What interests do states have in assisting and protecting vulnerable populations beyond their borders? Today, confronted as we are with civil wars, mass atrocities, and humanitarian catastrophes that have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians and generated the displacement of sixty million more, this question is as urgent as it has ever been. It is also one that is answered in a variety of ways.
Narrow interpretations of nationalism and realism tend to insist that states have no interests in assisting the distant vulnerable. A narrow nationalism claims that a state should never risk blood and treasure for the sake of vulnerable outsiders. In the wake of President Barack Obama's decision to intervene to protect civilians in Libya in 2011, for example, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton rebuked the president for embracing the Responsibility to Protect principle, describing it as “a gauzy, limitless doctrine without any anchor in U.S. national interests.” He charged Obama with “a desire to divert American military power from protecting U.S. interests to achieving ‘humanitarian’ objectives.” The president's “highest moral duty” is to protect American lives, he declared, “and casually sacrificing them to someone else's interests is hardly justifiable.”Footnote 1 A narrow realism reaches similar conclusions, claiming that, in a dangerous and unpredictable world, the scope of the national interest ought to be restricted to the pursuit of one's own power and the maintenance of one's own security. Such an interpretation of U.S. interests was arguably at play in the deliberations within the Obama administration leading up to the decision to intervene in Libya. While they were ultimately unsuccessful in their arguments, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen warned Obama against intervening on the grounds that core American security interests were not at stake.Footnote 2 However, such circumscribed nationalist and realist conceptions of self-interest strike many as problematic. Indeed, Obama himself later recalled that he was troubled by the arguments of some of his advisors, given the urgent threat to the lives of Libyan civilians, and he felt a need to be “calibrating our national-security interests in some new way.”Footnote 3
In contrast to such narrow interpretations of national self-interest, there are many who believe that states ought to adopt a broader, more “enlightened” understanding of their interests, which includes recognition of the long-term utility that is to be gained by assisting and protecting the distant vulnerable. For example, when justifying the Libyan intervention, Obama explained that the massacre of Libyan protesters at the hands of the government forces would have generated a large flow of refugees, placing strains on the fragile transition toward democracy in Tunisia and Egypt. Further, it would have sent a message to other dictators that violence can help them to cling to power, and it would have undermined the credibility of the United Nations Security Council. Obama concluded, “While I would never minimize the costs involved in military action, I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.”Footnote 4
More recently, the chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, Paulo Pinheiro, called on states to recognize the enlightened self-interest that they have in ending the violence and suffering in Syria, declaring that “the chaos that has engulfed Syria no longer affects Syria alone.” Noting both the flood of Syrian civilians seeking refuge in Europe and also the stream of radicalized individuals making their way to Syria to fight, he appealed to states to set aside their “narrow national interests” and to work together to end the crisis, warning that “without peace and justice in Syria, we will all suffer the consequences.”Footnote 5 Others have also implored European states to recognize the enlightened self-interest that they have in accepting refugees fleeing the crisis, arguing that, among other things, an influx of migrants would likely have a positive impact on their economies.Footnote 6 In his address to the seventieth session of the UN General Assembly in 2015, Obama catalogued the extreme poverty, humanitarian catastrophes, mass atrocities, pandemics, and the impacts of climate change that pose grave threats to peoples around the world, and declared that, in a globalized world, the care and protection of vulnerable strangers is in the interest of all:
Of course, in the old ways of thinking, the plight of the powerless, the plight of refugees, the plight of the marginalized did not matter. They were on the periphery of the world's concerns. Today, our concern for them is driven not just by conscience, but should also be driven by self-interest. For helping people who have been pushed to the margins of our world is not mere charity, it is a matter of collective security.Footnote 7
The notion that there is long-term utility to be derived from caring for the distant vulnerable is very old, as I shall demonstrate shortly. But it has repeatedly proven to be inadequate motivation for states to take the costly and risky actions that are necessary to succor those in need beyond their borders. NATO member states had clear interests in acting to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians in 1999, ranging from preventing a flood of refugees and preserving the stability of Europe to maintaining the credibility of the alliance. But five years earlier during the Rwandan genocide these types of interests seemed absent for European states. Similarly, some European states have started to recognize their interest in ending the devastating crisis in Syria, particularly since refugees have been flooding into Europe. But it is once again much more difficult to articulate what enlightened interests they may have in undertaking a high-cost and high-risk venture further afield, such as ending the crisis in the Central African Republic.Footnote 8 As valuable as the notion of enlightened self-interest is in giving states reason to act on behalf of vulnerable foreigners in certain instances, it is insufficient to prompt action in other cases, where the suffering of others is more distant and less strategically important such that even the long-term security interests of states are not adequately engaged.
