Introduction: Globalizing or Transcending Global Justice?

Ethic@: an International Journal for Moral Philosophy, 2011

Global Justice is a fascinating and powerful work about what can and ought to be done to achieve a better future for our species. Built on a Rawlsian styled thought experiment and supported by empirical reporting, the book presents a "basic framework of governing the world's inhabitants" (p. 50).Brock invites her readers to imagine a situation in which delegates from the peoples of the world meet to agree on principles of international justice but are impartial because they remain ignorant of their initial social position and interests. That is, they operate behind a "veil of ignorance" that induces impartiality. Global Justice extends the Rawlsian framework to the entire global community in innovative ways and applies it to important policy questions. Brock advocates a trans-boundary, trans-cultural moral concern for others (referred to as "global cosmopolitanism") against a more traditional notion that our moral obligations are primarily to those in our own group, community, or country (referred to as "liberal nationalism"). As in Rawls's Justice as Fairness, there are two sorts of implications reached from the impartial reasoning within the original position: one concerns rights and liberties, the other concerns the distribution of economic welfare. In this review I will touch upon three aspects of her analysis: distributive justice, rights and liberties, and the role of nationalism in moral theorizing about global justice.

Ethics & Global Politics, 2012

This essay criticizes a prominent strand of theorizing about global justice, Rawlsian global constructivism. It argues that the constructivist method employed by cosmopolitan and social liberal theorists cannot grapple with the complexities of interdependence, deep pluralism, and socio-cultural diversity that arise in the global context. These flaws impugn the persuasiveness and plausibility of the substantive conclusions reached by Rawlsian global constructivists and highlight serious epistemological problems in their approach. This critique also sheds light on some broader problems with ideal theory in the global context, showing how it leads to distortions in our thinking about justice and again raising doubts about the epistemological and normative conclusions of global constructivist approaches.

In the context of international political relations, the demands of global justice remain controversial, especially in terms of the relationships between developed and developing societies, where many questions arise regarding what justice entails, how much is owed, and to whom. Traditional political philosophy has identified national boundaries as the legitimate ethical horizons of justice, with all matters of justice outside said borders identified as 'international' affairs, to be handled between states. The political philosopher John Rawls's 1991 thesis The Law of Peoples has greatly influenced political thought regarding the legitimacy of states and the primacy of the interests of societies in matters of international justice. This article will explore a critique of his theory of international justice from the perspective of a disciple of Rawls's and a theorist on cosmopolitan justice, Charles R. Beitz. He argue that taking national boundaries as the starting point for global justice is inadequate to the practical and ethical demands of justice, and suggest that we may need to reevaluate the foundations of international relations by taking persons, and not peoples, as the starting point for theories of global justice.

International Studies, 2003

Critical response to John Rawls's The Law of Peoples has been surprisingly harsh. 1 Most of the complaints center upon Rawls' claim that there are no obligations of distributive justice among nations. Many of Rawls's critics evidently had been hoping for a global application of the difference principle, so that wealthier nations would be bound to assign lexical priority to the development of the poorest nations, or perhaps the primary goods endowment of the poorest citizens of any nation. Their subsequent disappointment reveals that, while the reception of Rawls's political philosophy has been very broad, it has not been especially deep. Rawls has very good reason for denying that there are obligations of distributive justice in an international context. A global application of the difference principle would have been in tension with a number of very central features of his political philosophy. There is a sense in which Rawls's claims about distributive justice, in The Law of Peoples, are under-argued. But this is primarily because they follow almost immediately from more fundamental commitments that he has adopted over the years: the idea of the basic structure as subject, the requirement that conceptions of justice be freestanding, the status that is assigned to the principle of efficiency, not to mention the overall pragmatism that informs his project. By drawing upon these themes in Rawls' work, I will try to show that one cannot deny the view of international relations outlined in The Law of Peoples without rejecting Rawls's approach to political philosophy as a whole (in all contexts, including the domestic one). What Rawls puts forward, in the Law of Peoples, is essentially a dilemma for the partisans of global distributive justice. It should go without saying that if world government were either an 1 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). All further citations to this work are in the text. Thomas Pogge calls Rawls's view an academic "rationalization of double standards of economic justice."

The field of global justice is rife with academic disagreement on a number of fundamental questions - “What does ‘global’ mean in this context?”, “What would justice look like?”, “Who is best placed to achieve it?”, “Is the aim of global justice to set base standards, or as Stanley Hoffman describes, “starting from what is and groping towards the “ought”” (1991)?”. This essay will show that the lack of consensus on global justice is a microcosm of schisms present in international relations (IR) perspectives. This impasse renders a universal conception of global justice untenable and infeasible. More cogently, if one cannot construct a hypothetical, coherent solution to global justice, how will it be implemented?

