The unprecedented movement of people across countries in recent years has made the subject of boundaries a concern and a challenge for many Western countries. The distinction between asylum-seekers in search of refuge and economic migrants seeking a better life is no longer easily maintained, nor is it the only ethical consideration. In the past, national borders usually marked out not only geographical boundaries but also the boundaries of a language and a culture. But today doubts can be raised about how far the territory we occupy and the traditional limits to its boundaries determine our own sense of identity. As far as boundaries are concerned, opinion in Europe is split between those who favour the Schengen principle of open borders and those who see the arrival of increasing numbers of newcomers as a reason for strictly controlled borders. What has become clear is that the moral debate involves a great deal more than this; issues include not only matters of culture and identity but also questions about the ethics of ownership, nationhood, multiculturalism, religion, and what it is to ‘belong’ to a country.
This broad picture is the context for Onora O'Neill's Justice across Boundaries: Whose Obligations? The series of papers in this volume, which cover rights, duties, justice and today's understanding of boundaries, are the fruit of wide-ranging reflections over a number of years that touch on some of the most challenging issues of our time. Their aim is to promote a wider conception of global justice – one in which the role of borders can be recognised, but in which borders must be judged by how far they are able to meet the standards of justice. Recognising the long-term endurance and success of some famous territorial borders – the Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall, the Berlin Wall – O'Neill is not unsympathetic to the claim that ‘good fences make good neighbours’. Her opening chapters, however, defer discussion of boundaries to focus on rights and their relationship to duties and obligations. Her own position is clear – she holds that while contemporary human rights approaches construe justice as respect for rights, rights themselves, whether natural or institutional, do not take precedence over duties and obligations. Justice in this context depends on how and on whom the duty to respond to rights falls: who should act and what they are obliged to do. It would be easy to assume that the answer to this question, when asked at the political level, is that the burden of action falls upon states. It is O'Neill's view, however, that the duties assigned to states in Declarations of Rights drawn up in the aftermath of the second World War can be regarded as second-order duties; they specify what states should require of others or of citizens, rather than determining what states themselves should take on as their direct responsibilities. For many individual states, it may be that their responsibility is simply to make a narrower judgement – to determine who would benefit from action, who has the power to intervene, and whether intervention is justified.
These early concerns, particularly with respect to rights and obligations in the case of hunger and extreme need, remain central to her work, as the selection of articles in this volume demonstrates. There is a return to the fundamental who, what, whom questions throughout the book, which is divided into four parts, each sub-headed as ‘across boundaries’. In the opening chapter, ‘Lifeboat Earth’, one of her best-known and most successful essays on the subject, O'Neill considers how the world should or could respond to the widespread problems of scarcity or famine that it faces – an issue she had raised in an earlier book, Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Development and Justice (Allen & Unwin, 1986) in which she considered the struggles facing international and voluntary agencies committed to seeking the relief of hunger and destitution. Here, she takes further some of her original thoughts on these matters without, however, deviating from her view of justice as a goal and as a dominant guiding principle. She rejects utilitarianism and emphasises the essential role of an ethics grounded in Kantian realism. Her central consideration is the practical requirement that when dealing with problems of poverty and suffering, any proposed solution must be action-based.
Continuing her opening theme, and providing a brief background to the areas of public and philosophical importance that are crucial to her argument, O'Neill looks back on the evolution of rights theory, from Thomas Paine's Rights of Man and the French and US Declarations of Rights, to the international Declarations of Human Rights of recent decades. She notes that while laissez-faire libertarians would leave freedom of action to those directly affected and the welfare liberal may favour external intervention, both see the rights they recognise as subject to ethics and to justice. She considers whether charity – a more neutral term as far as ethics and justice are concerned – might have a place in this context but rejects the suggestion which she sees as setting aside her primary requirement – the element of obligation. Obligation, she holds, goes beyond charity in recognising that rights create duties: they make claims on people, whether individuals or groups, and while it may not be the duty of any particular person or group to fulfil some specific obligation, where there are rights there must be correlative obligations. In O'Neill's words, ‘we do not know what a right amounts to until we know who has an obligation to do what for whom under which circumstances.’ In a neat comment, she adds that the fact that we cannot help everyone doesn't mean we have no obligation to help anyone.
