Cosmopolitan Citizenship and Climate Change1

Derek Bell

Newcastle University

Global climate change is probably the greatest challenge that humanity will face in

the twenty-first century. In his report for the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir

Nicholas Stern, former economist at the World Bank, states that:

The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change presents very

serious global risks, and it demands an urgent global response (Stern 2006, i).

Stern’s report is just one in a long series of reports on climate change going back to

the 1980s. The clear trend in those reports is toward greater confidence that there is

anthropogenic climate change and that it will cause suffering and death for present

and future generations. The Fourth Assessment Report from the International Panel

on Climate Change re-affirms that considerable changes are taking place in the

Earth’s climate and that these changes are to a large extent human induced (IPCC

2007). The projected changes include: raised temperatures (and therefore

desertification and crop failure); raised sea-levels (and therefore flooding of coastal

settlements and small island states); and increased unpredictability and extreme

weather events. These changes are likely to have profound effects on human lives.

The consistent message is that if we want to prevent (or minimise) suffering and death

caused by climate change, we need to act urgently. So far, the global response has

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been unimpressive. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

and the subsequent Kyoto Protocol have been widely dismissed as inadequate. The

recent Bali conference – despite some of the rhetoric – did not suggest that the post-

2012 agreement, which will replace the Kyoto Protocol, will lead to a fundamental re-

appraisal of existing policies and practices. However, we know that such a re-

appraisal is required.

In this context of political inaction, it is not surprising that people give up on

government and emphasise the importance of individual action. Indeed, governments

are also keen to ‘privatise’ the problem by emphasising that we all need to ‘do our bit’

and that each of us can ‘make a difference’ by changing our behaviour to reduce our

greenhouse gas emissions. This focus on individual action is expressed in many

different ways but, perhaps, the most interesting is the idea that it is a duty of

citizenship and a duty of justice to undertake climate-protecting action. There are

several versions of this ‘duty’ argument in the literature on climate change and, more

generally, on global environmental problems.2 Most versions of this approach offer

cosmopolitan arguments to support the claim that we have duties of justice not to emit

more than our fair share of greenhouse gases and to pay our fair share of the costs of

mitigation and adaptation. However, cosmopolitan arguments are controversial and

often fail to motivate people to act. It often seems difficult ‘to turn an intellectual

commitment to [cosmopolitan principles] into a determination to act on them’

(Dobson 2006a, 165). Cosmopolitanism does not seem to be able to overcome this

‘motivational problem’ (Dobson 2006a, 165).

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In this chapter, I will critically examine a radically new account of our duties that

promises to address the motivational problem. In his recent work, Andrew Dobson

has developed a new account of citizenship for a globalising world. Dobson’s

account of ‘ecological citizenship’ is designed for global environmental challenges,

including global climate change, and is intended to address the motivational problem.

It offers the hope of a theory of duties of citizenship and justice that might motivate

individual climate-protecting action.

The chapter is divided into five sections. In section 1, I summarise the key features of

Dobson’s account for my purposes. In section 2, I suggest that Dobson’s account

might be usefully understood as a contribution to an ongoing debate about the ‘justice

relation’ – i.e., what relationship there must be between two persons before they can

be said to owe each other duties of justice. I use Thomas Nagel’s recent work on ‘The

Problem of Global Justice’ and his account of the justice relation to illustrate the idea

and to provide the background for a more detailed comparison of Dobson’s position

and Nagel’s position. In section 3, I compare Dobson’s account of the justice relation

– and his account of the distinction between duties of justice and duties of humanity –

with Nagel’s account. My intention is not to defend Nagel against Dobson or Dobson

against Nagel but rather to highlight some important features of Dobson’s theory

through the comparison with Nagel. In section 4, I identify some major problems

with Dobson’s account of the justice relation and I suggest that his theory is only

coherent if we interpret it as a much more modest contribution to theories of

citizenship and justice. Unfortunately, Dobson has not provided us with a plausible

new theory of citizenship or justice and he has not solved the motivational problem.

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In section 5, I conclude by suggesting that we can draw three important lessons from

our critical examination of Dobson’s argument.

1. Dobson’s ecological citizenship

Dobson’s account of ecological citizenship is presented in most detail in his

Citizenship and the Environment (Dobson 2003). However, he has since developed

and clarified his account in a series of papers on citizenship, justice and ‘thick

cosmopolitanism’ (e.g., Dobson 2004, Dobson 2005, Dobson 2006a, Dobson 2006b,

Dobson 2006c). In some of this later work (e.g., Dobson 2006a) he says little

explicitly about citizenship but there is a clear continuity between this later work and

his explicit work on citizenship. Therefore, I will draw on both the earlier and the

later work to try to construct the clearest and most sympathetic reading of his

considered position.

