What is this thing called Global Justice?

Kok-Chor Tan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317566472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

What is this thing called Global Justice? explores the core topics covered on the increasingly popular undergraduate modules on global justice including:

• world poverty

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• economic inequality

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• nationalism

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• human rights

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• humanitarian intervention

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• immigration

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• global democracy and governance

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• climate change

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• international justice.

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Centered on real world problems, this textbook helps students to understand that global justice is not only a field of philosophical inquiry but also of practical importance. Each chapter concludes with a helpful summary of the main ideas discussed, study questions and a further reading guide.

1
^● introduction

This book is intended for the reader who is new to the field of global justice as a philosophical inquiry and who has little or no background in philosophy. My three main objectives are to introduce such a reader to (i) some of the real world problems of global justice and the moral and philosophical challenges they present, (ii) some of the main positions and arguments that philosophers have proposed in response to these problems, (iii) and the philosophical method of analyzing and evaluating these different perspectives and arguments. If there is a grander goal tying together these objectives, it is to show how philosophy can provide the analytical tools for clarifying and addressing the problems of humanity.

Global justice is a philosophical inquiry that is motivated by real world problems. To animate the subject for the reader, thus, I will adopt what we might call a “problems-driven approach” in this book. Instead of organizing my presentation around different theories of global justice, I will structure our discussion around real world problems or issues of global justice that will be largely familiar to any reader. These problems will motivate our inquiry and provide the access points into the philosophical debate. Some of the topics we will investigate are world poverty and economic inequality, human rights and sovereignty, nationalism and cultural diversity, just war and humanitarian intervention, and boundaries and immigration. Through a discussion of these familiar real world problems and an examination of how the main philosophical positions and arguments attempt to address them, I hope the reader can come to appreciate, in the spirit of John Dewey, that philosophy is not just “a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers”, but is “a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men” (Dewey 1981, p. 95).

• WHAT IS GLOBAL JUSTICE AND WHY IT MATTERS

What is global justice? This question can be interpreted substantively, to be asking what global justice would require of us and what a just global order, or a less unjust one, would look like. Indeed, an objective of this book is to orient the reader towards possible (and competing) answers to the substantive question of what global justice is.

But before we begin exploring this substantive question, we should clarify what global justice as a philosophical inquiry is. While the definition of justice, and hence the distinction between justice and other related concepts like ethics, is itself a point of contention among philosophers (more on this below), let us take it for now, ecumenically, that global justice as an inquiry aims to identify our duties to one another in the world at large beyond the confines of our country, and to clarify the basis and form of these duties.¹

Global justice as a normative inquiry

An inquiry into our duties, or what we owe to each other, is a normative inquiry. A normative inquiry is ultimately concerned with “what ought to be” rather than “what is the case”. A normative inquiry is thus basically interested in identifying and justifying standards or principles for guiding action and institutional design. What is the case – for example, how people actually behave or how institutions currently are structured – does not necessarily reflect how things ought to be. The question of global justice (broadly understood) is the question of how individuals and states ought to conduct themselves in relation to others on the world stage, and how international institutions might be restructured if the world were to be more just.

We should be interested in normative inquiries. For instance, we know that extreme global poverty is a fact of our world today. But ought the world to be that way? We know as a fact that human rights are not respected to the same degree in all countries. But should things be that way? Ought human rights to be uniformly and universally affirmed and protected? Or ought there to be cultural variations in how human rights are understood and enforced? If we appreciate that things as they are need not equate to things as they should be, we can appreciate the importance of normative inquiry.

That a normative inquiry is different from an empirical inquiry does not mean that the former may ignore empirical facts altogether. For one thing, what ought to be may be limited by real constraints in the world, including the limits of human physical nature and the limits of institutional organization. More relevantly for the field of global justice, certain facts might be considered as part the parameters of inquiry rather than subjects of inquiry themselves. For instance, most discussions of global justice take it as a given that we live in a world of independent and bounded sovereign states, and the salient normative question for them is how we ought to conduct ourselves or design our shared global order in light of this fact. Moreover, it can be argued that certain facts are granted as preconditions for the inquiry of global justice. For instance, the presumptions that humans have competing interests, that we live in a world of moderate scarcity and that we are mortal beings, dependent on one another and confined to the surface of the earth are the factors that make discussions about global justice pertinent. There would be no need to debate about the just allocation of material goods, or at least that debate would likely take a form wholly unrecognizable to us, if we lived in a world of absolute material abundance, such that human beings need not compete with each other at all for resources. Finally, to the extent that principles are useful only if there are feasible means of realizing them, some philosophers point out that our theorizing about principles should be influenced by the limitations of implementation.

