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.