1. I am using ‘responsibilities’, ‘duties’, and ‘obligations’ interchangeably to indicate actions or forbearances that one is deemed bound to perform or observe. Although this is consistent with much contemporary usage, each concept can also be taken to have a specific, distinct connotation. For discussions of the distinction between the concepts of ‘duty’ and ‘responsibility’, see J. Feinberg, ‘Duties, Rights and Claims’, in J. Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 130–42, and R. Goodin, Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 81–7. Robert L. Frazier outlines one way in which ‘duties’ have been distinguished from ‘obligations’ in his essay on ‘duty’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London/New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 178–83 (p. 178) while observing that the terms are now generally treated coextensively.
2. Questions regarding both the source and scope of our responsibilities to others are addressed within what has been referred to as the ‘communitarian-cosmopolitan debate’ within normative international relations theory. See, inter alia, C. Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), M. Cochran, Normative Theory and International Relations: A Pragmatic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and T. Erskine, ‘ “Citizen of Nowhere” or “The Point Where Circles Intersect”? Embedded and Impartialist Cosmopolitanisms’, Review of International Studies, XXVIII (2002) 457–78. Important arguments for duties that are global in scope include the following: O. O’Neill, Faces of Hunger (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986) and Bounds of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), C. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations [1979], 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), B. Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), H. Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), P. Singer, ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, I (1972) 229–44, T. Pogge, ‘Priorities of Justice’, Metaphilosophy, XXXII (2001) 6–24, and C. Jones, Global Justice: Defending Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
3. David Miller addresses this problem in ‘Distributing Responsibilities’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, IX (2001) 453–71, as does Christian Barry in Chapter 12.
4. It is worth noting that discussions of responsibilities in IR are not unique in failing to identify appropriate agents. Indeed, a lack of clarity in this regard is no more apparent than in the context of increasingly prominent discourses on rights – specifically human rights – in which duties are unavoidably implicitly invoked. Complexities here arise particularly in identifying the relevant agents against whom rights claims might be made. Indeed, approaching questions of justice from the perspective of rights rather than responsibilities is vulnerable to criticism precisely because it necessarily, rather than in moments of carelessness, avoids statements of who – or what – is to act. O’Neill, for example, observes in Bounds of Justice (p. 101) that, ‘the rhetoric of rights … is still a rhetoric of recipience rather than of action. It still takes the perspective of the claimant rather than of the contributor, of the consumer rather than of the producer, of the passive rather than of the active citizen’. See also O. O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 128–36.
5. As I discuss in Chapter 1, the portrayal of individual human beings that serves this analogue – that we are ideal, rational choosers – itself makes a number of questionable assumptions. For a valuable overview of assumptions regarding the agency of the state within rational choice and Game Theory models, see M. Hollis and S. Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), chapter 6. Finally, it is revealing to note that this analogy is so deeply ingrained that it is, apparently, possible for those within IR to appropriate the term ‘individualism’ to describe the ontology of the neorealist position with the relevant agents being posited as states. See, for example, Alexander Wendt’s use of the term in ‘The Agent–Structure Problem in International Relations Theory’, International Organization, XLI (1987) 335–70, and Hollis and Smith, p. 89. This very interpretation of the term implicitly rejects individualist assumptions as they are conventionally understood. 9 This combination of an uncritical acceptance of the state as an agent and the