For better or worse, political leaders and commentators tend to perceive a need to speak in the language of interests when arguing for action on behalf of the distant vulnerable. Some, however, recognize that the prevailing notions of either narrow or enlightened self-interest are not up to the task of motivating government action, and so they reach for other, less material conceptions of self-interest. In 2014, for example, responding to those claiming that the crisis in the Central African Republic was of no concern to the United States, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright chose simply to detail the extraordinary violence and suffering being endured by civilians, and then asked, “Why does America care? If you are still asking that question, I cannot help you with the answer.”Footnote 9 While Obama commonly appeals to notions of enlightened self-interest, he too sometimes reaches for an alternative conception. In his 2015 General Assembly address, for example, he supplemented his arguments for action based on enlightened self-interest with the claim that “when a terrorist group beheads captives, slaughters the innocent, and enslaves women, that's not a single nation's national security problem—that is an assault on all humanity.”Footnote 10 In 2008, speaking on the crisis in Darfur, he likewise asserted that “when genocide is happening, when ethnic cleansing is happening somewhere around the world and we stand by, that diminishes us. And so I do believe that we have to consider it as part of our interests, our national interests, in intervening where possible.”Footnote 11
Obama's notion that we are “diminished” by the slaughter of others invoked part of a famous meditation by seventeenth-century English poet John Donne:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.Footnote 12
Donne's words were a call to personal spiritual reflection rather than a call to the practical assistance of others. Nevertheless, the century during which he wrote was a time of lively debate in Europe about how individuals and, by extension, sovereign states should conceive of their interests and how these interests related to the needs of vulnerable strangers and foreigners. Whereas Thomas Hobbes developed a notoriously unsociable interpretation of the interests of actors in a state of nature, other philosophers such as Samuel Pufendorf defended the utility of sociability, highlighting the long-term benefits to be derived from performing duties of mutual aid and assistance in an unstable and dangerous world. Still others, such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, reached further and defended a much more generous and “disinterested” conception of self-interest, grounded not in considerations of material utility, but in the pleasure and “perfection” to be derived from caring for the wellbeing of those in need. Leibniz's treatment of self-interest in particular deserves renewed attention today, as he provides both a lucid articulation and a compelling defense of the kinds of sentiments being expressed by Albright, Obama, and others who seek to cultivate greater concern for the distant vulnerable.
The next section of this article expounds the three rival conceptions of self-interest outlined by Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Leibniz. It notes that, while the implications of Hobbes's and Pufendorf's theories for relations between states have been well explored, both by the authors themselves and by subsequent theorists, the potential of Leibniz's theory for thinking about the interests of states in caring for vulnerable outsiders remains largely unexploited. The final section then considers two ways in which Leibniz's treatment of self-interest, grounded in the pleasure and perfection to be gained from helping others in need, can be of use for us today. First, it provides resources for us to understand why states do sometimes act in “disinterested” and altruistic ways. As such, it complements well-known arguments about the construction of the identities and interests of states, as well as emerging arguments about the impact of emotions on international behavior. Second, and perhaps more crucially, it provides political leaders and commentators with a valuable normative tool for persuading people to help the distant vulnerable, even when it appears to be in neither their narrow short-term nor their enlightened long-term interests to do so.
