On Global Justice - Hardcover

Risse, Mathias

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691142696 ISBN 13: 9780691142692

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Debates about global justice have traditionally fallen into two camps. Statists believe that principles of justice can only be held among those who share a state. Those who fall outside this realm are merely owed charity. Cosmopolitans, on the other hand, believe that justice applies equally among all human beings. On Global Justice shifts the terms of this debate and shows how both views are unsatisfactory. Stressing humanity's collective ownership of the earth, Mathias Risse offers a new theory of global distributive justice--what he calls pluralist internationalism--where in different contexts, different principles of justice apply. Arguing that statists and cosmopolitans seek overarching answers to problems that vary too widely for one single justice relationship, Risse explores who should have how much of what we all need and care about, ranging from income and rights to spaces and resources of the earth. He acknowledges that especially demanding redistributive principles apply among those who share a country, but those who share a country also have obligations of justice to those who do not because of a universal humanity, common political and economic orders, and a linked global trading system. Risse's inquiries about ownership of the earth give insights into immigration, obligations to future generations, and obligations arising from climate change. He considers issues such as fairness in trade, responsibilities of the WTO, intellectual property rights, labor rights, whether there ought to be states at all, and global inequality, and he develops a new foundational theory of human rights.

About this title

About the Author

Mathias Risse is professor of philosophy and public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

From the Back Cover

"Risse's new book is ambitious in scope and diverse in intellectual resources. In his explorations of the leading questions of international justice, he is admirably sensitive to the wide range of grounds--including common humanity and natural, social, and political relationships--that ought to shape the answers. His account of common ownership of the earth diversifies our historical resources as well, by putting Grotius's work to use in addressing deep, current controversies."--Richard Miller, Cornell University

"This book takes the global justice debate to the next level and sets a new standard for philosophical depth, practical relevance, and sweep of vision. Unrivaled in its scope, sophistication, and scholarship, this tremendous achievement marks a turning point in political theory."--Leif Wenar, King's College London

"This broad, comprehensive, and challenging book on global justice combines a critical survey of the recent literature with a new and provocative view that the author calls pluralist internationalism. There is no other recent work on global justice of comparable philosophical ambition or scholarly breadth."--Charles Beitz, Princeton University

From the Inside Flap

"Risse's new book is ambitious in scope and diverse in intellectual resources. In his explorations of the leading questions of international justice, he is admirably sensitive to the wide range of grounds--including common humanity and natural, social, and political relationships--that ought to shape the answers. His account of common ownership of the earth diversifies our historical resources as well, by putting Grotius's work to use in addressing deep, current controversies."--Richard Miller, Cornell University

"This book takes the global justice debate to the next level and sets a new standard for philosophical depth, practical relevance, and sweep of vision. Unrivaled in its scope, sophistication, and scholarship, this tremendous achievement marks a turning point in political theory."--Leif Wenar, King's College London

"This broad, comprehensive, and challenging book on global justice combines a critical survey of the recent literature with a new and provocative view that the author calls pluralist internationalism. There is no other recent work on global justice of comparable philosophical ambition or scholarly breadth."--Charles Beitz, Princeton University

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

On Global Justice

By Mathias Risse

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14269-2

Contents

Preface..........................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments..................................................................................................................xiiiChapter 1: The Grounds of Justice................................................................................................1Chapter 2: "Un Pouvoir Ordinaire": Shared Membership in a State as a Ground of Justice...........................................23Chapter 3: Internationalism versus Statism and Globalism: Contemporary Debates...................................................41Chapter 4: What Follows from Our Common Humanity? The Institutional Stance, Human Rights, and Nonrelationism.....................63Chapter 5: Hugo Grotius Revisited: Collective Ownership of the Earth and Global Public Reason....................................89Chapter 6: "Our Sole Habitation": A Contemporary Approach to Collective Ownership of the Earth...................................108Chapter 7: Toward a Contingent Derivation of Human Rights........................................................................130Chapter 8: Proportionate Use: Immigration and Original Ownership of the Earth....................................................152Chapter 9: "But the Earth Abideth For Ever": Obligations to Future Generations...................................................167Chapter 10: Climate Change and Ownership of the Atmosphere.......................................................................187Chapter 11: Human Rights as Membership Rights in the Global Order................................................................209Chapter 12: Arguing for Human Rights: Essential Pharmaceuticals..................................................................232Chapter 13: Arguing for Human Rights: Labor Rights as Human Rights...............................................................245Chapter 14: Justice and Trade....................................................................................................261Chapter 15: The Way We Live Now..................................................................................................281Chapter 16: "Imagine There's No Countries": A Reply to John Lennon...............................................................304Chapter 17: Justice and Accountability: The State................................................................................325Chapter 18: Justice and Accountability: The World Trade Organization.............................................................346Notes............................................................................................................................361Bibliography.....................................................................................................................415Index............................................................................................................................453