Dobson offers this basic characterisation of ecological citizenship in Citizenship and

the Environment:

At first blush, then, ecological citizenship deals in the currency of non-

contractual responsibility, it inhabits the private as well as the public sphere, it

refers to the source rather than the nature of the responsibility to determine

what count as citizenship virtues, it works with the language of virtue, and it is

explicitly non-territorial (Dobson 2003, 89).

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He has highlighted five features of ecological citizenship. I am most interested in the

first feature: ‘ecological citizenship deals in the currency of non-contractual

responsibility’. I will devote most of this section to this feature. I will also talk about

the fifth feature (‘it is explicitly non-territorial’) and, at the end of this section, I will

suggest how the second feature (‘it inhabits the private as well as the public sphere’)

might emerge from Dobson’s argument. I do not discuss the role of virtues in

Dobson’s account.

Dobson claims that the responsibilities or duties of ecological citizenship are ‘non-

contractual’. He argues that liberal and civic republican conceptions of citizenship

are ‘underpinned by an explicitly contractual basis for … rights and duties’ (2003,

44). The contract is between the citizen and the state:

On this view, citizenship is regarded as a contract between the citizen and the

state, in which the citizen claims rights against the state, but according to

which the citizen also undertakes to contribute to the state’s ends by paying

taxes, for example … There is a reciprocity in which rights are earned

(Dobson 2003, 44).

The duties of citizenship are to be understood as duties that citizens incur as a

consequence of a contract between citizens and the state. However, Dobson rejects

the claim that a contractual understanding is definitive of citizenship:

‘Contract’ is not … a form of relationship specific to citizenship at all. If it is

specific to any area of social life, it is the sphere of trade and exchange … To

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this extent, the language of contract does not mark off citizenship as a special

and distinct kind of relationship but, rather, associates it closely with the

juridical-economic sphere and the expectations and assumptions that lie

therein. Contract is therefore as much an ideological as a definitional feature

of citizenship. Once this is recognized, other ways of articulating citizenship

relations become possible (Dobson 2003, 46).

The contractual understanding of the source of citizenship duties is metaphorical. It

models citizenship on relations in the ‘juridical-economic sphere’. Dobson’s

suggestion is that other – non-contractual – models of the source of citizenship duties

are possible. He sees ecological citizenship as one kind of non-contractual citizenship

and a particular version of what he calls ‘post-cosmopolitan citizenship’ (or in his

more recent work, ‘thick cosmopolitanism’). I will use the terms ‘post-cosmopolitan

citizenship’ and ‘thick cosmopolitan citizenship’ (the latter being a term that Dobson

hasn’t to my knowledge used – but which I see no reason for him to reject)

interchangeably but for the sake of simplicity I will tend to use the latter term more

often.

The duties of thick cosmopolitan citizenship are underpinned by a different kind of

relationship. Dobson describes this relationship as follows:

Post-cosmopolitanism … offers a thickly material account of the ties that bind,

created not by mental activity, but by the material production and reproduction

of daily life in an unequal and asymmetrically globalizing world. In this

conception, the political space of obligation is not fixed as taking the form of

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the state, or the nation, or the European Union, or the globe, but is rather

‘produced’ by the activities of individuals and groups with the capacity to

spread and impose themselves in geographic, diachronic, and … ecological

space (Dobson 2003, 30).

This is a novel account of how we should understand the source of the duties of

citizenship. We might begin to unpick it by noticing that Dobson does not talk about

the political community as the source of citizenship obligations but rather he talks

about ‘the political space of obligation’. He clearly understands that citizenship

duties are distinctively political duties (or duties of political morality) rather than

(just) moral duties. However, we have seen that he rejects the idea that citizenship

duties should be understood as underpinned by a contractual relationship between

citizens and their state. Moreover, we can now see that citizenship duties are not

confined to a conventional political community with traditional institutions, such as a

state or the European Union. Dobson also rejects a standard version of

cosmopolitanism, which suggests that the whole world should be understood as one

political community. He sees the ‘mental activity’ of appealing to our ‘common

humanity’, which underpins cosmopolitanism, as providing an unsatisfactory ‘thin

and non-material account of the ties that bind’ (Dobson 2003, 29). So, if Dobson

rejects contractual, traditional and cosmopolitan conceptions of the political

community, what does he want to put in their place?