Rival Conceptions of Self-Interest in the Seventeenth Century
Hobbes's Narrow Self-Interest
Writing in a time of great political upheaval in England, Hobbes aimed in Leviathan (1651) to persuade readers that peace and protection from harm could be secured only through subjection and obedience to a sovereign. He sought to demonstrate the necessity of submitting to the authority of a sovereign by explaining what life would be like without one. In the absence of a common power to restrain individuals, he claimed, human nature provides three causes of quarrel: competition, diffidence, and glory. These three causes lead individuals to behave violently toward each other for purposes of gain, safety, and reputation. Consequently, “during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man.” In this condition, there is no place for industry, arts, or society. Instead, there is “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”Footnote 13
Hobbes famously suggested that this natural condition of war could be recognized in the posture of sovereigns to one another in what might be termed the international state of nature:
But though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another; yet in all times, kings, and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed upon one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies upon their neighbours; which is a posture of war.Footnote 14
Hobbes claimed that reason dictates that the foundation of the laws that govern this natural condition of war must be the principle of self-preservation. Given the constant threat to existence, all natural individuals are obliged to direct all their actions to the goal of self-preservation. In turn, they must at all times retain the liberty to use their power to preserve themselves and, consequently, to do anything that they judge to be conducive to such preservation. And the same was true for states: “For as among masterless men . . . every commonwealth . . . has an absolute liberty, to do what it shall judge (that is to say, what that man, or assembly that representeth it, shall judge) most conducing to their benefit.”Footnote 15
In recent years, scholars have challenged the conventional interpretation of Hobbes as one who cautioned against cooperation among states and accorded to them unrestricted license to war and conquest. They have shown that he advised a substantial measure of cooperation and restraint in relations between states, and they have demonstrated that his portrayal of international relations was not as violent and grim as has been suggested in the past.Footnote 16 Hobbes claimed that the principle of self-preservation generated certain laws of nature, and he gave various indications as to how these laws should be applied to relations between states. He warned against wars of aggression and conquest that would only create enmity and thus undermine the security of the commonwealth, and he insisted that gratuitous cruelty should be forbidden even in times of war. He also recommended that states should establish confederacies and trade relations for their own security and advantage.Footnote 17 Nevertheless, it remains that, for Hobbes, the core objective of all actions by a state is to preserve itself and to secure the safety of its people, and he made clear that states should be ready to abandon practices of cooperation as soon as they judge that they have reason to do so. No state should ever rely on the good faith of others for its security: “Even when the fighting between [commonwealths] stops, it should not be called Peace, but an intermission during which each watches the motion and aspect of its enemy and gauges its security not on the basis of agreements but by the strength and designs of the adversary.”Footnote 18
Pufendorf's Enlightened Self-Interest
Seeking to avoid the charges of anti-Aristotelianism and impiety that had been leveled at Hobbes, the German philosopher Pufendorf grounded his treatment of The Law of Nature and Nations (1672) not on the principle that states have the right to do anything that is conducive to their benefit, but on the principle of sociability.Footnote 19 He shared Hobbes's belief that life in the state of nature is unstable and dangerous, but he firmly rejected the suggestion that it is akin to a condition of war. For evidence, he pointed to the peaceful relationships that are often found between states joined together by treaties and by friendship in an international state of nature. The natural condition is not one of war, but of peace, he declared. This is so because individuals (and states) recognize that they stand to benefit from practices of mutual aid and assistance. Certainly, they are fiercely protective of their own preservation. But they also recognize that they cannot secure their preservation without the assistance of others. This in turn gives them reason to extend assistance to others in times of need in order to gain the trust and favor of their fellow individuals (or states) and to be free from enmity and harm. Thus, Pufendorf identified a long-term utility in behaving sociably toward others:
