Nation-state is key – only way to motivate people to act to solve common problems

Th e discussion above illustrates a larger problem in cosmopolitan theorizing more generally – namely, its account of moral motivation is deeply want- ing. In arguing that moral principles might well motivate in the absence of feeling, Caney fails to offer an account of what it means to motivate in the first place. How do individuals come to be motivated to act according to their principles? How do moral principles motivate individuals to carry them out? It seems clear enough that any story about how it is that individuals become motivated to act according to moral principles requires that individuals inter- nalize them in some sense – it is insufficient to suggest that they ought to motivate, when in many instances they fail to do so. In other words, in order to motivate individuals moral principles must have some purchase with normal, human psychology.32 On the other hand, nationalists offer a compelling story of moral motiva- tion, one that seems to capture the true moral psychology of modern indi- viduals – it is from within the special relations that co-nationals share that their obligations to each other emerge. This way of interpreting the special obligations that characterize the relations among co-nationals (as distinct from the general obligations that all individuals owe to all other individuals) is typically defended from within a theory of associative duties. Associative duties are defined as those that ‘provide positive benefits for one’s associa- tions, duties that go beyond whatever positive duties we may have toward people in general’.33 Th ese duties hold among ‘members of significant social groups’ which are characterized by ‘socially salient characteristics’, and their source is the relationships themselves.34 For defenders of associative duties, that certain kinds of relationships give near-immediate rise to moral obliga- tions is a matter of common-sense morality. 35 In other words, the obligations we have to others derive from the relationships we have with them: ‘we account for special responsibilities...by citing the nature of our relation- ships to that person. We have special duties, we may say, because she is our sister, or our friend, or our neighbour’.36 Obligations are inherent in the notion of familial relation, of friendship, of neighborliness: even if we cannot defi nitively list which specific obligations are incumbent on us as members of any of these relations, it is clear that to be a member of any one of them means, in large part, to be willing to carry out the obligations to which they give rise.37 As David Miller writes, ‘the duties in question must be integral to the relationship, in the sense that the relationship could not exist in the form that it does unless the duties were generally acknowledged’.38 It may seem clear enough that we have special obligations towards those who are close to us – our friends, family members and so forth. In these kinds of cases, it seems straightforward to claim that our personal relations generate obligations that we need to take seriously in order for the relationship to con- tinue as that kind of relationship. But what may seem less clear is whether special obligations attend relationships that are not as clearly personal.39 Nationalists, however, argue that nations are sufficiently like these other forms of relations that they too generate special obligations among members. Nations are, crucially, communities that their members value, and the special obligations that pertain among co-nationals derive in large part from the value that the members see in their relations to each other. The nation – in order to defi ne itself, and in part to account for the worry that the family/friend–nation analogy fails to justify, on its face, the special duties that obtain among co- nationals – relies heavily on what David Miller terms a ‘shared public culture’, i.e., a shared ethos that manifests itself in overlapping values, norms and expectations among members of a community.40 In other words, national boundaries identify a group of people who, based on the existence of a shared public culture, have ethical duties towards each other that take priority over those they have towards others more generally.