He wants to offer a new account of how political relationships are created. He argues

that we should understand political relationships as the product of an asymmetrical

relationship in which one agent causes harm to another agent. We create political

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relationships between ourselves and others by harming them. Call this the ‘harming

relationship’. Dobson suggests that the harming relationship is a pervasive feature of

a globalizing world. He cites Judith Lichtenberg’s claim that ‘history has involved

the gradual (or perhaps not so gradual) transformation of the earth from a collection of

many relatively open worlds to one closed world’ (Lichtenberg 1981, 86 cited in

Dobson 2003, 30). In this one ‘closed world’:

Some of the relationships … are so pervasive and far-reaching that they are

difficult to pinpoint or to measure. There are also actions that may have

harmful consequences without any direct involvement between agents and

those affected (Lichtenberg 1981, 87 cited in Dobson 2003, 30).

Dobson suggests that ‘global warming’ is the example par excellence of the

asymmetry of globalisation, through which the globalizers harm the globalized

(Dobson 2006a, 173-5). The effects – and harms – of climate change are pervasive

but remote from the actions that cause them. The harming relationship reaches across

space and time but it does so asymmetrically – the global rich are emitting most of the

greenhouse gases that will harm the future (and present) global poor. Moreover, the

actions that cause climate change are the actions of everyday life; the actions through

which we achieve ‘the constant reproduction of [our] embodiedness’ and the ‘material

production and reproduction of our daily lives’ (Dobson 2006a, 177; Dobson 2003,

30). Therefore, Dobson suggests ‘we are “always already” affecting other things and

people’ (Dobson 2006a, 177).

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He further develops his account of the harming relationship by going beyond the

example of climate change to think more broadly about the way that we impact on

each other through our use of environmental resources. This leads him to the idea of

‘ecological citizenship’ as a ‘particular instantiation of post-cosmopolitan citizenship’

(Dobson 2003, 115). The distinctive harming relationship that produces ecological

citizenship occurs when we use more than our fair share of ‘ecological space’ or, as

Dobson puts it, when we are in ‘ecological space debt’ (Dobson 2006b, 449).3 So, the

particular harming relationship that creates (what we might call) the political space of

ecological obligation is the act of unjustly using ecological space. As Dobson puts it:

Political obligation between citizens is generated, in my conception, by the

requirements of justice under conditions of ecological space scarcity (Dobson

2006b, 448).

There is a finite amount of ecological space. Any agent’s use of ecological space –

i.e., their ecological footprint – creates a harming relationship with those on whom

their ecological footprint impacts. If agents have ecological footprints of different

sizes, the ‘impacts will be asymmetrical’ (Dobson 2003, 115). Those with the largest

ecological footprints will be (asymmetrically) harming those with less than their fair

share of ecological space. It is this particular harming relationship that produces

ecological citizenship relations.

Dobson’s general claim is that once we have created a political relationship with

someone – by harming them – we incur obligations to them because we share a

‘political space’ with them. These obligations are distinctively political obligations.

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In the general case, they are obligations of thick cosmopolitan citizenship. In the

particular case of harming others through the unjust use of ecological space, they are

obligations of ecological citizenship. Ecological citizenship duties are a particular

sub-set of thick cosmopolitan citizenship duties.

It should be clear that Dobson expects these (thick cosmopolitan and ecological)

citizenship obligations to extend well beyond traditional political communities and

even beyond the (thin) cosmopolitan community. If we can harm future generations

by emitting greenhouse gases (or using ecological space, more generally), we create a

political relationship with them and incur duties of citizenship to them. So, the

obligations of thick cosmopolitan citizenship and ecological citizenship are ‘non-

territorial’. Moreover, if the ‘material’ actions of everyday life create (thick

cosmopolitan and ecological) citizenship obligations, we might plausibly expect that

among our citizenship obligations will be obligations relating to those everyday

activities. In other words, the obligations of citizenship will ‘inhabit the private as

well as the public sphere’ (Dobson 2003, 89).

To summarise: Dobson has developed a novel approach to citizenship, which takes

seriously asymmetric globalisation. Citizenship duties are political duties of justice,

which are produced by harming relationships. The most pervasive harming

relationships are to be found in the effects on the globalised of the ‘material

1 I would like to thank the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council for supporting this research with a project grant (“Global Justice and the Environment”) and a research leave grant (“Global Justice and Climate Change”). I have benefited from many discussions of ‘ecological citizenship’ with Andy Dobson and other participants in the ESRC-funded seminar series on ‘Citizenship and the Environment’. I would also like to thank the other members of the “Global Justice and the Environment” project team (Simon Caney, Pia Halme, Clare Heyward, Ed Page and Graham Long) with whom I have discussed these and related issues since 2004.2 See, for example, Athanasiou and Baer (2002), Bell (2005), Caney (2006), Saiz (2005), Shue (1999). 3 On the idea of ecological space see Wackernagel and Rees (1996).

