The alt is doomed to fail – it opens the door for domination of the vulnerable and drains trust in institutions

The first worry is that, absent a global political culture, a cosmopolitan ideal of social justice would require unrealistic levels of altruism. As Pettit writes in his “Republican Law of Peoples,” the cosmopolitan ideal would be utopian in the sense that states, in particular the richer representative states, would have to be saintly—in effect, they would have to be controlled by saintly peoples—in order to provide robustly for the satisfaction of the ideal. The world in which states operated like that would be a more perfect world than ours but psychological and institutional realities make it into a scenario we can hardly rely on being able to attain.*

Pettit does not specify here why cosmopolitan justice, but not social jus- tice within the state, would require unrealistic levels of altruism. In more re- cently published work, however, there are some clues that, importantly, point in the direction of the PMA. First, Pettit sees state sovereignty as a necessary condition for non-domination, as it reflects the self-determination of a demo- cratic people. Since trust is in short supply across cultural divides, there will be “less likelihood of establishing those important unelected authorities . . . who could credibly claim to make decisions in line with shared standards,” and thus “the cause of democracy, articulated in terms of freedom, argues for a world of many states.”® Following this thought, Pettit argues that states are obliged not to use their citizens’ tax revenue towards the needs of other people “except when those citizens explicitly or implicitly demand this, or support it as an implication of a separate demand.”' Given the motivational limits on social justice, the cosmopolitan ideal is realizable only if people become more other- regarding than they currently are—in other words, assuming away the stability problem—or if political institutions act against their people’s expressed will.

The second and related concern is that cosmopolitan ideals of justice would require global political institutions for their creation and implementation, and these, in turn, risk becoming themselves sources of domination and arbitrary power. The danger lurks in the lack of a global equivalent of active citizen- ship, which in the civic republican account carries a motivational precondition of civic virtue and a sense of belonging to a polity. Without a political culture and tradition to provide the motivation to engage and criticize these political institutions, there is a risk of them operating against the democratic will of the people. This, correspondently, will have a negative effect on citizens’ trust towards allegiance to these institutions, seeing them as alien dominating forces rather than a representation of the democratic will.®?

Note that this republican concern need not assume that the ideal of cosmo- politan justice requires a global leviathan. Indeed, many, if not most contem- porary cosmopolitans explicitly reject the notion that their theories require the establishment of a global equivalent to the sovereign state, and restrict their prescriptions to global institutions addressing specific policy areas (for ex- ample, taxation, migration, or development policies).”” Nevertheless, insofar as cosmopolitan ideals of justice are meant to serve as a stable foundation for political action, and not merely as voluntary guidelines for sovereign states, they would require at least some of these supra-national institutions to have political authority over the relevant domains. Given that republicans question the existence of a global public culture that would facilitate civic engagement with these institutions, the worry with regards to domination is not unfounded even if we restrict the authority of these institutions to specific policy areas: consider, for example, the political power held by the World Trade Organiza- tion over weak states.

A third and final concern is that the diffusion of patriotic concern for compatriots would have negative consequences for the relationship between citizens. As Richard Miller argues, extending the relationship of civic friend- ship globally would undermine the relationship of trust among citizens. Miller interprets the cosmopolitan ideal of justice as allowing no partiality towards one’s compatriots, and thus the needs of more needy foreigners take prece- dence. As the disadvantaged citizens of a political society no longer see their compatriots as committed to their protection from domination, and since there is a “psychologically inevitable limit” on the levels of trust and respect in a domestic society without this special concern between compatriots, this will undermine the basis for cooperation in society and will generate forms of ob- jectionable domination.®