II. Globalism, Statism, and Internationalism

Contemporary conceptions of global justice initially developed out of extensions of John Rawls’s 1971 theory of social justice, called “justice as fairness,” to the world at large.Footnote ⁹ Like Rawls, Charles Beitz suggests that principles of justice should be hypothetically decided behind a so-called “veil of ignorance” in which decision-makers would not know of their personal characteristics such as their class or natural talents.Footnote ¹⁰ Different from Rawls, however, Beitz maintains that one’s nationality as well should remain unknown within this hypothetical choice situation, which should thus represent a “global original position” among all persons globally.Footnote ¹¹ In that situation, Beitz argues, participants would still accept as valid Rawls’s liberal and egalitarian principles of justice, even though the subject matter to which these principles would apply would be the global rather than the domestic social basic structure.Footnote ¹²

However, scholars such as Thomas Nagel hold that Rawls’s liberal egalitarian principles of domestic justice would apply only within contexts of state coercion.Footnote ¹³ Nagel points out that the state’s coercion is a particular form of coercion, as it is carried out in the name of its citizens.Footnote ¹⁴ It is because of this special feature of state coercion, Nagel argues, that this coercion can only be deemed just if the state’s basic structure fulfills Rawls’s principles of justice as fairness. Outside the state, however, where there is no state coercion, Nagel denies that any principles of distributive justice would apply, even though other moral demands, such as those of humanitarian aid, would indeed obtain globally. Following Statism’s opposition to Globalism, eventually the Internationalist position gained more support, according to which minimal socioeconomic human rights should be recognized as standards of global distributive justice within all countries.

Widespread support of this position by several contemporary philosophers is understandable because the Statist view that there are no demands of global distributive justice seems counterintuitive in a highly globalized world and Globalism seems to involve wishful thinking or naïve idealism. The psychological version of this latter critique of Globalism’s feasibility says, more specifically, that the motivation to comply with egalitarian principles among all individuals globally is either impossible to form or impossible to sustain over time.Footnote ¹⁵ David Miller, for example, objects that Globalism is psychologically not viable, given the ethical importance that modern subjects ascribe to their national identity and national sense of solidarity. This feeling of national attachment, Miller maintains, would prevent modern subjects from giving equal concern in matters of distributive justice to all human beings in the way that Globalism calls for. Therefore, they could not be morally motivated to act in the ways that Globalism requires.Footnote ¹⁶ The core psychological idea of this critique is thus that human beings’ moral motivation is particularistic and insufficiently sensitive to the abstract demands of Globalism grounded in the contractualist type of justification that the global original position represents.Footnote ¹⁷ What is more, cultural mechanisms such as a shared national culture for ensuring compliance with demands of distributive justice seem especially important in situations when partial compliance is possible and one can free-ride on others’ compliance.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet at the global level, even though there is no world state or government that could coercively ensure compliance and prevent free-riding, there are no such cultural mechanisms that would ensure compliance with the demands of Globalism.Footnote ¹⁹

III. Internationalism’s Global Crisis and the Critique of Its Psychological Feasibility

Given that Internationalism is psychologically far less demanding than Globalism, many of those who are critical of the psychological feasibility of Globalism may not think that this feasibility critique also applies to Internationalism. After all, the contribution to international institutions for the sake of realizing minimum socioeconomic human rights abroad is not only less demanding than realizing global interpersonal equality, but it is also compatible with pursuing an egalitarian distributive agenda domestically. Thus, Internationalism seems compatible with many of the feelings of national attachment that Miller ascribes to modern subjects and that supposedly find their expression in egalitarian concerns for distributive justice among compatriots. What is more, in the second half of the twentieth as well as the early twenty-first centuries we have witnessed an active international human rights movement that pursued the concerns of Internationalism.Footnote ²⁰ According to David Held, these efforts have transformed international society and created a cosmopolitan political reality.Footnote ²¹ Based on the example of this movement, Internationalists can plausibly maintain that it is possible for human agents to act in ways that Internationalism requires.