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production and reproduction of [the] daily lives’ of the globalisers (Dobson 2003, 30).

The thick cosmopolitan citizen must curtail her consumption of ecological space and

her emissions of greenhouse gases to fulfil her citizenship duties to those she is

‘always already’ harming (Dobson 2006a, 177).

2. Nagel on the justice relation

Dobson’s account of citizenship is designed specifically to cope with the new

challenges of globalisation, especially the challenges posed by global environmental

problems such as climate change. It provides an important stimulus for further

thinking about individual responsibility, citizenship and justice in the context of

climate change and other global environmental issues. However, there are some

important philosophical problems with his account. We might best begin to

understand the problems by locating Dobson’s thick cosmopolitanism in the context

of a current debate about the ‘justice relation’, which has become important for

analytical political philosophers writing on global justice (Julius 2006, 176).

A. J. Julius suggests ‘that two people are in the justice relation if the allocation of

goods across them is just or if it is unjust’ (Julius 2006, 176). They are not in the

justice relation if it is inappropriate to describe the allocation of goods across them in

terms of (in)justice. The debate about the justice relation is a debate about the scope

of justice. Two people are in the justice relation when they are both within the scope

of a single ‘system’ of justice. The most recent skirmishes in the justice relation

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debate were sparked by Thomas Nagel’s paper on ‘The Problem of Global Justice’

(Nagel 2005).

Nagel argues that the justice relation obtains only between ‘fellow citizens of a

sovereign state’ (Nagel 2005, 120). His account is complex and controversial. It is

beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a full discussion of it. However, I want to

highlight some aspects of Nagel’s account that might help us to better understand

Dobson’s position. Nagel makes a distinction between duties of justice and

humanitarian duties:

Justice as ordinarily understood requires more than mere humanitarian

assistance to those in desperate need, and injustice can exist without anyone

being on the verge of starvation … Humanitarian duties hold in virtue of the

absolute rather than the relative level of need of the people we are in a position

to help. Justice, by contrast, is concerned with the relations between the

conditions of different classes of people, and the causes of inequality between

them (Nagel 2005, 119).

Nagel’s account claims that we have humanitarian duties to anyone in ‘desperate

need’ wherever they may be in the world but we have duties of justice only to ‘fellow

citizens of a sovereign state’. There are two important points here.

First, there is a difference in the demandingness of humanitarian duties and duties of

justice. Humanitarian duties are minimally demanding duties to help those in

‘desperate need’ but justice is much more demanding – it requires the fair allocation

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of benefits and burdens between ‘fellow citizens of a sovereign state’. To use

terminology often employed in discussions of distributive justice: humanitarian duties

entail only a commitment to ‘sufficientarianism’ but duties of justice require a

commitment to ‘egalitarianism’ (or, perhaps, an alternative relational principle, such

as ‘prioritarianism’).

Second, there is a difference in the grounds of humanitarian duties and duties of

justice. Humanitarian duties are grounded in nothing more than the ‘desperate need’

of other human beings. We have a duty to help those in desperate need that we are in

a position to help just because they are human beings in desperate need (and we can

help them). We might say that the ‘humanitarian relation’ is created by the ‘desperate

need’ of another person (and an agent’s capacity to help them). However, justice is

‘something we owe through our shared institutions only to those with whom we stand

in a strong political relation. It is, in the standard terminology, an associative

obligation’ (Nagel 2005, 121). More precisely, Nagel suggests that the only ‘strong

political relation’ that can ground duties of justice is co-citizenship in a sovereign

state. As he puts it:

I submit that it is this complex fact – that we are both putative joint authors of

the coercively imposed system, and subject to its norms, i.e., expected to

accept their authority even when the collective decision diverges from our

personal preferences – that creates the special presumption against arbitrary

inequalities [i.e., injustices] in our treatment by the system (Nagel 2005, 128-

9).

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In other words, the justice relation – or the relation that brings people within the scope

of the same ‘system’ of justice and grounds duties of justice – is created by the joint

exercise of citizenship in a sovereign state. If we are collectively imposing laws (as

citizens) on ourselves (as subjects), we collectively create duties of justice among all

co-citizens. Duties of justice are grounded in co-citizenship of a sovereign state.

