The Ethics of Refugee Policy by Christina Boswell

Author:Christina Boswell [Boswell, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General, Human Rights
ISBN: 9781351890472
Google: ZAokDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 35196075
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2005-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

Justice as Impartiality

Barry’s theory of justice as impartiality in many ways resembles Rawls’ theory of justice. Indeed, Barry characterises Rawls’ theory as a variant of justice as impartiality: it is ‘the best-known, most influential, and the most fully developed variant of justice as impartiality’.39 The main difference between Barry’s theory and the early work of Rawls lies in the procedure for agreement to terms of justice. Rather than representing the impartial or moral perspective through the imposition of a veil of ignorance, Barry assumes that the parties to the contract are aware of their social and economic status and natural assets. Nonetheless, they are able and willing to abstract from these morally arbitrary characteristics and choose fair principles. There is no device for making a sharp distinction between moral motivation and self-interested rationality: impartial and personal perspectives are assumed to coincide in Barry’s conception of reason. Barry prefers to conceive of contractors as motivated by the desire for fairness. On this account, the impartial perspective is not conceptually or psychologically distinct from the interests of contractors. Rather, it is assumed that the contractors have an interest in or desire to accept impartial terms.

In terms of its characterisation of individual psychology, Barry’s failure to make a clear distinction between egoism and altruism seems at least prima facie to be a more accurate portrayal of people’s motivation: reasons for action invariably involve a complicated mixture of egoism and altruism, and it is difficult in practice to disentangle one from the other. However, at the conceptual level it creates a new set of problems for Barry’s account. Not only does his theory still rest on an assumed dichotomy between self-interest and impartial ethics. Paradoxically, his attempt to deny the dichotomy through the notion of a desire for fairness leads to a number of serious practical problems with his account. By blurring the conceptual distinction between self-interested and ethical motivation in his procedure for selecting principles, he is unable to explain impediments to motivating the global application of justice. Moreover by linking motivation so tightly to terms of justice, his theory risks being counter-productive. Where the relevant motivation is not triggered, there will be no terms of justice at all.

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