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This chapter defends the idea of national responsibility and identifies its limits. It argues that where nations act in ways that impose burdens on themselves or on others, responsibility for such burdens falls on every member, even on those who opposed the decisions or policies in question. The argument turns on the sharing of beliefs and attitudes that characterizes national communities, and on the benefits that membership brings with it. It is not wrong, in general, to hold contemporary fellow-nationals responsible for actions performed in their name. But the bearing this has on questions of global justice remains unclear. For one thing, nations can be held responsible not only for the benefits and burdens they create for their own members, but also for the impact that their actions have on outsiders. For another, outcome responsibility has to be understood alongside remedial responsibility, the responsibility we may have, as individuals and as members of collective bodies, to respond to human deprivation, including global poverty. Thus, by accepting the idea of national responsibility, we have not foreclosed the question what global justice demands of us.

This chapter examines historical rectification as an aspect of global justice, and focuses on the question of whether nations can be held responsible for the deeds of their forebears. It argues that anyone who is prepared to accept the general idea of national responsibility should also accept the idea of responsibility for the national past. The key is to reflect on the benefits that membership in a national community can provide — primarily tangible benefits in the form of inherited territory and capital — but also intangible benefits in the form of pride in the national past. One cannot legitimately enjoy such benefits without at the same time acknowledging responsibility for aspects of the national past that have involved the unjust treatment of people inside or outside the national community itself, and liability to provide redress in whatever form the particular circumstances demand. Although such redress is by no means the whole of global justice, it is certainly one part of the picture, and one that no theory that takes the idea of national responsibility seriously can afford to dismiss.

This chapter explores two senses of responsibility: the responsibility we bear for our own actions and decisions or ‘outcome responsibility’, and the responsibility we may have to come to the aid of those who need help or ‘remedial responsibility’. Outcome responsibility provides an important way of identifying remedial responsibility. Outcome responsibility starts with agents and asks how far they can reasonably be credited and debited with the results of their conduct. Remedial responsibility starts with patients — people who are deprived or suffering — and asks who should shoulder the burden of helping them. These two kinds of responsibility reflect contrasting aspects of the human condition: on the one hand, we are vulnerable creatures whose lives may not be worth living unless others are willing to come to our aid and supply us with resources. On the other hand, human beings are choosing agents able to control their actions and to take responsibility for the results. For such agency to exist they must be willing to bear losses and enjoy gains, whether these fall immediately on themselves or on others. The idea of outcome responsibility permits that. It prevents one person, or group of persons, imposing losses on other. At the same time, where losses are self-imposed, it frees other agents from having to make good the deficit.

This chapter presents a summary of the main arguments in this book. Among these is that national identity entails national responsibility. By virtue of identifying with compatriots, sharing their values, and receiving the benefits that national communities provide, we are also involved in collective responsibility for the things that nations do. This extends to include things that our ancestors have done — national responsibility includes responsibility for the national past.

This chapter discusses the complaint that the statist ideal is excessively biased in favour of the status quo and argues that this critique is only partly successful. While the statists’ (especially Rawls’s) refusal to extend egalitarian justice to the global realm does not in itself indicate subservience to the status quo, statist principles have unduly conservative implications because they are insufficiently sensitive to morally relevant phenomena characterizing the global realm. Although statists rightly identify peoples (states) as important subjects of international justice in virtue of the particular forms of coercive power they exercise by directly interfering in one another’s affairs, they fail to appreciate that these are not the only forms of international coercion in need of justification. Because the normative outlook underpinning Rawlsian statism is blind to these other potential sources of injustice, its principles may very well turn out to be status-quo biased and, therefore, rightly criticized on guidance grounds.

The chapter outlines John Rawls’ liberal theory of domestic justice. It highlights the problem of social justice as Rawls understands it, and describes the conditions necessary for grounding requirements of justice in the Rawlsian theory. Next, the chapter presents Rawls’s description and justification of principles for regulating the conduct of international affairs as developed in The Law of Peoples, focusing on some of his major objections to global requirements of distributive justice. It argues against Rawls’s reasons for rejecting the demand for international distributive justice by pointing out their lack of factual support and inconsistency with the main tenets of the liberal egalitarian theory of justice Rawls defends in his earlier work.

The federal government has established the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform tasked with “identifying policies to improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run.” The Commission has heard many proposals to increase revenues, most of which involve standard sources such as income, consumption, or company taxes. This chapter discusses a different focus, involving the use of environmental taxes. It highlights the fiscal and economic advantages of a carbon tax. It shows that a carbon tax can produce substantial revenues in the coming years—an estimated $134 billion of current revenues in 2015, equal to about 0.6 percent of GDP.

This chapter analyses how the global financial crisis was governed as a problem of debt from 2010, and especially of sovereign indebtedness and budgetary deficits. It covers the Coalition Government’s Emergency Budget of June 2010 in the UK, the end of fiscal stimulus and subsequent National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, Ryan budget, Budget Control Act, and so-called ‘fiscal cliff’ in the US. It shows how the rendering of the crisis as a problem of sovereign debt and fiscal crisis was grounded in liberal and neo-liberal economic concepts. It also explains how the apparent solution of austerity mobilizes the intuitive and moral appeal of debt repayment, and rests on the eliciting of an affective atmosphere of confidence among investors and entrepreneurs as it searches for so-called ‘growth-friendly fiscal consolidation’.

After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, leadership of the counter–Radio Right censorship campaign passed to the Democratic National Committee (DNC). DNC Chairman John Bailey recruited operative Wayne Phillips to take charge of a team that would intimidate conservative broadcasters who either supported Barry Goldwater or attacked Lyndon Johnson during the 1964 election. By Phillips’s own estimations, the project was a remarkable success, garnering hundreds of hours of free airtime via Fairness Doctrine complaints. They were aided by a new front organization—secretly created by the DNC—called the National Council for Civic Responsibility. As a bonus, the campaign also generated a court challenge from journalist Fred Cook against conservative radio station owner John Norris. The resulting court case, Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. FCC, went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ultimately upheld the Fairness Doctrine.

This chapter analyses the opposition’s contribution to scrutiny of government bills and policy-making at Westminster. Westminster is classically seen as dominated by an adversarial ‘opposition mode’, giving opposition politicians little policy impact. This chapter argues that there are actually several distinct ‘opposition modes’, which can be more consensual. It summarizes existing literature on opposition, and sets out the basics of how opposition parties are organized in both chambers. The bulk of Westminster legislative amendments are proposed by opposition parliamentarians, and the motivations behind these are explored. Many amendments are actually driven by objectives other than policy change—including seeking government explanations, and embarrassing the government. Hence it is important not to overstate ‘failure’ of such amendments. In addition, many opposition amendments go on to trigger government concessions, particularly via the House of Lords. In various ways, the opposition at Westminster is hence more influential on policy than is often assumed.