Global Justice and Development

J. Culp

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137389930
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Defending a procedural conception of global justice that calls for the establishment of reasonably democratic arrangements within and beyond the state, this book argues for a justice-based understanding of social development and justifies why a democracy-promoting international development practice is a requirement of global justice.

1

Introduction

1 A global village?

Increasingly since the early 1980s, economic globalization – driven by the active political promotion of market liberalization – with support from other significant factors such as the Internet has intertwined the lives of the people around the world. Our economic interdependence became unmistakable in September 2008 when the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers investment bank induced heavy financial turmoil around the world, resulting in a global economic slowdown and even a recession in many regions. The financial crisis that has prevailed since mid-2007 is a global phenomenon that concerns most of this world’s inhabitants in some way. This situation, in which all people on earth share a common fate by virtue of their economic as well as cultural and political interactions, often leads to the use of the term ‘global village’ (McLuhan, 2002 [1962], p. 31) to capture the sense of virtual closeness that is the distinctive feature of today’s global social relations.

If we think of humanity as a village, however, one has to acknowledge – at least prima facie – that from a moral point of view the social relations in the village are outrageous. If the world were a single village with 1,000 inhabitants, nearly 500 would be living in economic poverty and about 200 would suffer from hunger, lack shelter, and have no access to clean drinking water. And these 200 would be collectively poorer than the village’s richest person (cf. Beck and Poferl, 2010, pp. 9–10). The moral reactions that the metaphor of the global village provokes, when interpreted in light of the current socioeconomic conditions, stand in stark contrast to the dominant moral sentiments today, which have largely remained domestic rather than becoming ‘globalized’ as well. One can readily notice the contrast by observing how discussions about domestic social and economic policies take place in comparison to debates about international development policies. Not long ago Sloterdijk (2009) proposed in one of Germany’s most influential newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, to eliminate a coercion based tax system and to permit instead well-to-do German citizens to donate as much as they deemed adequate to the finance ministry and their fellow citizens. He argued that this institutional change in the transfer of resources throughout society is necessary in order to capture the true meaning of this societal transfer in question, namely, a generous gift of the wealthy to the poor. The reactions to Sloterdijk’s proposal, for instance by Honneth (2009) in Die Zeit, a widely read German newspaper, have been very harsh. By contrast, while the global distributive mechanism de facto functions according to Sloterdijk’s agenda, a public moral outcry of similar magnitude in light of this long lasting status quo has yet to be heard.

2 Another world is necessary

The individualist interpretation

In light of this mismatch between, on the one hand, the actual global interconnectedness that encourages us to think of global social relations as similar to those of a village and, on the other hand, the prevailing domestic bias in global politics, the proposition that another world is necessary appears readily intelligible. A world is necessary in which ‘personal identification with the ... world’s hungry, miserable and dependent’ no longer demonstrates ‘the power of moral imagination’ (Habermas, 1969, pp. 183–4), but rather a self-evident reflection of the fact that the world has shrunk and that we are all neighbors, so to speak, within a global village.¹ Already in 1972, the utilitarian moral philosopher Singer (2008 [1972]) argued along these lines in his eminent article ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’. He urged that in the same way in which people feel morally obliged to save a drowning child from a pond, persons living in a rich country should feel morally obliged to stop the suffering that people experience in poor countries. Since donations to certain international or non-governmental organizations would be an easy way to reduce human suffering abroad, Singer contended, persons in wealthy countries should act on this moral obligation and donate substantial amounts of their income to needy persons in poor countries. So Singer claimed that another world is necessary – a world in which our moral commitments are congruent with the virtual closeness that globalization has brought about, such that the misery of so many no longer co-exists with the great fortunes of a few. Being a utilitarian, however, Singer (2008 [1972], p. 3) added that it would be excusable not to donate only if the value of a potential donation would be of ‘comparable moral importance’ for the donor of the rich countries as for the recipient of the poor countries. This demand strikes many non-utilitarian philosophers (Smart and Williams, 1973, pp. 116–17) as implausible, because fulfilling such a demand, especially under conditions of widespread noncompliance with this demand, could require people to live only slightly above the level of sufficiency and could deprive persons from their capacity of being authors of their own lives.

Libertarians, for instance, would reject Singer’s argument, claiming that while one may choose voluntarily to donate significant amounts of one’s holdings so as to prevent human suffering, there is never a duty to do so. They could agree that another world is possible in the sense that, if people were willing to sacrifice their holdings to prevent the suffering of others, then the world would indeed be a different one, a world in which human misery would no longer co-exist with staggering abundance. Yet they would resist the claim that people of rich countries stand under a moral obligation to relieve human suffering in poor countries. To libertarians, a world in which people donate so much of their holdings that widespread human misery and radical socioeconomic inequality ends is a mere possibility, but no moral necessity.