And so it will be a fundamental law of nature, that “Every man, so far as in him lies, should cultivate and preserve towards others a sociable attitude [socialitatem], which is peaceful and agreeable at all times to the nature and end of the human race.” . . . By a sociable attitude we mean an attitude of each man towards every other man, by which each is understood to be bound to the other by kindness, peace, and love, and therefore by a mutual obligation.Footnote 20
Sociability is an imperative produced by the need and desire for preservation, Pufendorf explained. When individuals seek their advantage only, to the exclusion of others, their desires tend to clash with the desires of others, and this leads to conflict and insecurity. Individuals who hope to secure themselves should not disregard the needs and interests of others, but instead cultivate a sociable attitude and seek to contribute to the mutual advantage of all.Footnote 21 Every individual thus has a self-interest in seeking to “willingly advance the interests of others, so far as he is not bound by more pressing obligations. . . . It is for his advantage to conduct himself in such a way as to profit from their friendly attitude rather than incur their anger.”Footnote 22
The same is true for states, Pufendorf claimed. Living and writing within the relatively weak independent German states, he had good reason to highlight the interests that states had in contributing to each other's security and wellbeing. These states were delicately held together as part of the Holy Roman Empire by the Westphalian settlement, but were repeatedly threatened by the interference and encroachment of stronger European powers.Footnote 23 Pufendorf recommended that states engage in practices of collective security and provide safe passage, hospitality, and refuge to those who request them. However, having grounded his concept of sociability in considerations of long-term utility, he also recommended that states be prepared to act unsociably if their utility demanded it. One such example was his callous suggestion that states could justly expel foreigners in times of famine for the sake of their own citizens.Footnote 24 Such ruthless exceptions to sociability suggested a flaw in the concept of enlightened self-interest that Leibniz was quick to expose.
Leibniz's Disinterested Self-Interest
Asked for an opinion on Pufendorf's political theory, the German philosopher Leibniz provided a scathing review. In a letter penned in 1706, Leibniz concluded that the principles that Pufendorf had outlined “suffer from no small weaknesses.” He argued that, among many problems, Pufendorf's decision to ground his system in considerations of utility had forced him “to be content with an inferior degree of natural law.” If the motivation for action is merely consideration of the material benefits to be derived for oneself, Leibniz observed, there is nothing to stop an individual from “committing great crimes, which can gain very great goods for him with impunity.” Brutally exposing the limitations of the notion of enlightened self-interest, he asked, “Why, indeed, would someone risk riches, honors, and his very existence on behalf of his dear ones, of his country, or of justice, when, by the ruin of others, he could think only of himself, and live amidst honors and riches?”Footnote 25
In a series of essays and letters written in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Leibniz suggested that, in place of considerations of long-term material utility, individuals should be guided by consideration of the pleasure and perfection that they derive from contributing to the wellbeing and happiness of others. This was grounded in a recognizably Aristotelian-Thomist understanding of the purpose of human activity. Aristotle had described happiness as “the best, noblest, and most pleasant thing in the world,” and claimed that it is “something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of human action.” Thomas Aquinas had similarly declared that “the final end of man, as of every intellectual substance, is called felicity or happiness.”Footnote 26
In an early essay, “Elements of Natural Law” (1670‒1671), Leibniz echoed their claims and suggested that this desire for happiness motivates individuals to act to benefit others: “There is no one who deliberately does anything except for the sake of his own good, for we seek the good also of those whom we love for the sake of the pleasure which we ourselves get from their happiness.”Footnote 27 Over time, he came to perceive that this recognition of the pleasure that one rightly derives from loving others provided a resolution to a controversy raging between two rival French bishops, François Fénelon and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, over the possibility and desirability of “disinterested love.”Footnote 28 Our love of others, Leibniz insisted, ought not to be driven by considerations of utility, but it was perfectly consistent with our desire for our own happiness. “To love,” he explained in a letter to Bossuet, “is nothing else than finding one's pleasure (I say pleasure, and not utility or interest) in the well-being, perfection, happiness of another; and thus, while love can be disinterested, it can nonetheless never be detached from our own interest, of which pleasure is an essential part.”Footnote 29
