Current Theoretical Debates, p. 2
This page continues where the page 1 of Current Theoretical Disagreements leaves off. Below are still more detailed entries that expand on several of the key points central to current debates regarding the relationship between domestic justice and global justice. Included are discussions regarding issues of moral responsibility in a global age, moral responsibility for structural injustice, and variety of points of contention that divide cosmopolitans, statists, and hybrid theorists, and more.
Strong Statism, Libertarianism, and Defenses of the Moral Adequacy of Market Norms, Globally Applied
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Should some egalitarian moral commitments apply globally, even if the requirements of justice in the global arena are somewhat weaker than what an egalitarian would accept in the domestic arena?
The orthodox answer among most political philosophers is no. Strong statists, as they are often known, claim that there are no globally applicable duties of egalitarian justice, not even some limits on inequalities less demanding than required in the domestic case.
Let’s make clear the strong statist’s position. The strong statists conclude that the only morally relevant norms underpinning the global economic order are market norms. The implications are stark inasmuch as the strong statist defends purely libertarian, free market views as morally adequate outside of the domestic context. Whatever the cumulative effects of cross-border market transactions turn out to be, as long as the transactions are not a product of fraud or coercion among the parties, the patterns of inequality that emerge are not unjust. There is no globally applicable floor of human well-being that the global affluent are required to pursue as a matter of justice, no moral limit on inequalities in opportunities or life prospects. There is no moral constraint on permissible inequalities in the ability to affect the policy decisions of the major institutions that regulate the economic global order. There are no duties of nations, or of multinational corporations based in developed nations, to refrain from taking advantage of vast differences in bargaining power in global economic transactions.
John Rawls is one well-known defender of strong statism. While affluent nation-states may have duties of humanitarian assistance to what he calls burdened societies, he seems insistent that these are not duties of justice (or if they are duties of justice, they are wholly unlike duties of distributive justice applicable domestically). Apart from duties of humanitarian assistance, nothing other than certain forms of non-interference are due to non-nationals as a matter of cross-border justice. He and other statists offer a number of complex arguments for limiting all duties of egalitarian justice to the domestic arena. (They are complex and explored in further detail in various entries near the end of this page).
But let's be clear about how the duty of humanitarian assistance figures into the equation. One might suppose that strong statists differ profoundly from the staunchest libertarian insofar as they do tend to support some duties of assistance, but in fact, even Nozick thinks that there are strong individual moral duties of beneficence to aid the badly off. But these are not duties of justice. They trigger no claims of rights among the global poor. They generate no duties among the global affluent to see to it that institutional arrangements and widespread market practices don't engender vast inequalities of the sort that often press people below some decent standard of living. They certainly do not advocate greater equality in the control of global institutions or worry that lack of equality in governance involves a kind of domination or subordination that they are likely to find unjust domestically.
So for now, let’s examine the market norms that strong statists think morally adequate for regulation of the global economic order and the arguments they rely upon.
At this point I should pause to note that the moral framework of global political and economic interaction endorsed by both strong statists and various strands of libertarian theory is neither exotic nor idiosyncratic. Global free market libertarianism, as i call it, is the mainstream American view among philosophers and much of "official Washington." It has been the view of the last five American administrations, and it is often labeled the “Washington consensus.” It remains the dominant ideology shared by developmental economists and technocrats who shape and control the policies of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and other institutions that constitute the overarching framework for the global economic order.
The key assumption is that on balance, a global system of trade is a mutually beneficial form of social interaction. Because everyone is presumed to benefit no one can complain. The idea is an old one, traceable to Adam Smith and made famous in the 19th century by John Stuart Mill and David Ricardo. The heart of the claim is that protectionist trade policies such as high tariffs on imports, state subsidies for domestic industry, and restrictions on the in-flow of foreign capital harms both protectionist nations and their trading partners.
One of the main rationales for that conclusion is known as the argument from comparative advantage. Dani Rodrik's book offers an explicitly moral set of arguments for reconsidering the case for robust, immediate integration of developing economies into the larger global economy under terms that conform to the dictates of free trade fundamentalism. The problem with the comparative advantage argument for free trade on moral grounds is two-fold. It can be predicated upon practices and social arrangements, which were they instituted in developed nations, would be ruled out as violations of other moral norms or values arguably more weighty, and movements toward a greater degree of free trade can occasion radical redistributive effects that would be subject to grave doubt were they the result of various other social policies.
More of the arguments are discussed in greater detail elsewhere on this website. If the various criticisms of the comparative advantage argument are persuasive, it would especially difficult, I think, for egalitarians of any stripe to endorse a global free trade regime to the extent that it contributes to already very badly off people being pushed further below some minimal standard of a decent human life and whole nations being systematically disadvantaged under arrangements that pile on more benefits and advantages for the global affluent. This is not precisely how Rodrik expresses his argument, of course, but what he offers the reader is in fact a fine example of the kinds of points crucial to a good philosophical argument about the requirements of justice. His book begins with the premise that two moral arguments underlie much of his case for reconsidering the depth and pace of integration into the global economy on the terms of free trade fundamentalism. It is a rare book from within the economics profession, and one that is self-consciously written to explain how economists as a group - like human beings in general - can go so terribly and confidently wrong in their recommendations.
The comparative advantage argument has obvious way of making the connection to another familiar argument for letting the outcomes of markets determine the distribution of income, wealth, and other important sources of human well-being. A familiar variant of utilitarian argument goes something like this. If the overarching moral demand is to maximize aggregate utility, then the likely set of social policies that utilitarianism would endorse are ones that redistribute the various sources of utility from the better-off to the least well-off persons in the world. After all, more money and other goods are unlikely to produce as much or more utility as a policy that gives more to billionaires than to the global poor. But for utilitarianism to support markets as the optimal means to utility maximization, a further empirical assumption is required. One has to believe that market failures are rare and largely inconsequential, and that over the long-run, resources will not concentrate in the hands of those whose wealth increases both market advantage and political advantage so great that it allows them to shape for their own benefit the background rules by which market transactions are regulated.
Other theories support markets as well, but for reasons entirely distinct from any assumption about the long-run greater benefit to the least well-off. Robert Nozick and some other libertarians who follow his line of argument defend markets on the grounds that they are the best way to honor the value of individual liberty of choice. People engage in market transactions - capitalist acts between consenting adults, as Nozick calls them - in the belief that they are made better off than they would be otherwise.They are presumed to be made better-off by their own lights, or else as rational actors they would not have entered into the transactions. To suppose otherwise is to substitute the judgments of third parties for the judgments of the contracting parties themselves. In effect, interference with market transactions, say, in order to protect presumptively vulnerable parties, is to act paternalistically. A robust valuing of individual liberty on this account must avoid the sort of continuous interference with markets for the sake of some preferred pattern of distribution or for the sake of protecting the vulnerable, even if the distributive consequences over time are such that some are very badly off.
Economists are less inclined to the doctrinaire defense of liberty at all costs in the way Nozick's particular brand of libertarianism does. They tend to defend markets on the grounds that all will be benefited more over the long-run. One reason for that faith is the belief that markets left to function on their own do so with few market failures. Another reason is that they often trace their theory to its utilitarian foundations within Neoclassical economic theory. They suppose that markets maximize overall social utility, where the concept of utility they rely upon is understood as preference satisfaction.
But note how this view combines both the commitment to the superior moral importance that Nozick assigns to liberty with the faith in the role of markets as a means of utility maximization. Deference to preference is due on this account both because it best accords with respect for individual liberty and because it maximizes utility. Magic.
The orthodox answer among most political philosophers is no. Strong statists, as they are often known, claim that there are no globally applicable duties of egalitarian justice, not even some limits on inequalities less demanding than required in the domestic case.
Let’s make clear the strong statist’s position. The strong statists conclude that the only morally relevant norms underpinning the global economic order are market norms. The implications are stark inasmuch as the strong statist defends purely libertarian, free market views as morally adequate outside of the domestic context. Whatever the cumulative effects of cross-border market transactions turn out to be, as long as the transactions are not a product of fraud or coercion among the parties, the patterns of inequality that emerge are not unjust. There is no globally applicable floor of human well-being that the global affluent are required to pursue as a matter of justice, no moral limit on inequalities in opportunities or life prospects. There is no moral constraint on permissible inequalities in the ability to affect the policy decisions of the major institutions that regulate the economic global order. There are no duties of nations, or of multinational corporations based in developed nations, to refrain from taking advantage of vast differences in bargaining power in global economic transactions.
John Rawls is one well-known defender of strong statism. While affluent nation-states may have duties of humanitarian assistance to what he calls burdened societies, he seems insistent that these are not duties of justice (or if they are duties of justice, they are wholly unlike duties of distributive justice applicable domestically). Apart from duties of humanitarian assistance, nothing other than certain forms of non-interference are due to non-nationals as a matter of cross-border justice. He and other statists offer a number of complex arguments for limiting all duties of egalitarian justice to the domestic arena. (They are complex and explored in further detail in various entries near the end of this page).
But let's be clear about how the duty of humanitarian assistance figures into the equation. One might suppose that strong statists differ profoundly from the staunchest libertarian insofar as they do tend to support some duties of assistance, but in fact, even Nozick thinks that there are strong individual moral duties of beneficence to aid the badly off. But these are not duties of justice. They trigger no claims of rights among the global poor. They generate no duties among the global affluent to see to it that institutional arrangements and widespread market practices don't engender vast inequalities of the sort that often press people below some decent standard of living. They certainly do not advocate greater equality in the control of global institutions or worry that lack of equality in governance involves a kind of domination or subordination that they are likely to find unjust domestically.
So for now, let’s examine the market norms that strong statists think morally adequate for regulation of the global economic order and the arguments they rely upon.
At this point I should pause to note that the moral framework of global political and economic interaction endorsed by both strong statists and various strands of libertarian theory is neither exotic nor idiosyncratic. Global free market libertarianism, as i call it, is the mainstream American view among philosophers and much of "official Washington." It has been the view of the last five American administrations, and it is often labeled the “Washington consensus.” It remains the dominant ideology shared by developmental economists and technocrats who shape and control the policies of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and other institutions that constitute the overarching framework for the global economic order.
The key assumption is that on balance, a global system of trade is a mutually beneficial form of social interaction. Because everyone is presumed to benefit no one can complain. The idea is an old one, traceable to Adam Smith and made famous in the 19th century by John Stuart Mill and David Ricardo. The heart of the claim is that protectionist trade policies such as high tariffs on imports, state subsidies for domestic industry, and restrictions on the in-flow of foreign capital harms both protectionist nations and their trading partners.
One of the main rationales for that conclusion is known as the argument from comparative advantage. Dani Rodrik's book offers an explicitly moral set of arguments for reconsidering the case for robust, immediate integration of developing economies into the larger global economy under terms that conform to the dictates of free trade fundamentalism. The problem with the comparative advantage argument for free trade on moral grounds is two-fold. It can be predicated upon practices and social arrangements, which were they instituted in developed nations, would be ruled out as violations of other moral norms or values arguably more weighty, and movements toward a greater degree of free trade can occasion radical redistributive effects that would be subject to grave doubt were they the result of various other social policies.
