One another’s equals? Humanity and the state in international theory

Abstract

The concept of the person is ubiquitously used in international theory, most prominently to attribute a certain character to human beings and states. While it features in discussions of how best to analyze state behavior, as well as being essential in characterizing human beings and states as subjects of international law, it is also used to answer one of international theory’s core normative questions: who in the world of international relations deserves moral consideration? This article highlights a central problem with how this concept is used in normative international theory. It argues that, since it is used to ground the moral standing of both human beings and states, it becomes remarkably difficult to deny that they should be recognized as one another’s equals, which means that normative international theorists will also find it exceedingly challenging to defend the moral priority of one over the other. The main upshot of this argument is twofold. Demonstrating the flaws of the main attempts to escape this impasse, the article establishes a serious problem with one of the main conceptual tools in the toolkit of normative international theory. But since the normatively untenable state of the equality between human beings and states only follows from the dependence upon this concept, the article also showcases where an escape route should more plausibly begin. The article thus ends by suggesting how normative international theory can free itself from its dependence on the concept of the person.

Whose interests ought to be given priority, those of individual human beings or those of states? This question lies at the heart of international theory, often perceived to constitute one of its core moral dilemmas. It is one which becomes especially pronounced when their respective interests are perceived to diverge, which is the case in discussions on external interventions into the affairs of states. In such discussions, international theory appears to be divided in two. Those who conceive of humanity as united within a universal moral community tend also to argue the case for the permissibility of such interventions when they are done to protect the lives of human beings. Those, by contrast, who hold the state to be a good in its own right make the contrary case on the grounds that the sovereignty of the state ought to be respected rather than found morally arbitrary.

Rather than making the case for either humanity or the state, this article questions what both sides of this debate usually take for granted, namely that a moral choice between them can consistently and coherently be made. It does so by analyzing how the attribution of moral status is justified in international theory; how, that is, international theorists morally justify why they take some beings, entities, or associations to be deserving of moral consideration and not others. To have the means available to justify such an attribution is arguably a necessary precondition of making a choice between human beings and states, and this article explores one relatively unexplored consequence of using the language of persons to this end. As I argue, the consequence of grounding the attribution human beings and states in their personhood is that, rather than being posited as the two horns of a dilemma, they need instead to be recognized as one another’s equals. For if it is true, as many international theorists are wont to argue, that human beings are deserving of equal moral consideration because they are persons, and if it is true, as some international theorists maintain, that states are persons, then it should follow that human beings and states are moral equals in virtue of their personhood. And this, to be sure, would make the choice between them exceedingly difficult to make.

Just as the aim of this article is not to make prescriptive claims on behalf of humanity or the state, nor is it to argue that human beings and states ought to be regarded as one another’s equals. Like Wendt (2004: 292), who is one of the few who have recognized this to be a consequence of international theory’s dependence on the language of persons (see also Hindriks, 2014), I have no wish to overturn the principle that human beings are the ultimate bearer of rights and responsibilities. But I also agree with Skinner (2010) that we need the theoretical means to explain why it is sometimes right that governments around the world conclude “that the person whose life most urgently needs to be saved is the person of the state” (p. 46). The key idea I wish to convey in this article is instead that the language of persons is not a reliable means to achieve either of these ends. And this, I want to demonstrate, constitutes a major problem for international theorizing.

That it does, however, hinges on two rather uncertain premises. The first, which will be discussed in the article’s second section below, concerns the necessity of appealing to personhood in the first place, a premise some international theorists have keenly called into question (e.g. Lomas, 2005; Schiff, 2008). The other premise, discussed in the third section, is that the state is, in fact, a person or that it is a person in the same way that a human being is. Those who ground the special moral status of human beings in their personhood usually reject this premise (e.g. Beitz, 1979: 75–76; Caney, 2005: 235–236). If they are right, that the state is not a person and that this is a language we do not need in grounding the attribution of moral status, the problem would simply dissolve since it is only a problem insofar as the moral status of human beings and states needs to be grounded in their personhood. But as I will seek to demonstrate in these two sections, it is just as difficult to reject the idea of state personhood as it is to leave the language of persons behind. Despite this, in the article’s fourth and final section, I make an attempt at such an escape, suggesting that it would involve a rethinking of the purpose of normative international theory. For all this to make sense, however, I need to spell out in greater detail why this problem arises in the first place, which means discussing the purpose for which international theory makes use of the language of persons. It is to this I will now turn.

The purpose of persons

As the tapestry of international theory is woven with diverse threads, there are multiple ends for which international theorists make use of the language of persons. Some, for instance, refer to states as persons because they want a better explanation for or understanding of state behavior, and they do so by attributing to states properties of human beings such as “a self” (Krickel-Choi, 2024; Mitzen, 2006), consciousness (Lerner, 2021), anxiety (Gustafsson and Krickel-Choi, 2020; Naude, 2022; Rumelili, 2020), or trustworthiness (Ku and Mitzen, 2022). Others discuss the “personality” of human beings (Finegan, 2012; Gündogdu, 2021; Kingston, 2019; Moyn, 2011) and states (Parfitt and Craven, 2018; Strobeyko, 2023) because this is the term used to denote their status as subjects of international law (Nijman, 2004; Portman, 2010).

But the problem of equality I want to emphasize does not primarily result from these uses of the language of persons. Instead, it is a problem mainly confined to normative international theory. This is because the language of persons is here used not merely to attribute to states and human beings certain properties without relating these to the status they have (which is what international theorists do when they personify states to better explain or understand their behavior) or to attribute to human beings and states a particular status without relating this to the properties they have (which is often how human beings and states figure as legal persons). In normative international theory, by contrast, the language of persons is used for the purpose of grounding the attribution of moral status, which means that the properties of persons serve as a justification for why someone or something receive the status of persons.