The psychological feasibility of maintaining an Internationalist motivation over time, however, has not yet been positively confirmed by empirical fact. To the contrary, over the course of the past decade, empirical realities have provided reasons to question that Internationalism is psychologically feasible over time. Different from the political climate toward the end of the twentieth century, in which political support for Internationalism was broader at least in liberal Western societies, the present climate is characterized by extremely nationalist, explicitly anticosmopolitan, and illiberal normative orientations. Within countries that used to be considered democratically consolidated, political parties such as the Rassemblement National in France, the Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP) in Austria, and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany advocate extremely nationalist positions. Moreover, there are presently social cleavages within most liberal democratic societies between groups with “cosmopolitan” orientations, like those of Internationalism, and those with “communitarian” ones that would denounce Internationalism as insufficiently patriotic.Footnote ²² What is more, the rise of illiberal countries such as China and Russia has given rise to a multipolar order in which there is no shared commitment toward international cooperation for protecting minimum human rights.Footnote ²³ While Russia and China still participate in liberal international organizations such as the World Trade Organization, they tend to use their participation to promote nationalist aims.Footnote ²⁴ In addition, they also aim at undermining cosmopolitan forces by spying and threatening critical journalists based abroad as well as by financing news media that support their illiberal agenda.Footnote ²⁵ These extremely nationalist, explicitly anticosmopolitan, and illiberal parties and movements oppose the normative commitments of not only Globalism but also of Internationalism. The ways in which such opposition to Internationalism represents a challenge to the long-term psychological feasibility of Internationalism become especially clear once we adopt a probabilistic or scalar understanding of psychological feasibility.Footnote ²⁶ According to this understanding of feasibility, a moral motivation is feasible to maintain over time if it is reasonably likely that agents will maintain a particular moral motivation over time if they try to do so. Employing this probabilistic or scalar understanding of long-term feasibility, Internationalism is psychologically less feasible in the present climate than it was in the late twentieth century. The following four points explain why this is so and thereby further substantiate the view that Internationalism is in crisis.

First, today it is no longer sufficient to convince members of liberal societies that due to the globalized nature of social, political, and economic relations, the liberal commitments that they already entertain domestically now give rise to a commitment to the principles of distributive justice of Internationalism globally. As a significant portion of formally liberal societies nowadays reject liberal commitments, this way of arguing for Internationalism no longer works.

Second, agents who used to have an Internationalist motivation may have given it up or are no longer trying to disseminate this motivation and bring about the necessary political changes. They may have become exhausted or overwhelmed by the difficulties and sheer amount of activist political work that they are facing, given the existence of so many actors and groups with anticosmopolitan, extremely nationalist, and illiberal orientations.

Third, the less support there is for Internationalism, the more certain communitarian-type reasons for questioning the psychological feasibility of Globalism also apply to Internationalism. In the case of the communitarian critique of Globalism, there are two reasons why the absence of commitments to Globalism is viewed as problematic. The first reason is that without such commitments, there are no effective agent-relative motives to comply with these principles. The second reason is that because of the lack of such commitments, there is no adequate conceptual understanding of the meaning of these principles.Footnote ²⁷ Today, theorists of global justice can no longer circumvent this communitarian-type critique by adopting Internationalism and claiming that this morality, different from Globalism, reflects already shared commitments. Not long ago, this argumentation was, in effect, what political philosophers and theorists such as Rawls and Beitz offered.Footnote ²⁸ They maintain that the practices of international law reflect the international community’s commitment to human rights, which their so-called practice-based approach was simply meant to reconstruct. Thereby their Internationalist position seemed immune to the communitarian-type of critique concerning the lack of agent-relative motives and conceptual understanding. Yet under current conditions in which the commitments to an international order are seemingly no longer as much human rights-respecting as they used to be, the communitarian-type critique that there are no agent-relative motives, has gained in validity.