Kantians, on the other hand, acknowledge a so-called ‘duty of humanity’ and thus indeed could agree with Singer that up to a certain point people generally stand under a duty to use some of their holdings to promote others’ well-being.² The relation between the sacrifice that the potential duty-bearer accrues and the benefit that the recipient receives determines the threshold as to when people can legitimately refrain from assisting others. Therefore, if someone is in dire need and if it is possible for another person to relieve this person from suffering at a relatively small personal cost, then this other person has a duty to do so. Only if the sacrifice of relieving another person from dire need involves a more substantial cost might the obligation flowing from the duty of humanity not be applicable. So a Kantian endorsement of a duty of humanity represents a middle ground between potentially very demanding utilitarian obligations, on the one hand, and the libertarian denial of any duty to promote the well-being of others on the other.

However, it is not immediately clear whether a Kantian understanding of humanitarian obligations would support only the proposition that another world is possible or the morally more exigent statement that another world is necessary. Clearly a Kantian could endorse the former slogan in the same spirit as the libertarian. That is, he or she could concede the possibility that most rich people might eventually become willing to employ large amounts of their holdings to promote others’ well-being. And their doing so would obviously make our world – the global village – a different one. On the other hand, while the duty of humanity certainly commands very many of the donations that Singer’s utilitarian principle also requires – namely, all those that can be realized at small personal cost – it is not so obvious that Kantians would support the proposition that another world is necessary solely on the basis of the duty of humanity. After all, they might say, many people already donate parts of their income to non-governmental organizations and, besides, many countries maintain the practice of granting official development assistance (ODA).

One could object, of course, and argue that fulfilling our obligations of humanity requires much more than that. But this is a difficult argument to make because obligations that flow from the duty of humanity are by their very nature indeterminate and require judgment in their application. Moreover, even if one could make a compelling argument that some people have to do more in order to fulfill their humanitarian obligations, it is not clear that doing more would make our world really a substantively different one. Doubling the level of ODA, for instance, may indeed do a lot of good, but it might still leave the global village in a situation of high socioeconomic inequality, with a significant portion of its inhabitants living in miserable conditions. So it is far from evident that, on the basis of humanitarian obligations, one can argue that another world is necessary.

In the end, then, the statement that another world is necessary may actually indeed simply show ‘the power of moral imagination’; it may appeal to morally heroic utilitarians, but it cannot be grounded in either a more down-to-earth Kantian account of humanitarian obligations or a libertarian understanding as to what persons owe one another. So it seems as if the alter- and anti-globalization movements of the World Social Forum (2012) wisely chose the slogan ‘another world is possible’, because changing the world is not an imperative that people from these three dominant moral outlooks (that is, utilitarians, Kantians and libertarians) could all accept as a categorical one. Rather, these social movements characterize the project of changing the world as a fascinating ‘vision of the universal’ that is in principle achievable and may be worthwhile to undertake despite, as Benhabib (2004, p. 16) puts it, its ‘permanent tug of war ... [with] the attachments of the particular’.

The institutionalist interpretation

This way of rejecting the statement that another world is necessary may have gone too quickly, however. It focused exclusively on the question of what people, and the world’s richer people in particular, are obligated to do with their own resources so as to promote the well-being of others. And the respective utilitarian, libertarian, and Kantian answers have been, to put it very crudely, ‘a lot’, ‘nothing’, and ‘something’. Thereby our approach proceeded on the assumption that the actual global distribution of holdings would serve as a suitable baseline for answering this question. In other words, the answers have been framed solely in individualistic terms and have neglected the institutional dimension, or the global system of entitlements that decrees the holdings that various people have in the first place. But the statement that another world is necessary can also mean – more radically – that it is necessary to change this global system of entitlements.

How are we to understand, if at all, this rather grandiose question whether the global system of entitlements should be changed? Until about 1970 skepticism regarding this question may indeed have made good sense. As long as the social sciences were presenting the world as an assembly of scattered villages, populated by separate groups that have come to be known as nations, the very notion of a global system of entitlements would have seemed misplaced. Without a global institutional order decreeing what individuals and groups are entitled to, asking whether the system should be changed would seem to be in vain, for there would be no system to analyze at the global level in the first place. In this spirit, or so it seems, even Rawls’s seminal discussion of, as Caney (2005a, p. 112; 2007, p. 278) and Pogge (2010a, p. 15) put it, ‘institutional’ as opposed to merely ‘interactional moral diagnostics’ in A Theory of Justice (1971, pp. 54–60, 108–14), which has been described as epitomizing the left-leaning, social-democratic Zeitgeist, remained largely concerned with domestic issues.

