The Utopian

Baroness Onora O’Neill, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University, chair of the Nuffield Foundation, and former president of the British Academy in conversation with Alexander Lee.

What are the limits of talking about politics using the language of justice and/or rights?

They’re very different. To talk about politics in terms of justice is to leave it open whether you think rights are a privileged — or the privileged — way of looking at justice, or — as I happen to think — duties and obligations give us a better purchase, including a better purchase on anything you might say about rights. So, I see rights theories as fashionable, powerful, and rather thoughtless ways of getting to the things that matter for justice.

The advocates of taking rights as foundational say they’re the people who put the victim centre stage, put the recipient centre stage; but putting recipients in the middle of the stage is never very helpful if you haven’t thought about who has to do what for whom. You have to think about agents and their duties if you’re to take rights seriously.

“I regard rights theories as fashionable, powerful, and rather thoughtless ways of getting to the things that matter for justice.”

So that’s why I tend to put rights in, as it were, a derivative position. That doesn’t make them unimportant; it just means that in thinking about these things we can’t just start there, except by making some — let’s say — generous appeals to arguments from authority, such as the authority of charters or conventions or what have you.

Justice, it seems to me, is something that you have to take in a fuller way than any theory of rights or position on rights can provide…But maybe the most interesting thing is why justice is not the whole story either.

Perhaps you could expand on that a little?

Well, if we go back to a very, very long tradition in European thinking…people would say “oh yes, there’s justice and there’s ethics.” Whether you’re talking about Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, or John Stuart Mill, people will distinguish the perfect obligations of justice — which they will often think may be coercively enforced — from the imperfect and broader obligations that bind human beings to one another, where ethics and culture are more important.

“People are beginning to think not merely…that rights are not enough, but that justice is not enough either.”

Do you see this as a change merely in academic attitudes, or as a shift that influences, or is influenced by, political realities?

I’d have thought that all big changes in political philosophy reflect things that are going on in the ‘outside’ world, and one of the things that has gone on in the liberal heyday of the last thirty or forty years is a very serious effort to work largely through the instrument of legal enforcement of a limited set of rights, and to regard what happens within that space as no concern of the state, the government or the people themselves.

“In the UK, there is a dawning realisation that the perfection of cultures of control and accountability on the one hand, and allowing choice to bloom on the other hasn’t actually brought us a desirable social world.”

It is sometimes, I think misleadingly, called “respect for individual autonomy”, but I think it is more aptly characterised as a desire to allow individual choice to dominate large areas of life. This has been an extraordinarily powerful political movement —adopted by large parts of the political spectrum — and it seems to me that it hasn’t offered a conspicuously successful way of addressing a whole lot of social, educational, and cultural issues.

I would myself — within the UK — point to the dawning realisation that the perfection of cultures of control and accountability on the one hand, and allowing choice to bloom on the other hasn’t actually brought us a desirable social world.

What do you perceive to be the major challenges to the establishment of justice for women?

The major challenges to justice have probably been met in most developed societies, and the remaining disparities between the lives of men and women are to a great extent reflections of cultural patterns and choices. That’s to say, people choosing not to work full time, or to work while they have children. There may be residual areas — the commanding heights of certain industries are notably monochrome in gender terms — but I don’t think that there are really major difficulties. Now that’s not a fashionable thing to say because there are many people who try to use participation rates in different lines of activity as an index of discrimination, but it is a very poor index since there are so many other reasons why people differentiate what they do and it is not a violation of anybody’s rights if some people choose to stay at home looking after a family for a time.

“The major challenges to justice have probably been met.”

I am afraid I think that the major deficits probably come from the area that lies beyond justice, namely the social and cultural relations that make it harder for people to achieve self-respect, to have their voices heard, and since I think it’s a mistake to try to conflate everything and call it justice, I suspect that a relentless focus on rights isn’t going to provide a remedy for these things. What you end up doing is making a bit of a monkey of the theory of rights by trying to invent all sorts of ad hoc little rights to bolster people’s participation rates or success rates. I think that’s a strategy that’s been tried and isn’t too promising. It may, of course, end up hamstringing institutions, penalising other people, and humiliating the people whose rights it is supposed to secure. I wouldn’t say that the difficulties women have in developed countries are due to injustice, but I do think there are some cultural traditions which are painfully harmful to women, most obviously a degree of toleration of domestic violence that is still evident in many cultures.

