Eddy Souffrant, Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, stands among the leading professional philosophers in the United States working at the intersection of Philosophy and International Relations. His formal specializations are Applied Ethics, History of Anglo-American Social and Political Philosophy, and Philosophy of International Affairs. “Anglo-American” here refers primarily to Anglo-analytical political thought, which means, in effect, liberal political philosophy, although there are Marxist analytical philosophers.
The focus of Souffrant’s work in these areas of specialization is the problem of dehumanization or the degradation of human dignity and freedom. This concern is distinguished by a cosmopolitan sensibility contextualized by his earlier work on John Stuart Mill, such as Formal Transgression: John Stuart Mill’s Philosophy of International Affairs (2000). As a philosopher of the British Empire in its heyday, Mill thought in global terms about arrangements of power in the service of the amelioration of human misery. Souffrant focused on Mill’s philosophy of international relations because of its avowed commitment to making the world better. A concern that Souffrant may wish to have considered, however, was later raised by Robert Vitalis in White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (2017), which is that much of what has become known under the euphemisms of foreign and international relations was actually the project of race relations, as the progenitures of the journals on which the contemporary fields attest. Even in Mill’s thought, a presupposition of international relations was, basically, white global governance. An inheritance of that mentality is the persisting view that the planet is supposedly better off—that is, in the welfare of all—with white people ruling it.
Souffrant clearly became aware of this problem, as his subsequent articles, anthologies, and monographs reveal. His anthology A Future without Borders?: Theories and Practices of Cosmopolitan Peacebuilding (2016) addresses an issue that is bearing out in today’s regression into authoritarianism and rising racism in many countries—namely, the limitations of nation-states when it comes to addressing the pressing problems of humanity and other life forms on our planet. Although cosmopolitanism, marked by liberal commitments, focuses on morality more than politics in what is called “normative political theory,” the upshot is that the privatization of power globally is a political matter with catastrophic moral consequences. Implicit in global peacebuilding is the fortification of public institutions or public access through which democratic possibility requires moving beyond classical liberal paradigms.
It makes sense, then, that Souffrant’s 2013 monograph, Identity, Political Freedom, and Collective Responsibility: Pillars and Foundations of Global Ethics (2013), took on the question of collective responsibility. The classical liberal line, premised on a metaphysics that is ultimately not relational—the individual rooted in substance metaphysics—faces its limits when transgressions are against groups. How, in other words, can dominated groups find justice under normative systems that don’t recognize rights of aggregates? Although working through the ethical question of addressing such a political challenge, the question of the distinct nature of political responsibility comes to the fore. In that regard, Souffrant brought his work in critical conversation with feminist political philosophers such as Iris Marion Young and Judith Butler, especially on challenges of inclusion.
Given the range of feminist philosophers whose work Souffrant engaged over the years in the liberal context, I am surprised at the absence of Hannah Arendt (and by extension, Karl Jaspers) in this debate, but as it is the argument that is his central concern—and Young engaged the Jaspers-Arendt elements—it is sufficient that the ethics-politics tension is outlined well in his work. I mention all this to frame the discussion in terms of Souffrant’s Global Development Ethics: A Critique of Global Capitalism (2019). Published a year before the pandemic, its resonance is highly relevant to our efforts to climb out of it in the midst of other global crises.
Permit me, however, two additional contextualizations. In “Hospitality, Identity, and Cosmopolitanism: Antidotes to the Violence of Otherness” (2018), Souffrant offers a critique of xenophobia and a demonstration of the nation-state as a condition of its possibility. He argues, persuasively, that the presupposition of a nation-state is the rallying of power around a specific group in such a way that those outside of it don’t legitimately belong. The slippery slope of nationalism to racism follows, which are threats to peace, dignity, and freedom. Souffrant followed that piece with “Some Approaches to an Ethics for Disaster” (2019), in which he examines Haiti as a case study of liberal efforts (particularly John Rawls’s and Alan Gewirth’s) to articulate moral responses to circumstances requiring interventions from institutions of power—that is, political institutions. Souffrant is especially concerned with problems of paternalism in his critique, but there is a deeper problem at the heart of these approaches. As is well known, there is the tension between libertarian principles and those of equality. Most liberals assert liberty as supervening equality.
I won’t here spell out the many limitations of that view except to bring up Charles Houston’s insightful critique of that position thirty years before Rawls formulated his version of the theory: liberty makes no sense when there are no material conditions to make it possible. In other words, the equality (note, not sameness) principle should supervene as a necessary condition for meaningful liberties. For Souffrant’s analysis, what he calls human disasters (those constituted by the human world) and natural disasters, affect the options for meaningful action. Souffrant ultimately takes Houston’s position of the interdependency of human beings—in short, the social conditions of our appearance as human beings—as a supervening factor. Souffrant’s conclusion in those essays is a hope for finding common solutions even with nation-states facing others in moments of disaster. I take it that he is concerned here for nations, since not all of them have states. I don’t see why, however, we should preserve the nation-state model in this case. One could reject nation-states without eliminating nations. Without state-power centering a nation, there could be, say, a global federalism in which no nation is bound or limited to a single territory but, instead, has freedom of movement and access. In that sense, perhaps many kinds of disasters could be addressed paradoxically without falling into catastrophes.