Chapter One

The Grounds of Justice

1. When Thomas Hobbes devoted De Cive to exploring the rights of the state and the duties of its subjects, he set the stage for the next three and a half centuries of political philosophy. Focusing on the confrontation between individual and state meant focusing on a person's relationship not to particular rulers but to an enduring institution that made exclusive claims to the exercise of certain powers within a domain. Almost two centuries after Hobbes, Hegel took it for granted that political theory was merely an effort to comprehend the state as an inherently rational entity. And 150 years later, the American philosopher Robert Nozick could write that the "fundamental question of political philosophy is whether there should be any state at all" (1974, 4).

Two central philosophical questions arise about the state: whether its existence can be justified to its citizens to begin with, and what is a just distribution of goods within it. As far as the first question is concerned, philosophers from Hobbes onward have focused on rebutting the philosophical anarchist, who rejects the concentrated power of the state as illegitimate. For both sides of the debate, however, the presumption has been that those to whom state power had to be justified were those living within its frontiers. The question of justice, too, has been much on the agenda since Hobbes, but it gained centrality in the last fifty years, in part because of the rejuvenating effect of John Rawls's 1971 A Theory of Justice. Again, the focus was domestic, at least initially.

However, real-world changes, grouped together under the label "globalization," have in recent decades forced philosophers to broaden their focus. In a world in which goods and people cross borders routinely, philosophers have had to consider whether the existence of state power can be justified not just to people living within a given state but also to people excluded from it (e.g., by border controls). At a time when states share the world stage with a network of treaties and global institutions, philosophers have had to consider not just whether the state can be justified to those living under it but whether the whole global order of multiple states and global institutions can be justified to those living under it. And in a world in which the most salient inequalities are not within states but among them, philosophers have had to broaden their focus for justice, too, asking not only what counts as a just distribution within the state but also what counts as a just distribution globally.

My focus in this book is on the last of these new problems, although what I have to say will be relevant to the other two new problems as well. I consider the question of what it is for a distribution to be just globally and offer a new reply: a new systematic theory of global justice, one that develops a view I call pluralist internationalism. Up to now, philosophers have tended to respond to the problem of global justice in one of two ways. One way is to say that the old focus on justice within the state was, in fact, correct. The only distributions that can be just or unjust, strictly speaking, are within the state. The other response is to say, by contrast, that the old focus on justice within the state was completely wrong. The only relevant population for justice is global. Leading theories of justice within the state, such as Rawls's, should simply be applied straightforwardly to all of humanity. This usually yields the result that global distributions are radically unjust.

This book defends a view between those two, one that improves on both. I agree with the second view that we can talk about global justice, that global distributions are just or unjust. But I agree with the first view that nonetheless, the state has a special place in accounts of justice. Domestic justice—justice within the state—and global justice have different standards, and the former are more egalitarian. Theories of domestic justice like Rawls's cannot simply be transferred to the global scene. That means that the global distribution of various goods is not as radically unjust as it would be if domestic justice did apply straightforwardly. Nonetheless, global distributions turn out to be unjust in various important ways.