To what extent a normative inquiry is to be constrained by facts – and what kinds of facts are relevant for the inquiry – is itself a point of contention among philosophers. Indeed, some of the topics we will be discussing will engage this crucial question. The key point to note, however, is that even if a normative inquiry has to be appropriately sensitive to certain empirical facts, what it is concerned with ultimately is with how things ought to be.

The distinctiveness of global justice

The question of what we owe to each other is one of the subjects of moral and political philosophy. Global justice is concerned with what we owe to each other in the world at large. So, how is global justice distinct from moral and political philosophy more generally? In a sense, global justice is moral and political philosophy that encompasses the world as a whole. In this regard, global justice is an integral part of moral and political philosophy. Yet global justice is not simply moral philosophy and political philosophy writ large or straightforwardly applied to the global plane.

First, global justice draws attention to specific global issues and potential problems of injustice. These special problems can become new test cases for evaluating our moral and philosophical theories, and can, in fact, compel us to revise them. For instance, global justice forces us to confront this question: What does global economic equality tell us about our theories of egalitarian justice that are traditionally conceived for the context of a single state? Do we need to rethink our theories of egalitarianism in light of this global fact? In short, global justice is not simply an additional site of application for moral and political philosophy. Rather, it provides a new vantage point from which to reexamine, and where necessary recast, our moral and political theories.

Second, the moral and political context of the world order is not simply the moral and political context of the domestic state carried over to the global stage. Individuals stand in very different moral and political relationships to each other globally than in the setting of the domestic state. The international stage has institutional players that aren’t present at the domestic level, such as independent sovereign state entities. On the other hand, the international stage lacks other forms of institutions. There isn’t, for example, a central political authority with coercive powers on the world stage as in the domestic arena. Thus, the moral landscape, as it were, in which individuals interact and relate to each other in the global setting is quite different from the domestic one. It is a matter of debate (as we shall see) as to what moral significance these relational and institutional facts really have. Some philosophers will argue, for example, that these facts are ultimately morally irrelevant. But that is a conclusion to be drawn. At the get-go, these institutional and relational differences make global justice a special subject.

Why global justice matters

What is the use of global justice? What purpose is this normative inquiry supposed to serve? Most of us agree that we live in a world that is patently unjust, and we might think that the central obstacle to achieving a better world seems to be more a problem of political will than of understanding. Indeed, I noted above that this book is organized around familiar problems of justice. But isn’t a philosophical inquiry redundant if the problems are already familiar, and agreed by us to be problems in need of address? Or, even worse, isn’t such an inquiry rather extravagant and indulgent and isn’t the real task before us to change the world, not to interpret it?

Yet, to say that problems are familiar and in need of solutions, is not to say that we have achieved a full understanding of them and that there is a consensus on how we are to address them. Rather, it means that we can appreciate that these issues raise moral challenges, or that we are at least aware of the questions of justice that could be raised about them. The aim of a philosophical inquiry into these questions is to help illuminate the nature of these problems of justice and to identify possible forms of responses and solutions to them.

For example, does justice require that we respond to extreme global poverty? This question might seem straightforward, morally speaking. Yet there is more to it. Even if we all agree that extreme poverty is a bad thing and that something should be done about it, we can still disagree why it is a bad thing, what duties we have in response to it, and what the basis of these duties is. More challengingly, consider the question of whether global justice requires some regulation of global economic inequality. Even though we can understand this question, and debates about economic equality are familiar enough both as a domestic and a global issue, it is far from obvious what the right view is. Some philosophers deny that economic inequality is really a problem of justice, while others argue that if there is a case for egalitarianism more generally, then global egalitarianism follows. One purpose of global justice, in this situation, is to force us to examine more deeply what qualifies as a problem of global justice. In this respect, global justice as a philosophical inquiry helps to guard against moral complacency by pushing us to challenge our assumptions and to be on the lookout for potential blind spots in our moral worldviews. It can, in other words, provide a framework from which to see things in a new light and to uncover hitherto obscured instances of injustice.

