Territory and State Sovereignty

The final approach to be considered looks at the notion of the state as a territorial entity. The state is a political body with a defined sphere of territorial authority. The question that emerges here is simple: What justifies the state in excluding outsiders from entering into that territory? What, moreover, entitles the state in question to care simply about the interests of individuals who happen to already be within that territorial space? This question becomes more urgent when we consider the plausible moral premise that the earth’s surface is best understood as the shared property of all humanity. The earth, after all, is simply there; no individual created it, and we might therefore think that all individuals have some symmetrical claim towards it. This notion does not require any state to give up its exclusive territory, nor its rights to exclude others from this territory. It does, however, require each state to give some justification to outsiders as to why they cannot enter into the territory in question, and why their interests will therefore not be taken as important in the determination of government policy.

This justification, we might think, requires each state to give some minimal standard of living to all individuals abroad. In Robert Goodin’s analogy, the local focus of the state might be understood as equivalent to that of a lifeguard at a crowded public beach. There is nothing wrong with a lifeguard guarding only part of the beach, thereby caring only for those individuals within her domain of protection. There may even be nothing wrong with her excluding individuals from coming into her territorial domain. However, this exclusion is only permissible if we ensure that all individuals on the public beach have access to lifeguards of their own; we need not all have the same lifeguard, but all must have some lifeguard. If the beach is in some sense owned by all, then all must be cared for in the design and setup of protective institutions.

Though this argument has a great deal to recommend, it has significant difficulties as well. The most prominent issue is the simple fact that the key moral premise of this approach – the collective ownership of the earth – is neither universally accepted, nor especially easy to understand. We can make this argument more or less plausible by varying what we mean by a right to own part of the world’s surface. However, we still face the problem that this notion might be simply rejected by those it calls upon to act. It is not clear how the notion of the collective ownership of the earth might be justified to those who do not already find this notion compelling. Furthermore, the nature of the justification in question requires a great deal of philosophical work. To borrow the analogy once again, we might ask just how good a foreign “lifeguard” has to be before we can legitimately turn our focus inwards. What interests are those that must be protected before the local focus is justifiable? The present argumentative strategy stands in need of considerable amplification before it becomes a full answer to the moral basis of development aid.

Conclusion

None of these arguments are without difficulty. By itself, each approach is not sufficient to ground universal acceptance. This should not be taken as in any sense disproving the idea that wealthier states owe something to the citizens of impoverished foreign states. Instead, it should merely indicate that we have an obligation to engage in more research and reflection, to determine the best reasons we can give to establish the nature of such a duty. Such philosophical work might help us better understand why we have duties towards the global poor; we may further hope that this work will eventually aid us in understanding the content of these duties as well. However, I will close by noting that one lesson emerging from this debate might be the limited role of moral philosophy in guiding international action. In the end, we should take the existence of even these partial and incomplete arguments as giving us reason to regard the moral claims of impoverished persons abroad as both real and powerful. But we should not await the perfection of our moral theory before we engage in practical action abroad. The problem of international poverty is as much a failure of practical will – neglecting to do what we already accept we should – as it is a failure of theoretical understanding.