184 Ethics and politics
Chapter 5. Justice theory (B) does not seem to be on its way to influencing politics
as the ‘ideas of ’89’ once did and remains an academic business (more on ideal the-
ory in the next chapter). The cohesion furnished by nations (C) and their degenera-
tion into nationalism has largely vanished after 1945, all attempts (post-Soviet and
post-Yugoslavia politics in the 1990s, Euroscepticism paired with national pride
in EU-member states, Arab nationalism) to reinstate it could not but fail and have
sometimes shown poisonous side effects.
It is against this backdrop that solidarity needs to be rethought as both a norma-
tive category (from which duties of solidarity derive for policy-making actors) and
a sense of belonging together that survives any defensive
closing of the borders,
both geographic and mental. Since solidarity is a word coming up more and more
with regard to migrants, it is perhaps useful to be explicit on this matter: solidarity
does not mean admitting all migrants for whatever reason they migrate from all
possible corners, but taking care of them wherever they are, instead of leaving them
in the hands of traffickers or violent governments. On the other hand, reinstating
solidarity as a self-imposed obligation is not a normative indication that can go
without a measure of political wisdom, for at least two reasons. First, solidaristic or
welfare policies – if not well-carved and provisioned with safety mechanisms – can
be easily misused by people who end up using them as a permanent instead of a
temporary source of outcome, and acting as a lobby of welfare receivers. Second,
the difficulties of states overburdened by tasks and not
receiving enough tax money
are likely to last for an entire epoch until a new wave of (sustainable) growth takes
effect or the economy is reformed in a more efficient and more just way – a model
for this combination is, however, not in sight.
In the light of these two considerations, a problem that comes up again is our
stance towards future generations, this time however not in the framework of lethal
problems affecting people of the far future. Though support cannot be mutual
between generations if their life-spans
do not partially overlap,
7
here too time uni-
versalism applies: there is no reason why future generations should not deserve our
solidarity like our contemporaries, particularly with reference to public debt and the
pension system. Also, generous solidarity towards contemporaries is wrong if it com-
promises or spoils in advance the financial premises of similar policies to be imple-
mented in 50 or 75 years. Let us also remark that in countries with declining birth
rate, two aspects of solidarity policies – the acceptance and integration of migrants
and the care for future generations – converge; the first can reveal itself to be instru-
mental in keeping the social security system afloat to the benefit of the posterity.
Finally, my reintroduction of solidarity as a self-standing
category in the family
of normative concepts accompanying politics is due to the intention to comple-
ment this family with a neglected member, by no means to counterpose it to the
other, more celebrated partners. Rather than rejecting liberal political thinking
altogether, as communitarians do, solidarity as a category in the company of the
three others appears to be able to give answers to the questions liberalism leaves
open with regard to social and political cohesion as well as the interconnectedness
of
individuals, who remain the fundamental agents.
Justice and solidarity
185
How liberty and equality, justice and solidarity can interplay is not up to a text-
book to determine, but is rather left to citizens, polities and thinkers reflecting and
acting within specific configurations of problems and conditions. The tools that
may be useful to them have been presented in the last two chapters, while in the
next one suggestions and warnings as to how to use those tools will follow.
Notes
1 Titles of books and articles are nowadays flooded with ‘justice’, added
as a sort of univer-
sal operator (as they say in logic) to the most various topics, both in general and applied
political philosophy of normative obedience. In Cerutti (2016) this approach is criticised
with specific reference to climate ethics as the wrong way to develop a political philoso-
phy of climate change.
2 This word means both ‘justice’ and ‘righteousness’. As with other words relevant to polit-
ical philosophy, the semantic of justice is not homogeneous across languages.
3 Sandel is also the author of the famous online course (MOOC)
Justice, available on the
Harvard-MIT edx.platform at http://www.justiceharvard.org/.
4 For this terminology see the next chapter, §1.
5 www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/solidarity
6 With
regard to them, I have used in Chapter 7 the notion of empathy, which is related
to sympathy, though being by no means its namesake.
7 This is true for support, but not in the same measure for sympathy: if we cannot know
if our posterity will look back upon us with sympathy, we can, nonetheless, act in a way
that we can reasonably expect it will induce them to do so.
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