The scenes of rioting in the UK over the last few days have been pretty awful, involving, as they have, widespread destruction of property and of some people's homes. The responses to the riots have had problems of their own, resting largely, as they have, on appeals for repressive state measures and ritual incantations of the need for re-moralising society. Amidst this fevered hubbub it has become apparent that the reflex responses of members of the public, as well as of the leading politicians in the country, are basically punitive in nature.
To an extent these responses are understandable since it is true that threats to livelihoods, homes and basic physical security, do tend to panic people. And I am far from wanting to engage in extended responses here concerning the question of what drives people to engage in behaviour that puts such things at risk, though not because I think such discussion is otiose. Rather it is because, in the first instance, what strikes me as important here is to reflect on the question of what philosophically there is to say about what these riots reveal to us about social order and social cohesion.
In the first instance, what comes to mind is the way that these riots reveal the need for discussion of the notion of the "state of nature". This notion has been misunderstood as either a historical one or as being something that is only at the edges of political theory, something preliminary, as it were, to its real business. What disturbances of the sort we have witnessed have revealed, however, is how central to the task of political philosophy the discussion of the state of nature really is. It is not only that the riots reveal well how a state of nature can be re-created in advanced societies, even if only in a few streets and for a short time. It is, even more, that the problems that the social contract is meant to resolve, problems of assurance and the overcoming of isolation, are not conclusively solved in any of the societies in which we live which is why they remain beset by recurrences of reversion to the state of nature.
Hence it is not only false to think that the state of nature is an historically closed episode, it is also wrong to think that it is not of continuous relevance in the comprehension of the bases of social order. A state of nature is constituted whenever it is the case that there exists in a situation no conclusively established and reliably applicable authority. In this sense our societies, whilst based on social contracts for the most part, are riven with exceptions that place us either as individuals or members of groups, back into the state of nature. Once placed there we have the basic problems revealed again that require recourse to the social contract. In this sense the need for social order is much more basic than the ritual incantations of politicians, commentators and social theorists, suggest.
It is not merely a problem of appealing for 'parents to parent' or for measures that alleviate problems of poverty and neglect, it is also a problem of articulating both within the spaces governed by the social contract and those apertures through which authority disappears, the need for a regulation of behaviour that enables the formation and re-formation of ordered connections such that something like cohesion can be said to exist. The ritual noises that we hear on such occasions point to formations that allegedly threaten such order, whether what is meant here are loose morals or chasms of inequality. Such factors are not without interest in the overall understanding of social order but the basis of it is elsewhere. It is in the simple view that there is an interest in order existing and being maintained in a manner that supersedes that which can tie together a band of robbers. This case is far from simple and cannot be regarded as conclusively established but that it requires to be made and re-made is the basic philosophical lesson that emerges from these disturbances, a lesson that is of more lasting interest and importance than either the disturbances themselves or the ritual denunciations that are made when they take place.
As I mentioned in yesterday's posting there has recently appeared a response from Tim Waligore to an earlier posting on this blog. Yesterday I tackled one aspect of Tim's response which concerned the reference I made earlier to the notion of the "social contract" and whether I could simply move from the general account of coercion in the "Introduction" to the Doctrine of Right to the discussion of the social contract that is specifically discussed under the heading of Public Right. However, the more important point Tim raised against my earlier published position concerned a cosmopolitan objection to the reasoning I gave when prescinding from the detail of an argument concerning immigration controls in the journal Political Theory.
First it's necessary to place this discussion back in context. The argument in Political Theory to which I was responding concerned the question of whether immigration controls are coercive. One of the parties to the debate argued that they are coercive whilst the other suggested that they are not but merely acts of "prevention". Basically the distinction is that some acts are ones that you can be prevented from doing without it following that you have been coerced. So if I refuse someone's request to marry me I haven't coerced them but I have prevented them from carrying something out. Similarly it may be that preventing someone from coming to a country by erecting an immigration barrier does stop them from carrying out their purpose without it following that this means that they have been coerced. Now, the reason I proceeded to prescind from the specifics of the debate was because it struck me that both parties to it effectively subscribed to a view of politics that was broadly informed by the views of Robert Nozick. On those views acts of coercion require some special justification as the nature of "right" is not defined in terms of coercion but rather more loosely by reference to something understood as "autonomy" where this notion appears to have some vague connection to the Kantian term but which Kant does not use in political philosophy. In response I was suggesting that a Kantian view is quite different since, on this view, right and authorization to use coercion are intimately connected, Kant even writing at one point that they "mean one and the same thing" (Ak. 6: 232). So my decision to prescind from the detail of the argument concerning immigration controls was based on an attempt to reach a more fundamental question of political philosophy.