3. Dobson and Nagel compared

It is, I think, illuminating to compare Nagel’s account with Dobson’s. Dobson also

distinguishes duties of justice from duties of humanity or, what he calls,

‘Samaritanism’ (Dobson 2006a, 173). However, his account of the distinction is

different in important respects from Nagel’s account. In this section, I want to

highlight some of those differences – beginning from the two features of Nagel’s

account discussed in the previous section, namely, the relative demandingness of

justice and humanitarianism and the different grounds of duties of justice and

humanitarian duties. In the next section, I will build on the discussion in this section

to identify the main problems with Dobson’s account of thick cosmopolitan

citizenship.

Dobson suggests that Samaritan duties are more ‘demanding’ than duties of justice

(Dobson 2006a, 171). He takes the biblical story of the Good Samaritan ‘assisting the

poor unfortunate by the side of the road’ as an exemplary case of Samaritanism and

he suggests that it ‘illustrates how demanding … it is’ to ask people to help others

simply because ‘they are members of a common humanity’ (Dobson 2006a, 171). As

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he puts it, ‘[We] are moved by the story [of the Good Samaritan] precisely because

we recognise the Samaritan’s act is an extraordinary one’ (Dobson 2006a, 171-2). At

first sight, Dobson’s position appears to be the opposite of Nagel’s. Dobson is

claiming that humanitarianism (or ‘Samaritanism’) is more demanding than justice

while Nagel’s position suggests the opposite. However, the appearance is deceptive

because the idea of ‘demandingness’ is ambiguous.

On Nagel’s account, duties of justice are more demanding than humanitarian duties

because they require us to do more for other people. We can fulfil our humanitarian

duties by saving others from ‘desperate need’ but to fulfil our duties of justice we

must support the egalitarian redistribution of benefits and burdens. So,

demandingness relates to how much we might be asked to redistribute to others. Call

this the ‘level of sacrifice’ interpretation of demandingness. On Dobson’s account,

Samaritanism is more demanding than justice because it is motivationally more

difficult to undertake an act of Samaritanism than it is to undertake an act of justice.

As he puts it:

‘[Let] me make one motivational assumption: we are more likely to feel

obliged to assist others in their plight if we are responsible for their situation –

if there is some identifiable causal relationship between what we do, or what

we have done, and how they are. The reason why we feel especially moved

by the act of the Good Samaritan in assisting the poor unfortunate by the side

of the road is that the Samaritan was not at all responsible for his injuries’

(Dobson 2006a, 171).

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Dobson is interested in how easy it is for people to be motivated to act to help others.

His claim is that it is very difficult for people to be motivated to help those that we

have not harmed. Therefore, if we require people to undertake acts of Samaritanism,

we require them to do something that is motivationally very demanding. However, he

believes that it is easier for people to be motivated to help those that they have harmed

– we are, he claims, more likely to ‘feel’ a sense of duty towards them. We both have

and ‘feel’ a duty of justice to those we have harmed. So, Dobson’s demandingness

relates to how difficult it is likely to be for people to be motivated to act. Call this the

‘motivational difficulty’ interpretation of demandingness.

The two understandings of demandingness are not unrelated. We might expect that

the level of motivational difficulty will increase as people are asked to make greater

sacrifices. If justice requires greater levels of sacrifice than humanitarianism – as

Nagel claims – we might expect that justice would be more demanding than

humanitarianism on both understandings of demandingness. However, Dobson’s

argument suggests that the level of sacrifice may not be the only factor that impacts

on motivational difficulty. On his account, motivational difficulty is also affected by

whether or not I have harmed the person for whom I am being asked to make a

sacrifice. It is, of course, unlikely that Dobson would want to claim that the level of

sacrifice is irrelevant in determining the motivational difficulty of an action but for

him (unlike Nagel) there is no general (or systematic) difference between the level of

sacrifice required by justice and the level of sacrifice required by Samaritanism. In

other words, the ‘content’ of justice and the ‘content’ of Samaritanism are the same

for Dobson and the only difference between them is whether I am being asked to help

someone I have harmed or someone I have not harmed. Nagel defines justice and

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humanitarianism so that they require different levels of sacrifice; Dobson does not

define justice and Samaritanism so that they require different levels of sacrifice.

Dobson claims that Samaritanism is motivationally more difficult than justice; Nagel

does not claim that humanitarianism is motivationally more difficult than justice.

Dobson’s understanding of demandingness is directly linked to his account of the

grounds of Samaritanism and justice. We have seen that Nagel suggests that

humanitarian duties are grounded in nothing more than the ‘desperate need’ of other

human beings while duties of justice are grounded in co-citizenship of a sovereign

state. Dobson’s account is rather different. He suggests that Samaritanism is

grounded in ‘empathy’ with others (Dobson 2006a, 171):

The Samaritan managed to turn the stranger into a neighbour … Although, we

are not told how the Samaritan achieved this state of grace, it is likely that it

was through some process of empathy, and this is indeed one mechanism for

developing the right sorts of dispositions – cosmopolitan dispositions, indeed.