More of the arguments are discussed in greater detail elsewhere on this website. If the various criticisms of the comparative advantage argument are persuasive, it would especially difficult, I think, for egalitarians of any stripe to endorse a global free trade regime to the extent that it contributes to already very badly off people being pushed further below some minimal standard of a decent human life and whole nations being systematically disadvantaged under arrangements that pile on more benefits and advantages for the global affluent. This is not precisely how Rodrik expresses his argument, of course, but what he offers the reader is in fact a fine example of the kinds of points crucial to a good philosophical argument about the requirements of justice. His book begins with the premise that two moral arguments underlie much of his case for reconsidering the depth and pace of integration into the global economy on the terms of free trade fundamentalism. It is a rare book from within the economics profession, and one that is self-consciously written to explain how economists as a group - like human beings in general - can go so terribly and confidently wrong in their recommendations.
The comparative advantage argument has obvious way of making the connection to another familiar argument for letting the outcomes of markets determine the distribution of income, wealth, and other important sources of human well-being. A familiar variant of utilitarian argument goes something like this. If the overarching moral demand is to maximize aggregate utility, then the likely set of social policies that utilitarianism would endorse are ones that redistribute the various sources of utility from the better-off to the least well-off persons in the world. After all, more money and other goods are unlikely to produce as much or more utility as a policy that gives more to billionaires than to the global poor. But for utilitarianism to support markets as the optimal means to utility maximization, a further empirical assumption is required. One has to believe that market failures are rare and largely inconsequential, and that over the long-run, resources will not concentrate in the hands of those whose wealth increases both market advantage and political advantage so great that it allows them to shape for their own benefit the background rules by which market transactions are regulated.
Other theories support markets as well, but for reasons entirely distinct from any assumption about the long-run greater benefit to the least well-off. Robert Nozick and some other libertarians who follow his line of argument defend markets on the grounds that they are the best way to honor the value of individual liberty of choice. People engage in market transactions - capitalist acts between consenting adults, as Nozick calls them - in the belief that they are made better off than they would be otherwise.They are presumed to be made better-off by their own lights, or else as rational actors they would not have entered into the transactions. To suppose otherwise is to substitute the judgments of third parties for the judgments of the contracting parties themselves. In effect, interference with market transactions, say, in order to protect presumptively vulnerable parties, is to act paternalistically. A robust valuing of individual liberty on this account must avoid the sort of continuous interference with markets for the sake of some preferred pattern of distribution or for the sake of protecting the vulnerable, even if the distributive consequences over time are such that some are very badly off.
Economists are less inclined to the doctrinaire defense of liberty at all costs in the way Nozick's particular brand of libertarianism does. They tend to defend markets on the grounds that all will be benefited more over the long-run. One reason for that faith is the belief that markets left to function on their own do so with few market failures. Another reason is that they often trace their theory to its utilitarian foundations within Neoclassical economic theory. They suppose that markets maximize overall social utility, where the concept of utility they rely upon is understood as preference satisfaction.
But note how this view combines both the commitment to the superior moral importance that Nozick assigns to liberty with the faith in the role of markets as a means of utility maximization. Deference to preference is due on this account both because it best accords with respect for individual liberty and because it maximizes utility. Magic.
Cosmopolitan Justice: Disagreements about the underlying justification for norms of social justice
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Not all theories that reject free market libertarianism as the proper normative basis of the global economic order go the whole distance and claim that whatever duties of distributive justice apply domestically apply as well globally. But one of the most significant fault lines among participants in debates about global justice is between cosmopolitans and their critics. However, there are many competing definitions of what makes a theory of justice a cosmopolitan theory.
A Generic Definition
A cosmopolitan theory of justice identifies a set of norms of justice and then argues that they are universally applicable without regard to factors such as common citizenship. In a trivial sense, some cosmopolitan norms of justice are endorsed by much of the world. For example, there are some widely recognized norms of non-aggression that constrain all individual and collective agents - individual persons, corporations, other non-governmental organizations, and nation-states, and additionally, those norms protect all individual and collective agents from the prohibited form of aggression.
The rough idea of what counts as a cosmopolitan theory of justice sketched in the preceding paragraph is meant to be ecumenical in two crucial ways.
First, the definition is maximally inclusive of the types of agents or entities to which a theory of justice applies. Other definitions are more narrowly defined. Thomas Pogge, for example, focuses entirely on universal norms of justice that are applicable only to individuals (Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2002, 169). His definition consists of three criteria: (1) "the ultimate units of concern are human beings, or persons - rather than say family lines, tribes, ethnic cultural or religious communities, nations or states;" (2) equal concern must be shown to all individuals equally; and (3) this concern must be shown by all to everyone. Notice that (2) and (3) of Pogge's account tracks standard accounts of human rights that embrace the requirement of "double universality": whatever duties are correlated with human rights are owed by every person to every person. It is a globally applicable theory of interpersonal justice. Nothing is said, for example, about what nation-states owe to non-citizens or what nation-states owe to each other. As the next entry on this page shows, a narrow definition of this sort fails to make room for the fact that there are many accounts of global justice that are not intended to be interpersonal theories, or theories that articulate what all persons owe to all other persons in their individual capacities.
Second, the definition is inclusive enough to count a universally applicable set of norms containing only negative rights and duties (i.e, duties of forbearance) as a cosmopolitan justice theory. Of course, what is at issue for the most part is whether there are universal norms of justice that require positive acts of assistance or distribution. Thus, what is at stake in the debate between cosmopolitans and their critics is the global applicability of certain norms of social justice beyond standard negative rights and duties. The notion of "certain norms of social justice" is left intentionally vague for the reason that cosmopolitans and their critics do not uniformly agree on what counts as the sort of norm of justice that is in dispute. A familiar, highly stylized example of a "divided world" is illustrative.
Divided World Examples
Imagine that there are two societies that exist independently with no interaction of any sort. There are no common political institutions, no trade or commerce, not even communication or efforts to co-ordinate ways of maintaining their separation. One society is very rich and prosperous while the other is poor and its inhabitants eke out a miserable existence. The affluent society did not cause the misery of the poor society; it did not exclude the poor from the most hospitable geographic territories; and it does not intend to institute any sort of ongoing relationship of the sort such that the inequalities that divide them are likely to lead to its dominance over the other. Are there any duties of justice that require improving the lot of the worst-off or perhaps reducing the degree of inequality between them, either at the level of society-to-society or between affluent individuals and poor individuals? Philosophers answer questions of this sort in quite different ways.
A humanitarian assistance conception: This view holds that there are moral duties to alleviate the worst forms of human suffering simply in virtue of our common humanity. Only some sort of prior or potential forms of interaction could trigger such duties. Thus, their claim is that this merely humanitarian concern does not give rise to a duty of justice, but only a duty of compassion, humanitarian assistance, or beneficence. It is not a matter of justice inasmuch as members of the poor isolated community have no moral claims or entitlements against the members of the more fortunate society; they did not wrong them and there is no risk of domination going forward. Moreover, many think that any duty to alleviate misery lies outside the domain of justice because justice is said to be essentially comparative, or concerned with how some fare in relation to others. Thus, even if there are universal moral duties of aid or assistance, these are not duties of justice, and there are no cross-societal duties of justice requiring anyone to address inequality of condition or opportunity between the two societies and no worries that such inequalities might produce domination.
A sufficientarian view of global justice: A second account argues that there are some universal norms of justice even when there are no forms of ongoing (or even future) association, and that these norms require the better-off to assist the worse-off at least to the extent that they can lead minimally decent human lives. This view agrees that there are no duties to address inequalities, only a concern for a threshold or sufficient level of human well-being. However, an interesting feature of this account is that roughly the same duties of assistance that the humanitarian argues for are counted as duties of justice, also often on the ground that the bare fact of common humanity triggers some claims against the more fortunate that are not merely matters of charity, compassion.
There is not necessarily a deep disagreement between sufficientarians and humanitarian assistance theories over what is morally required in the Divided World examples, and in most cases, both views agree that the justification for any such duties resides in our common humanity. On what basis should we decide about the appropriate label? David Miller, for example, argues that those who reject these "non-comparative" moral requirements as outside the scope of justice are arbitrarily stipulating that justice is concerned only with how some fare in relation to others such that duties to reduce inequalities, rather than duties to ensure a minimally decent life properly thought of as justice. I come back to some further complicating factors that might suggest that the seemingly semantic difference is actually a substantive disagreement in some cases.
Hybrid theories of global justice: Views such as the one David Miller defends (Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice) often distinguish sharply between domestic and global duties of social justice. What makes his view a hybrid is the assumption that only some form of relationship or interaction of the sort he attributes to the relations among co-nationals triggers more demanding duties of social justice. It is only under such conditions that inequality itself sometimes matters, above and beyond the global concern for addressing low absolute levels of well-being. Such theories are hybrid at the most fundamental level of justification. The assumption is that some domestic norms of social justice might be triggered by certain forms of relationship while other universal norms of justice are grounded in common humanity.
Cosmopolitans: Relationalists versus Non-relationalists. The Divided World example provides a ready test case for cosmopolitans who seek to ground robust duties of social justice in our common humanity, independently of any actual or prospective relationship. By robust duties of social justice I simply mean norms of justice that extend the alleviation of the worst forms of human misery and include some concern for certain types of global inequality. Simon Caney, for example, argues that there is simply no plausible ground upon which the residents of the better-off society can assert that they are entitled to their superior life prospects (Caney, Justice Beyond Borders 2005, 111). The situation is simply unfair because it is morally arbitrary. Whatever facts about human beings that trigger any norms of social justice in the domestic context - for example, a capacity for leading an autonomous life - also trigger norms of social justice globally.
Other cosmopolitan theories of global justice rely, at least in part, upon relational arguments as the basis for justification of some globally applicable norms of social justice. Charles Beitz, for example, (Political Theory and International Relations, 2nd revised ed 2001) pursues two distinct lines of argument. He argues for the moral arbitrariness of vastly unequal life prospects based upon the accident of birth. But he also argues that the densely woven web of international relations increasingly resembles the relations among citizens that Rawls identifies as the rationale for broadly egalitarian duties of distributive justice in the domestic case. For Rawls, his distributive principles are grounded in what he calls the basic structure of society, a set of institutions and social practices that exert profound and pervasive impact on the life prospects of those affected by those social arrangements. While Beitz places more weight on the moral arbitrariness argument than he did in the original 1979 edition of his book, others since have attempted to extend the application of various inequality-reducing distributive principles beyond the confines of the nation-state by arguing for the existence of some types of relationships on the global scale that trigger similarly robust duties of social justice beyond national borders.
In short, at the center of the debate among cosmopolitans and their critics is a disagreement over whether there are certain norms of social justice that have universal application. But cosmopolitans differ among themselves on whether the best justification for cosmopolitan norms lies in an appeal to common humanity or some account of global relationships that trigger robust universal norms of social justice. For the common humanity theorists, the Divided World cases provide a litmus test; duties of justice are triggered no matter what. For relationalists, the theoretical ambitions of a cosmopolitan conception of justice depend entirely upon the claim that global relationships trigger robust norms of social justice no less than in the domestic case.
A Generic Definition
A cosmopolitan theory of justice identifies a set of norms of justice and then argues that they are universally applicable without regard to factors such as common citizenship. In a trivial sense, some cosmopolitan norms of justice are endorsed by much of the world. For example, there are some widely recognized norms of non-aggression that constrain all individual and collective agents - individual persons, corporations, other non-governmental organizations, and nation-states, and additionally, those norms protect all individual and collective agents from the prohibited form of aggression.
The rough idea of what counts as a cosmopolitan theory of justice sketched in the preceding paragraph is meant to be ecumenical in two crucial ways.