In the preface to a collection of international treaties, which he published in 1693, he elaborated on the process of “converting the happiness of another into one's own”:
With this is resolved a difficult question, of great moment in theology as well: in what way disinterested love is possible, independent of hope, of fear, and of regard of any question of utility. In truth, the happiness of those whose happiness pleases us turns into our own happiness, since things which please us are desired for their own sake. And since the contemplation of the beautiful is pleasant in itself, and a painting of Raphael affects a sensitive person who understands it, although it brings him no [material] gain, so that he keeps it in his [mind's] eye, as the image of a thing which is loved; when the beautiful thing is itself capable of happiness, this affection passes over into pure love.Footnote 30
Our “true interest,” he declared, lies not in the pursuit of material utility, but in the pursuit of happiness.Footnote 31 We derive lasting pleasures from pursuing the good, happiness, and “perfection” of others, and in doing so we contribute to the “perfection of ourselves.”Footnote 32
It is worth noting that Leibniz's understanding of the self-interest that we have in the disinterested love of others was grounded in theological claims that will seem alien to many readers today.Footnote 33 The disinterested love of others flows from the love of God, he claimed in a short note on “Felicity” written in the 1690s. One is truly happy when one loves God, but one cannot love God without comprehending his perfection, and this perfection is comprehended, in part, through the discovery of “the marvels of reason and eternal truths” about what is just and what is unjust. The more one desires to understand God's perfection and the more one seeks to imitate this perfection, “the happier he will be.” We have an obligation to seek to imitate God's perfection by, for example, loving our neighbor, and this in turn increases our happiness: “Thus the sovereign wisdom has so well regulated all things that our duty must also be our happiness, that all virtue produces its [own] reward.”Footnote 34
While appreciation of Leibniz's theology certainly adds depth to our understanding, we nevertheless remain able to comprehend and utilize his basic insight about the possibility of pleasure-based self-interest without recourse to this theology. After all, as we have seen, he himself at times highlighted the temporal pleasure that we can gain from activities ranging from contemplating a beautiful painting to securing the wellbeing of others, quite independent from the spiritual pleasure gained through imitation of the divine. That being said, some appreciation of his theological reasoning is useful as it reveals the nature of the relationship between happiness and right action. As I explain later, Leibniz's insistence that our pleasure ought to align with considerations of justice and duty usefully underscores the fact that a pleasure-based conception of self-interest should be read not as a sufficient guide to ethical action, but rather as a tool that can be used to cultivate a disposition in favor of such action.
In a number of works, Leibniz gave some clear indications that his concept of disinterested love among individuals applied to relations between all of humankind. He condemned the assumption that “the utility of the state makes everything permissible,” insisted that considerations of justice should extend beyond the state and to all peoples, and commended those who refused to draw a distinction between subjects and foreigners. But beyond this, he did not pursue the international application of disinterested love very far.Footnote 35 It would be his disciples, particularly the great eighteenth-century theorists Christian Wolff and Emer de Vattel, who more fully applied his notion of “universal benevolence” to relations between states.Footnote 36 However, while Wolff and Vattel faithfully declared that states have solemn duties to contribute to the wellbeing and happiness of people in need beyond their borders, they tended not to explore the possibility that states might be motivated to perform these duties based on the pleasure that collective peoples and their leaders might derive from caring for the distant vulnerable. Instead, Vattel often resorted to Pufendorfian claims about long-term material utility.Footnote 37 The applicability of Leibniz's notion of “disinterested” self-interest to international efforts to assist and protect the distant vulnerable remains largely unexplored and unexploited through to the present day.
Disinterested Self-Interest and the Distant Vulnerable Today
Leibniz's conception of self-interest provides an explanatory tool for understanding why states sometimes willingly act in “disinterested” and altruistic ways for the sake of outsiders. It also provides a normative tool that leaders, activists, and others can use to persuade reluctant people to assist and protect the distant vulnerable even when it is in neither their narrow nor their enlightened interests to do so. I consider each in turn.