I defend my view by developing a pluralist approach to what I call the grounds of justice. These, roughly, are the reasons why claims of justice apply to a certain population. Some grounds apply only among those who share a state, while others apply universally or almost so. Some—membership in a state, common humanity—have been explored before, though I hope to show that they should be understood in new ways. But other grounds—common ownership of the earth, membership in the global order, subjection to the global trading system—have not been explored in this context before, and I hope to show they have a substantial contribution to make. From a plurality of grounds of justice we get a plurality of principles of justice—again, some of which apply only within the state and some of which apply globally or almost so. We also get a host of real-world applications, to matters as diverse as illegal immigration, climate change, the global regulation of trade, and the provision of essential drugs. The British philosopher Bernard Williams once said of contemporary moral philosophy that it had "found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all" (Williams 1993, xvii). Political philosophy too is susceptible to such a problem, but I hope the wide range of concrete applications in this book will prevent it from sharing this fate.

Inquiries into global justice differ from those into international justice by not limiting inquiry to what states should do. They question the system of states itself, and assess alternative arrangements. We must broaden our view about what is involved in justifying states, and we must adopt a broader perspective on the scope of justice. In the rest of this book, I investigate these grounds one by one, exploring the principles they generate. At the end, I consider the implications of the resulting list of principles for institutions. I return to the state, and also consider—as an example of what can be said about a global institution—the World Trade Organization (WTO). This allows me to return as well to the two other new problems described above that globalization has raised for political philosophy, the problem of justifying the state to outsiders and the problem of justifying the global order to all. In the remainder of this chapter, though, I will set the stage for the rest of the book by making what I have said so far more precise.

2. Let me start by saying a bit more about globalization. Globalization denotes processes that erode the political and economic importance of national boundaries and increasingly affect life chances through the system of rules that constitutes the global order. Globalization is actually not new. It traces back to developments that began in the fifteenth century through the spread of European control, continuing with the formation of new states through independence or decolonization. In 1795, Kant could write that the "community of the nations of the earth has now gone so far that a violation of right on one place of the earth is felt in all" (Perpetual Peace, 1970b, 330). Political philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Hugo Grotius, Christian Wolff, Samuel Pufendorf, John Locke, Emmerich Vattel, or Immanuel Kant, explored questions about that stage of globalization. They developed the doctrine of sovereignty, explored under what conditions one could acquire non-European territories, and debated what kind of ownership there could be of the seas.

The "major fact about the 19th century is the creation of a single global economy," writes the historian Eric Hobsbawm, "an increasingly dense web of economic transactions, communications and movements of goods, money and people" (1989, 62). The creation of this economy reflected the spread of European control. By the end of the nineteenth century, political philosophers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill were busy justifying why non-Europeans should endure political dependence. A period of devising rules for the spread of empire gave way to a period of justifying its persistence. After World War II, "global governance" came into its own, and talk about a "global (political and economic) order" and an "increasingly interconnected world" has become commonplace and appropriate.

While this global order has no government, it comprises treaty- and convention-based norms regulating territorial sovereignty, security and trade, some property rights, human rights, and the environment. Politically, the UN Charter codifies the most significant rules governing this system. Economically, the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and later the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the WTO—form a network intended to prevent war and foster worldwide betterment. Jointly with more powerful states, these institutions shape the economic order. At this stage of globalization philosophers must worry about the normative issues that such governance raises.

These developments in the world have prompted changes in the concerns of political philosophers, in particular, a new interest in global distributive justice. So let me turn to saying something in general about how I understand distributive justice. In what follows, "justice" means "distributive justice" unless otherwise specified. (It is a controversial matter what other kinds of justice there are.) Distributive justice determines what counts as an acceptable distribution of holdings. Principles of distributive justice are propositions in the first instance about the distribution of some good in some population. They take this form: "The distribution of good G in population P is just only if...." These principles entail further propositions about duties (for agents and institutions) and claims (of individuals). The principle says "only if"—the right-hand side states a necessary condition of the distribution on the left-hand side being just, not a sufficient condition. This leaves space open for there being multiple principles of justice: there could be more than one principle even for the same good and the same population.

A theory of distributive justice explains why certain individuals have particularly stringent claims to certain relative or absolute shares, quantities, or amounts of something. The relevant population for a principle of justice usually consists of individuals living at a given time, but it need not. To use some examples that will be relevant later in the book, it can be a population of states or one of different generations. Two especially important populations in what follows are the population of all humanity, the whole population living on earth (at present, those two groups happen to be identical), and the population within a particular state. I sometimes talk about the "scope of, or associated with, a principle" to mean the relevant population for that principle.