First, the definition is maximally inclusive of the types of agents or entities to which a theory of justice applies. Other definitions are more narrowly defined. Thomas Pogge, for example, focuses entirely on universal norms of justice that are applicable only to individuals (Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2002, 169). His definition consists of three criteria: (1) "the ultimate units of concern are human beings, or persons - rather than say family lines, tribes, ethnic cultural or religious communities, nations or states;" (2) equal concern must be shown to all individuals equally; and (3) this concern must be shown by all to everyone. Notice that (2) and (3) of Pogge's account tracks standard accounts of human rights that embrace the requirement of "double universality": whatever duties are correlated with human rights are owed by every person to every person. It is a globally applicable theory of interpersonal justice. Nothing is said, for example, about what nation-states owe to non-citizens or what nation-states owe to each other. As the next entry on this page shows, a narrow definition of this sort fails to make room for the fact that there are many accounts of global justice that are not intended to be interpersonal theories, or theories that articulate what all persons owe to all other persons in their individual capacities.
Second, the definition is inclusive enough to count a universally applicable set of norms containing only negative rights and duties (i.e, duties of forbearance) as a cosmopolitan justice theory. Of course, what is at issue for the most part is whether there are universal norms of justice that require positive acts of assistance or distribution. Thus, what is at stake in the debate between cosmopolitans and their critics is the global applicability of certain norms of social justice beyond standard negative rights and duties. The notion of "certain norms of social justice" is left intentionally vague for the reason that cosmopolitans and their critics do not uniformly agree on what counts as the sort of norm of justice that is in dispute. A familiar, highly stylized example of a "divided world" is illustrative.
Divided World Examples
Imagine that there are two societies that exist independently with no interaction of any sort. There are no common political institutions, no trade or commerce, not even communication or efforts to co-ordinate ways of maintaining their separation. One society is very rich and prosperous while the other is poor and its inhabitants eke out a miserable existence. The affluent society did not cause the misery of the poor society; it did not exclude the poor from the most hospitable geographic territories; and it does not intend to institute any sort of ongoing relationship of the sort such that the inequalities that divide them are likely to lead to its dominance over the other. Are there any duties of justice that require improving the lot of the worst-off or perhaps reducing the degree of inequality between them, either at the level of society-to-society or between affluent individuals and poor individuals? Philosophers answer questions of this sort in quite different ways.
A humanitarian assistance conception: This view holds that there are moral duties to alleviate the worst forms of human suffering simply in virtue of our common humanity. Only some sort of prior or potential forms of interaction could trigger such duties. Thus, their claim is that this merely humanitarian concern does not give rise to a duty of justice, but only a duty of compassion, humanitarian assistance, or beneficence. It is not a matter of justice inasmuch as members of the poor isolated community have no moral claims or entitlements against the members of the more fortunate society; they did not wrong them and there is no risk of domination going forward. Moreover, many think that any duty to alleviate misery lies outside the domain of justice because justice is said to be essentially comparative, or concerned with how some fare in relation to others. Thus, even if there are universal moral duties of aid or assistance, these are not duties of justice, and there are no cross-societal duties of justice requiring anyone to address inequality of condition or opportunity between the two societies and no worries that such inequalities might produce domination.
A sufficientarian view of global justice: A second account argues that there are some universal norms of justice even when there are no forms of ongoing (or even future) association, and that these norms require the better-off to assist the worse-off at least to the extent that they can lead minimally decent human lives. This view agrees that there are no duties to address inequalities, only a concern for a threshold or sufficient level of human well-being. However, an interesting feature of this account is that roughly the same duties of assistance that the humanitarian argues for are counted as duties of justice, also often on the ground that the bare fact of common humanity triggers some claims against the more fortunate that are not merely matters of charity, compassion.
There is not necessarily a deep disagreement between sufficientarians and humanitarian assistance theories over what is morally required in the Divided World examples, and in most cases, both views agree that the justification for any such duties resides in our common humanity. On what basis should we decide about the appropriate label? David Miller, for example, argues that those who reject these "non-comparative" moral requirements as outside the scope of justice are arbitrarily stipulating that justice is concerned only with how some fare in relation to others such that duties to reduce inequalities, rather than duties to ensure a minimally decent life properly thought of as justice. I come back to some further complicating factors that might suggest that the seemingly semantic difference is actually a substantive disagreement in some cases.
Hybrid theories of global justice: Views such as the one David Miller defends (Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice) often distinguish sharply between domestic and global duties of social justice. What makes his view a hybrid is the assumption that only some form of relationship or interaction of the sort he attributes to the relations among co-nationals triggers more demanding duties of social justice. It is only under such conditions that inequality itself sometimes matters, above and beyond the global concern for addressing low absolute levels of well-being. Such theories are hybrid at the most fundamental level of justification. The assumption is that some domestic norms of social justice might be triggered by certain forms of relationship while other universal norms of justice are grounded in common humanity.
Cosmopolitans: Relationalists versus Non-relationalists. The Divided World example provides a ready test case for cosmopolitans who seek to ground robust duties of social justice in our common humanity, independently of any actual or prospective relationship. By robust duties of social justice I simply mean norms of justice that extend the alleviation of the worst forms of human misery and include some concern for certain types of global inequality. Simon Caney, for example, argues that there is simply no plausible ground upon which the residents of the better-off society can assert that they are entitled to their superior life prospects (Caney, Justice Beyond Borders 2005, 111). The situation is simply unfair because it is morally arbitrary. Whatever facts about human beings that trigger any norms of social justice in the domestic context - for example, a capacity for leading an autonomous life - also trigger norms of social justice globally.
Other cosmopolitan theories of global justice rely, at least in part, upon relational arguments as the basis for justification of some globally applicable norms of social justice. Charles Beitz, for example, (Political Theory and International Relations, 2nd revised ed 2001) pursues two distinct lines of argument. He argues for the moral arbitrariness of vastly unequal life prospects based upon the accident of birth. But he also argues that the densely woven web of international relations increasingly resembles the relations among citizens that Rawls identifies as the rationale for broadly egalitarian duties of distributive justice in the domestic case. For Rawls, his distributive principles are grounded in what he calls the basic structure of society, a set of institutions and social practices that exert profound and pervasive impact on the life prospects of those affected by those social arrangements. While Beitz places more weight on the moral arbitrariness argument than he did in the original 1979 edition of his book, others since have attempted to extend the application of various inequality-reducing distributive principles beyond the confines of the nation-state by arguing for the existence of some types of relationships on the global scale that trigger similarly robust duties of social justice beyond national borders.
In short, at the center of the debate among cosmopolitans and their critics is a disagreement over whether there are certain norms of social justice that have universal application. But cosmopolitans differ among themselves on whether the best justification for cosmopolitan norms lies in an appeal to common humanity or some account of global relationships that trigger robust universal norms of social justice. For the common humanity theorists, the Divided World cases provide a litmus test; duties of justice are triggered no matter what. For relationalists, the theoretical ambitions of a cosmopolitan conception of justice depend entirely upon the claim that global relationships trigger robust norms of social justice no less than in the domestic case.
What is a Theory of Global Justice a Theory of?
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Rawls is among the many philosophers who claim that whatever principles of social justice that are applicable to the evaluation of the basic structure of a society are limited in their application to a single society taken in isolation. He argues that many of the sources of confusion surrounding his theory of social justice stem from a failure to appreciate the “division of moral labor” among distinct “levels of justice,” which he subdivides into local, domestic, and global justice (Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, 2001, 11). Local justice involves principles that apply to the voluntary transactions among individuals and the interactions among members of associations such as the family, religious institutions, unions, and universities. Rawls's principles of social justice – such as the Difference Principle or the Principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity – do not apply directly to these activities, for example, by requiring distribution of resources to family members so as to maximize the distributive share of the least advantaged, or by dictating how religious organizations should choose their church hierarchy (2001, 163-65).
Principles of social justice nonetheless regulate indirectly private transactions and forms of association that are otherwise to be governed by local principles directly. His principles of social justice are described as principles that regulate the “background social framework” (2001, 10, 51) within which private associational and market transactions occur. Principles of global justice, by contrast, on Rawls's mapping of the moral terrain, are principles governing the relations among nation-states.
Among the critics of the Rawlsian idea of a sharp division of moral labor among levels are those who seek to extend certain norms of social justice globally, and many as well follow Rawls in equating "global justice" with the moral norms governing relations among nation-states. But what exactly might various ways of extending a theory of justice beyond the domestic domain look like? There are several options worth considering.
One possibility would be to think of global justice as a matter of interpersonal justice. We might then consider what individuals everywhere owe all individuals as a matter of entitlement, regardless of nationality or citizenship. Such a view would be one that treats all duties of justice as doubly universal rights - claimable by all against all. But if these global claims of individuals against individuals include rights to some basic goods, a standard of well-being, or even more ambitiously, a right to equality of opportunity, then the result is a very demanding cosmopolitan theory of justice operating at the level of interpersonal morality.
Compare this view with familiar cosmopolitan moral claims made by philosophers such as Peter Singer (see entries below). Singer does not place great weight on moral labels (justice, beneficence, duties of humanity, and so on). But for those who press claims of global justice by way of doubly universal human rights claims, it is not merely that affluent individuals ought to assist the global poor, but in addition, the global poor have a claim based in justice for such assistance - and perhaps a whole lot more!
A second alternative would be to think of global justice as a matter of interstate justice. Literally, that would mean asking questions about what states are justified in asking of other states as a matter of justice, and in Rawls's terminology global justice is international justice as I have defined it. The Law of Peoples is Rawls's attempt to answer questions about interstate justice, and his answer is that while affluent states ('peoples' in his terminology, and I set aside here what difference the distinction might make) have duties to aid "burdened societies" attain the ability to meet the human rights demands they have toward their own citizens, affluent states have no duties of justice to reduce inequalities between states or even direct duties to secure a minimum level of well-being for citizens outside of their own nation. There are of course other, more ambitious ways of spelling out the requirements of interstate justice, but the point is that global justice might be conceived of as state-to-state moral requirements as contrasted with individual-to-individual moral requirements.
In addition, we might propose a third alternative, namely a more comprehensive account of global justice that attempts to spell out a fuller range of requirements of affluent states to poor states, affluent persons to poor persons (after all, there are poor people in rich nations and rich people in poor nations, as well as duties of rich nations to poor individuals. We might even attempt to delineate the responsibilities of non-state actors to the global poor, and these might include multinational corporations, NGOs, and global institutions that regulate or oversee key aspects of the global economy (e.g., World Bank, IMF, WTO, and so on).
A fourth alternative might fall somewhere between an interstate theory and a comprehensive theory. We might focus instead on what we might call a primary actor account. We know, for example, that key global economic institutions, nation-states, and some large multinational corporations exert a profound and pervasive impact on the life prospects of billions of people around the world, and in particular, on some of the poorest, most vulnerable persons in the world.
Many of the available theories, however, are not clear about where within the sort of the rough taxonomy I have suggested they fall, but it is an important for philosophers to pursue a variety of different theoretical paths and do so with some clarity about their theoretical ambitions.
Principles of social justice nonetheless regulate indirectly private transactions and forms of association that are otherwise to be governed by local principles directly. His principles of social justice are described as principles that regulate the “background social framework” (2001, 10, 51) within which private associational and market transactions occur. Principles of global justice, by contrast, on Rawls's mapping of the moral terrain, are principles governing the relations among nation-states.
Among the critics of the Rawlsian idea of a sharp division of moral labor among levels are those who seek to extend certain norms of social justice globally, and many as well follow Rawls in equating "global justice" with the moral norms governing relations among nation-states. But what exactly might various ways of extending a theory of justice beyond the domestic domain look like? There are several options worth considering.