The appeal to sceptics to recognise that they are members of a common

humanity is, I take it, an appeal to the mechanism of empathy (Dobson 2006a,

171).

The recognition that others are in need is not enough without ‘empathy’ for them.

Standard versions of cosmopolitanism rely on our capacity to empathise with all other

‘members of a common humanity’ to generate a cosmopolitan political community.

We might say that the ‘Samaritan relation’ is created by empathy with those in need

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of our help. Unfortunately, most people have a weak capacity for empathy with

distant strangers, therefore, Samaritanism is motivationally difficult for us.

Dobson’s account of the grounds of duties of justice is also different from Nagel’s

account. As he puts it:

Justice refers us to giving people their due, in connection with some

antecedent action or agreement. The giver and recipient of justice are,

therefore, connected in ways that the giver and recipient of aid are not. Justice

is regarded as the appropriate response to a situation in which others suffer,

and which the giver has done something to engender (Dobson 2006a, 173-4).

We do not need to be co-citizens in a sovereign state to owe duties of justice to each

other. Instead, we need to have some kind of prior connection. More specifically, we

need to be connected by a harming relationship – whereby, the recipient of justice has

been harmed by the giver of justice. In other words, the justice relation is created by

one person harming another or causally contributing to the other suffering harm. For

Dobson, the justice relation is motivationally stronger than the Samaritan relation

because ‘we are more likely to feel obliged to assist others in their plight if we are

[causally] responsible for their situation’ (Dobson 2006a, 171). Dobson does not

explain why the justice relation is motivationally stronger but it might just be the case

that the human capacity for justice – or our ability to act on our sense of justice – is

stronger than the human capacity for empathy.

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To summarise: I have contrasted Dobson’s account of the differences between

Samaritanism and justice with Nagel’s account of the differences between

humanitarianism and justice. More specifically, I have suggested that they offer

different accounts of the grounds of both duties of justice and duties of humanity.

Moreover, they have different views of the relative demandingness of justice and

humanitarianism/Samaritanism, which reflect differences in their understanding of the

content of duties of justice and duties of humanity as well as the differences in their

accounts of the grounds of those duties.

4. What’s wrong with Dobson’s account of the justice relation?

I have suggested that Dobson’s account of thick cosmopolitan citizenship might

usefully be located in an ongoing debate about the justice relation. In this section, I

will build on the comparison of Dobson’s and Nagel’s accounts in the previous

section to argue that there are two important problems with Dobson’s account of the

justice relation.4 The first problem concerns the relationship between motivation and

justification in Dobson’s theory. The second problem is that his account of the

grounds of duties of justice – and, therefore, his account of the justice relation – is

confused.

Dobson’s understanding of the justice relation is closely connected to his concern that

standard cosmopolitanism – or, as he calls it, ‘Samaritanism’ – does not motivate

action. In the contemporary globalizing world, there are too many global challenges

4 There are other problems with Dobson’s account – see, for example, the food discussions of his position in Hayward (2006a and 2006b) and Smith (2005).

19

that require urgent action, including global climate change, for us to rely on such

weak motivations. If standard cosmopolitanism cannot motivate people to make a

difference – to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions or limit their use of ecological

space – we need an alternative moral or political theory that will motivate individuals

to act. Dobson’s concern with, what he calls, the ‘motivational problem’ is an

important corrective for political and moral theorists who are unconcerned by the gap

between securing ‘an intellectual commitment’ to their principles and ensuring ‘a

determination to act on them’ (Dobson 2006a, 165). We should care if no one –

including us – acts on the moral and political principles that we advocate.

Unfortunately, Dobson’s response to the motivational problem tends to confuse

motivation and justification. The failure of standard cosmopolitanism to motivate

action might be a reason to consider an alternative theory but it is not a conclusive

reason against standard cosmopolitanism. There are many occasions when I know

what I should do but I don’t do it – because I am too lazy or too busy or too tired or

too selfish or too much in love. There are likely to be many other occasions when I

don’t do what I should do – because I don’t think about what I should do or I deceive

myself or I just try not to think about what’s happening in the world or I tell myself

that I can’t make any difference. In these cases, my failure to act is not generally

regarded as a reason for anyone to change their moral judgements about what I should

have done. In other words, moral principles can justify actions even if they do not

motivate people to take those actions. We know that people will often fail to fulfil

their duties and one of the tasks of political theory is to design institutions and laws

that make it easier for people to do the right thing and more difficult for them to do

the wrong thing. The study of the barriers to dutiful action is a matter for

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psychologists and sociologists. Their theories should inform the work of political

theorists and students of public policy seeking to design political, social and economic

institutions that will help us to overcome the barriers. Dobson does not pursue this

route. Instead, he treats the motivational problem as a decisive reason for rejecting

standard cosmopolitanism. In other words, he confuses motivation and justification –

there can be no justification without motivation on his account. He is right that moral

and political principles (justifications) are supposed to motivate but he is wrong to

think that principles that do not (often) motivate should be rejected.