Whatever it is whose distribution is at stake is the distribuendum, metric, or currency of justice. The relevant goods for a principle of justice are potentially heterogeneous and range from quite concrete things (material goods) to quite abstract things (primary goods, legal rights) and even (potentially) subjective states (satisfaction, happiness). It can be controversial whether something is an appropriate candidate to be a good whose distribution is a matter of justice, but facing that controversy is part of the job of someone defending a specific principle of justice. Principles of justice need not specify an exactly equal distribution. Few that have been seriously defended do. But they can be more or less egalitarian. A paradigmatic example of an egalitarian principle is Rawls's "difference principle," which says (roughly) that the distribution of goods within a population is just only if any differences in holdings benefit the worst-off.

Principles of justice have grounds. The grounds are those considerations or conditions based on which individuals are in the scope of principles. We may think of this in two (roughly equivalent) ways. First, these are the features of the population (exclusively held) that make it the case that the principle of justice holds. Second, these are a set of premises that entail the principle of justice. These premises can be partly normative. Grounds can support more than one principle, but these will have the same population. Grounds are features of populations, and a vague ground may correspond to a vague population. Different grounds can support principles that apply to the same population. The same principle could be supported by different grounds. Principles of justice trivially entail stringent claims. Every member of the relevant population has a stringent claim to whatever its share of the relevant good would be if the distribution was just. Principles, distribuenda, grounds, and scopes must form a coherent theory. I will say that they are respectively associated with each other.

Principles of justice also trivially entail "obligations, or duties, of justice" for somebody. ("Obligation" and "duty" I use interchangeably.) For each principle there is some individual or institution or other agent that has an obligation to do what it can, within limits, to bring about that sort of just distribution—that is, to bring it about that the relevant stringent claims are satisfied. Exactly which agents have this obligation for which principles, though, is a matter to be settled in particular theories of justice. It is a controversial matter whether the obligations that follow from principles of distributive justice are the only "obligations of justice" there are (just as it is controversial what other kinds of justice there are). It is commonly agreed, though, that obligations of justice are not the only sorts of moral obligation, and that among moral obligations, obligations of justice are especially stringent.

Alan Ryan (1993) reminds us that in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Shylock makes his demand for a pound of his delinquent debtor's flesh in terms of justice, and until the clever Portia finds a device for voiding the contract, the presumption is that it must be granted. Demands of justice are the hardest to overrule or suspend. Kant goes too far insisting there is no point for human beings to continue to live on earth unless justice prevails. Still, justice plays its central role in human affairs because it enables persons to present claims of such stringency. "We can't leave it to insurance companies to deliver justice," J. M. Coetzee has the protagonist of his novel Disgrace say (2000, 137). This is amusing precisely because of the stringency of justice. We speak about justice in the family, at the workplace, or in competitions. There is justice as a personal virtue, a constitution of character or disposition to help ensure others have, or are, what they should have or be. Domestic distributive justice is also often called social justice.

Those are the central concepts of justice. Here are some other concepts that in due course will play a role in this book. There is a demand of reasonable conduct on person P to perform action A if and only if it would be unreasonable for P not to do A, and if and only if P can reasonably be expected to do A. If P has a duty of justice to do A, then there is a demand of reasonable conduct that P do A, but not vice versa. Demands of reasonable conduct can be less stringent than duties of justice. I will mostly be interested in cases in which there are demands of reasonable conduct without corresponding obligations of justice. In such cases I talk of"mere" demands of reasonable conduct. Moreover, a person has a moral right to X if and only if someone else has a moral obligation to let that person have X. We can distinguish moral rights from positive rights (e.g., legal rights, conventional rights, etc.). It is a matter of empirical research what legal rights someone in a given country has, say. It is a matter of philosophical inquiry what moral rights someone has. Positive rights can enter theories of justice as goods to be distributed; moral rights can enter as part of the grounds of a principle of justice.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691142696
• ISBN 13: 9780691142692
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 480