One possibility would be to think of global justice as a matter of interpersonal justice. We might then consider what individuals everywhere owe all individuals as a matter of entitlement, regardless of nationality or citizenship. Such a view would be one that treats all duties of justice as doubly universal rights - claimable by all against all. But if these global claims of individuals against individuals include rights to some basic goods, a standard of well-being, or even more ambitiously, a right to equality of opportunity, then the result is a very demanding cosmopolitan theory of justice operating at the level of interpersonal morality.
Compare this view with familiar cosmopolitan moral claims made by philosophers such as Peter Singer (see entries below). Singer does not place great weight on moral labels (justice, beneficence, duties of humanity, and so on). But for those who press claims of global justice by way of doubly universal human rights claims, it is not merely that affluent individuals ought to assist the global poor, but in addition, the global poor have a claim based in justice for such assistance - and perhaps a whole lot more!
A second alternative would be to think of global justice as a matter of interstate justice. Literally, that would mean asking questions about what states are justified in asking of other states as a matter of justice, and in Rawls's terminology global justice is international justice as I have defined it. The Law of Peoples is Rawls's attempt to answer questions about interstate justice, and his answer is that while affluent states ('peoples' in his terminology, and I set aside here what difference the distinction might make) have duties to aid "burdened societies" attain the ability to meet the human rights demands they have toward their own citizens, affluent states have no duties of justice to reduce inequalities between states or even direct duties to secure a minimum level of well-being for citizens outside of their own nation. There are of course other, more ambitious ways of spelling out the requirements of interstate justice, but the point is that global justice might be conceived of as state-to-state moral requirements as contrasted with individual-to-individual moral requirements.
In addition, we might propose a third alternative, namely a more comprehensive account of global justice that attempts to spell out a fuller range of requirements of affluent states to poor states, affluent persons to poor persons (after all, there are poor people in rich nations and rich people in poor nations, as well as duties of rich nations to poor individuals. We might even attempt to delineate the responsibilities of non-state actors to the global poor, and these might include multinational corporations, NGOs, and global institutions that regulate or oversee key aspects of the global economy (e.g., World Bank, IMF, WTO, and so on).
A fourth alternative might fall somewhere between an interstate theory and a comprehensive theory. We might focus instead on what we might call a primary actor account. We know, for example, that key global economic institutions, nation-states, and some large multinational corporations exert a profound and pervasive impact on the life prospects of billions of people around the world, and in particular, on some of the poorest, most vulnerable persons in the world.
Many of the available theories, however, are not clear about where within the sort of the rough taxonomy I have suggested they fall, but it is an important for philosophers to pursue a variety of different theoretical paths and do so with some clarity about their theoretical ambitions.
Changing Conceptions of Individual Moral Responsibility In An Age of Globalization
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Theorists who resist the statist's claim that the nation-state is the sole locus of the kind of relationships sufficient to trigger demands of justice are often persuaded by a certain empirical account of the world. But whatever they might have to say in regard to how they assess the justice or injustice of the overarching global structure, within which economic transactions and political negotiations occur, developing an account of the moral responsibilities of individuals, rather than governmental or other collective agents, offers a potential way of making sense of global justice in a way that does not involve the restrictive relationships between states and citizens. But this path has its own obstacles.
An increasingly familiar normative claim is that the key facts of globalization have altered the very nature of our moral responsibilities to others. For example, Samuel Scheffler poses the following problem in "Individual Responsibility in A Global Age" (Social Philosophy and Policy 1995: 219-236). Our inherited model of moral responsibility rests upon a “largely implicit conception of human social relations” consisting of small-scale interactions among independent individual agents with clearly demarcated lines of moral responsibility (p. 227). However, our current reality is very different from the inherited picture of human interaction. We live within a web of global interconnectedness. Citizens of the developed world are participants in a “network of institutional arrangements that support a very different quality of life for people in other parts of the world.” (p. 229). We are participants in a great many large-scale causal processes to which each of us contributes in limited ways. Very few of us exercise much control over those causal processes. Most of us have modest understanding of the overall processes and the effects of our actions. Moreover, “we have great difficulty in abstaining in any wholesale way from participation in any of them” even if motivated to do so (p. 233).
Nonetheless, the old model is hard to shake. We are most at ease with a conception of moral – and legal - responsibility for the fate of others when that conception hews closely to a conception of our place in the world in which we see ourselves as embedded in a web of largely face-to-face interactions with consequences largely contained within small scale, closed environments. We see ourselves as morally responsible for more or less what we are causally responsible. But the illusion is difficult to sustain. We participate in and benefit from (or are disadvantaged by) overlapping networks of institutional arrangements and increasingly regularized social practices that have (in language bequeathed by John Rawls) profound and pervasive impact on the life prospects of every participant.
Even as we extend that familiar model of moral responsibility in order to better fit the new reality of geographically and temporally dispersed consequences of individual actions and patterns of interaction, our moral and legal ideas of responsibility are tempered by psychologically comforting assumptions. We hold ourselves responsible (morally and legally) only for what we judge to be reasonably foreseeable and avoidable without excessive personal costs. In legal parlance, we substitute the normatively laden idea of a “proximate cause” for the epistemically intractable and morally discomforting task of trying to map the remotest regions of possible causal pathways. Our ideas of causal responsibility are thus normatively laden in the sense that our understanding of social causation gets remade to suit our moral aspirations.
Too much revision of our conception of moral responsibility threatens our ability to hold onto a picture of ourselves as individuals with our own lives to lead, our own legitimate interests in pursuing our own projects and commitments. Utilitarianism, for example, offers the most obvious alternative to the inherited model. On some utilitarian accounts – al least as critics portray them – we each seem to be morally responsible for every remote consequence of our actions, however marginal our causal contribution. Worse yet, if we are required to act in ways best calculated make the world a maximally better place, we are accountable prospectively for our failure to strive for a state of the world in which there is as much aggregate good as any available alternative. Critics such as Bernard Williams describe the utilitarian conception of moral responsibility as a doctrine that holds us to account personally not only for the remotest effects of our actions, but for everything that happens for which our actions might affect even marginally.
While sophisticated utilitarians can offer theoretical refinements in order to rebut some of the claims of their critics, the larger point is that the primary theoretical option available seems to demand too much revision of our ordinary moral consciousness. And yet, some revision is required. We are morally implicated in the new global dynamics, at least insofar the benefits we enjoy contribute to and sustain pervasive, enduring, virtually inescapable, profoundly adverse consequences for others.
An increasingly familiar normative claim is that the key facts of globalization have altered the very nature of our moral responsibilities to others. For example, Samuel Scheffler poses the following problem in "Individual Responsibility in A Global Age" (Social Philosophy and Policy 1995: 219-236). Our inherited model of moral responsibility rests upon a “largely implicit conception of human social relations” consisting of small-scale interactions among independent individual agents with clearly demarcated lines of moral responsibility (p. 227). However, our current reality is very different from the inherited picture of human interaction. We live within a web of global interconnectedness. Citizens of the developed world are participants in a “network of institutional arrangements that support a very different quality of life for people in other parts of the world.” (p. 229). We are participants in a great many large-scale causal processes to which each of us contributes in limited ways. Very few of us exercise much control over those causal processes. Most of us have modest understanding of the overall processes and the effects of our actions. Moreover, “we have great difficulty in abstaining in any wholesale way from participation in any of them” even if motivated to do so (p. 233).
Nonetheless, the old model is hard to shake. We are most at ease with a conception of moral – and legal - responsibility for the fate of others when that conception hews closely to a conception of our place in the world in which we see ourselves as embedded in a web of largely face-to-face interactions with consequences largely contained within small scale, closed environments. We see ourselves as morally responsible for more or less what we are causally responsible. But the illusion is difficult to sustain. We participate in and benefit from (or are disadvantaged by) overlapping networks of institutional arrangements and increasingly regularized social practices that have (in language bequeathed by John Rawls) profound and pervasive impact on the life prospects of every participant.
Even as we extend that familiar model of moral responsibility in order to better fit the new reality of geographically and temporally dispersed consequences of individual actions and patterns of interaction, our moral and legal ideas of responsibility are tempered by psychologically comforting assumptions. We hold ourselves responsible (morally and legally) only for what we judge to be reasonably foreseeable and avoidable without excessive personal costs. In legal parlance, we substitute the normatively laden idea of a “proximate cause” for the epistemically intractable and morally discomforting task of trying to map the remotest regions of possible causal pathways. Our ideas of causal responsibility are thus normatively laden in the sense that our understanding of social causation gets remade to suit our moral aspirations.
Too much revision of our conception of moral responsibility threatens our ability to hold onto a picture of ourselves as individuals with our own lives to lead, our own legitimate interests in pursuing our own projects and commitments. Utilitarianism, for example, offers the most obvious alternative to the inherited model. On some utilitarian accounts – al least as critics portray them – we each seem to be morally responsible for every remote consequence of our actions, however marginal our causal contribution. Worse yet, if we are required to act in ways best calculated make the world a maximally better place, we are accountable prospectively for our failure to strive for a state of the world in which there is as much aggregate good as any available alternative. Critics such as Bernard Williams describe the utilitarian conception of moral responsibility as a doctrine that holds us to account personally not only for the remotest effects of our actions, but for everything that happens for which our actions might affect even marginally.
While sophisticated utilitarians can offer theoretical refinements in order to rebut some of the claims of their critics, the larger point is that the primary theoretical option available seems to demand too much revision of our ordinary moral consciousness. And yet, some revision is required. We are morally implicated in the new global dynamics, at least insofar the benefits we enjoy contribute to and sustain pervasive, enduring, virtually inescapable, profoundly adverse consequences for others.
Climate Change as an Example of the Challenge to Notions of Individual Moral Responsibility
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While there are many issues of individual moral responsibility not easily addressed by our traditional conceptions few are as vexing as those that arise in the context of thinking about the role of individuals in causing climate change. As Dale Jamieson observes, our traditional conception “presupposes that harms and their causes are individual, that they can be readily identified, and that they are local in time and space.” (1992/2010, p. 83). The inherited conception “collapses when we try to apply it to global environmental problems” because “millions of people will have made tiny, almost imperceptible causal contributions – by driving cars, cutting trees, using electricity, and so on” (p. 83). Because many of the arguments for various principles for assigning moral responsibility for climate change are subject to powerful objections that arise out of our inherited conception, Jamieson conjectures that that the global environment might be destroyed and “yet no one will be responsible.” (p. 84).
Consider the implications of the seeming inadequacy of the traditional conception of individual moral responsibility when applied to the evaluation of individual lifestyle choices that have had and continue to have a significant aggregate detrimental effect in the production of greenhouse gases (GHGs) that result in global warming. The actions that produce the harmful effects flow from the largely morally benign consumer choices that are discrete, isolated, uncoordinated, occurring over large periods of time and in geographically dispersed settings. And until recently, individual consumers have acted with little reason for awareness of their long-term consequences. We might - for any number of reasons - favor some form of global carbon-tax. One reason would be simply the practical value of creating economic disincentives that would reduce the aggregate emissions that cause global warming. We might also think that such a tax has some moral backing insofar as it captures the underlying intuition that part of the problem, and thus part of the right way to allocate the burden of moral responsibility, are policies that ensure that the burden falls most heavily on the carbon-intensive lifestyles that are primarily for the sake of luxury consumption. Carbon taxes then are seen as new instances of the traditional idea of "sin taxes."