I have argued that Dobson’s argument against standard cosmopolitanism confuses

motivational failure with justificatory failure. We may well have cosmopolitan duties

to help others even if we are not motivated to help them. Dobson could, of course,

accept my claim but argue that his ‘thick cosmopolitanism’ offers a better way

forward because it can both justify action to help others and motivate us to help

others. Unfortunately, thick cosmopolitanism is not a genuine alternative because it is

either incoherent or depends on a prior commitment to standard cosmopolitanism.

We have seen that Dobson offers a distinctive account of the grounds of duties of

justice – the justice relation is created by one person harming another or causally

contributing to the other person suffering harm. The problem with this account of the

justice relation is that until we have an account of justice we cannot identify cases of

‘harming’. As Henry Shue points out:

Simply being made worse off (e.g., driven out of business by a legal and fair

competitor) does not constitute suffering harm. To be harmed means to be

21

made worse off in some wrongful way. One clear example of being harmed is

being made worse off through the violation of one’s rights … One can also be

harmed by being made worse off through being deprived of one’s fair share

(Shue 1993-4, 352-3).5

On Shue’s account, not all negative effects should be counted as harms. Instead,

harms will be a narrower class of negative effects. In particular, Shue’s suggestion is

that the relevant negative effects are those that violate rights or result in one having

less than one’s fair share. In other words, a person is harmed when they suffer unjust

negative effects. In short, we need an account of justice to determine when someone

has been harmed.

There are times when Dobson comes close to recognising the dependence of his

account of duties of justice on a prior account of rights. For example, he says:

The duty to reduce the size of an overlarge [ecological] footprint is, however,

driven by the correlative right to sufficient ecological space (Dobson 2003,

93).

The reason that I have a duty to reduce my ‘overlarge’ footprint is that by using more

than my fair share of the earth’s resources (and sinks) I am violating someone else’s

right (and possibly many people’s rights) to a fair share of ecological space.

However, he doesn’t appear to recognise that these rights to ecological space – and,

we might add, other rights, including emission rights – must be part of a theory of

justice. His account of the justice relation suggests that there are no rights or duties of 5 For a similar account see Elliott (2006).

22

justice until one person has harmed another or causally contributed to another person

suffering harm but without a prior conception of rights – and, therefore, a conception

of justice – we cannot say when someone has been harmed.

Moreover, the most plausible account of Dobson’s right to ecological space is a

standard cosmopolitan one.6 As he suggests, there is a ‘presumption that, absent

qualifying conditions, ecological space should be divided equally among its potential

recipients’ (Dobson 2003, 78). So, all humans have a prima facie claim to equal

ecological space. They have a standard cosmopolitan right to a fair share of

ecological space and a standard cosmopolitan duty of justice not to use more than

their fair share of ecological space. If some people use more than their fair share of

ecological space, they act unjustly and incur a duty of ‘compensatory justice’ to

rectify or compensate for the wrong that they have done (Dobson 2006a, 174).

Dobson’s account of the justice relation is actually better understood as an account of,

what we might call, the ‘compensatory justice relation’. It is not a coherent account

of the grounds of duties of justice. The justice relation – which must obtain between

all persons as claimed by standard cosmopolitanism – must precede the harming

relationship that creates the (very special) compensatory justice relation.

I have argued that Dobson’s rejection of standard cosmopolitanism is premature. He

is correct that it lacks motivational force but he is wrong to think that provides a

sufficient reason for rejecting it. Moreover, his own account of the justice relation is

only coherent if we re-interpret it as an account of one – special – part of a theory of

justice, namely, compensatory justice. On this revised interpretation, Dobson’s thick

cosmopolitanism is a theory of compensatory justice, which is dependent on a prior 6 Hayward makes a similar argument (2006a, 443-5).