An Explanatory Tool
A Leibnizian conception of self-interest helps us to understand what Albright, Obama, and others seem to be alluding to when they insist that we have some kind of interest in assisting or protecting the distant vulnerable even when there appears to be neither short-term nor long-term material utility to be gained from doing so. It also helps us to understand why political leaders sometimes implement disinterested policies of assistance and protection: while there may be no material benefit, there is pleasure and pride to be obtained from contributing to the wellbeing of those in need. Consider, for example, Germany's generous response to the flood of Syrian refugees into Europe during the second half of 2015. While some critics cautioned that Germany was neglecting its material interests by opening its borders to those seeking asylum—one detractor even lamented that it was “a hippie state being led by its emotions”Footnote 38 —German officials spoke of the pleasure that they took from the decision to accept and embrace hundreds of thousands of vulnerable outsiders. Chancellor Angela Merkel declared, “I'm happy that Germany has become a country that many people abroad associate with hope”; and Federal Minster for Economic Affairs Sigmar Gabriel claimed that “Germany is showing a side of itself of which it can rightly be proud.”Footnote 39 Rather than highlighting material gains, these officials emphasized the emotional gains that were derived from being generous toward the vulnerable.Footnote 40
Of course, the conception of self-interest that Leibniz developed three hundred years ago does not constitute a definitive map on which we can simply plot the various claims about self-interest being made today. Rather, his ideas open the door for us to interpret the broad array of understandings of self-interest that are claimed and acted upon today that do not rely on conventional notions of material utility. The suggestion that the leaders of states can perceive an interest in caring for the distant vulnerable due to the perfection and pleasure that is derived from such action complements well-established arguments by constructivist scholars about how the identities and interests of states are socially and historically constructed, and not derived solely from material concerns. In recent decades, such scholars have catalogued how the identities and interests of particular states in particular contexts have been (re)constructed in favor of undertaking costly and often risky programs of foreign aid, humanitarian assistance, and humanitarian intervention even in the absence of material interests.Footnote 41 Adding to the insights of constructivists is an emerging body of scholarship that highlights the impact of emotions on international behavior. Scholars of emotions have critiqued constructivists for too often neglecting to consider the impact of emotions on the construction of the identities and interests of states. They have explained how emotions can be attributed not only to individuals but also to collective actors such as states, demonstrating that emotions can be collectively felt and can generate both intergroup perceptions and intergroup behaviors.Footnote 42 And they have proceeded to show that emotions can not only inspire states to adhere to moral norms but that these norms sometimes emerge and flourish because they reflect the “moral interests and emotional dispositions” of the most dominant states.Footnote 43 Emotions theorists have begun to explore the role of a range of emotions, such as empathy/pity and pride/shame, in generating particular identities and interests and in motivating humanitarian action by states.Footnote 44
Scholars of emotions in international relations commonly trace the roots of their ideas to the “moral sentiment” theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment—particularly the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith—all of whom wrote during the century following Leibniz.Footnote 45 These theorists tended to frame actions motivated by sentiments of sympathy and fellow-feeling in opposition to actions motivated by self-interest. Eager to distance themselves from the “selfish” theories of Hobbes and Pufendorf, among others, they insisted that acts prompted by compassion, while pleasurable, were not rightly said to be produced by self-interest.Footnote 46 In contrast, Leibniz accepted that actors can be understood to have an interest in the pleasure and perfection that they derive from the “disinterested” care of the vulnerable, and in doing so he anticipated the kind of interpretations of the national interest that has been manifested by Merkel, Obama, and other political leaders in certain instances today.