But, as Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has argued in considerable detail, on most renderings of principles of personal responsibility, it can be said that it makes no difference whether any one person does these things or not (Armstrong 2005/2010; cf Jamison, 1992/2010, p. 83). No one can trace the harm experienced by any particular individual to the actions of any particular individual inasmuch as the harm occurs as a consequence of many small contributing actions. Presumably no one intends to cause harm. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with emitting carbon. But most importantly perhaps, the case for blaming individuals suffers from the fact that the individual actions of drivers of gas guzzlers, owners of private jets, and importers of distant exotic fruits and fish are neither necessary nor sufficient for the harm that is produced. For the harm of global warming is created only as a consequence of exceeding the total stock of dangerous GHG emissions, to which many individuals have contributed and continue to contribute (Sinnott-Armstrong (2005/2010, p. 333).
Sinnott-Armstrong’s two-fold conclusion is that we have no real choice but to return to the sphere of political responsibility and that advocates of consumer-based ethical responsibility should “come down from the mountains” and work for political solutions. “Governments still have the obligation to fight global warming because they can make a difference” (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005/2010, p. 343). One worry about arguments of this sort is that they prove too much. If the fair resolution of collective action problems is stymied by the inability of one person in the marketplace to make a difference to a harmful outcome, the same objection, applies to democratic political involvement. As a pragmatic matter, one can’t advocate for political activism on the part of any individual while denying any meaningful role for individual consumer activism.
See: Jamieson, D. (1992/2010) “Ethics, Public Policy, and Global Warming,” and Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2005/2010) “It's Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations,” both reprinted in Climate Ethics: Essential Readings, ed. by S. M. Gardiner, S. Caney, D. Jamieson, and H. Shue (eds), Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 332-46.
Consider the implications of the seeming inadequacy of the traditional conception of individual moral responsibility when applied to the evaluation of individual lifestyle choices that have had and continue to have a significant aggregate detrimental effect in the production of greenhouse gases (GHGs) that result in global warming. The actions that produce the harmful effects flow from the largely morally benign consumer choices that are discrete, isolated, uncoordinated, occurring over large periods of time and in geographically dispersed settings. And until recently, individual consumers have acted with little reason for awareness of their long-term consequences. We might - for any number of reasons - favor some form of global carbon-tax. One reason would be simply the practical value of creating economic disincentives that would reduce the aggregate emissions that cause global warming. We might also think that such a tax has some moral backing insofar as it captures the underlying intuition that part of the problem, and thus part of the right way to allocate the burden of moral responsibility, are policies that ensure that the burden falls most heavily on the carbon-intensive lifestyles that are primarily for the sake of luxury consumption. Carbon taxes then are seen as new instances of the traditional idea of "sin taxes."
But, as Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has argued in considerable detail, on most renderings of principles of personal responsibility, it can be said that it makes no difference whether any one person does these things or not (Armstrong 2005/2010; cf Jamison, 1992/2010, p. 83). No one can trace the harm experienced by any particular individual to the actions of any particular individual inasmuch as the harm occurs as a consequence of many small contributing actions. Presumably no one intends to cause harm. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with emitting carbon. But most importantly perhaps, the case for blaming individuals suffers from the fact that the individual actions of drivers of gas guzzlers, owners of private jets, and importers of distant exotic fruits and fish are neither necessary nor sufficient for the harm that is produced. For the harm of global warming is created only as a consequence of exceeding the total stock of dangerous GHG emissions, to which many individuals have contributed and continue to contribute (Sinnott-Armstrong (2005/2010, p. 333).
Sinnott-Armstrong’s two-fold conclusion is that we have no real choice but to return to the sphere of political responsibility and that advocates of consumer-based ethical responsibility should “come down from the mountains” and work for political solutions. “Governments still have the obligation to fight global warming because they can make a difference” (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005/2010, p. 343). One worry about arguments of this sort is that they prove too much. If the fair resolution of collective action problems is stymied by the inability of one person in the marketplace to make a difference to a harmful outcome, the same objection, applies to democratic political involvement. As a pragmatic matter, one can’t advocate for political activism on the part of any individual while denying any meaningful role for individual consumer activism.
See: Jamieson, D. (1992/2010) “Ethics, Public Policy, and Global Warming,” and Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2005/2010) “It's Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations,” both reprinted in Climate Ethics: Essential Readings, ed. by S. M. Gardiner, S. Caney, D. Jamieson, and H. Shue (eds), Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 332-46.
Modest Requirements of Justice beyond borders? Or more Ambitious Institutional Responses?
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Environmental issues show the limits of strong statist theories. Many environmental problems are both intergenerational and international in their impact. Few of the feasible solutions imaginable can be implemented without at least some form of international political authority with power to resolve cross-border disputes and enforce decisions. Groups such as the UNPA (click on the graphic at left) argue that only some sort of United Nations parliament based on democratic principles - not the deliberately hierarchical structure of UN governance we have now - holds promise for effective solutions to the world's most pressing challenges. However, the inertia of the system of nation-states is so great and the power of entrenched advantages enjoyed by the most powerful nation-states is so vast that significant institutional change faces an uphill battle.
In addition, the dominant Western philosophical thinking about justice creates little space for elaborating the theoretical foundations for such changes. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the system of nation-states is likely to remain in place. Let's assume also, again for the sake of argument, that there are many valuable benefits associated with such a system, not the least of which is the assignment of primary responsibility for the well-being of much of the Earth's population to institutions and agents who have local knowledge and a practical advantage in addressing human needs within a geographic territory. And let's assume also that there are enormous practical obstacles to assignment of moral responsibility to individual consumers for addressing global poverty, environmental degradation, and predatory behavior of multinational corporations.
Is the strong statist view the final word on the subject? Not necessarily. In the final entries on this page we return to a more detailed discussion of the main arguments for and against strong statism. For now it is enough to observe an important distinction between two statists' claims. Even if we agree with the positive thesis of the strong statists - that the existence of nation-states generates special and stringent requirements of egalitarian justice that apply within national borders - there are many reasons to doubt the plausibility of the negative thesis - that there are no legitimate concerns about inequality and perhaps only limited concern about patterns of ongoing global interaction that lock in low levels of well-being for the global poor. What other theoretical resources, perhaps only partial or incomplete theories of justice, might inform our reflections about cross-border requirements of justice?
My hypothesis is that although quite a few theories of justice emphasize a particular concern as central to justice the following claims are true: (i) each identifies something of distinct moral salience that is not reducible to concerns that other theories take to be be central; (ii) the various concerns identified by different theories are not mutually exclusive requirements; (iii) all of these concerns might figure as reasonable components of any adequate comprehensive theory of justice; and (iv) the application of each of these partial theories of the requirements of justice do not depend essentially upon the existence of a nation-state, even if more robustly egalitarian variants of those requirements are grounded in some sort of facts about common citizenship. Several suggestions come to mind.
First, contemporary human rights theory identifies some universal moral interests of such great weight that it is very difficult to argue against the view that some institutional arrangement adequate to their satisfaction is imperative, at least under two types of conditions: (i) when nation-states alone cannot take up the primary responsibility typically assigned to them for their own citizens; and when the threats to those rights can only be abated by global collective action. Debates about climate change are among the issues for which philosophers have made the most theoretically significant in-roads in theorizing regarding cross-border rights and responsibilities in the latter condition. While they have done much to show that moral responsibility for fulfillment of the various human rights put at grave risk by climate change cannot be left to nation-states to deal with on their own, the debates also show how enormously complicated it is to assign moral responsibility among members of the community of nations or to significant non-state actors, including multinational corporate polluters and the global economic institutions that enable them. But the growing body of philosophical literature on climate change is a great place to start because it causes us to rethink our views of human rights For a review and assessment of some of the main issues and best papers, you can read the penultimate draft of my forthcoming article on climate change responsibility under Works in Progress.
Second, there are arguments found in common law legal theory that have a possible analogue to the moral case. Lief Wenar, for example, in "Responsibility for Severe Poverty" argues that there are well-known and intuitively powerful arguments about assigning responsibility for averting threats of various sorts of interests that are the familiar subject of human rights theory, and that these are useful guides even if we lack a complete theory of distributive justice. The argument in a nutshell is that we generally assign primary moral responsibility to those who are best positioned to avert a disaster and can do so with an ability to bear the costs, independent of whether they are causally responsible for the existence of the threat in the first place. The 'least-cost principle" is used to support two large-scale conclusions. First, in a significant range of cases much of the responsibility for averting predictable threats to human well-being falls on individuals, and this is a conclusion that tracks some of the libertarian's intuitions about the appropriateness of assigning primary responsibility for prevention and remedy of harm to individuals themselves. Second, the least-cost principle simultaneously explains a different range of cases in which the fairest and most efficient assignment of responsibility requires us to rely upon collective institutions - or if none adequate to the task exists, to create them - rather than vesting responsibility in the hands of individuals or even nation-states.
Third, one set of justice-based concerns that have no inherent connection to any features of the nation-state can be cashed out under the rubric of systematic disadvantage. The rough idea is that even if there are no requirements of egalitarian justice pertaining to ensuring fair equality of opportunity among citizens bound together under a common set of laws, it is still arguably unjust to enter into and sustain densely woven patterns of disadvantage across borders. For a basic exposition of that core idea, you can read a summary account of the Twin Aims of Justice on this website or read a short published summary of the account of systematic disadvantage drawn from my earlier book coauthored with Ruth Faden. Among the global practices to which such a view might apply are global land and water grabs, the extension of extractive modes of industrial agriculture to parts of the developing world, and a variety of demands made upon developing nations made by the major global economic institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and others. Similar arguments are found in chapter 6 of Altman and Wellman, A Liberal Theory of International Justice. Both the Powers/Faden and the Altman/Wellman view combine some basic well-being requirements of the sort found in many human rights theories with further constraints on severely disadvantaging social arrangements that often undermine self-determination and result in grossly unfair terms of in the kinds of social interactions that shape profoundly the most important aspects of a person's life prospects.
Third, there are some powerful and compelling theories of exploitation that bear on global environmental justice. The idea of exploitation is an intuitively compelling one, but a source of great philosophical puzzlement. In a nutshell, how can a bargain voluntarily entered into and which makes both parties better off (as each party would judge the matter) be unjust or wrong? While I remain uncertain and indeed suspicious of the idea that a single theory can answer questions about what, if anything, is unjust in transactions we intuitively find exploitative, at least some good theoretical work is available that shows what might be wrong with some forms of sweatshop labor contracts - and by extension, some forms of direct foreign investment that has profound adverse environmental impact. For one really provocative account, see chapter 3 of Richard Miller's Globalizing Justice. One of great philosophical merits of this particular discussion of exploitation is that it links its theory of what makes routine patterns of transactions among developing nations and multinational corporations unjustly exploitative to an account of a more basic theory of what justice requires in the design of the system of rules governing the global economic order, within which these bilateral economic transactions occur. Only against this backdrop can the injustice of, and remedy for, individually exploitative transactions be understood properly.
Fourth, another partial theory of justice, and one that also has a place within many accounts of justice, is the idea that among the main desiderata of any fully adequate theory of justice is the requirement that major structural features of social arrangements that have a profound and pervasive impact on life prospects should not result in the domination or oppression of some individuals and groups by those who hold asymmetric power over resources, cultural and social capital, and public decision-making processes. Non-domination theories take many forms. Phillip Pettit's well-known book, Republicanism, is one important source, as is Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference. Moreover, a number of other theories address the issue of non-domination in some fashion. My own theory developed with co-author Ruth Faden deals with aspects of this issue under the discussion of self-determination as a core element of Basic Well-being and the Structural Fairness Aim, and Rawls in his later works notes that preventing domination is one of several crucial desiderata in determining the adequacy of his own distributive principles. A recent paper that extends the core idea of the non-domination account to the global scheme, and which suggests possible application to practices such as water privatization and other resource extraction policies is Mira Bachvarova's "Non-domination in the theorizing of global justice".
