Compatriot Preference: Is There a Case?

Although broader ethnic or religious loyalties sometimes supervene, people all over the world attach special importance to the fate of their compatriots. How to measure the preferential factor is an intriguing question: perhaps we could measure the front-page space devoted to domestic and international matters respectively, or the extent of a foreign as opposed to a domestic disaster needed to cross the threshold of attention, or compare foreign-aid budgets with domestic welfare and social service expenditures. Some measures might yield a very high factor: perhaps compatriots are given a thousand times more weight, perhaps more, in some respects. But of course, even if compatriots were (implicitly) judged to be worth only (!) twice as much as others, we should still want to know why. Sometimes psychological reasons are given: it is argued, for example, that Rousseau was right to claim that human attachments weaken as they extend, that they must stop somewhere if they are to retain any motivating force and remain reliable (Orwin, 1996). We might, however, still want to know if we are justified in doing what we feel inclined to do. Moreover, Rousseau’s spatial model doesn’t fit the facts at all well. Quite often people give more weight to relatively large attachments than to relatively small ones; they send their children off to war, for example – a reminder of the important fact that compatriot preference needs to be justified in relation to smaller local attachments, as well as to whatever it is that global justice demands (Jones, 1999: 131-3; Moore, 2001: 47-50). That consideration has particular weight in light of views that partiality at the sub-national level is more readily justified than compatriot preference (Shue, 1988; Singer, 2004: 15-16). The enquiry attempted here is broader than some and narrower than others. It is broader than enquiries into the mutual obligations that arise within a society of a kind that we are assumed to admire: a liberal, liberal-democratic, republican, or egalitarian kind. Two refined recent treatments of compatriot preference have advanced excellent reasons for giving special weight to the mutual obligations