Fourth and finally, doubts concerning the long-term psychological feasibility of Internationalism also arise from the interpretation of the current climate characterized by extreme nationalism, explicit anticosmopolitanism, and illiberalism as a reactionary backlash to the increasing success that Internationalism had toward the end of the twentieth century. According to this interpretation, this backlash is explainable on evolutionary grounds because the kind of moral motivation that Internationalism requires goes against the grain of the evolutionarily developed, tribalist nature of human beings’ moral psychology. In other words, moralities of the type that Internationalism represents may indeed be motivationally possible to realize in occasional instances or within short time periods. However, due to their lack of congruity with the evolutionarily hard-wired characteristics of humans’ moral motivation, which is supposedly tribalist, the attempt to institutionalize such moralities provokes opposition. And so, the motivation to pursue moralities such as Internationalism, although psychologically possible in the short term, is fragile and unstable.Footnote ²⁹

These four ways in which the Internationalist project of global order is deemed infeasible explain why some view it as a global crisis. To assess the critique of Internationalism’s long-term psychological feasibility, on which judgments concerning the crisis of Internationalism are based, the next section will explore the recent literature on the evolutionarily conditioned development of human beings’ moral psychology and its importance for such feasibility assessments.

IV. The Evolutionary Foundations of Moral Psychology

Research on the evolutionary foundations of humans’ moral psychology has emerged from the apparent difficulty of explaining human beings’ altruistic or pro-social behavior. After all, from the perspective of evolutionary theory it seems as if non-altruists who do not behave pro-socially should be able to outcompete pro-social altruists who help non-kin. Thus, apparently, non-altruists should have greater reproductive fitness than the altruists, which should lead to the eventual extinction of pro-social altruists. The question of why this is not the case and how so many members of the human species are altruistic vis-à-vis others to whom they are not genetically related, is what drives this research on moral psychology informed by cultural anthropology and biology.Footnote ³⁰

The explanation of altruistic or pro-social behavior that most evolutionary biologists accept refers to the development of social cooperation among homo sapiens living within hunter-gatherer bands of foragers in the mid-to-late Pleistocene 120,000 to 50,000 years ago.Footnote ³¹ This explanation suggests that the moral capacity for indirect, reciprocal cooperation represented an evolutionary adaptation of homo sapiens. This capacity allowed the members of homo sapiens to engage in more specialization and division of labor based on a wider range of resources than was previously the case among homini erecti and heidelbergensis. The homo sapiens’ moral capacity involves the recognition and observance of implicit and explicit norms of indirect, reciprocal cooperation; it is supported by moral gossip; and it goes along with a willingness to punish those who violate these norms. According to several scholars, the development of this moral capacity emerged after an earlier stage of the Pleistocene in which homini erecti and heidelbergensis practiced a form of mutualism in the immediate division of prey, a practice which already represented a cultural innovation over even earlier, largely independent foraging practices. There is disagreement, however, on whether this mutualism, which may have emerged prior to the existence of a rich (moral) language, already involved the recognition of implicit norms. Whereas some scholars such as Michael Tomasello, Robert Boyd, and Joseph Henrich argue that mutualism expresses a recognition of implicit (but not explicit) norms, others such as Kim Sterelny hold that this mutualism was regulated merely by reactive attitudes such as anger or resentment. By contrast, there seems to exist a scholarly consensus that the capacity to follow, morally gossip about, and sanction both implicit and explicit norms of cooperation is a central cultural feature of not only the hunter-gatherer bands of the mid-to-late Pleistocence, but also of the more elaborated clan-like kinship structures within larger, segmented social groups of the very late Pleistocene. This capacity starts becoming especially important in the social environments of the mid-to-late Pleistocence, which are not only larger and more anonymous, but also characterized by novel technologies of the “projectile revolution” and a wider range of economic resources.Footnote ³²

To illustrate this view, consider Chris Boehm’s cultural-anthropological work, according to which the interaction between gene and culture in the mid-to-late Pleistocence has generated human beings’ capacity for altruistic behavior.Footnote ³³ He observes that hunter-gatherer bands cooperated in various activities with no expectation of immediate or exact reciprocation, whereby they displayed a capacity for compliance with norms of social cooperation even if such compliance did not benefit individuals directly.Footnote ³⁴ Boehm therefore argues that group selection is the cause of such pro-social behavior, as those groups with more altruistic cooperative tendencies achieved greater reproductive fitness.Footnote ³⁵ Boehm identifies three cultural mechanisms that facilitated altruistic, cooperative behavior:

1. (1) the punishment of group members that violate norms of cooperation, for example, by way of excluding them from future cooperationFootnote ³⁶;

2. (2) the internalization of cooperative norms through the formation of a moral conscience, which gives rise to moral emotions such as a sense of shame, which makes individuals feel uneasy when they break moral normsFootnote ³⁷; and

3. (3) the “preaching” of cooperative behavior in moral gossip through which peers mutually monitor one another morally, establish moral consensus on how people should behave, and keep track of who is a reliable cooperator and who should be punished.Footnote ³⁸

The groups that cultivated these mechanisms were able to create more egalitarian societies of superior reproductive fitness, whereby the capacity for altruistic or pro-social behavior eventually became biologically engrained.Footnote ³⁹ Biologically, this is reflected in the size of human beings’ prefrontal cortex, which helps with assessing social consequences and controlling anti-social impulses. Damage to this part of the brain causes deviant behavior.Footnote ⁴⁰ According to Boehm, the ability to distinguish and communicate “good” and “evil” behavior, to punish immoral behavior, and to internalize corresponding rules of behavior, is thus unique to our species.Footnote ⁴¹

One relevant characteristic of these evolutionary accounts of moral psychology like that of Boehm is that the capacity for moral behavior emerged from social cooperation within groups, as those groups whose members were capable of moral behavior had a reproductive surplus vis-à-vis those groups that were lacking this capacity. Based on this observation, Evoconservatives maintain that humans’ moral psychology continues being tribalistic even today. Their argument is that since the capacity for moral behavior evolved within “tribally” circumscribed groups in the environment of evolutionary adaptation in the mid-to-late Pleistocene, that capacity is currently still limited to cooperation among members of a circumscribed group. Evoconservatism thus holds that human beings’ moral psychology is not well adapted for complying with the principles of Internationalism that claim validity for all human beings regardless of their belonging to more narrowly defined groups. And so, from the Evoconservative point of view, the international human rights movement and practices of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries seem to represent an anomaly.

Nevertheless, this human rights movement does not necessarily falsify Evoconservatism. Evoconservatism can concede that it does not deny the possibility of forming the moral motivations that Internationalism demands, while still questioning the feasibility of these motivations over time, given that our evolved human nature opposes them. In line with such an argument, the more recent proliferation of extremely nationalist, anticosmopolitan, and illiberal movements and parties confirms that human beings are not capable of sustaining an Internationalist ethos over time, even if the formation of Internationalist moral motivations is not altogether impossible. In this way, hence, Evoconservatism can articulate a distinct version of the motivational critique of the long-term feasibility of Internationalism that also provides relevant cues for explaining the contemporary crisis of Internationalism.Footnote ⁴²