There are, of course, other theoretical options, including some variants of cosmopolitan justice theory and Thomas Pogge's various papers arguing that many international economic institutional policies directly harm the global poor by undermining the ability of nations to secure the human rights of their own citizens, but the above alternatives are among the ones that I use in my own courses on global justice and the environment. One discussion that brings together a number of these disparate concerns, including commentary on Pogge's basic claims, is the previously mentioned chapter by Altman and Wellman. They argue against a cosmopolitan egalitarianism of the robust sort Rawls defends domestically, but argue also that forms of domination and oppression, arrangements that produce systematic disadvantage for some of its participants, or undermine their most vital human interests of the sort that inform many theories of human rights are nonetheless unjust ways of conducting political and economic cross-border interactions. They provide an interesting assessment of Pogge's claims about how global arrangements harm the global poor, and they link that discussion to matters of political legitimacy of nation-states. Among the arresting conclusions they reach is the following: "...wealthy states would have no right to make loans to regimes that oppress and impoverish their own people, nor to sell such regimes military equipment used to bolster their power. More radically, wealthy states would have no right against interference by a group - call it the 'poverty army' - that was willing and able to stop the wealthy states from imposing their unjust global order." (p. 152
To sum up, we see several distinct strands of morally salient concerns that various theories of justice highlight or emphasize. Many of these strands are woven into the fabric of a variety of more comprehensive theories of justice, and the specific ways in which various theories accommodate them can vary. But in at least the most modest interpretations of their requirements it is difficult to argue that they have robust egalitarian application domestically but no application beyond the borders of nation-states. Institutional arrangements and ongoing forms of interaction that undermine the most basic requirements of well-being are difficult to defend. Domination, exploitative agreements and institutional rules that facilitate them, along with extreme forms of control that limits any reasonable degree of ability and individuals and nations to be self-determining are unjust even if they do not reduce levels of other aspects of basic well-being to an unacceptably low level. Configurations of social arrangements and ongoing patterns of social arrangements that have profound and pervasive impact on the life prospects of those affected by them are unjust if they systematically disadvantage some in their ability to secure their own well-being, even if through hard work, great good fortune, or both some manage to navigate the obstacles that are placed in their way but not in the path of the more advantaged. Nothing in these overarching concerns depends essentially on the existence of nation-states.
Basic well-being is one morally salient concern of justice; self-determination and freedom from the arbitrary and thoroughgoing control and domination of others is another distinct concern; and deeply disadvantaging structural impediments to securing life prospects comparable to other participants in some presumably mutually beneficial ongoing social arrangement mark yet another concern (even if, as Ruth and I argue, domination on the basis of gender, ethnicity and the like is a prototypical example of systematic disadvantage with which we are familiar). Though all of these injustices often co-travel, they are separate moral saliencies that are among the reasonable concerns of justice. Quite often they are matters of justice that can only be addressed at the institutional level in order to mitigate the systematic adverse effects of uncoordinated and often morally benign behavior of multiple actors. The nation-state is one institutional option but it is not necessarily the only one.
In addition, the dominant Western philosophical thinking about justice creates little space for elaborating the theoretical foundations for such changes. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the system of nation-states is likely to remain in place. Let's assume also, again for the sake of argument, that there are many valuable benefits associated with such a system, not the least of which is the assignment of primary responsibility for the well-being of much of the Earth's population to institutions and agents who have local knowledge and a practical advantage in addressing human needs within a geographic territory. And let's assume also that there are enormous practical obstacles to assignment of moral responsibility to individual consumers for addressing global poverty, environmental degradation, and predatory behavior of multinational corporations.
Is the strong statist view the final word on the subject? Not necessarily. In the final entries on this page we return to a more detailed discussion of the main arguments for and against strong statism. For now it is enough to observe an important distinction between two statists' claims. Even if we agree with the positive thesis of the strong statists - that the existence of nation-states generates special and stringent requirements of egalitarian justice that apply within national borders - there are many reasons to doubt the plausibility of the negative thesis - that there are no legitimate concerns about inequality and perhaps only limited concern about patterns of ongoing global interaction that lock in low levels of well-being for the global poor. What other theoretical resources, perhaps only partial or incomplete theories of justice, might inform our reflections about cross-border requirements of justice?
My hypothesis is that although quite a few theories of justice emphasize a particular concern as central to justice the following claims are true: (i) each identifies something of distinct moral salience that is not reducible to concerns that other theories take to be be central; (ii) the various concerns identified by different theories are not mutually exclusive requirements; (iii) all of these concerns might figure as reasonable components of any adequate comprehensive theory of justice; and (iv) the application of each of these partial theories of the requirements of justice do not depend essentially upon the existence of a nation-state, even if more robustly egalitarian variants of those requirements are grounded in some sort of facts about common citizenship. Several suggestions come to mind.
First, contemporary human rights theory identifies some universal moral interests of such great weight that it is very difficult to argue against the view that some institutional arrangement adequate to their satisfaction is imperative, at least under two types of conditions: (i) when nation-states alone cannot take up the primary responsibility typically assigned to them for their own citizens; and when the threats to those rights can only be abated by global collective action. Debates about climate change are among the issues for which philosophers have made the most theoretically significant in-roads in theorizing regarding cross-border rights and responsibilities in the latter condition. While they have done much to show that moral responsibility for fulfillment of the various human rights put at grave risk by climate change cannot be left to nation-states to deal with on their own, the debates also show how enormously complicated it is to assign moral responsibility among members of the community of nations or to significant non-state actors, including multinational corporate polluters and the global economic institutions that enable them. But the growing body of philosophical literature on climate change is a great place to start because it causes us to rethink our views of human rights For a review and assessment of some of the main issues and best papers, you can read the penultimate draft of my forthcoming article on climate change responsibility under Works in Progress.
Second, there are arguments found in common law legal theory that have a possible analogue to the moral case. Lief Wenar, for example, in "Responsibility for Severe Poverty" argues that there are well-known and intuitively powerful arguments about assigning responsibility for averting threats of various sorts of interests that are the familiar subject of human rights theory, and that these are useful guides even if we lack a complete theory of distributive justice. The argument in a nutshell is that we generally assign primary moral responsibility to those who are best positioned to avert a disaster and can do so with an ability to bear the costs, independent of whether they are causally responsible for the existence of the threat in the first place. The 'least-cost principle" is used to support two large-scale conclusions. First, in a significant range of cases much of the responsibility for averting predictable threats to human well-being falls on individuals, and this is a conclusion that tracks some of the libertarian's intuitions about the appropriateness of assigning primary responsibility for prevention and remedy of harm to individuals themselves. Second, the least-cost principle simultaneously explains a different range of cases in which the fairest and most efficient assignment of responsibility requires us to rely upon collective institutions - or if none adequate to the task exists, to create them - rather than vesting responsibility in the hands of individuals or even nation-states.
Third, one set of justice-based concerns that have no inherent connection to any features of the nation-state can be cashed out under the rubric of systematic disadvantage. The rough idea is that even if there are no requirements of egalitarian justice pertaining to ensuring fair equality of opportunity among citizens bound together under a common set of laws, it is still arguably unjust to enter into and sustain densely woven patterns of disadvantage across borders. For a basic exposition of that core idea, you can read a summary account of the Twin Aims of Justice on this website or read a short published summary of the account of systematic disadvantage drawn from my earlier book coauthored with Ruth Faden. Among the global practices to which such a view might apply are global land and water grabs, the extension of extractive modes of industrial agriculture to parts of the developing world, and a variety of demands made upon developing nations made by the major global economic institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and others. Similar arguments are found in chapter 6 of Altman and Wellman, A Liberal Theory of International Justice. Both the Powers/Faden and the Altman/Wellman view combine some basic well-being requirements of the sort found in many human rights theories with further constraints on severely disadvantaging social arrangements that often undermine self-determination and result in grossly unfair terms of in the kinds of social interactions that shape profoundly the most important aspects of a person's life prospects.
Third, there are some powerful and compelling theories of exploitation that bear on global environmental justice. The idea of exploitation is an intuitively compelling one, but a source of great philosophical puzzlement. In a nutshell, how can a bargain voluntarily entered into and which makes both parties better off (as each party would judge the matter) be unjust or wrong? While I remain uncertain and indeed suspicious of the idea that a single theory can answer questions about what, if anything, is unjust in transactions we intuitively find exploitative, at least some good theoretical work is available that shows what might be wrong with some forms of sweatshop labor contracts - and by extension, some forms of direct foreign investment that has profound adverse environmental impact. For one really provocative account, see chapter 3 of Richard Miller's Globalizing Justice. One of great philosophical merits of this particular discussion of exploitation is that it links its theory of what makes routine patterns of transactions among developing nations and multinational corporations unjustly exploitative to an account of a more basic theory of what justice requires in the design of the system of rules governing the global economic order, within which these bilateral economic transactions occur. Only against this backdrop can the injustice of, and remedy for, individually exploitative transactions be understood properly.
Fourth, another partial theory of justice, and one that also has a place within many accounts of justice, is the idea that among the main desiderata of any fully adequate theory of justice is the requirement that major structural features of social arrangements that have a profound and pervasive impact on life prospects should not result in the domination or oppression of some individuals and groups by those who hold asymmetric power over resources, cultural and social capital, and public decision-making processes. Non-domination theories take many forms. Phillip Pettit's well-known book, Republicanism, is one important source, as is Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference. Moreover, a number of other theories address the issue of non-domination in some fashion. My own theory developed with co-author Ruth Faden deals with aspects of this issue under the discussion of self-determination as a core element of Basic Well-being and the Structural Fairness Aim, and Rawls in his later works notes that preventing domination is one of several crucial desiderata in determining the adequacy of his own distributive principles. A recent paper that extends the core idea of the non-domination account to the global scheme, and which suggests possible application to practices such as water privatization and other resource extraction policies is Mira Bachvarova's "Non-domination in the theorizing of global justice".
There are, of course, other theoretical options, including some variants of cosmopolitan justice theory and Thomas Pogge's various papers arguing that many international economic institutional policies directly harm the global poor by undermining the ability of nations to secure the human rights of their own citizens, but the above alternatives are among the ones that I use in my own courses on global justice and the environment. One discussion that brings together a number of these disparate concerns, including commentary on Pogge's basic claims, is the previously mentioned chapter by Altman and Wellman. They argue against a cosmopolitan egalitarianism of the robust sort Rawls defends domestically, but argue also that forms of domination and oppression, arrangements that produce systematic disadvantage for some of its participants, or undermine their most vital human interests of the sort that inform many theories of human rights are nonetheless unjust ways of conducting political and economic cross-border interactions. They provide an interesting assessment of Pogge's claims about how global arrangements harm the global poor, and they link that discussion to matters of political legitimacy of nation-states. Among the arresting conclusions they reach is the following: "...wealthy states would have no right to make loans to regimes that oppress and impoverish their own people, nor to sell such regimes military equipment used to bolster their power. More radically, wealthy states would have no right against interference by a group - call it the 'poverty army' - that was willing and able to stop the wealthy states from imposing their unjust global order." (p. 152
To sum up, we see several distinct strands of morally salient concerns that various theories of justice highlight or emphasize. Many of these strands are woven into the fabric of a variety of more comprehensive theories of justice, and the specific ways in which various theories accommodate them can vary. But in at least the most modest interpretations of their requirements it is difficult to argue that they have robust egalitarian application domestically but no application beyond the borders of nation-states. Institutional arrangements and ongoing forms of interaction that undermine the most basic requirements of well-being are difficult to defend. Domination, exploitative agreements and institutional rules that facilitate them, along with extreme forms of control that limits any reasonable degree of ability and individuals and nations to be self-determining are unjust even if they do not reduce levels of other aspects of basic well-being to an unacceptably low level. Configurations of social arrangements and ongoing patterns of social arrangements that have profound and pervasive impact on the life prospects of those affected by them are unjust if they systematically disadvantage some in their ability to secure their own well-being, even if through hard work, great good fortune, or both some manage to navigate the obstacles that are placed in their way but not in the path of the more advantaged. Nothing in these overarching concerns depends essentially on the existence of nation-states.
