Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [109]
If you accept obligations of solidarity and belonging, the answer is obvious: Israel has a special responsibility to rescue Ethiopian Jews that goes beyond its duty (and that of all nations) to help refugees generally. Every nation has a duty to respect human rights, which requires that it provide help, according to its ability, to human beings anywhere who are suffering from famine, persecution, or displacement from their homes. This is a universal duty that can be justified on Kantian grounds, as a duty we owe persons as persons, as fellow human beings (category 1). The question we are trying to decide is whether nations have further, special responsibilities to care for their people. By referring to the Ethiopian Jews as “our brothers and sisters,” the Israeli prime minister invoked a familiar metaphor of solidarity. Unless you accept some such notion, you would be hard pressed to explain why Israel should not have conducted its airlift by lottery. You would also have a hard time defending patriotism.
Is Patriotism a Virtue?
Patriotism is a much contested moral sentiment. Some view love of country as an unassailable virtue, while others see it as a source of mindless obedience, chauvinism, and war. Our question is more particular: Do citizens have obligations to one another that go beyond the duties they have to other people in the world? And if they do, can these obligations be accounted for on the basis of consent alone?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an ardent defender of patriotism, argues that communal attachments and identities are necessary supplements to our universal humanity. “It seems that the sentiment of humanity evaporates and weakens in being extended over the entire world, and that we cannot be affected by the calamities in Tartary or Japan the way we are by those of a European people. Interest and commiseration must somehow be limited and restrained to be active.” Patriotism, he suggests, is a limiting principle that intensifies fellow feeling. “It is a good thing that the humanity concentrated among fellow citizens takes on new force through the habit of seeing each other and through the common interest that unites them.”48 But if fellow citizens are bound by ties of loyalty and commonality, this means they owe more to one another than to outsiders.
Do we want people to be virtuous? Let us begin then by making them love their country. But how can they love it, if their country means nothing more to them than it does to foreigners, allotting to them only what it cannot refuse to anyone?49
Countries do provide more to their own people than they do to foreigners. U.S. citizens, for example, are eligible for many forms of public provision—public education, unemployment compensation, job training, Social Security, Medicare, welfare, food stamps, and so on—that foreigners are not. In fact, those who oppose a more generous immigration policy worry that the new entrants will take advantage of social programs American taxpayers have paid for. But this raises the question of why American taxpayers are more responsible for their own needy citizens than for those who live elsewhere.
Some people dislike all forms of public assistance, and would like to scale back the welfare state. Others believe we should be more generous than we are in providing foreign aid to assist people in developing countries. But almost everyone recognizes a distinction between welfare and foreign aid. And most agree that we have a special responsibility to meet the needs of our own citizens that does not extend to everyone in the world. Is this distinction morally defensible, or is it mere favoritism, a prejudice for our own kind? What, really, is the moral significance