Of course, we must be careful not to conflate the emotions and interests of state leaders with the collective emotions and interests of the state itself. While theorists have explored how emotions can be collectively felt by states and thereby guide state behavior, some have also acknowledged the importance of specifying the connections between the collective emotions of the state and the emotions of its key decision-makers.Footnote 47 Consider Merkel's decision to grant hundreds of thousands of refugees entry into Germany in 2015, for example. This decision was enthusiastically received by parts of the German population, who themselves expressed a pleasure-based interest in extending generosity to the vulnerable, but it was firmly opposed by other parts of the population.Footnote 48 The fact that Merkel's emotional response to the flood of refugees into Europe cohered with the emotions of many Germans is to be expected. Articulating a theory of “circulations of affect,” Andrew Ross rightly observes that “emotions are often contagious social processes affecting leaders and publics alike.” Nevertheless, the fact that this emotional response was not shared by all Germans is also to be expected. As Todd Hall notes, “popular emotion is diverse, inchoate, and contradictory.”Footnote 49 But that need not be the end of the story. As I will now explain in the final part of the article, Leibniz's notion of pleasure-based self-interest not only helps us to understand the behavior of states and their leaders but it provides these leaders (and other actors) with a valuable normative tool for persuading reluctant publics to support policies aimed at helping the distant vulnerable.
A Normative Tool
While political leaders, activists, and others tend to rely on appeals to narrow or enlightened self-interest whenever possible, they sometimes recognize that they can cultivate popular support for humanitarian principles and channel that support toward particular policies by appealing to the pleasure and pride that is to be gained from assisting those in need. Such cultivation and channeling of a disinterested self-interest in assisting and protecting the vulnerable seems to have been precisely Merkel's intention when she spoke of her happiness and pride at the German people's widespread embrace of more generous asylum-seeker policies in 2015. The chancellor encouraged Germans to embrace the element of self-sacrifice involved in opening up Germany's borders, declaring that “Germany is a strong country—we will manage.” When many Germans responded positively to her message and made efforts to support new arrivals, she celebrated that they had “painted a picture of Germany which can make us proud of our country.”Footnote 50 In this way, Merkel was acting as an “emotional entrepreneur,” to borrow a term from Ross.Footnote 51 One can say the same about former Prime Minister David Cameron's attempts in recent years to nurture popular support for Britain's decision to be “out in front” with respect to global efforts to reduce poverty and malnutrition. Appealing to the sentiments of the people, Cameron explained British aid policy on the grounds that “we accept the moral case for keeping our promises to the world's poorest—even when we face challenges at home. When people are dying, we don't believe in finding excuses. We believe in trying to do something about it.” Britain's willingness to give aid to strangers in need, he has declared, “makes me proud to be British.”Footnote 52 The arguments made by Merkel, Cameron, and Obama demonstrate that there are opportunities for creative leadership to appeal to the profound individual and collective pride and joy that can be had in acting in accordance with an identity anchored in moral principles, and by accepting a measure of cost and risk for the sake of the vulnerable.
Emotions theorists have long known that actors tend to have most empathy for and derive most pleasure from helping those who are closest to them, be they family members, friends, or fellow citizens. However, they have also observed that our feelings of empathy and pleasure can be cultivated and channeled in particular directions, for example, through exposure to images, narratives, and testimonies of suffering strangers and foreigners.Footnote 53 They have begun to detail a rich history of such cultivation and channeling of popular emotions toward international humanitarian projects, including efforts by eighteenth-century abolitionists, nineteenth-century atrocitarians, twentieth-century champions of famine relief, and twenty-first-century advocates of disaster relief.Footnote 54 This is not to suggest that the task of cultivating and channeling popular support for a disinterested self-interest in assisting and protecting the vulnerable is an easy one. As Ross rightly suggests, “even as leaders and activists tap into popular emotions, they rarely control them fully.”Footnote 55 Merkel, for example, has found that the initial euphoria surrounding her announcement has gradually subsided, and popular opposition to the policy has grown. Over subsequent months, the chancellor has also moved to place restrictions on the flow of refugees into Germany.Footnote 56 But this does not necessarily render her efforts to champion an altruistic refugee policy a failure. After all, since the initial announcement of the policy, Germany has taken in around one million asylum seekers and, at the time of writing, the majority of German voters continue to support electoral candidates that advocate generosity toward refugees.Footnote 57 Hall observes that more work needs to be done to understand the extent to which popular emotion is “pliable and vulnerable to manipulation or rigid and resistant.”Footnote 58 Emma Hutchison cautions that, even when a particular “emotional culture” is successfully cultivated, such a culture will remain conditional and potentially subject to contestation and change.Footnote 59 But while we work to fully comprehend the potentials and limits of emotional entrepreneurship, it is reasonable to suggest that, just as political leaders can at times steer popular emotions in the direction of fear and hatred toward outsiders, so too there is the possibility of cultivating and channeling popular feelings in the direction of pleasure and pride for assisting vulnerable strangers.