On the problems-driven approach to philosophy, one measure of a philosophical theory’s success is its plausibility and reasonableness as practical guidance for addressing the problems of humanity. To the extent that many of the urgent challenges facing us today are global in nature – such as extreme poverty, climate change and human rights abuses – the success of any moral and political philosophical theory is cast into doubt if it cannot or does not engage with these problems of the world.

In short, global justice is a normative inquiry into what we owe to each other globally. That is, it addresses questions of “what ought to be?” rather than questions of “what is”. It is a distinctive subject since the global arena introduces new problems and questions of what we owe to each other. This inquiry matters because its distinctive problems can compel us to reexamine our conventional commitments and standard philosophical theories, and can help expose injustices that we might be blind to.

Justice and ethics

One common view of justice, and this is just one view, is that justice is concerned with how the basic institutions of a social order allocate persons their fundamental rights and responsibilities. So justice is concerned with what we owe to each other, but as this obligation is mediated via our shared institutions. The duties of justice then are primarily duties which have to do with the kinds of institutions we should establish, support and maintain. On this understanding, justice can be contrasted with (one interpretation of) ethics, which is concerned with what individuals owe to each other interpersonally. Accordingly, global justice is concerned with the kinds of global institutions we ought to support, and global ethics has to do with our responsibilities to other persons more directly. Thus, the question of our interpersonal responsibility in response, say, to famine is a question of global ethics, whereas the question of what global institutions we ought to establish and support in response to global economic inequality is a question of global justice.²

On this more exacting definition of ethics and justice, this book ought to be titled “What is this Thing Called Global Justice and Global Ethics?” But this terminological issue need not detain us further if we are clear on what we take “justice” to include. We will take our main question to be that of what responsibilities we have to each other, broadly conceived, institutionally and interpersonally. So long as the reader is aware of the difference, our choice of label is less important for the present purpose.

Approach and organization

This book introduces students to the subject of global justice by inviting them to engage in the inquiry itself. The book is thus, as mentioned, organized around certain topics or problems of global justice. Through these topics and problems, the reader will be introduced to the main competing philosophical positions and the forms of arguments in support of them. If this book had a subtitle, it would be The Problems of Global Justice.

Although I will refrain from explicitly supporting a substantive position over others, I occasionally, within the bounds of a critical introduction, raise more critical questions for some positions than others. But the reader should take this as an invitation to counter my views, and I hope the study questions at the end of each chapter can help facilitate this. What is important is that I present the different positions and arguments fairly and accurately enough (which I hope I am able to do).

At the end of each chapter are references to some primary sources that can be seen as companion pieces to the chapters. Since one of my aspirations is to provide a reference book for students in an introductory course on global justice, my list of primary sources reflects the seminal articles and papers that are commonly assigned in such a course. These publications are not necessarily the most recent to appear in the literature (although some are recent). Rather, they are seminal works that have set, and are continuing to set, the terms of the current debate. Where it might be helpful, I will subdivide these primary references into topics. A list of further reading included at the end of each chapter supplements the primary sources with suggestions for more recent works and writings that have advanced the agenda of the primary publications.

My approach within each chapter, for the most part, is to identify the representative positions and the outline of their arguments on a given topic, and not to engage with the details of the particular arguments of specific authors. It is the normative perspective and forms of arguments that certain philosophers represent that I wish the reader to become acquainted with first rather than the specifics of particular arguments. My hope is that readers will be inspired and equipped by our discussion to go on to study the particular arguments of specific authors on their own. Focusing on the big picture in this way, we can better avoid losing s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 World poverty
• 3 Global economic equality
• 4 Against global egalitarianism
• 5 Nationalism and patriotic sentiments
• 6 The universality of human rights
• 7 Human rights: state sovereignty, culture and gender
• 8 Just wars and humanitarian intervention
• 9 Borders: immigration, secession and territory
• 10 Climate change justice: sharing the burden
• 11 Global democracy: cosmopolitan versus international
• 12 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index