Basic well-being is one morally salient concern of justice; self-determination and freedom from the arbitrary and thoroughgoing control and domination of others is another distinct concern; and deeply disadvantaging structural impediments to securing life prospects comparable to other participants in some presumably mutually beneficial ongoing social arrangement mark yet another concern (even if, as Ruth and I argue, domination on the basis of gender, ethnicity and the like is a prototypical example of systematic disadvantage with which we are familiar). Though all of these injustices often co-travel, they are separate moral saliencies that are among the reasonable concerns of justice. Quite often they are matters of justice that can only be addressed at the institutional level in order to mitigate the systematic adverse effects of uncoordinated and often morally benign behavior of multiple actors. The nation-state is one institutional option but it is not necessarily the only one.
Moderate and Strong Statism: Disagreements over the norms of social justice having global application
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As we have seen already, some cosmopolitans are relationalists. They argue for the existence of relationships that trigger certain norms of social justice on a global scale. However, all statists are relational theorists. Some feature of relationships unique to the context of the nation-state trigger certain norms of social justice. Statist critics of cosmopolitan theories of justice fall into two main camps.
Strong statists claim that there are no robust norms of social justice that have application beyond the nation-state. Thomas Nagel, for example, is a strong statist. He thinks that there are duties of humanitarian assistance that apply globally, but duties of socioeconomic justice (as he labels them) apply only domestically because of the existence of coercive relationships jointly authorized by citizens that trigger those duties. Common humanity generates duties of one kind; relationships of a special sort generate additional duties. The existence of the nation-state for the strong statist is both necessary and sufficient to trigger the distinctively egalitarian norms of socioeconomic justice.
Moderate statists claim that while there might be certain norms of social justice that have application beyond the nation-state, they are not as demanding as the various egalitarian norms that apply domestically. David Miller (discussed in the previous entry) is a moderate statist, and along with other hybrid theorists he thinks that certain features of the relationships among members of a single country are morally unique and thus trigger more demanding norms of social justice than those that are applicable globally. Put another way, the existence of the state is sufficient to trigger robust norms of social justice, but it is not necessary to trigger some types of norms of social justice.
Precisely what sorts of relationships have been cited as necessary or sufficient to trigger robust norms of global justice are considered in the taxonomy below. However, debates among cosmopolitans, strong statists, and moderate statists also turn on precisely which norms of social justice the various partisans have in mind when they assert or deny that any robust norms of social justice are triggered other than by some sort of relationship found only within a nation-state. Consider some examples.
For Nagel, the relevant norms that are exclusively state-generated are described generically as socioeconomic justice, and he offers Rawls's broadly egalitarian principles as illustrative examples. Simon Caney (above 2001) and Darrel Moellendorf (Cosmopolitan Justice 2002) each argue for a global version of an equality of opportunity principle somewhat similar to Rawls's Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle. Cosmopolitan theorists Charles Beitz and Simon Caney both argue for some global version of Rawls's Difference Principle, and both strong statist Samuel Freeman and moderate statist David Miller argue against it. Beitz also argues that everyone should have an equal claim on natural resources, or at least for a principle that ensures that every society has enough for a fair chance to develop an economic and political system that can satisfy the basic needs of its members. Caney also argues that everyone has a basic human right to subsistence and for a global principle of equal pay for equal work. In addition, the possible norms having global application are not limited to distributive principles. Andrew Altman and Christopher Wellman argue for norms that limit deep inequalities in status and power or prevent oppression and domination on an international scale (A Liberal Theory of International Justice 2009). Laura Valentini (Justice in a Globalized World 2011) also argues for robust global norms of social justice that limit the ability of some to oppress others.
The above short list of options shows that the range of norms of social justice potentially applicable globally is not limited to the familiar contenders and the case for global norms of social justice generally is not necessarily defeated by arguments closely tied to the specifics of any particular norm in question.
Strong statists claim that there are no robust norms of social justice that have application beyond the nation-state. Thomas Nagel, for example, is a strong statist. He thinks that there are duties of humanitarian assistance that apply globally, but duties of socioeconomic justice (as he labels them) apply only domestically because of the existence of coercive relationships jointly authorized by citizens that trigger those duties. Common humanity generates duties of one kind; relationships of a special sort generate additional duties. The existence of the nation-state for the strong statist is both necessary and sufficient to trigger the distinctively egalitarian norms of socioeconomic justice.
Moderate statists claim that while there might be certain norms of social justice that have application beyond the nation-state, they are not as demanding as the various egalitarian norms that apply domestically. David Miller (discussed in the previous entry) is a moderate statist, and along with other hybrid theorists he thinks that certain features of the relationships among members of a single country are morally unique and thus trigger more demanding norms of social justice than those that are applicable globally. Put another way, the existence of the state is sufficient to trigger robust norms of social justice, but it is not necessary to trigger some types of norms of social justice.
Precisely what sorts of relationships have been cited as necessary or sufficient to trigger robust norms of global justice are considered in the taxonomy below. However, debates among cosmopolitans, strong statists, and moderate statists also turn on precisely which norms of social justice the various partisans have in mind when they assert or deny that any robust norms of social justice are triggered other than by some sort of relationship found only within a nation-state. Consider some examples.
For Nagel, the relevant norms that are exclusively state-generated are described generically as socioeconomic justice, and he offers Rawls's broadly egalitarian principles as illustrative examples. Simon Caney (above 2001) and Darrel Moellendorf (Cosmopolitan Justice 2002) each argue for a global version of an equality of opportunity principle somewhat similar to Rawls's Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle. Cosmopolitan theorists Charles Beitz and Simon Caney both argue for some global version of Rawls's Difference Principle, and both strong statist Samuel Freeman and moderate statist David Miller argue against it. Beitz also argues that everyone should have an equal claim on natural resources, or at least for a principle that ensures that every society has enough for a fair chance to develop an economic and political system that can satisfy the basic needs of its members. Caney also argues that everyone has a basic human right to subsistence and for a global principle of equal pay for equal work. In addition, the possible norms having global application are not limited to distributive principles. Andrew Altman and Christopher Wellman argue for norms that limit deep inequalities in status and power or prevent oppression and domination on an international scale (A Liberal Theory of International Justice 2009). Laura Valentini (Justice in a Globalized World 2011) also argues for robust global norms of social justice that limit the ability of some to oppress others.
The above short list of options shows that the range of norms of social justice potentially applicable globally is not limited to the familiar contenders and the case for global norms of social justice generally is not necessarily defeated by arguments closely tied to the specifics of any particular norm in question.
Relational Triggers of Norms of Social Justice: A Taxonomy
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Statists often appeal to relational triggers as the grounds of all duties of justice, and of course, they argue that no such triggering relationships exist beyond the nation-state. They disagree among themselves as to what sort of relationship uniquely triggers duties of justice strictly limited to co-nationals. Cosmopolitans and various hybrid theories that adopt the relational justificatory approach, by contrast, argue that the appropriate triggering mechanism is in place globally. The list of distinct relational triggers seems to grow with each passing season, but a few of the main alternatives are the following. There are a number of very good surveys of the main types of relational theories. Simon Caney's survey in Social Justice, Global Dynamics provides a brief but exceptionally illuminating survey. Below are some comments on some of the main contenders.
Associational models. Some statists appeal to the allegedly morally unique aspect of ties of sentiment, social bonds among ethnically or religiously homogeneous groups. Common culture or heritage and shared norms or values are similarly invoked. And these very same criteria are often invoked as well as justifications for secession. On the other hand, many nations claim the right of self-determination in the face of increasingly pluralist constituencies and such associational appeals increasingly seem quaint, or at the very least, of marginal significance as possible justificatory grounds for statism.
[Note: some people use the term 'associational' as a synonym for what I and many others call 'relational'. To make terminological matters more confusing, relational triggers or modes of justification of robust norms of social justice should not be confused with relational egalitarianism, which is an answer to questions about what the point or purpose of social justice is. Needless to say, a broadly relational egalitarian theory is a very congenial answer to questions about the point of social justice among those who also subscribe to the view that robust norms of social justice are triggered by certain kinds of relationships.]
Structural models. Some arguments for the statist view emphasis the idea of a basic structure that Rawls relies upon. The claim is that only within the context of the nation-state can we find the dense web of institutional and other arrangements that have the degree of profound and pervasive impact on life prospects sufficient to trigger duties of justice of the sort that embody an appropriate concern for various types of inequality. Much of the case for and against the statist invocation of the structural trigger turns on empirical judgments, with critics of the statist view arguing that even if the impact on life prospects from the "global basic structure" is less significant and perhaps triggers less demanding requirements of justice, the nation-state is not the locus of morally unique relational triggers of all inequality-sensitive duties of justice. For one volume that explores the factual assumptions that underlie the global extension of discussions of the Rawlsian idea of a basic structure, click on the image on the left for a link to the book's description and table of contents. (And see below for more discussion of practice-dependent theories and their conceptual affinities and disagreements with some relational views).
Co-operation models. Some relationalists argue that the profound and pervasive impact requirement of the structural model is merely a necessary but not sufficient element of what triggers duties of justice. Forms of ongoing association within an overarching social structure that shapes life prospects only trigger duties of justice when they are associations that are created for certain moral purposes and which embody certain shared understandings of the purpose of such associations. Rawls describes his own statist account of justice as centrally concerned with the idea of a society conceived of as an ongoing form of cooperation across generations for the purpose of mutual benefit or mutual advantage of its members. Persons involved in mutual benefit associations of the relevant sort found in nation-states share expectations that every fully co-operating member should reasonably expect to benefit and for that reason there is a sufficient justification for each person to agree to participate.
Statists then argue that the global arena of interaction, even if sustained over time, and not merely a series of isolated transactions, and even when there is profound and pervasive impact on the participants, still does not trigger the moral demands of justice.This is because the relationship is not a mutual benefit organization characterized by reciprocal obligations among members who engage in and support a common enterprise for the sake of benefits that accrue to each participant. Critics of the statist view either argue that the global economic order is in fact a cooperative arrangement that also triggers reciprocal duties of justice, or they simply deny the relevance of the cooperation requirement above and beyond the structural impact criterion.
