Political dispositions and global justice: Understanding the duties of individuals in an unjust world

This dissertation places the dispositions, attitudes, and perspectives of individuals at the heart of political obligation rather than at its margins, where they are found in the prevalent views that understand such obligation essentially as compliance with institutional rules. Chapter One traces this family of views to its origin in Kant's political philosophy, which influentially argues that justice and political duties are intrinsically tied to the state and coercion, suggesting that international social justice is fundamentally an oxymoron. Kant's account founders on internal contradictions and has unappealingly inegalitarian consequences in the domestic realm, so the dissertation turns in Chapter Two to contemporary arguments that try to fix these problems by adopting egalitarian liberal premises while remaining within Kant's framework. These arguments also falter because the premises that they adopt to guarantee domestic egalitarianism also require greater openness to both international and non-coercive domestic forces than they can allow if they wish to restrict fully political duties to the state alone. By demonstrating the surprising extent to which John Rawls's theory of justice relies on elements of Hegel at key junctures, I develop in Chapter Three a dispositional approach to political duty that show how citizens must shape their own attitudes and perspective in order for political society to function fairly. Chapter Four extends this dispositional approach to show how the interdependence of individuals and institutions facilitates reciprocity in a well-ordered society and to consider the implications for the non-ideal case of societies like ours, which are not well-ordered. Chapter Five then develops a conception of solidarity to help individuals understand their political obligations in a non-ideal social world that forces them to cooperate internationally with others whom shared institutions and practices fail to treat as free and equal. The dissertation defends this conception against charges of its being ideological with a consideration in Chapter Six of how political theory itself shapes the dispositions of individuals and the materials which it may reasonably draw upon in doing so. In doing so, the project concludes by advancing a methodology for better linking ideal and non-ideal theory.