The need for international theorists to ground their attributions of moral status arises because it is not immediately clear who in the world of International Relations deserves moral consideration. Who, that is, is deserving of such a standing that their interests, needs, and well-being ought not only to be taken into consideration but to be done so for the being or entity’s own sake? Insofar as normative international theorists do not take the world of International Relations to be defined only by power struggles but also, and perhaps primarily, a world in which moral questions ought to take precedence over those of politics, this is one of the most fundamental normative questions by which they will be faced.

This question becomes particularly pertinent in the case of states. International theorists might agree with Bull (1977) that

[t]he starting point of international relations is the existence of states, or independent political communities each of which possesses a government and asserts sovereignty in relation to a particular portion of the earth’s surface and a particular segment of the human population (p. 8).

But if international theory is not to be defined by the “intellectual and moral poverty” with which Wight (1960: 38) once believed it was marked, then normative international theorists concerned with questions of morality cannot just assume that the interests of states must be taken into consideration because of the political reality is that the state is still the most considerable human association there is. Insofar as they wish to claim that the state is the kind of human association that deserves not to be deemed morally irrelevant, then they should justify this claim comprehensively and, arguably, in ways that render it something more than a mere subjective belief.

Perhaps less evidently so, the need is also present in the case of the moral status of human beings, in particular when these are elevated above other beings. International theorists are often confronted with their anthropocentrism (see e.g. Fishel, 2017; Leep, 2023; Youatt, 2020), and to the extent that they take human beings to have a different moral standing than other beings and things, then this is something that they should be able to justify. And so they should if they attribute to human beings a standing different than what is attributed to human associations such as states. This is a sentiment found most clearly expressed in cosmopolitan thought, in which the moral standing of states is seen as being derived from the “primordial moral community of the whole of mankind” (Donelan, 1978: 82); in which the “order among mankind as a whole” is not only held to be something wider, fundamental or primordial than the order among states, but also “something morally prior to it” (Bull, 1977: 21); and whose unifying belief is that the “ultimate units of concern are human beings, or persons” (Pogge, 1992: 48–49). The sentiment, in other words, is that moral status of human beings is of such a character that they can take moral priority over states. But it is a sentiment which requires justification.

This moral status, which is sometimes attributed to states and more often to human beings, is widely recognized to be synonymous with personhood. This is because the status itself, of being morally considerable, is often referred to as personhood; that being a person is to be one whose interests, needs, and well-being others are obliged to take into consideration for the person’s own sake. But it is also because it is in personhood the attribution of this status is commonly grounded; that it is in virtue of having certain descriptive characteristics associated with personhood (typically sophisticated cognitive capacities) one becomes deserving of the moral status of persons in the first place (see Jaworska and Tannenbaum, 2019; Warren, 1999). John Rawls is a prominent example of a thinker having appealed to the language of persons to make this kind of argument. Those who are regulated by the principles of justice, he argues, are moral persons, and moral persons are those whose cognitive capacities are sufficient for developing both a conception of the good and a sense of justice (Rawls, 1999: 442). The language of persons can in this way be used to explain why human beings and states are deserving of a moral status from which many other beings, entities, and associations are excluded: because they meet the descriptive conditions of personhood.

The language of persons stands in this way centrally within the cosmopolitan tradition of international thought (see Caney, 2005: 63–101; Cochran, 1999: 21–51). The particular descriptive characteristics in which they ground the moral status of human beings vary. As it is usually not a characteristic that human beings and non-human animals share since that would leave the cosmopolitan with few means to explain why such a community ought to be conceived as a community of humankind (see Cochrane, 2018; Singer, 2011: 48–70), they have appealed to characteristics that non-human animals are believed to lack. Agency is a prominent one (Gewirth, 1982, 1996; Griffin, 2008; O’Neill, 2000). The use of language is another (Habermas, 1990; Kateb, 2011; Linklater, 1998; Shapcott, 2001) To be capable of having a sense of justice and to pursue a conception of the good are together a third (Beitz, 1983; Kuper, 2000). But they are usually united in emphasizing what cosmopolitans historically has been wont to accentuate, namely that these characteristics all depend a basic capacity to reason: when human beings speak or act morally, such as when they communicate their sense of justice or use their agency to pursue their conception of the good, they do so with an intent that is only present in beings who have some basic rational capacities (Bartelson, 2009; Brown, 2009; Nussbaum, 2019; Richter, 2011).

The idea of state personhood has also featured prevalently in the history of political and international thought. As one might expect, it has been proclaimed by those who are often taken to have laid the foundation for statist international thought, such as Hobbes (1996), who considered the state to be “One Person” (p. 121), or Vattel (2008), who articulated what would later become a cornerstone of statist thought, namely that “nations or sovereign states are to be considered as so many free persons living together in the state of nature” (p. 68). Perhaps more surprising is the fact that much of the same argument was made by those thinkers who are taken to have privileged humanity over states, such as Kant (1991: 150), who also believed the state to be “a moral person” (Byrd, 1995; Holland, 2017; Vaha, 2021). The idea of state personhood, therefore, was no less central to what we now take to be cosmopolitan thinkers than to its supposed critics.