However Tim's reply to my earlier posting raises a question which suggests that the response I made to the debate in Political Theory concealed a problem, a problem that, effectively prevents my being able, as easily as I thought in any case, from being able to prescind from the debate over immigration controls. There are two strands to Tim's challenge. The first concerns the way the "social contract" is referred to when Kant mentions it in his discussion of Private Right. This occurs towards the conclusion of Kant's discussion of acquisition when he writes that the problem of its justification requires reference to a notion of original acquisition before going on to write: "even if it is solved through the original contract, such acquisition will always remain only provisional unless this contract extends to the entire human race" (Ak. 6: 266).
This points to the first rationale Kant gives for a connection between the social contract and cosmopolitan considerations. To it can be added a second one to which Tim also refers. This is the very beginning of the discussion of Public Right where we find:
Since the earth's surface is not unlimited but closed, the concepts of the right of a state and of a right of nations lead inevitably to the idea of a right for a state of nations (ius gentium) or cosmopolitan right (ius cosmopoliticum). So if the principle of outer freedom limited by law is lacking in any one of these three possible forms of rightful condition, the framework of all the others is unavoidably undermined and must finally collapse. (Ak. 6: 311)
Kant's concluding comment here is fairly drastic but clearly indicates the importance of the connection he felt there was between the different elements of right. Cosmopolitan right and international right are here distinguished though the difference between them is not clear at this point of the text.
Tim's general point is that the will of a given state is, by reference to other states, still a specific will, the reasoning that Kant uses to suggest that the relationship between states constitutes a state of nature. In this situation the existent state appears to those not included within its boundaries simply as a power so that whilst the state needs no specific justification for coercion in regard to its citizens it does require some justification with regard to non-citizens who are not included in the will that was established when the state was set up. Further, to go back to the specifics of the question concerning immigration controls, there needs something specific to be shown concerning what it is that requires non-citizens to be limited and regulated in terms of their entry to the state, something that specifically relates to them as non-citizens concerning why they should be limited in this way.
A lot of separate issues are involved here. Firstly, Tim is quite right to bring out the problem of provisionality with regard to states prior to establishment of a cosmopolitan contract. This is the subject of the monograph of Elizabeth Ellis to which I have given some response elsewhere. It does importantly complicate questions of state of nature theory if the relationship between states is thought of as such a state of nature although it has to be added that this view of the existent state of play between nations is not held by, for example, Habermas who instead insists that the present relations involve a form of law that shows the state of nature has, to at least some extent, been superseded. From a strict Kantian point of view, however, Tim is right to draw attention to this point.
The second point is that the connection drawn between the right of the state, international right and cosmopolitan right at the beginning of the discussion of public right does not collapse the distinctions between them. Kant indicates an important relationship between them but he does not conflate them with each other. So there is some sense to right within the state, regardless of international right and cosmopolitan right although this sense is, as Ellis and Tim both correctly argue, provisional. The scope of such provisionality hence has to be worked through which I attempted in the article I wrote in response to Ellis.
However these points are not the core of the issue. The core is rather Tim's conclusion that we cannot abjure the provision of justification of coercive measures with regard to the non-citizens who wish to enter the domain of the state. Now, within the argument of the Doctrine of Right, Kant does not address this question. Kant only looks at the reasons why colonial settlement is problematic arguing for a need for specific contracts and against force. There is no specific discussion concerning what is required for those who would wish to settle within the domain of an existent state.
However surely the Kantian response is that the existent state has, by means of the constitutional measures it has set in place, defined the scope of agreed settlement within its borders? This would not merely include the need for new settlers to adhere to the laws already given but could well incorporate considerations the citizens of the state have made to the effect that they wish to decide whether to admit new citizens. This does not have to be based, as it so often is for existent states today, on grounds of ethnicity or on implied reference to considerations of "welfare". But part of the point of an established constitution is surely one of decision that the sovereign power can determine the basis of citizenship. After all, it is normal to be able to strip citizenship from someone if they perform certain acts deemed treasonous so, similarly, there could be grounds for determining whether or not anyone is allowed to begin life as a citizen. It is true that all this is, in the strict sense, provisional but no more so than any other ground of right. This doesn't prevent it from being the case that the non-citizen needs to be given justifications for why application for citizenship is turned down but the fact that there needs to be a process of such application would itself be a settled law of the land, like any law and as such the process would be in no more need of special justification than any other and in this sense I would continue to reject the view I took to be underlying the debate that took place in Political Theory.
