Abstract

An important issue in discussions of global justice is whether one has special obligations to favor the interests of one’s co-nationals, a proposition I label national partiality. A common argument for national partiality attempts to justify it as an associative duty in analogy with duties that are generally thought to arise from special relationships, paradigmatically, among close family members. In response, the distributive objection critiques associative duties on the grounds that they unfairly disadvantage those not included in the special relationships. However, the distributive objection is problematic in that it assails all associative duties equally, while a better critique would explain why national partiality is less justifiable than familial partiality. I show how the distributive objection can be refined in this way on the grounds that partiality at the national level has a far greater potential to lead to injustice than at the familial level.