Yet in light of the intensification of globalization and transnationalization processes that occurred in the late 20th century, Rawls’s short treatment of the so-called ‘Law of Nations’ (1971, pp. 377–80) in A Theory of Justice and even his later account in The Law of Peoples (1999a) increasingly appeared to be proper only for ‘a bygone Westphalian order’ (Buchanan, 2000). Since then, however, the theoretical landscape has radically changed and many theorists have undertaken wide-ranging examinations of the global system of entitlements that transcend mere ‘interactional moral diagnostics’ (Barry, 1973, pp. 128–33; Danielson, 1973, pp. 331–40; Scanlon, 1973, pp. 1066–7; Beitz, 1999a [1979]; Pogge, 1989; Moellendorf, 2002; Tan, 2004). These writers have argued that in a world that the social sciences increasingly recognize and explain as globalized and transnationalized, the Rawlsian ‘institutional moral diagnostics’ would work very well on the global plane as well.³ For what, if anything, could justify attempting, like Rawls, to construct an account of what sort of social and political institutions would constitute a just society, while refraining from an attempt to identify just social and political institutions at the global level?

Beitz (1999a [1979]) addressed this question in Political Theory and International Relations and argued that in an age of globalization there would be no good reason to restrict a theory of institutional justice to the domestic case only. Moreover, he claimed that domestic and global relations are sufficiently analogous to justify the global validity of Rawls’s specifically liberal-egalitarian conception of ‘justice as fairness’. With respect to the moral adequacy of the global system of entitlements, Beitz claimed that the global institutional order could qualify as distributively just only if it maximized the life prospects (in terms of income and wealth) of the members of the economically least-advantaged group. Consequently, Beitz’s (1999a [1979], pp. 128–9, 150–3) account supported the more radical, institutionalist interpretation of the proposition that another world is necessary: whether or not it is necessary for richer individuals to donate to the world’s poor, it is necessary to change the global institutional order so that the global system of entitlements would maximally benefit the life prospects of those who are economically least well-off.

Utilitarians, such as Murphy (1998), would reject this institutionalist interpretation of the above proposition, because it relies on a distinction between a moral theory of institutions and a moral theory of individual conduct. Utilitarian monism, however, which argues that different principles for individual and institutional human relations are derived from the effect that compliance with such principles has with regard to the promotion of some conception of the good, has received severe criticism. Rawls, for instance, makes the case that, while under certain conditions the full pursuit of one’s personal conception of the good is an appropriate principle for individual conduct, an analogous principle to maximize the sum of the good of all members of society is not justifiable. Given the separateness of persons, that is, the fact that persons lead lives of their own, the objective of maximizing total social good cannot serve as a justification for requiring individuals to constantly further the overall good when doing so causes them to lose their capacity of formulating, revising, and pursuing their personal conception of the good.

On the other hand, libertarians and Kantians would agree that if the global system of entitlements is unjust, then institutional reform is necessary, even if that means that individuals have to modify quite radically their beliefs about what belongs to them. Libertarians and Kantians, that is, would accept that, in order to fulfill demands of justice, individuals could be asked to incur significant burdens, although these two groups would claim that, once a just distribution of holdings is achieved, individuals may permissibly do nothing at all (the libertarian view) or only relatively little (the Kantian view) for the well-being of others. Furthermore, both could also accept that failing to consider first the moral adequacy of the distributional status quo would eventually nourish, as Freire calls it, ‘false generosity’ (1970, p. 44; cf. also Barry, 2008 [1982], pp. 206–7), that is, the alleged expression of humanitarian ‘generosity’ even while perpetuating the distributive injustice that makes this kind of generosity at all possible.

However, before endorsing the statement that another world is necessary in Beitz’s sense, libertarians and Kantians would have to examine whether it actually is appropriate to view domestic relations as sufficiently analogous to global relations. For otherwise one cannot make sense of either the claim that ‘institutional moral diagnostics’ can be employed for assessing the global distribution of holdings or of the claim that a just global distribution would have to be determined by reference to an egalitarian distributive principle like the difference principle.

Theorizing global justice

Initially, Beitz’s case for employing the Rawlsian difference principle globally rested on the claim that because of the fact of globalization, one now has to ask what particular global distribution of holdings would be just. At first Beitz meant to argue that since a conception of distributive justice should determine, following Rawls (1971, p. 4), the ‘appropriate distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation’, the existence of a global scheme of social cooperation would permit employing standards of justice to assess social relations globally. Later, however, Beitz conceded...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• Part I  Global Justice
• Part II  Global Development
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index