In a recent posting Tim Waligore has replied to an earlier posting of mine. In that earlier posting I was myself responding to a debate in the journal Political Theory that had specifically focused on questions of whether immigration controls were coercive but my posting prescinded from the specific debate over immigration controls to raise what I took to be a prior question about the nature of political justification and in that posting I suggested a contrast between "liberal" views and "republican" ones. In some respects, although this is not the point of Tim's reply, I now think the contrast wasn't entirely correctly described in that posting. As I pointed out in that earlier posting there was a model of political authority derived from Robert Nozick at work in the debate in Political Theory so it would make more sense to describe it as a contrast between "libertarian" and "republican" views rather than "liberal" and "republican". As I will explore on some other occasion there are good reasons for thinking that libertarian views are very far from being "liberal" in inspiration.
In any event, the contrast I was intending in this earlier posting was between a view of political authority that regards coercion as requiring specific additional justification over and above the basic rights of states and one that instead sees coercion as built in to the very nature of the right of states and this was the basis for my claim that the views in the Political Theory debate shared an underlying commitment to the same kind of political notions despite disagreeing over the question of whether immigration controls constituted a "coercive" act or not.
Tim's posting responds to this earlier one of mine in effectively two different ways. The first is to suggest that I moved rather too easily from the view of the "Introduction" to the Doctrine of Right to the account of the social contract (which is part of "Public Right") whilst the second response concerned instead the specific question of whether I had not, in my earlier posting, left aside the justification by which states relate to each other, left aside, that is, an important question of cosmopolitanism in my desire to prescind from the debate concerning immigration controls. I will tackle this question concerning cosmopolitanism and immigration controls in the next posting, concentrating in this one merely on the relationship between coercion and the state contract.
Tim is right that I was drawing on the "Introduction" to the Doctrine of Right when I discussed coercion in the earlier posting. In the "Introduction" Kant makes clear that right is connected to authorization to use coercion arguing: "if a certain use of freedom is itself a hindrance to freedom in accordance with universal laws (i.e., wrong), coercion that is opposed to this (as a hindering of a hindrance to freedom) is consistent with freedom in accordance with universal laws, that is, it is right" (Ak. 6: 231). So the central message that coercion is understood as a basis of right provided it meets the conditions given here is allowed. Subsequently Kant goes on to talk about this "reciprocal coercion" in terms of strict right, so much so that he writes: "Right and authorization to use coercion...mean one and the same thing" (Ak. 6: 232).
Tim's point, however, is that it is a long way from this argument to construction of Kant's view of the social contract since the opening of the Doctrine of Right proper is with private right and that there is only one reference to the notion of a "social contract" in the province of private right. The context of the discussion of the contract in private right is the penultimate paragraph of Kant's account of acquisition in which it is made clear that any acquisition that occurs in the state of nature is only provisional. Here Kant does also add: "even if it is solved through the original contract, such acquisition will always remain only provisional unless this contract extends to the entire human race" (Ak. 6: 266).
This point connects to the question of cosmopolitanism to which I will return in the next posting. However it is worth pointing out, as a general matter of political theory, that the basis of the notion of the state was already given in the argument of the "Introduction" to the Doctrine of Right on which I was drawing in my earlier posting. This is made specifically clear in paragraph 45 of the Doctrine of Right where Kant writes that "insofar as" the laws of the state "are a priori necessary as laws, that is, insofar as they follow of themselves from concepts of external right as such" then its form is "the form of a state as such", the state in idea, the state "as it ought to be in accordance with pure principles of right". Hence the concepts of external right as such are sufficient to give us the norm by which we can test the behaviour of actual states. This being so I don't take it to be the case that the move I made from the argument of the "Introduction" to the Doctrine of Right to the notion of the social contract was, in itself, one that involved a conflation of levels. It is, however, a different matter whether some legitimate cosmopolitan replies to the argument I made in the earlier posting are not, all the same, available.