Coercion models. Some statists argue that beyond the requirement of a significant structural impact on life prospects a further moral requirement for triggering duties of justice concerns the way the profound and pervasive impact is achieved. They argue that the added moral requirement is some form of coercive imposition of the overarching social structural influences on life prospects. Because states coerce their citizens they owe a special justification to its citizens for the differential life prospects it produces for those who participate as citizens subject to coercive legal sanctions. Critics of course can either argue against the decisive moral relevance of coercion as a trigger of some duties of justice (even if coercion ups the ante on the nature and demandingness of the duties of justice thus triggered) or they can argue that some analogue of the coercion requirement can be found in the operation of the global economic and political order. The latter kind of claim maintains that the terms of international association are in some sense imposed by powerful nations and economic interests upon weak nations or parties with much less bargaining power. Or they argue that whatever definition of coercion we rely upon, there is an important sense in which the life prospects of the global poor are so constrained by and shaped by social forces from which there are few feasible and desirable options for escape that for moral purposes the essential concern of the coercion criterion is present, whether or not we call it coercion. Andrea Sangiovanni's essay in this collection takes a different tact. He argues that neither coercion nor weaker forms of non-voluntarism - imposition, framing - trigger any norms of social justice inas much as coercion on its own, while needing good and sufficient reasons that justify, cannot explain why new distributive norms are thereby generated.
Social Practice Conceptions. One way of arguing for extending the application of broadly egalitarian norms of justice beyond the nation-state is to argue that Rawls's underlying conception of a "basic structure" actually exists on a global scale. But of course the success of this approach depends first, on just what one takes Rawls's notion of a basic structure to be, and second, on the plausibility of various empirical claims. So for example, those who conceptualize the basic structure along the lines Rawls suggests when he equates that structure the set of institutions and practices that exert a profound and pervasive influence on life prospects might argue that there is now a degree of economic interdependence that there is a "global basic structure" that triggers some distributive duties. Others who focus on the political institutional aspect of the basic structure within a single nation tend to deny the existence of a sufficient level of political integration necessary for concluding in favor of the existence of the relevantly coercive basic structure that Rawls might be read as having defended. Others have argued that perhaps various forms of social relationships and social practices - whether or not they qualify as basic structures in any Rawlsian sense - might on their own trigger norms of distributive justice applicable on a global scale. This so-called "practice-dependent" conception thus reflects a great deal of conceptual common ground with various theories that are self-described 'relational' approaches. But a difference is that social practice theories tend to rely on an additional assumption. They claim that various social practices have their own internal point or purpose, from which norms of fairness might be generated. In addition to some of the contributions to the collection of essays shown in the image above, see for example, Aaron James, Fairness in Practice.
Associational models. Some statists appeal to the allegedly morally unique aspect of ties of sentiment, social bonds among ethnically or religiously homogeneous groups. Common culture or heritage and shared norms or values are similarly invoked. And these very same criteria are often invoked as well as justifications for secession. On the other hand, many nations claim the right of self-determination in the face of increasingly pluralist constituencies and such associational appeals increasingly seem quaint, or at the very least, of marginal significance as possible justificatory grounds for statism.
[Note: some people use the term 'associational' as a synonym for what I and many others call 'relational'. To make terminological matters more confusing, relational triggers or modes of justification of robust norms of social justice should not be confused with relational egalitarianism, which is an answer to questions about what the point or purpose of social justice is. Needless to say, a broadly relational egalitarian theory is a very congenial answer to questions about the point of social justice among those who also subscribe to the view that robust norms of social justice are triggered by certain kinds of relationships.]
Structural models. Some arguments for the statist view emphasis the idea of a basic structure that Rawls relies upon. The claim is that only within the context of the nation-state can we find the dense web of institutional and other arrangements that have the degree of profound and pervasive impact on life prospects sufficient to trigger duties of justice of the sort that embody an appropriate concern for various types of inequality. Much of the case for and against the statist invocation of the structural trigger turns on empirical judgments, with critics of the statist view arguing that even if the impact on life prospects from the "global basic structure" is less significant and perhaps triggers less demanding requirements of justice, the nation-state is not the locus of morally unique relational triggers of all inequality-sensitive duties of justice. For one volume that explores the factual assumptions that underlie the global extension of discussions of the Rawlsian idea of a basic structure, click on the image on the left for a link to the book's description and table of contents. (And see below for more discussion of practice-dependent theories and their conceptual affinities and disagreements with some relational views).
Co-operation models. Some relationalists argue that the profound and pervasive impact requirement of the structural model is merely a necessary but not sufficient element of what triggers duties of justice. Forms of ongoing association within an overarching social structure that shapes life prospects only trigger duties of justice when they are associations that are created for certain moral purposes and which embody certain shared understandings of the purpose of such associations. Rawls describes his own statist account of justice as centrally concerned with the idea of a society conceived of as an ongoing form of cooperation across generations for the purpose of mutual benefit or mutual advantage of its members. Persons involved in mutual benefit associations of the relevant sort found in nation-states share expectations that every fully co-operating member should reasonably expect to benefit and for that reason there is a sufficient justification for each person to agree to participate.
Statists then argue that the global arena of interaction, even if sustained over time, and not merely a series of isolated transactions, and even when there is profound and pervasive impact on the participants, still does not trigger the moral demands of justice.This is because the relationship is not a mutual benefit organization characterized by reciprocal obligations among members who engage in and support a common enterprise for the sake of benefits that accrue to each participant. Critics of the statist view either argue that the global economic order is in fact a cooperative arrangement that also triggers reciprocal duties of justice, or they simply deny the relevance of the cooperation requirement above and beyond the structural impact criterion.
Coercion models. Some statists argue that beyond the requirement of a significant structural impact on life prospects a further moral requirement for triggering duties of justice concerns the way the profound and pervasive impact is achieved. They argue that the added moral requirement is some form of coercive imposition of the overarching social structural influences on life prospects. Because states coerce their citizens they owe a special justification to its citizens for the differential life prospects it produces for those who participate as citizens subject to coercive legal sanctions. Critics of course can either argue against the decisive moral relevance of coercion as a trigger of some duties of justice (even if coercion ups the ante on the nature and demandingness of the duties of justice thus triggered) or they can argue that some analogue of the coercion requirement can be found in the operation of the global economic and political order. The latter kind of claim maintains that the terms of international association are in some sense imposed by powerful nations and economic interests upon weak nations or parties with much less bargaining power. Or they argue that whatever definition of coercion we rely upon, there is an important sense in which the life prospects of the global poor are so constrained by and shaped by social forces from which there are few feasible and desirable options for escape that for moral purposes the essential concern of the coercion criterion is present, whether or not we call it coercion. Andrea Sangiovanni's essay in this collection takes a different tact. He argues that neither coercion nor weaker forms of non-voluntarism - imposition, framing - trigger any norms of social justice inas much as coercion on its own, while needing good and sufficient reasons that justify, cannot explain why new distributive norms are thereby generated.
Social Practice Conceptions. One way of arguing for extending the application of broadly egalitarian norms of justice beyond the nation-state is to argue that Rawls's underlying conception of a "basic structure" actually exists on a global scale. But of course the success of this approach depends first, on just what one takes Rawls's notion of a basic structure to be, and second, on the plausibility of various empirical claims. So for example, those who conceptualize the basic structure along the lines Rawls suggests when he equates that structure the set of institutions and practices that exert a profound and pervasive influence on life prospects might argue that there is now a degree of economic interdependence that there is a "global basic structure" that triggers some distributive duties. Others who focus on the political institutional aspect of the basic structure within a single nation tend to deny the existence of a sufficient level of political integration necessary for concluding in favor of the existence of the relevantly coercive basic structure that Rawls might be read as having defended. Others have argued that perhaps various forms of social relationships and social practices - whether or not they qualify as basic structures in any Rawlsian sense - might on their own trigger norms of distributive justice applicable on a global scale. This so-called "practice-dependent" conception thus reflects a great deal of conceptual common ground with various theories that are self-described 'relational' approaches. But a difference is that social practice theories tend to rely on an additional assumption. They claim that various social practices have their own internal point or purpose, from which norms of fairness might be generated. In addition to some of the contributions to the collection of essays shown in the image above, see for example, Aaron James, Fairness in Practice.
Coercion, Agency, and The Problem of Moral Responsibility for Social Injustice
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Some political philosophers argue for the superiority of the coercion model over either the other models because there is an identifiable agent involved. Statists in particular may find this approach appealing. In the case of nation-states it is the state itself that is the relevant collective agent that can be held accountable for unjust forms of coercion. Their manta is "no agent, no coercion." As indicated above, there are those who would extend the coercion model beyond the confines of the state sometimes argue that there are identifiable agents who direct and shape the global order in coercive ways for their own interests.
The coercion model contrasts starkly with structural models that focus entirely on the profound and pervasive effects on the global poor, rather than defend claims about identifiable agents and their intentions. One merit of the agency-based arguments is that it is responsive to a complaint that Frederick Hayek lodged against Rawls's original social structural theory of domestic justice. Hayek argues that virtues, properly understood, are ascribable only to individual moral agents because “only human conduct can be called just or unjust” (31). “To speak of justice always implies that some person or persons ought, or ought not, to have performed some action” (33). But instances of social injustices refer to states of affairs characterized by inequalities (for example, in well-being, opportunities, economic rewards, and so on), for which there are no identifiable agents who can be held individually accountable for unjust actions. Moreover, a theory of social structural justice of the sort Rawls defends cannot be rescued from incoherence by treating government as a moral agent. As Hayek characterizes Rawls's theory, “the demand for ‘social justice’ is addressed not to the individual but to society – yet society, in the strict sense in which it must be distinguished from the apparatus of government, is incapable of acting for a specific purpose” (64).
Source: Law, Legislation, and Liberty: The Mirage of Social Justice (Vol. 2, University of Chicago Press, 1976),
Contrast the coercive agency requirement for assessing the justice of social structures with Iris Marion Young's claim:
“Structural injustice … exists when social processes put large groups of persons under systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time that these processes enable others to dominate or to have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising capacities available to them. Structural injustice is a kind of moral wrong distinct from the wrongful action of an individual or the repressive policies of a state. Structural injustice occurs as a consequence of many individuals and institutions acting to pursue their particular goals and interests, for the most part, within the limits of the accepted rules and norms.” (p. 52)
Source: Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice, 2011.
The coercion model contrasts starkly with structural models that focus entirely on the profound and pervasive effects on the global poor, rather than defend claims about identifiable agents and their intentions. One merit of the agency-based arguments is that it is responsive to a complaint that Frederick Hayek lodged against Rawls's original social structural theory of domestic justice. Hayek argues that virtues, properly understood, are ascribable only to individual moral agents because “only human conduct can be called just or unjust” (31). “To speak of justice always implies that some person or persons ought, or ought not, to have performed some action” (33). But instances of social injustices refer to states of affairs characterized by inequalities (for example, in well-being, opportunities, economic rewards, and so on), for which there are no identifiable agents who can be held individually accountable for unjust actions. Moreover, a theory of social structural justice of the sort Rawls defends cannot be rescued from incoherence by treating government as a moral agent. As Hayek characterizes Rawls's theory, “the demand for ‘social justice’ is addressed not to the individual but to society – yet society, in the strict sense in which it must be distinguished from the apparatus of government, is incapable of acting for a specific purpose” (64).
Source: Law, Legislation, and Liberty: The Mirage of Social Justice (Vol. 2, University of Chicago Press, 1976),
Contrast the coercive agency requirement for assessing the justice of social structures with Iris Marion Young's claim:
“Structural injustice … exists when social processes put large groups of persons under systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time that these processes enable others to dominate or to have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising capacities available to them. Structural injustice is a kind of moral wrong distinct from the wrongful action of an individual or the repressive policies of a state. Structural injustice occurs as a consequence of many individuals and institutions acting to pursue their particular goals and interests, for the most part, within the limits of the accepted rules and norms.” (p. 52)
Source: Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice, 2011.