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Rights, Boundaries, and the Bonds of Community: A Qualified Defense of Moral Parochialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 1985

Richard Dagger
Richard Dagger*
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
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Abstract

One effect of the cosmopolitan turn in recent political philosophy is that widely held beliefs and intuitions are being called into question. My purpose here is to scrutinize one of these beliefs—that we should attend to the needs of our compatriots before the needs of the foreigners—from the perspective of a rights-based theory. After sketching a theory that takes the right of autonomy as its cornerstone, I consider four arguments that might support the intuition that compatriots take priority. Only one of the four is sound, I conclude, and even this argument, the argument from reciprocity, supports the intuition only in a highly qualified form.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 79 , Issue 2 , June 1985 , pp. 436 - 447
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1985

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