To the extent that the cultivation of feelings of empathy and pleasure is necessary to provoke more altruistic international behavior, individuals may well have a moral duty to pursue such cultivation—Leibniz, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant certainly thought so—and political leaders may have a particular responsibility to facilitate such cultivation within their electorates.Footnote 60 Certainly, in an often dangerous and unstable world, it can be entirely appropriate for actors to work to secure their short- and long-term material interests. Hobbes and Pufendorf were right to seek principles that could restrain human aggression and secure self-preservation. But too often, as that most insightful of realists Arnold Wolfers observed, the requirements for security are overstated and the opportunities for generosity are neglected.Footnote 61 Leibniz explained how actors can be understood to have an interest in reaching beyond the conventional preoccupation with short- and long-term material utility and in acting with benevolence toward those in need. His pleasure-based conception of self-interest is a powerful alternative to fear-based conceptions that have long dominated our assumptions about the behavior of states.Footnote 62
It is also worth emphasizing that a pleasure-based understanding of self-interest ought not to be conceived as a substitute for ethical argument any more than either a narrow or enlightened understanding of self-interest should be.Footnote 63 The moral-sense theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment argued that our emotional responses to the suffering of others provide us with moral guidance as to how we ought to act.Footnote 64 However, as Kant countered, our emotional inclinations frequently fail to conform to morality, such as in instances where nature has “placed little sympathy in the heart of this or that man” so that he is “by temperament indifferent to the sufferings of others.”Footnote 65 In recent years, emotions theorists have not only examined this problem of indifference and the related challenge of “compassion fatigue,” but they have also explained how collective feelings of pleasure and pride can at times be cultivated for controversial programs, such as Live Aid in 1985, or even mobilized for perverse purposes, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003.Footnote 66 A pleasurable feeling derived from actions directed toward others is no guarantee that the action is moral. As indicated earlier, Leibniz himself insisted that supposedly benevolent or charitable behavior that generates feelings of pleasure needs to be “conformed to wisdom” and to a right understanding of virtue if it is to be considered just.Footnote 67 Thus, even when they embrace a pleasure-based understanding of the national interest, political leaders are still morally obligated to carefully examine whether policies aimed at protecting the distant vulnerable are wise, appropriate, and genuinely helpful. But if they have done their ethical due diligence, then leaders are in a position to exercise moral leadership to encourage their publics to recognize the interest that they have in enjoying the emotional fruits of aiding strangers in need.
It is perhaps regrettable that it is necessary to rely on the language of self-interest to motivate states and their people to care for those beyond their borders. Ideally, we would be motivated by virtues of benevolence and agapism,Footnote 68 and in some instances by considerations of justice and the duty to rectify structural harms inflicted on others,Footnote 69 rather than by concern for ourselves. Ideally, we would respond to the suffering of others not because their suffering diminishes us but simply because they are suffering. However, insofar as interest-based arguments seem to remain crucial for persuading states and their people to assist and protect the distant vulnerable, we could do worse than to ground our understanding of interest not in, or at least not only in, the material utility that we can gain, but in the pleasure and pride that we can derive from contributing to the security and wellbeing of strangers.