In grounding the moral status of the state in their personhood, it is argued that the state possesses many of the same characteristics that define the personhood of human beings. In so arguing, it is acknowledged that not all associations of human beings have this quality; whereas one association may be categorized as no more than a “sociological entity,” another is so capable of intentional action that it can be categorized as a “moral person” (French, 1984: 38). What separates the one from the other, just as what separates human beings from non-human animals, is their “capacity to perform as a person,” namely that they have “the ability to make judgments on normative propositions and to act rationally on their basis,” which requires “abilities associated with the faculty of reason” and “a rich capacity for self-regulation” (List and Pettit, 2011: 173; 177–178). This is something states have in virtue of their internal decision-making structures by which the acts of natural persons can be incorporated into corporate acts which, among other things, makes it possible to distinguish the collective responsibility borne by all the members of the group from that belonging to the group itself. Thus, the state can be said to have “a capacity for reasoning and decision-making that is akin to that of the human individual” (Erskine, 2001: 75). And it does not make any difference to their personhood that the state itself does not possess rationality or any capacity to act or speak for itself (cf. Fleming, 2017a). The state, as Skinner (2018: 381) argues, is a person because it is “capable of being represented by real agents whose actions count as those of the state,” which entails that “states are genuine actors, because actions can validly be attributed to them” (see also Wendt, 1999: 220–221). Insofar as there is some rational actor who is authorized to speak and act in the name of the state, then, the state is itself the author of these actions and thus the person responsible for them.

The problem of persons

It is from this practice of attributing personhood to human beings and states that the problem I wish to emphasize in this article arises: does the attribution of the same moral status to human beings and states mean that they need to be considered one another’s moral equals? Having outlined the purpose for which normative international theory makes use of personhood, this problem should, hopefully, appear slightly less implausible than it might at first seem. It arises not merely because human beings and states have received the status of persons, for they might merely have received the legal status of persons from some legal agent or apparatus, from which their equality would only follow in the altogether unlikely scenario that this same agent or apparatus willed it to be so. ¹ Instead, it is only in the exercise of grounding the moral standing of human beings and states in their personhood that their equality becomes plausible.

Still, it is not necessarily evident that this should constitute a problem for international theorizing. Since the only reason for holding human beings and states to be one another’s equals is that their moral status is grounded in personhood, it is only a problem insofar as international theorists need to justify their attribution of moral status by way of the language of persons. Yet, as I aim to make clear in this section, the problem persists because it is exceedingly difficult to ground such attributions in ways that render them universal and impartial without appealing to personhood. To see why, let us consider the case of humanitarian interventions.

To argue that one state ought to intervene into another state, thus violating the latter’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, is no mean feat. Most who attempt make such an argument begin with the assumption that all human beings are worthy of a particular moral status and that they possess this status equally (see Beitz, 1979: 71–83; Caney, 2005: 232–235; Tesón, 2003). From this basic assumption, something more can be said about the moral standing of states and the right they have to intervene into other states. Since the first principle is that all human beings are equally worthy of moral consideration and respect, only states that respect this principle are themselves worthy of moral consideration and respect, which consequently justifies interventions into those states that do not. And from this right to intervene, one may finally move onto the obligation to intervene by grounding this obligation in the corresponding right to be respected.

Two questions follow from this way of justifying humanitarian interventions. One concerns the initial assumption that all human beings are worthy of a particular moral status and that they possess this status equally; the other why it follows from this that the moral status of individual human beings trumps that of states. Let us take the initial assumption first: on what grounds can one assume that all human beings are one another’s equals? Some may see human equality as something which does not require justification (see e.g. Phillips, 2021). But when this remains unjustified in this context, we would face difficulties explaining why this realm of equality only consists of human beings. What it is about us human beings that make us equal despite the many differences between us, which can also explain why the differences between ourselves and other beings and things are sufficient to exclude the latter from our realm of equality? A failure to address questions such as this would thus make it unclear why the unjust treatment of human beings gives reasons to intervene but not, say, the unjust treatment of non-human animals or the environment (see Cochrane and Cooke, 2016; Eckersley, 2007; Mitchell, 2014).

As we have seen, it is in response to questions such as this international theorists have appealed to personhood. All human beings are worthy of this status, the argument goes, because they are persons. This answer also figures in justifications of humanitarian interventions. Consider, for instance, Tesón’s liberal defense of such interventions. Interventions into the sovereign domain of states are permissible, he argues, when they are done for the purpose of defending “persons” (Tesón, 2003: 99). Because the argument will remain incomplete until the defense of “persons” is itself morally grounded, he adds that it rests on “a standard assumption of liberal political philosophy,” namely that “a major purpose of states and governments is to protect and secure human rights, that is, rights that all persons have by virtue of personhood alone” (Tesón, 2003: 93, emphasis added). Human beings are therefore deserving both of equal moral status and protection because of their “personhood.”

In so appealing to the personhood, normative international theorists circumvent three common philosophical problems associated with grounding the special moral status of human beings: triviality, circularity, and speciesism. All three problems stem from the same source, namely the tendency to ground this special moral status in the “humanity” of human beings, which is the case when justifications of humanitarian interventions appeal to “our common humanity” (e.g. Thakur, 2015: 23; Vincent, 1986: 12–14; Wheeler, 2000: 33–52). Such justifications are trivial because they serve as little more than a reminder that human beings are human beings (Bain, 2007: 561; Williams, 1973: 230). They are circular since they amount to saying that human beings are deserving of a moral status from which other beings are excluded on the grounds that they are human beings (Waldron, 2017: 87–88). And they are arguably also speciesist as they exclude others from this status on the basis of the arbitrary criterion of species membership (Singer, 2009).

