In the last five chapters, we have explored some weighty and controversial subjects. At no point, however, have we addressed the existence of state welfare or the underlying assumptions of modern social policies. What if the affluence on which advanced welfare systems depend is in some way immoral? What if it derives from historical injustices and/or contemporary exploitation? What if the price of our affluence is a world in which malnutrition and premature death is rampant? What if we (continue to) fail to do anything about this deplorable state of affairs? And what if our lassitude is due not only to addictive consumerism, corporate domination, post-ideological politics and moral inertia, but also to an attachment to welfare services that absorb resources that could be directed elsewhere? Don't our responsibilities to address global impoverishment outweigh obligations to compatriots and neighbours, perhaps even friends and relatives? Isn't the welfare state morally unaffordable?

This chapter explores two issues that relate to this question of how resources should be globally redistributed. One deals with whether migration and cultural diversification require a two-tiered conception of welfare entitlements; the other deals with whether domestic social justice is compatible with global distributive justice. Given the novelty of some of these debates, we will draw on our three moral philosophies more selectively than before.

The fairness hypothesis

Should we restrict the welfare rights of recent migrants?

Should we limit the welfare entitlements of non-UK citizens residing in Britain? Why is this question even worth considering? Debates about migration somehow manage to become ever more raucous. This is partly because the left has been exercised with them. Some argue that, given their long-standing internationalism, the continued salience of national identity has rendered social democrats unable to deal properly with questions of cultural, ethnic and religious tensions (Phillips, 2006). Their scepticism has left them deaf to people's genuine anxieties about sociocultural change and so impotent to suggest forward strategies. They have become lost in politics of identity, recognition and difference to such an extent that principles of universalism, solidarity, trust and redistribution have been undermined (Rorty, 1998; Barry, 2001). The former have led to a multiculturalism that erodes the basis of the welfare services and mutualist institutions that depend on the latter. Only by stressing a renewed sense of common identity and national citizenship can social democrats wrestle the debate away from conservatives, ultra-nationalists and racists.