The moral significance of nations

Nations were a very significant feature of the affluent moral landscape. As one affluent philosopher put it, “A nation is a community constituted by shared belief and mutual commitment, extended in history, active in character, connected to a paricular territory, and marked of from other communities by a distinct public culture”. Most affluent people believed that co-nationals had special obligations to one another; that national identity was a vital part of each individual's identity; and that nations themselves had special rights, privileges and obligations. Every affluent state was a nation state, claiming authority over specific people within a particular territory.

Not everyone agreed. (Affluent philosophers were seldom unanimous about anything.) Cosmopolitans (“citizens of the world”) denied the moral significance of nations altogether. They argued that all moral obligations are universal and the only significant “community” is humanity as a whole. But most affluent philosophers were pragmatic. Nations were a fact of (affluent) life. If you wanted to talk about justice, the nation state was the only game in town. Justice was a virtue of political instituions, and such instituions existed only within nations, as did the solidarity needed to generate obedience to anything beyond Nozick's minimal state.