When, however, human beings are instead held to be worthy of this status in virtue of their personhood, these problems are avoided. As the attribution of this status is done on the basis of whether or not the being or entity in question is in possession of certain characteristics (rationality, agency etc.), it is not a case of speciesism since it is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a member of a particular species in order to be afforded this status. Relatedly, given the theoretical possibility that not all persons are human beings because not all who possess these characteristics are members of the human species and that not all human beings are persons (provided that there are some human beings who do not possess these characteristics), nor does such an argument beg the question. Finally, considering that possessing these characteristics is a plausible precondition for being held responsible for one’s words and actions and to hold others to account for their words and actions, it is not trivial to hold that beings and entities in possession of these characteristics are deserving of a special moral status.

It is when we consider the other question, of why the moral status of individual human beings trumps that of states, that we begin to see why grounding the special moral status of human beings in their personhood might be problematic. The reason is that the same idea of equality and the same way of justifying it presides in the relations between states. States are also believed to be one another’s equals despite the vast material differences between them, and for such luminaries as Christian Wolff and Emer de Vattel, this was so because states are persons too (Bartelson, 2015; Holland, 2011; Whelan, 1988). Like with humanity, one will of course find critics who deny that there is any need to ground the equality of states in their personhood. As Schiff (2008), for instance, maintains, “we need not care at all whether states are or are not persons” (p. 373). And when state personhood is used to explain why humanitarian interventions are impermissible, one will find those who proclaim the state’s moral sanding to rest elsewhere, namely in its individual citizens. As Walzer (1977: 53–54) has articulated this view, even if “it makes sense to say that territorial integrity and political sovereignty can be defended in exactly the same way as individual life and liberty,” this does not require the state to be a person in its own right, for “states are neither organic wholes nor mystical unions” and the rights and duties that they have are merely collectivized form of the rights and duties of its individual citizens.

Yet, statists who maintain the impermissibility of humanitarian interventions have just as good reasons to ground the moral standing of the state in its personhood as those who proclaim its permissibility has for grounding this claim in human personhood. If the only reason for its impermissibility is that it violates individual rights to life and safety, this argument will be susceptible to the criticism, advanced by Rodin (2002: 130–132), that not all violations of a state’s territorial integrity constitute a threat to the safety of the individuals who reside there. For, as he argues, one might plausibly imagine a state annexing another state’s uninhabited territory or invading with such force that the other state capitulates before any blood is shed. If one wishes to say that these actions violate the territorial integrity and political sovereignty of the victim state, then, appealing to individual rights to life and safety does not seem to be the way to go.

By appealing instead to the personhood of states, this problem is avoided. As the moral standing of the state is now grounded in the state itself and its personhood, the wrongness hinges not on its violation of the rights of individuals but whether or not the states in question have the necessary characteristics to warrant their status as persons. An intervention in which no natural person is harmed can therefore still be deemed morally wrong as it would still violate the autonomy of the person of the state. As Eckert (2009) articulates this point, “if states possess moral personality, they possess a right of self-defense like that possessed by individuals” (p. 162), which makes aggression against states the moral equivalent of murder or attempted murder. Thus, it would seem, what such a way of grounding the autonomy of states lacks in intuitiveness, it makes up for in reliability, able as it is to explain why a bloodless invasion violates the territorial integrity of states.

The case of an annexation of a state’s uninhabited territory only reinforces this point. States are usually held to lay claim not only to abstract territorial rights but also a right to this particular territory. In the absence of such particular rights, the territorial rights of states could find its moral basis in individuals’ right to live within a territorially bounded moral community, but this would not suffice as a justification of states’ rights to any particular territory (Stilz, 2009: 187–188). Insofar as the annexation of an uninhabited part of a state’s territory would not necessarily infringe on this individual right—they can still live within a bounded territory with the same people as before—a reduction of the state’s territorial rights to the aggregation of individual rights would not be a sufficient reason to deem such an annexation impermissible. In addition to their particularity, these rights need also to be defined by their permanence: the state’s claim to territorial rights need to precede any particular individual who happen to live inside its territory at any particular time and they must remain in force after her death.

The combination of these two conditions on territorial rights, particularity and permanence, gives weight to the argument that these are no mere aggregation of the rights of individuals. Unless one would be prepared to argue that each individual of which the state consists holds the proprietary rights to a particular segment of a state’s territory, rights which have been passed on to them from their parents and to the their parents from their parents and so on, and that the sum total of these rights amount to the territorial rights of the state, these are rights which must belong to some sort of whole exceeding the mere the sum of its parts. Whether this whole is organic or mystical or something else is not important; nor whether it is considered to be the nation (Miller, 2012) or the people (Moore, 2015; Nine, 2008). What is important is that, when the state is said to be a distinct person from both individual citizens and the government, what is meant is precisely this: the state is that irreducible whole who holds rights such as territorial rights and in whose name the government acts when these rights are exercised. An annexation of a state’s uninhabited territory would thus be impermissible as it would constitute an infringement on the territorial integrity of the person of the state, much in the same way that chopping someone’s arm off wrongfully infringes on this person’s bodily integrity.

If, then, the moral standing of human beings and states are grounded in their personhood, and if defenders and critics of humanitarian interventions are dependent upon this in making their respective cases for or against such interventions, does that not mean that they have encountered a major problem in explaining why human beings and states should not be considered one another’s equals? Defenders of humanitarian interventions may, for instance, claim that these interventions can be justified on the grounds that the moral standing of the state is reducible to how it treats its citizens and that this is so because the state itself does not have any intrinsic value (Blake, 2013: 14–20; Fabre, 2012: 170; Rodin, 2002: 141–162). But insofar as the premise of this argument is that all human beings are deserving of the same moral status because they are persons, then the personhood of states makes such a rejection exceedingly difficult to make. For if personhood is supposed to explain why basic human equality presides in the context of radical difference, it is not immediately clear why the many differences that undoubtedly exist between human beings and states matter if they both possess the necessary characteristics of personhood. Indeed, if all human beings are equals because they are all persons and all states are equal because they are all persons, does it not instead follow that human beings and states are one another’s equals?

