Equity

The human rights activist, Bianca Jagger, gave a presentation at a recent conference.  Her central concern was the role of large industries in the suppression of human rights across present and future generations.  She cited many examples including her involvement in campaigns for justice for the victims of the 1984 Bhopal disaster.  Not only were people immediately stricken in 1984 by the chemical leak, but subsequent generations have arguably suffered too.

Any case of this sort will bring different views and it is hard to steer a path of neutrality.  I am not going to attempt that feat in this piece.  But I would note that theoretically Jagger's concern that some actions have far reaching effects is a sound one.  Her solution, in the context of the industrial giants, is to change the international legislative landscape in a way that will inflict definite costs on those found guilty.  During her talk she noted that whilst action can be brought against such companies they are sufficiently resourced to clog up the legal works with seemingly endless counter claims etc. and, where they are found guilty, the punishments are negligible.  Often, she argued, they amount to no more than an attempt to shame the company and this has no real effect upon their activities.

I digested Jagger's concerns in the context of Jared Diamond's new book, The World Until Yesterday.  I am only part way through this tome so I cannot claim to have absorbed its full message at this stage.  However, his basic ambition is to compare tribal societies with those like our own, both historically and now.  He makes various interesting observations about differences in concepts of justice between such groups.  States have three advantages in this domain, according to Diamond:

First and foremost, a fundamental problem of virtually all small-scale societies is that, because they lack a central political authority exerting a monopoly of retaliatory force, they are unable to prevent recalcitrant members from injuring other members, and also unable to prevent aggrieved members from taking matters into their own hands and seeking to achieve their goals by violence...

A second advantage ... of state-administered justice over do-it-yourself traditional justice involves power relationships.  A disputant in a small-scale society needs to have allies if his bargaining position is to be credible, and if he really wants to collect ...

Still a third advantage of state justice involves its goal of establishing right and wrong, and punishing or assessing civil penalties against wrong-doers, so as to deter other members of the society from committing crimes or wrongs.  Deterrence is an explicit goal of our criminal justice system. (Diamond, 2013: 115-117)

Diamond's analysis is much fuller than this excoriated quotation implies, and he also lists costs to state justice.  I exhort you to read the book.  But from this segment I hope to make a few points.

Jagger's plea for a stronger international legal framework to punish large industries that do damage to people across generations amounts to a request for an extension of state justice as defined above.  In effect, the companies she refers to are accused of acting as small-scale social groups, with vested interests and powerful allies in the form of governments, who give them access to resource and affect any penalty, by protection or other means.  Meanwhile, state citizens must abide by criminal and civil laws, be wary of negligence etc. for fear of punishment.  In this way states are stabilised, at least partially.   Jagger, and many like her, feel an inherent injustice, that these companies are above, or beyond the reach of law.

If Diamond is correct in his analysis of states then their success relies upon imposition of regulation from above.  We may vote for those who decide upon the nature and management of that imposition, but in some sense we exercise this democratic right in order to opt for an undemocratic situation.  Our society is too large to manage through vote and negotiation at every turn.  This would be both impractical and meaningless, because the social bonds that maintain a tribal society cannot extend beyond a certain group size.

Given this, a ruling class is inevitable.  It stikes me that a reasonable hypothesis would be that for a ruling class to function they cannot be too large in number. They will need to negotiate and work together in a manner that perhaps is closer in nature to the mechanisms seen in some non-state societies.  Historically we have seen a move from kin-based ruling classes to elected and unrelated individuals, but I suspect that successful government is achieved when the psychology of kinship is invoked: not unlike the Westermarck effect.

State societies are fundamentally capitalist, in the sense of distributed labour, the need to differentially allocate tasks and a consequential trading of activities to sustain each life.  In the present moment state economies have financial markets at their core and inevitably the interaction between government and the industries that sustain such markets will lead to collaboration.  Whilst there are financial laws to reduce corruption and the unbalancing of currencies etc. one would anticipate alliances and actions beyond these constraints in order to retain power.  Jagger noted that the costly actions of companies that she is concerned about occur in developing world regions, away from the companies' home states.  She argued this was because life in those regions is seen as of less value than life 'back home.'

Diamond discusses the psychology of tribal warfare at some length and notes that tribes that are not part of an alliance are often regarded as sub-human, and this is associated with decisions to kill them under particular circumstances (such as revenge or resource disputes, for example).  A strong sense of group identity and an equally strong sense of alien other seems crucial in this analysis. 

Jagger's point may be correct, and her clear outrage might be explained because she is a (dual) state citizen who makes her day-to-day moral decisions about justice within a context of imposed law: an effect that Diamond sees as generally pacifying.  In other words, Jagger is judging a tribal mentality as morally wrong.

My argument is not fully formed, and may well be wrong.  But if there is anything in it I wonder what this might mean for hopes of legal sanctions.  I am sure they could be implemented, but this would only change the nature of the ruling tribes' business.  Diamond talks about the imposition of Western law on various tribal societies, and the relief this brought as it removed them from an endless cycle of warfare.  State law was imposed and this is part of his argument for the pacifying effect.  But this cannot be an infinite chain, someone will be on top.  In the context of a conference on fairness this made me think that equity is sustained through inequity.