23

standard cosmopolitan – and egalitarian – theory of (distributive) justice. I’m not sure

that Dobson is right that standard cosmopolitanism is grounded in the capacity for

empathy rather than the capacity to do justice – i.e., to treat others fairly and support

just institutions – but he is probably right that the guilt motive (or compensatory

justice motive) is typically stronger than the justice motive. The guilt that comes with

wrongdoing is often a strong motivation. Therefore, we might make progress with the

motivational problem by persuading people that they have (thick cosmopolitan) duties

of compensatory justice to help other people. Unfortunately, the problem is that once

they ask what they did wrong – what was the injustice that they have done – we will

have no option but to appeal to a standard cosmopolitan account of universal human

rights to fair shares of ecological space. Ultimately, we cannot escape the

motivational problem by adopting thick cosmopolitanism.

5. Conclusion

I began by emphasising the importance of the challenge posed by global climate

change – the exemplary case of a global environmental problem. We know how

important it is to take action now to mitigate climate change and adapt to its effects

but governments, corporations and individuals continue to do too little. When our

governments are doing so little it is tempting to think that the solution has to come

from the bottom-up. Moreover, governments encourage us to believe that it is up to

us as individuals to ‘do our bit’ and to ‘make a difference’. They suggest that

individuals taking responsibility for their own behaviour – their own emissions – is

the only way forward. They suggest that governments alone cannot solve the problem

24

of climate change; we will only meet the challenge of climate change if we all pull

together. This emphasis on individual action is expressed in many different ways –

one of the most interesting is the suggestion that changing our behaviour to tackle the

problem of climate change is a duty of citizenship. A key problem for the citizenship

approach – and for many other approaches that emphasise individual action – is that

people are not motivated to change their behaviour. In this chapter, I have examined

a theory that not only argues that changing our behaviour to tackle climate change

(and many other problems) is a duty of citizenship but also claims to offer a theory of

citizenship that addresses the motivational problem – Andrew Dobson’s argument for

thick cosmopolitan (and ecological) citizenship duties.

I have suggested that Dobson’s account is best understood in the context of ongoing

debates about the justice relation. I introduced Thomas Nagel’s account of the justice

relation and his distinction between duties of justice and humanitarian duties so that

we could compare Dobson’s account to Nagel’s. My aim was not to endorse Nagel’s

account – on the contrary, I think Nagel’s account of the justice relation is much too

restrictive (although, it is a coherent account of the justice relation). Instead, my aim

was to provide a background against which we could identify the problems with

Dobson’s thick cosmopolitanism. I have argued that Dobson’s focus on the

motivational problem leads him to confuse the relationship between motivation and

justification. He rejects standard versions of cosmopolitanism because they do not

motivate enough people to act but I have argued that cosmopolitan principles might

be justified even if there are psychological or sociological barriers that limit their

motivational power. Moreover, I have claimed that Dobson’s thick cosmopolitan

account of the grounds of duties of justice is only coherent if we interpret it in a much

25

more limited way – as an account of the grounds of duties of compensatory justice,

which depends on a prior commitment to a standard cosmopolitan theory of

(distributive) justice.

We can, I think, take three important lessons from our critical discussion of Dobson’s

account of thick cosmopolitan citizenship. First, there is no obvious alternative to

standard cosmopolitanism for those who really believe that the global distribution of

benefits and burdens, including the benefits and burdens of climate change, is always

a matter of justice.

Second, we cannot avoid the motivational problem. Dobson may be right that we are

more likely to be motivated to right wrongs that we believe we have done. However,

we will still need to persuade people that they have done something wrong in the first

place – i.e., that they have committed an injustice. Moreover, we will need to

recognise that motivating people to do the right thing is not simply a matter of

providing them with another justification that might have more motivational force

because it somehow ‘plugs’ into stronger motivations. Instead, we will need to

engage much more directly with the psychological and sociological obstacles that

prevent people from doing the right thing.

Third, the solution to the problem of climate change is very unlikely to lie in

individual action alone. The psychological and sociological obstacles that prevent

people from doing the right thing are most likely to be overcome by re-designing the

political, social and economic institutions that provide the context in which

individuals act. Changing institutions and their cultures is not an easy task. It takes

26

leadership. Exemplary individuals – ‘climate champions’ who promote climate-

protecting action – can offer that leadership in their workplaces, communities and

even their homes. The work of these exemplary individuals, who have not

succumbed to the motivational problem, does make a difference but progress from the

bottom-up is slow. We need innovative political theorists and public policy experts to

design institutions and policies that will promote climate-protecting action and we

need political leaders who will take the political risk of advocating and implementing

them. Individual action is part of the solution but it is the individual action of our

political leaders that is most important. It is our duty as cosmopolitan citizens to press

our political leaders for meaningful action on climate change.

Notes

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