This is not merely a problem for defenders of humanitarian interventions, however. It is also a problem for those who reject humanitarian interventions on the grounds that states are persons in their own right. Take, for instance, the argument of Skinner (2010: 46), that one of the main reasons for conceiving of the state as a person in its own right is to displace the hegemony of the individual human being and to give theorists the means “of vindicating the actions that governments are sometimes obliged to take in times of emergency,” namely those actions whose guiding principle is “that the person whose life most urgently needs to be saved is the person of the state.” Interventions may thus be deemed impermissible because, as Eckert (2009) argues,

[i]f the state is a moral person like the individual citizens who inhabit them, then aggression against a state is akin to murder (or, perhaps, something like attempted murder assault if the attack fails to completely annihilate the state as an independent political community (p. 162).

But if we take Skinner’s claim at face value, governments would seem to be left with a difficult decision to make, one for which the language of persons furnishes them with rather poor means. Consider a scenario in which the government of State A not only fails to protect the basic rights of its citizens but also actively violates them, making urgent the question of whether State B has a right or duty to intervene in order to protect the citizens or whether it should respect State A’s autonomy and territorial integrity. The government of State A might decide that the one whose rights most urgently need to be prioritized is not the human person but the person of the state. But insofar as two radically different beings are equals so long as they share the same capacity to perform as a person, the government has prioritized among equals. And if it is left to governments to choose which person take moral priority, what would then make impermissible the verdict of the government of State B that the urgency of the situation in State A necessitates a disregard of the latter’s independence and autonomy in order to protect, in the name of personhood, individual lives? Since the basis for equality is personhood and not statehood, a decision such as this would seem just as legitimate as one which prioritizes state persons over human persons.

That the equality between human beings and states would constitute a problem for international theory, there is little doubt. Nor should there be any doubt that this is something most international theorists would immediately reject. And since it does hinge on an idea that is far from certain and which has here been taken for granted, namely that the state is a person in its own right, then one might conclude that this does not really constitute a problem of international theory because it rests upon a faulty logic. In the next section, therefore, I will consider different attempts to reject the idea of the equality between human beings and states.

The equality of persons

There is no doubt that human beings and states are not materially the same. Even Wolff, who is often associated with the view that human beings and states are so analogous that they are deserving of the same rights to autonomy (Beitz, 1979: 75–76; Caney, 2005: 235–236), did not think so. As he wrote, the “nature and essence” of states “undoubtedly differ very much from the nature and essence of individual humans as physical persons” (Wolff, 2017: 7). Yet, does the personhood attributed to both imply their moral equality? As this section argues, it is exceedingly difficult to answer this question in the negative. Three different kinds of responses will be considered. The first disputes their equality by rejecting the premise that states are persons, reserving true personhood only for human beings. The second grants the initial premise and accepts the theoretical possibility that not all persons are necessarily human beings but rejects the grounds for state personhood. The last accepts both the premise and the grounds for state personhood but nevertheless reject the conclusion that this implies their equality.

Rejecting the premise

The most effective and straightforward way to counter this argument is to reject the premise on which it rests, namely that states are persons. This would be a particularly effective approach, seeing as there are no grounds for suggesting the equality between a human being and a state if personhood could not be attributed to both. Their imputed equality does, after all, not hinge on anything else; the whole argument depends on whether both human beings and states can belong to the category of “persons.” Successfully arguing that this category is exclusively reserved for human beings would therefore simply dissolve the problem at hand: if states are not persons, nor are they the equals of human beings.

This rejection is also the most straightforward since it is consistent with how most use the concept of the “person.” Colloquially, references to “persons” are almost always references to human beings. This is also the case in academic writing, in which, say, the “rights of persons,” the “equality of persons,” or the “defense of persons” are usually taken to refer unambiguously to the rights, equality, and defense of human beings. When, for instance, Tesón (2003) argues that “[w]e have a general duty to assist persons in grave danger if we can do it at reasonable cost to ourselves” (p. 97), it is clear that he is not arguing that our duty is to assist all who may be classified as persons, whether human beings or states; our duty, he holds, is to assist human beings, and this is clear because, as he understands it, only human beings are truly persons. It is for this reason most references to state personhood are not taken to imply their equality to human beings. Whereas human beings are persons by nature, states are only persons in a metaphorical or analogical sense. Such attributions are therefore done as “a matter of convenience and economy” (Gilpin, 1984: 301); it is merely a “category of thought” or a “tool” in order to make better sense of the state’s behavior in a highly complex world with many moving parts (Carr, 2016: 138–139). And since claiming that states can have a moral standing on the basis of their personhood would, as Gould (2009) puts it, be “too much to expect of a metaphor” (p. 720), so would definitely the claim that that they are the equals of human beings. Their equality would therefore seem to rest, not upon solid premises, but upon a category mistake.

Yet, if we recall why the language of persons is used in the first place, this rejection becomes far less straightforward. While academics certainly use the concept of the “person” as a synonym for a human being, this is not the sole purpose for which they use the language of persons. As we have seen, it also serves the arguably more important purpose of grounding the moral standing of human beings; that human beings are not deserving of moral consideration because they are human beings but because they are persons, which was how Tesón defended the right to intervene. Arguments such as these leave open the possibility that other beings or entities may qualify for the same moral status. This follows from the relationship between fact and value that is engrained into this argument. As is the case here, the moral personhood that serves as the basis for prioritizing persons over non-persons depend (or supervene) upon descriptive characteristics, namely sophisticated cognitive capacities. Because this is a relationship of dependence, in which the moral personhood depends upon these descriptive characteristics, consistency requires that there cannot be a scenario in which someone or something possessing this characteristic does not also receive an acknowledgment of their moral personhood.

