren’t able to mix their work of accumulation of knowledge with being politically active. Starting with the last point, I agree that some researcher don’t have time to be politically active. Like Phyllis who is constantly researching in his Lab or Eggop who is constantly writing about being politically active. However, like voting I still think that scientist should try or bear a minimal cost to reach out to politicians. Instead of just doing your research and publish it, scientist should also direct it to the concerned decision maker. Also scientist could be members of political party to make themselves heard at a low cost. So I accept that some scientists aren’t able to be really politically active. However, most of them have enough time to send their research, or make it more easily available to politicians. For example, scientist shouldn’t only try to publish in specialized magazine but also on magazine which are read by politicians. Or instead of selling their research results they could make it available for free. Also some others have
enough time to come to party congresses in order to vote for the political program and to be member of political parties. But here we come to the first criticism about neutral knowledge.
The problem with scientists being members of a party is that they have an incentive themselves for their research to be positive about their own party. In other words they benefit from a specific outcome of their research. This could jeopardize the objectivity of their research. So if we attribute a great value on objective knowledge, we should be careful to promote scientists who are members of political parties (if their research focuses on political parties).40 I
indeed accept that if scientists are Member of Parliament or other decision makers, their objectivity could be jeopardized if they are doing research that interfaces with their work. We can expect the expert’s view to be influenced by their political positions, especially if it benefits from a special outcome of their research. This can lead even unconsciously to a bias in the results of the scientist’s research41. Bias problems can be especially evident when scientists are
member of political parties. So it will be too strong and counter-productive to ask of experts to be members of political parties.
However, the most important thing isn’t that experts become politicians, but that the knowledge of scientist reaches the political arena. The most important is that the driver stops hitting people, not that the scientist takes his place. So the duty for scientist would be to be heard, not especially to be politically active. For example it would be ok for a scientist not to be a party member, as long as he or she does come to a congress and explain what his research has shown about this policy.
However, some can advocate a kind of labor division; shift the duty to inform from scientists to journalists and lobbyists. The advantages of this division of labor are that political scientists will be able to produce objective knowledge without losing time being politically active and without becoming biased due to their implications in politics. There are two important problems with this idea. First the already raised problem concerning objectivity and second the problem of lower epistemic situation. Journalists and lobbyists also have some
40 Even though I accept the bias problem of scientists being members of political parties, it can be used as a pretext to escape political duties. First I think that the bias problem shouldn’t be exaggerated, political articles of scientist being members of political parties should be read with some skepticism but can still be correct. Secondly I think there are lots of other incentives who give a certain bias in the objectivity of some research results, like where the financing come and the values of the scientist. I think it would be an interesting further research to look how much does party membership influence the objectivity of some scientist’s results. I have no idea how we could investigate this question, but it could be worth trying.
hidden agenda or just preference why they would promote more some kind of information than another. Journalist are also constrained by the interest of the public, they will prefer to share some kind of news that will be sensational and give them hired viewing or reading percentages.
Next to that there is the problem of lower epistemic situation. Researcher who have done years of research about one subject can engage in an productive debate because they easily can separate what counts as a good argument and what doesn’t. Non-experts, on the other hand, can lower their epistemic situation by participating in an expert’s debate; journalist can spread out incorrect two-type argument as a non-expert source42.
I want to make a last point about politically active scientists. Namely that knowledge should be prior to political activity. So scientist should come to parties with a special interest to implement his policies, not in order to make research that defends the policies of the party. Scientist should abstain from judging their party ante facto but their choice should be the result of a post facto judgment.
Conclusion
Concluding, we have seen in the first part that institutions are harmful to the global poor. By sustaining those institutions and legitimating them, Western citizens contribute to the harm done to the global poor. To fulfill our moral duty we should at least stop enabling harm to the global poor, so we should stop those harmful institutions. Pogge proposed that we compensate the global poor by donating money to NGO’s and international organizations. However, I showed that by donating money without changing institutions, you keep causing harm so the compensation compensates nothing. So the most efficient way to fulfill our moral duty is to change those institutions. In a liberal democracy citizens can do it by voting against those institutions. So each citizen should vote in order to do so, but they also have a minor epistemic duty so they can make a justified vote for the political party who will indeed restrain harmful institutions.
However, voting is sometimes not enough, there are people required who propose policies against harmful institutions and who are willing to implement those policies. So people with political power and influence like politician do not only have the duty to vote for good policies, but they also have the duty to create them, promote them and implement them. But Politicians don’t know everything and can’t know everything. Politicians are bound to the judgment of the people and inclined to promote easy sold policies. So politicians need knowledge and information and these should come from science.
42 Levy, 2006: 58-59, 64.
Scientists, like politicians, also have a more stringent duty to act. They have the duty to help politicians create, support and implement good policies. However, in order to have enough time and objectivity to create empirical knowledge, they don’t have a duty to create the policies, to become a decision maker, but they have the duty to make themselves heard.
Each citizen who has the right of voting should stop enabling harmful institutions. They should do it by voting against them and vote for morally acceptable policies, with a minimal epistemic duty in order for them to have the realistic possibility to make a choice. However, the more political power one gets the more stringent his duty is to promote moral policies and to implement them. Beside that knowledge also gives more duties, the more you know the more you are able and you are aware of the harm done by institutions, thus the more you must make the world better!
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