If charity, then, cannot fill the function of duty or obligation, the possibility raised in the final chapter of Part 1 is that this function might be fulfilled by compensation – something a libertarian who is committed to rights might choose to recognise as a neutral rather than a moral response to need. However, O'Neill holds that her own focus on actions and agents actually strengthens the force of rights. Providing aid to the vulnerable, she suggests, makes a more powerful and effective claim on people if it is seen as a fundamental obligation rather than as routine compensation.
The topic of boundaries in relation to justice is taken up more prominently in Part 2. O'Neill argues that states do not necessarily have to be defined by territorial boundaries, and traditional assumptions about borders should be treated with caution: justice can stretch across boundaries and in some circumstances it may be right to cross them. But this is not simply a straightforwardly relativist defence of national boundaries without reference to ethics, as O'Neill makes clear. She writes: ‘How can those who argue for universal principles of justice, or for human rights, endorse structures that entail that the rights people actually have depend on where they are, or more precisely on which place recognises them as citizen rather than as alien?’ The romance of the nation-state may linger but many people do in fact find the notion of globalisation attractive and, while notions of justice can be widely shared, this does not, she remarks, require the creation of a world police-force. In sum: ‘We trade, we broadcast, we travel, we negotiate, and above all we communicate with distant others’. Fundamental to her position, then, is the claim that justice cannot be contained within state boundaries, nor do boundaries guarantee a state's own sovereignty. Moreover, the impermeable boundaries of one state can stand in the way of justice for another. The scope of justice, O'Neill suggests, must be defined in a way that will convince us that ‘our’ world must be shared with others. This leads to some challenging conclusions: that identity is always formed in terms of concepts that are independent of boundaries, and that policies of forced relocation are hugely unjust. It also seems to hint at a reciprocal need for ‘us’ to accept intervention by those who may want to bypass ‘our’ boundaries.
Involved here again is the issue of identity – of nations, peoples, and communities – and in Part 3, ‘Action Across Boundaries’, O'Neill returns to the subject of human rights, beginning with a reminder that Christianity was the first universal mode of thought that Europe exported and that science, technology, and the ideology of the market have been among the hardiest travellers to have taken route elsewhere. She finds much to value in the work of Edmund Burke, seeing him as a realist about rights and a pioneer of modern (human) rights theory who might well have endorsed many of the human rights claims that now command wide assent. This view could well find support in Burke's remark that ‘I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics’. It is certainly a remark that might weaken attachment to the status quo and, as far as justice is concerned, O'Neill is sensitive to the fact that circumstances change, that human rights are universal but not uniform, and that a state can only be obliged to carry out what is feasible or practical: whether state or institution, the obligation is only to do what is possible. Even so, there are many ways in which what is possible may be limited, and not only by money: some states are unjust, others may be unable to carry out human rights requirements even if they want to, not everything can be afforded, and globalisation may force countries to reduce the effectiveness of their borders, leaving them to become more porous.
The recent past has brought many significant changes and in Justice across Boundaries O'Neill has provided a serious and considered appraisal of some conspicuous political and social developments. It is noticeable that, despite its title, the role that boundaries play in the book is limited, while rights and justice feature in most chapters without necessarily referring to territorial matters. This expansion of subject matter, however, has enabled O'Neill to reach favourable conclusions on a broad range of topics including the wide acceptability of human rights and liberal ideals, of market relations, and of liberal principles of justice. With reference specifically to rights, however, she detects a dark side to the human rights culture, and warns of the risk that, in becoming a central ruling idea of our age, it could, like earlier ruling ideas, be changed or modified over time, while meanwhile being capable of extending the power of the state over individuals in a way that would be incompatible with liberty.
O'Neill concludes, however, that obligations rather than rights are the active aspects of justice and that, despite the qualifications she has expressed, human rights are now part of the international architecture, generating treaties and legislation, international covenants and conventions. Cultures and practices vary, she says, but the justification for principles of justice need not be ‘What agreement can we presuppose?’ but rather ‘What understanding and what agreement can we construct?’ Some liberals would favour a conception of justice in which national or ideological boundaries would fade away from public notice; for others, O'Neill suggests, the idea of ‘shared ideals’ can prompt extreme cultural unquiet. The terms ‘boundary’ and ‘border’ have been given a rather broad interpretation in this challenging book, but they may best be understood as representing a global ordering within which human needs and fair social, legal and economic arrangements can find a place. Understood like this, the notion of just boundaries, supported by just laws, falls into place.