It is for this reason the moral personhood of states can be just as real as the moral personhood of human beings. Hobbes’s personification of the state demonstrates, I think, these points well. While he did present the state as “but an Artificiall Man” (Hobbes, 1996: 9) and while he did conceive of the state as a person by fiction (see Fleming, 2017b; Runciman, 2000; Skinner, 1999), he neither equated persons with human beings nor believed states to be persons only metaphorically. Natural persons, for him, were not necessarily human beings but those who displayed sufficient rational capacities so that their words or actions could be considered their own. It is this that makes the state a person by fiction: since it does not itself have linguistic or agential capacities, it needs a natural person to speak and act in its name; the fiction by which we need to be convinced is not that the state is some sort of human being but rather that the words or actions performed by its representative (what Hobbes calls an “Artificiall Person”) are actually the words or actions of the state. In this way, the state is no more a fictional person than those human beings whose lack of rational capacities make them dependent on guardians to speak and act for them (Hobbes, 1996: 111–115). And what makes the person of the state more than a mere metaphor is that those words or actions performed in the name of a state actually belong to the state, just as the words or actions of natural persons belong to natural persons. Thus, since the state will be held responsible for whatever the representative says or does and its personhood is accordingly accompanied with real-life consequences, the person of the state can be just as real as any human person.

It is not, therefore, a category mistake to propose the moral equality of human beings and states on the basis of their personhood. As a moral status attributed based on descriptive characteristics, moral personhood can be attributed to all beings and entities who have these descriptive characteristics. As such, the moral personhood of states is not any more metaphorical or analogical than the moral personhood of attributed to human beings; both receive the status in virtue of being in possession of sufficiently sophisticated cognitive capacities to perform certain moral actions.

Rejecting the grounds

The next question therefore becomes: does the state possess the capacities necessary to receive the status of persons? While one may accept as true the initial premise, that all who are in possession of sophisticated cognitive capacities are equally deserving of moral consideration, one may still maintain it to be a category mistake to hold human beings and states to be equal on the grounds that the latter does not have the same capacities as the former. Rejecting the grounds for rather than the premise of the equality between human beings and states is a common approach. This is especially true for those explicitly opposing the argument advanced by statists, that the rights states have to autonomy and non-interference are analogous to those of individuals. Beitz’s (1979: 71–83) critique of state personhood is illustrative in this regard (but see also Caney, 2005: 194–195, 235–236; Kymlicka, 1989: 241–242; Tan, 2004: 35–36). As he argues, since states “do not think or will or act in pursuit of ends” (Beitz, 1979: 76) and since they “lack the unity of consciousness and the rational will that constitute the identity of persons” (Beitz, 1979: 81), they, unlike human beings, cannot derive their autonomy from their personhood. Thus, because there is a lack of analogy between human beings and states, so there is a lack of analogy between their autonomy.

But if one accepts the premise that personhood is a moral status and that persons are not necessarily human beings, the exercise of disproving the grounds for state personhood would appear to become more difficult. For if the only reason why states are undeserving of the moral status of persons is their lack of sophisticated cognitive capacities, it would also call into question why it is nonetheless true that all human beings are deserving of this moral status even when not all human beings meet its conditions. Beitz (1979) makes clear that he does not “want to argue that only the righteous, the virtuous, or the psychologically well integrated should be respected as autonomous beings” (p. 81). But what he does not make clear is why one should not question the moral status of human beings on the basis of these conditions but why this is permissible when it comes to the moral status of states; he merely notes that the reason why such a question needs to be asked in the first place just “illustrates how deeply the analogy of states and persons has penetrated our perceptions of the state, and at what cost” (Beitz, 1979: 81). Instead, I think it illustrates how difficult it is to disprove this analogy while at the same time accepting the premise that personhood is not only attributable to human beings.

More to the point, this is also because the initial premise affects how one would go about disproving that states possess the necessary capacities for personhood. It may seem obvious that states cannot truly think or will or act in pursuit of ends on the account that they are not biological creatures with brains on their own. But if it is true that persons are not necessarily human beings, then it becomes far from obvious why possessing these capacities necessarily entails possessing them in the same way as human beings. Indeed, a rejection on these grounds would seem to forget why these mental properties are deemed sufficient for the attribution of moral standing in the first place. Having sophisticated cognitive capacities is by itself morally arbitrary unless they are connected to the types of actions for which they allow. Having a “rational will” only becomes decisive insofar as this gives the possessor a capacity to perform genuinely moral actions, and a basic sense of rationality allows for actions which are not merely the result of instinct but which are deliberate, making it possible the attribution of responsibility for them. This is why it is not morally arbitrary to attribute a distinct moral status to those sufficiently rational to carry out such actions. That states lack brains should therefore not matter much for their moral status, provided that they are furnished with their own means to make rational decisions.

These, then, are the grounds that need to be rejected if their equality should be deemed unviable. If human beings are persons only because they can think and will and act in pursuit of ends (and not because they are human beings), and if these capacities constitute the identity of persons only because they are necessary in producing moral actions (and not because they are genuinely human capacities), what one would need to reject is that states are incapable of carrying out genuinely moral actions. But states are arguably capable of acting in such a way. While their way of thinking and willing and acting in pursuit of ends are different from that of a human being, they do possess mechanisms for deliberation and decision-making that would make the actions they produce of the same moral character (see Eckert, 2006: 848–852; Erskine, 2001: 74–76; List and Pettit, 2011: 158–163; Wendt, 2004: 296–305). And if this is true, what are the grounds for denying that human beings and states should also be regarded as one another’s equals?