It is important to recognize, however, that beyond the consensus regarding the emergence of the capacity for moral behavior, there is no scholarly consensus that human beings’ moral psychology is still exclusively tribalist today. Alternative accounts of the evolved nature of human beings’ moral psychology reject Evoconservatism’s claim that human beings’ present moral psychology is limited to cooperation within narrowly circumscribed groups. Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell, for example, maintain that human beings’ moral psychology is plastic and can adapt itself flexibly to the social conditions at hand.Footnote ⁴³ They recognize, like Boehm and others, that in the environment of evolutionary adaptation in which human beings first developed the capacity for moral behavior, human beings initially adopted tribalistic or exclusivist moralities.Footnote ⁴⁴ According to Buchanan and Powell, tribalistic or exclusivist moralities are characterized by relatively high levels of cooperation, reciprocity, and solidarity among those who are part of the same tribe or in-group. In addition, however, these exclusivist moralities regard foreigners, who are members of other tribes or out-groups, as unreliable partners for cooperation. Thus, if human beings’ moral psychology were still tribalistic today, it seems unlikely that Internationalism’s ethos could be maintained over time. And so, it would be questionable that human beings were capable of institutionalizing international cooperation of the kind that fulfill the human-rights-based socioeconomic global demands of Internationalism. Accordingly, Buchanan concedes that “our tribal moral nature dooms the project of creating genuinely cosmopolitan international institutions.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Yet Buchanan and Powell argue that under sociocultural conditions more favorable than those that are found under the relatively harsh conditions of the environment of evolutionary adaptation, human beings can and are reasonably likely to develop and maintain inclusivist moralities that permit international cooperation with foreigners. Buchanan and Powell’s central idea is that when material and cultural conditions have created a reproductive surplus, human beings need not constantly worry about improving their reproductive fitness. Buchanan and Powell call this process the “Great Uncoupling.”Footnote ⁴⁶ It is due to this uncoupling of our moral psychology from adaptative pressures to survive under harsh conditions that human beings can eventually cooperate, reciprocate, and act in solidarity with human beings who are not part of their tribe or in-group. To clarify, on Buchanan and Powell’s view, this potential development of an inclusivist morality—such as that of Internationalism—is not merely a cultural achievement of overcoming the limitations of a hard-wired tribalistic moral psychology, as other evolutionary accounts of moral psychology may claim.Footnote ⁴⁷ Instead, the development of such an inclusivist morality, although it is triggered by changes in human beings’ cultural, political, and economic environments, is nevertheless also facilitated by and conditional on the biologically and evolutionarily conditioned moral plasticity of the human mind. In support of this understanding of a plastic human moral psychology, Buchanan and Powell offer a revisionist account of prehistory. This account holds that not all human beings were subject to the same kind of environment of evolutionary adaptation, and so some human beings found themselves in conditions that allowed them to develop practices of intergroup cooperation—such as long-distance trade, outmating, and military alliances—that gave rise to “shallowly inclusive” moralities.Footnote ⁴⁸

The upshot of this analysis of Buchanan and Powell’s plastic account of the human moral mind is hence that the formation of Internationalist motivation depends on the prevalent sociocultural conditions, given that, according to this plastic account, the preponderance of either inclusivist or exclusivist moralities depends on these conditions. Accordingly, while it may be reasonably unlikely that agents form and maintain Internationalist motivations under social conditions that favor exclusivist moralities, it may be reasonably likely that they succeed at forming and maintaining such motivations under social conditions that favor inclusivist moralities. Thus, while forming and maintaining Internationalist motivation may indeed be infeasible under conditions that resemble the environment of evolutionary adaptation, Internationalist motivation can feasibly be formed and maintained when these conditions are no longer present.

On this view, hence, we should not regard Internationalism as invalid due to the insufficient likelihood or alleged impossibility of its long-term psychological feasibility. Instead, it seems more plausible to hold that Internationalism is valid and that those who are successful at forming Internationalist motivations under sociocultural conditions unfavorable to forming and sustaining inclusivist moralities have “dynamic duties” to create the social conditions under which it is reasonably likely that other actors as well will form and sustain Internationalist motivations.Footnote ⁴⁹ In addition, it also follows from this analysis that whenever sociocultural conditions are in place that are favorable to inclusivist moralities, then agents have duties to maintain these conditions and prevent them from eroding. Indeed, this view concedes that under certain sociocultural conditions, the formation and maintenance of Internationalist motivations will not be feasible in the probabilistic sense of being reasonably likely. Nevertheless, under favorable sociocultural conditions, it is reasonably likely to form and maintain an Internationalist ethos as well as to take measures, based on such motivations, that prevent the erosion of these favorable social conditions. Hence, from the point of view of Internationalism, it is necessary, at least for those who can, to work toward the realization of social conditions favorable to the long-term psychological feasibility of Internationalism, even under social conditions that are unfavorable to the emergence and durability of the Internationalist ethos.Footnote ⁵⁰ Future research on the long-term psychological feasibility of Internationalism should focus on exploring further the sociocultural conditions under which the Internationalist ethos is reasonably likely to emerge as well as on mechanisms that would prevent these conditions from eroding.