The common theme of those two critical essays comes to the fore in Global Development Ethics. Written with the virtues of clarity and precision, this treatise offers a case for a “global development ethics,” whose purpose is to “guide a humane world in its effort to redress nefarious conditions that alter the lies of persons” (2). Concerned about “compassion fatigue,” Souffrant argues that the challenge is to “establish responsibilities and duties that aim to sustain the viability of all members of the human community” (ibid). He is, in short, arguing for ethical responses to one another, from a micro to a macro (governmental and other political institutional) scale in times of catastrophe and disaster—for, in other words, a global commitment to not leaving our fellow human beings behind.
It is crucial that Souffrant uses the word “ethics” since, as he then points out, responses are often of the moralistic blaming kind, which doesn’t help the lives of the afflicted, or deployment of short-term material resources under conditions of exigency in which the underlying causes of vulnerability may not be addressed. The former already speaks to the distinction between ethics and morality; it is possible to be so committed to a conception of morality that one slides into the cruel ignoring of suffering, that one is, in other words, unethically moralistic. The underlying obligation embedded in the idea of “development” here is not one of, say, becoming like those who dominate others; it is, in typical Souffrantian fashion, to make the world better as one is best able. I write “typical Souffrantian fashion” because Souffrant is not a narrow, formalistic idealist nor a utopian. Instead of abstract formalism in which it is easier to articulate ideal forms of typification, he proffers addressing reality as encountered with the resources of reason instead of closed or complete models of rationality. Like Drucilla Cornell, in her book Defending Ideals (2004), his argument depends on an appeal to reasonability. It is, in other words, unreasonable that humanity, with access to the means of doing so, doesn’t intervene to ameliorate human suffering and conditions that further the path of misery.
We see in this basic understanding the continued potential, in Souffrant’s view, of utilitarian thought, but we should bear in mind that his approach to the form of moral thought is not reductive. There is a metaethical consideration of the practical outcomes approach of utilitarianism, which is a necessary condition of interdependency among a species that is, at the individual level, vulnerable. At each moment, he reminds us that people live in countries, and that global statist discussions should bear in mind what the stakes ultimately are in ethical humanistic terms. His main case study is Haiti after the 2010 earthquakes. His arguments are clearly relevant to the variety of other disasters affecting materially under-resourced countries.
Within countries such as the USA, Canada, or Australia, one could think of how basic structures of access during moments of natural disasters work; in the USA, for example, a large portion of revenue from states such as New York and California provide revenue for the federal responses to tornadoes, hurricanes, and floodings in states such as Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi (among others that are, ironically, politically antipathetic to taxation and infrastructural investments advanced by the states that rescue them).
The core philosophical argument in the book could be understood through the point about reasonability that I have offered. From a reductive, rationalistic perspective, one could imagine a maximum consistency of the self to itself, in near isolated Cartesian fashion. But since such a self would be closed, it could find itself depending on a rationalistic model of consistency that fails to respond to the needs of the world because of an effort to avoid any contradictions to its completeness. Such a self would be unreasonable, which not only reveals the distinction between being rational and being reasonable but also a crucial ethical point: to be reasonable requires being open to the lives of others. The “ethics” dimension of Souffrant’s argument, then, comes to the fore in the basic subject of global development—namely, people who, as pluralistically understood, mean others. This premise enables Souffrant to articulate the limitations of national identity arguments, liberal economic models premised on profit instead of human wellbeing or the cultivation of a humane world, liberal democracy (as burdened by exclusionary norms of recognition), and it enables him to conclude with an argument for “moral capitalism.”
I take it that “moral” is being used in Souffrant’s conclusion in the way I referred to ethics or ethical constraints. If there are constraints on capitalism—a system that, by definition, asserts itself as limitless—then the argument is really for mixed economies akin to social-welfare state democracies. This is because if people are ultimately placed first, is it really capitalism? One could argue that a problem with capitalism is that it is premised on business over markets (since business may involve the elimination of one’s competitors, including other markets). Thus, as “market” and “capitalism” are not identical, a question could be raised about other conceptions of markets that may be conducive for ethical life.
For instance, a capitalist conception of a marketplace is one in which one garners profits in the form of relevant units such as currency or an increased supply of tradable goods. Historical markets were—and many continue to be—places of connectedness, human contact, sociality, news, etc. In short, a problem with historical markets from a capitalist perspective is that they’re too human. I’m thus not sure that the culminating argument for moral capitalism works, but as the context of the debate is one dominated by neoliberalism and neoconservatism, in which for both capitalism is theological or ontologically basic, Souffrant’s effort is a plea for reasonability among hegemons, and what is reasonability but a demand for an attunement to the lives of others?
Global Development Ethics is clearly a book to recommend not only for courses in applied ethics and social and political philosophy but also human rights studies, international studies, and development studies. It is a substantial contribution to scholarship in contemporary Anglo-liberal political theory and applied ethics.
Lewis Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Chairperson of the Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA, and Penguin-UK 2022); Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon, edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey (Bloomsbury, 2023); and “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n'est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023).