Debates on global justice are flourishing. In this review article I examine three recent contributions to this debate, which, even though they differ from each other in their overall approach and normative conclusion, exemplify what might be called the third wave of global justice theorizing. Aaron James’s Fairness in Practice, Mathias Risse’s On Global Justice, and Laura Valentini’s Justice in a Globalized World belong to the third wave of theories of global justice in virtue of a combination of features: They disentangle conceptual and normative disagreements that underpinned debates between cosmopolitans and non-cosmopolitans, or statists and globalists; drawing on their refined conceptual toolkit, they develop both substantive and methodological alternatives to familiar positions; and they take these alternatives as a vantage point for thinking about what justice would require of particular aspects of the international order, sometimes in very practical terms. My discussion of the third wave proceeds in four steps. First, I shall present the key arguments and most important ideas of each book. I introduce Valentini’s coercion framework for thinking about questions of global justice, explain how James thinks of structural equity as a requirement of fairness in international trade, and present Risse’s approach of pluralist internationalism and its focus on common ownership of the earth. Second, I shall explain how each contribution exhibits at least some of the features characteristic of the third wave. On the one hand, this section explains why in spite of their differences a common label is appropriate for James, Risse and Valentini. On the other hand, it offers an account of the virtues and strengths of each approach. Third, I present what I believe is a systematic challenge to the third wave of global justice: Each way of covering the middle ground between statism and globalism comes with a particular difficulty, giving rise to what one may call a third wave dilemma. Finally, I conclude by sketching how the third wave is likely to transform the research agenda of international political theorists. Even those developing alternatives to the third wave will have to be measured by the standards it sets.

Thomas Pogge has been challenging liberal thinking on global politics, often through critical engagement with John Rawls' work. Pogge presents both normative and empirical arguments against Rawls: normatively, Rawls' domestic Theory of Justice (TJ) and global Law of Peoples (LP) are incompatible ideal theories; empirically, LP is too removed from the actual world to guide the foreign policy of liberal societies. My main purpose here is to contest the first, ideal theory criticism in order to direct more attention to the second, non-ideal objection. I argue against Pogge that TJ and LP can be read as coherent, once one employs a Rousseauian rather than Pogge's economic Kantian reading of TJ. The first two sections present Pogge's view of TJ and contrast it with a Rousseauian alternative that is less cosmopolitan and economic and much more focused on the democratic and sovereign context of justice as fairness. The third section seeks to refute Pogge's incoherence arguments, which encompass the identity of the parties to the international original position, their motivations and their decisions. Instead of a conclusion, the last section emphasizes LP's non-ideal problems, and suggests that insofar as LP is the most robust liberal ideal theory of global politics, its empirical failure indicates the need to shift global justice theorizing even more to the non-ideal realm.

Global Justice - An Alternat

In this paper, the theories of global justice designed by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas are analyzed and then included to design a new approach based on the idea of justice through the absence of injustice.

Global Rectificatory Justice

During the last few decades we have witnessed a significant increase in the literature on global justice. Scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations, and other disciplines are turning their attention to global relations and in particular the implications of globalization on ethics and international politics. Globalization implies global interdependence. Decisions taken in one place reverberate in another place far away and thus the scope of our responsibility is widening. People from different parts of the world come closer and we learn about the lifestyles and living conditions of peoples far away. Widespread poverty and the gaps between the global "haves" and the global "have-nots" challenge our sense of justice. These global injustices have been enduring since colonial times. Yet, strangely enough, ethicists involved in the discussion on global justice have almost entirely focused on one aspect of justice, namely distributive justice, and neglected the history behind the global injustices we encounter today. As I argue in this chapter, there is a missing premise in much of the argumentation. Obviously, questions of distributive justice are crucial for the normative discussion of global justice but, as I argue throughout this book, the discussion on global justice should also be informed by a historical perspective. In this chapter I show that the legacy of colonialism provides an important background to the main issues in the present discussion on global justice. In the first part of the chapter I raise the question of whether some key issues in the global justice discussion-global poverty, global inequality, and global migration-are related to the legacy of colonialism. Then, in the next section, I introduce Thomas Pogge's theoretical notion of an "international resource privilege" and argue that this privilege has its origin in colonialism.