“a relentless focus on rights isn’t going to provide the remedy… you end up making a monkey of the theory of rights.”

The developing world is a very different story because there we see patterns of familial control which make the exercise of very ordinary economic and civil rights difficult or impossible for women; we see a lack of education, or assumptions that women will not be employed; we see a great deal of marriage of women who have not yet finished their growth and who then have children when they are neither physically nor psychologically ready. So that’s where I think the real challenge lies.

What do you make of arguments in the developing world that economic performance is more important than justice and rights?

The Asian model. The deficiency that is alleged about societies that take that line of action — and we’re talking not only about Singapore, but also about China — is really two deficiencies. One is a lack of respect for core personal and civil rights, and the other is a lack of formal democratic political structures.

By their fruits you shall know them, on the whole. And I think it is quite clear that a number of societies have succeeded economically while failing to provide personal and civil rights, or political democracy. They have not, I think, generally succeeded economically without establishing rule of law, at least in part — that, it seems to me, is difficult because you have to have things like enforcement of contracts in order to develop a prosperous business culture. But you can clearly have selective restrictions on what are taken to be the normal civil rights of persons, although I think it is a bit of an open question how much a state can succeed in doing that without damaging economic performance. Democracy, it seems to me, quite often looks as though it is unnecessary for a successful economic performance.

“Democracy…often looks as though it is unnecessary for successful economic performance.”

So I think that the so-called Asian model, although very much questioned by many people in Asia for its neglect of democracy and/or its neglect of the basic right of the person, has had a certain success. But we’re not certain. It’s like what Mao Tse Tung said about the French Revolution, isn’t it? He was asked whether it had been a success, and he replied “there hasn’t been time to tell.”

“If you’re delivering 5-10% growth a year, people are prepared to put up with a lot.”

The Asian model has had and indeed is having great success, but I think one needs to look more closely to see whether it permits sustainable success as prosperity increases. As long as you’re delivering five to ten per cent growth a year, people are prepared to put up with a lot. But that is clearly not sustainable in the long term, and people may not be prepared to put up with quite so much if delivery is not on that scale. Amartya Sen does not think that the Asian model is convincing, which is quite interesting.

Do you believe, then, that we can ever deliver on the universal promise of justice?

If we look at modern cosmopolitan writers, we can see a number of different positions on cosmopolitanism. There are people like Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge who are effectively looking in the direction of a world state. I think that’s a risky direction to look, indeed quite a dangerous one, because if you had a world state in which you could, for example, implement Rawls’s difference principle across the globe, you would have a concentration of power that would be very dangerous and probably concentrate incompetence — we know that power has that effect, and that we can have no guarantee of sustained competence. So I certainly wouldn’t think that that sort of world state provides a convincing form of cosmopolitanism.

If you have a plurality of states, then state power is to that extent limited and constrained. It’s a very rough and ready thing indeed, and if one talks about global justice in that context, one presumably means, to some extent, domestic justice within each of a plurality of states. The likelihood of everybody succeeding at one and the same time in having rule of law and a fair degree of wider protection of rights and democracy is perhaps not very high, but we have seen a really astonishing degree of change in the last fifty years. There were rather few functioning democracies post World War Two; now there are a lot. Have brilliantly democratic polities emerged? No. But they are a great deal more open to democratic structure and to the orderly transfer of power between different parties or groups, and that seems to me the bit you require for democracy, which rule of law and respect for rights don’t secure. So we’ve seen a great deal achieved there.

As Michael Doyle showed quite convincingly about twenty years ago, one of the real payoffs is that, on the whole, democratic states do not go to war with one another; they go to war with non-democratic states, but they resolve things with other democratic states. So there’s an enormous payoff to securing a degree of democracy within states; they can achieve transfers of power and they can negotiate things better. Can it go further? Yes, presumably it can, but there are a lot of problems. But I’m not a pessimist in any wholesale way: I think that, despite gross excesses in the commercial world, despite lots of corruption in the politics of many regions, on the whole, prosperity has been spread, people have more chance of living with moderate degrees of justice than they did have.

Alexander Lee, co-founder of The Utopian, is a research fellow at the Universite du Luxembourg and the University of Warwick.