Rejecting the conclusion

Finally, it should also be mentioned that there are those who deny the equality between human beings and states while maintaining that the state is a person in its own right. List and Pettit (2011: 173), for instance, argue the case for group persons by appealing to a “performative conception” of personhood, according to which “a person is an agent who can perform effectively in the space of obligations.” In so doing, they defend the premise that persons are not necessarily human beings. Indeed, as they note, one of the most persuasive elements of their conception is that the status of persons cannot be denied to someone or something capable of performing as a person (List and Pettit, 2011: 174). Still, after having outlined why they think groups such as states are deserving of this status, they reach the conclusion that group persons should not be given an equal standing to that of “natural persons.”

Their reasons for thinking thus are not so much novel as they are instructive, and they are instructive since responding to them serves as a way to revisit the major points made in the two first sections. One of their main reasons for not thinking human beings and states to be one another’s equals is that, while individuals in a Rawlsian original position would never settle for anything less than the equal status among them, these same individuals “can certainly be expected to agree to less than equal status for the corporate bodies they construct” (List and Pettit, 2011: 181). But this takes us back to the sort of question to which personhood often becomes the answer, namely why it is only human beings who assemble in an original position to decide on the basic structure of society. This distinctive status of human beings need to be justified and cannot simply be assumed, which is why Rawls’s (1999: 442) own answer is that the parties in the original position are the same as those who are entitled equal justice, namely “moral persons,” whose distinctive characteristics are that they are capable of having a conception of their own good and a sense of justice. Insofar as states arguably also possess these capacities (see, in particular, Eckert, 2006), it therefore remains unclear why they are not also entitled to equal justice.

Instead, List and Pettit (2011) merely note that they “take it as a working assumption that group persons do not have whatever functional characteristic it is that makes individual human beings distinctively valuable, such as sentience of the right kind or other distinctively human qualities” (p. 182, fn. 128). Yet, this way of justifying the special moral status of human beings is arguably problematic. For if human beings are “distinctively valuable” because they possess “distinctively human qualities,” does not the whole basis rest upon a circular foundation? Is that not effectively the same as saying that human beings are deserving of a superior moral status because they are human beings? And is not one of the main reasons why the language of persons is such a popular way of grounding the special moral status that it avoids such a problem? These are questions which, serious though they are for normative international theory, hopefully appear in a different light after the final section of this article, in which I reflect more broadly about the possibility of leaving the language of persons behind.

Persons and normativity in international theory

Where does this apparent impasse leave international theory? The previous three sections have outlined how the language of persons is used in international theory to ground the attribution of moral status, how this only deepens the impasse between human beings and states, and how this is an impasse from which it is remarkably difficult to escape. But this, certainly, is no acceptable place to leave international theory. What is needed, is an escape route. What I can do here, however, is merely to point out where such a route might plausibly begin. And what I want to suggest is that a proper escape requires broadening the scope of what we take normativity in international theory to mean.

This suggestion follows from a two-step diagnosis of the problem at hand. The first part of the diagnosis is that the problem cannot be reduced to the use of the language of persons within normative international theory. Although the only reason for holding human beings and states to be one another’s equals is that their moral status is grounded in personhood, what we need to understand is why this language has become so prominently used by normative international theorists. The second part follows from the first by providing an answer to this question: that its prominence begins with the assumption that the normativity with which international theory needs to be concerned is a distinctively moral normativity. By this I mean an outlook on normativity which takes moral concerns to take precedence over any other (be they political, legal, economic, religious etc.); which maintains that it is on moral ideals such as justice, freedom or rights normative theorists need to focus, not on, say, political legitimacy or religious beliefs; and which sees the role of the normative theorists as offering prescriptive claims and moral justifications for these rather than descriptive claims supported by explanations. It is this outlook which makes it reasonable for normative international theorists to consider the morality of the political choice to militarily intervene into other states. It is what gives credence to their focus of evaluating the justice of such interventions. And it is what delineates their task at hand as providing universal and impartial justifications for one choice over another. It is thus not implausible to suppose that the causal chain that leads to the prominence of personhood begins with this outlook. As long as the purpose of normative international theory is seen as evaluating and justifying the basis for just political actions, international theorists will continue to look for sources of normativity that make these evaluations and justifications internally consistent, nontrivial, and nonarbitrary. This is why appeals to “our common humanity” when justifying humanitarian interventions will continue to be regarded as insufficient. And this is why there will always remain good reasons to appeal to the properties of persons when justifying claims such as this.

If this diagnosis proves correct, we are in the fortuitous position that an alternative path is not too far out of reach. Because, as the recent revival of political realism in political and international theory has made clear (e.g. Bell, 2016; Geuss, 2008; Rossi and Sleat, 2014; Williams, 2005), the kind of normativity with which international theory can be concerned need not be one which accepts that morality takes precedence over politics, that justice is analytically superior to political legitimacy, or that justifications rather than explanations are what needs to be offered. Instead, as these realists have demonstrated, international theory can take as its basis a distinctly political normativity. According to this alternative outlook, it is far from obvious that a branch of theory which concerns itself with politics should prioritize the moral over the political to the extent that political and international theory merely becomes “applied morality” (Williams, 2005: 2). Instead, their theoretical point of departure is that the political is an autonomous sphere with its distinct sources of normativity. For this reason, rather than evaluating the justice of political institutions and actions on the basis of pre-political principles and ideals, their legitimacy can be evaluated with reference to their to their part in creating or maintaining political order and stability, on the basis of their contributions to the political purposes for which they were granted political authority, or in light of the epistemic status of the beliefs which supports their political authority (Rossi, 2019). And this entails that the hierarchical ordering between justification and explanation disappears: since the legitimacy of political arrangements and actions will always be context-dependent, there is no obvious reason why normative international theory should seek to offer an impartial and universal justification in their defense and not be concerned with explaining what render them legitimate.

Taking these insights onboard, we can begin to see the relationship between humanity and the state in a different light. ² I began this inquiry on this relationship by noting that, insofar as the world of International Relations is not defined only by a struggle for power, international theorists must answer why they take into consideration the interests, needs, and well-being of some and not others. One way to approach this problem is to find ways to transcend the continuous struggle for power in which might makes right by offering moral reasons why one should be prioritized over the other. This is the approach which so often ends up appealing to the properties of persons, and which follows from the moralistic outlook on normativity. Another is to accept that this struggle for power is constitutive of the domain in which such decisions take place, namely the domain of politics. This is the outlook of political normativity. Of course, accepting this is not necessarily to accept that the world of international relations is defined only by a struggle for power. It only entails believing that the normative international theorist should also take seriously that part of this world in which such the struggle for power is a feature and not a bug, that decisions which involve a choice between humanity and the state will inevitably also involve a contestation between different systems of beliefs, and that these decisions can be evaluated normatively by way of sources internal to the political domain.

Nor, therefore, does it follow from this alternative outlook that might makes right. Without recourse to moral sources of normativity, it is still possible to offer reasons to prefer humanity over the state or the state over humanity. Political legitimacy is one such immoral source. Just because there are compelling moral reasons for the government of State A to intervene militarily in State B, it does necessarily follow that it is politically legitimate for it do so. The government of State A might lack support from the people in whose name they govern, from the people of State B, or from the international community at large, rendering the decision to engage in a military intervention morally just but politically illegitimate. Even if the government of State A can wield military resources significantly greater than those of State B, and even if State A has morality on its side, one can still offer a normative judgment on why this military engagement should not take place.

Finally, adopting this outlook means that we can better make normative sense of endorsements of humanitarian interventions appealing to our common humanity or objections made with reference to the belief in the distinct value of the state. While these obviously rest upon a circular foundation, this only becomes something which needs emphasized and resolved when the purpose of normative international theory is seen as justifying why the prioritization of one over the other ought to be seen as just. With a different outlook on normativity, in which the role of international theory is instead to explain what renders such a prioritization legitimate, it becomes rather pointless to evaluate the explanation on the basis of its internal consistency for the obvious reason that internally inconsistent beliefs are ubiquitously essential parts of legitimation narratives. One can certainly imagine a scenario in which it is from the people of State A’s belief in the idea of a common humanity that the government can derive its legitimacy in deciding to intervene into State B, just as it is plausible that the people of State B will attempt to delegitimize this action based on their belief in the freedom and independence of their own state.

With this alternative outlook, then, a different approach to the relationship between humanity and the state presents itself. It makes it possible to appreciate what might be a rather trivial point: that it is not because human beings or states are persons that they are so valued; it is because they are already valued that we have sought to give a moral justification for why our reverence should be seen as something more than a mere product of subjective beliefs. It is not from the discovery of the fact that there actually is some property that we all possess that the belief in “common humanity” emerges; it is precisely because there already is a belief in something that unites us that those who believe go looking for what it might be. Similarly, there is a belief in the value of the state as a distinct entity, not because it is in anyway like a person or bears the characteristics of persons, but because this is a whole in which we have (for various reasons) come to believe. With this alternative outlook, this can be where an analysis of the relationship between them begins. Indeed, when politics is not assumed to be inferior to morality, when the object of normative analysis is legitimacy instead of justice, when explanation can be prioritized over justification, a whole different role for normative international theory reveals itself. In embracing this different role, the allure of personhood simply disappears. And with it, the idea that human beings and states are one another’s equals.

Conclusions

International theorists theorizing the moral status of human beings and states may appear to make good use of the language of persons. Those who want to attribute to human beings a status which justifies why they take human beings and not non-human animals, rivers, or trees to be the “basic entities” of the world of International Relations, can effectively appeal to the language of persons to do so. Theorists of the state can do the same: rather than conceiving of states as no more than a collection of human beings, the language of persons makes it possible to assign to the state a value in its own right. But, as I have sought to demonstrate in this article, there is price to pay for this efficacy. The more the natural and human domains are kept separate, it would seem, the more difficult it becomes to make distinctions within these respective domains. In this article, I have analyzed the relationship between human beings and the associations they create, focusing specifically on the most important human association, the state. While they are often taken to be at odds with one another, I have argued that their shared premise that the domain of the human is marked off from nature by being characterized as a world of persons threatens to undercut the key arguments their respective proponents are seeking to make. The language of persons, I have contended, leaves both the defender of the state and the defender of the human being with rather poor means to make the argument they ultimately want to make, namely that their person is the superior person. If both are persons, then they are equals, just as they are equal to any other person.

My primary aim with this article has thus been to emphasize a problem with one of the main conceptual tools in the toolkit of normative international theory. The hope is that the argument presented here is sufficiently convincing to instigate a reconsideration of the use of personhood in international theorizing. But I have also suggested that the problem perhaps runs deeper; that what leads normative international theory to appeal to personhood is a set of hierarchical assumptions that begin with the superiority of morality over politics. If I am right in this suggestion, it reveals the proper place at which to start a reconsideration of the use of personhood, namely by asking what, precisely, we take normative international theory to be for.