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Demands of Justice, Feasible Alternatives, and the Need for Causal Analysis

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Abstract

Many political philosophers hold the Feasible Alternatives Principle (FAP): justice demands that we implement some reform of international institutions P only if P is feasible and P improves upon the status quo from the standpoint of justice. The FAP implies that any argument for a moral requirement to implement P must incorporate claims whose content pertains to the causal processes that explain the current state of affairs. Yet, philosophers routinely neglect the need to attend to actual causal processes. This undermines their arguments concerning moral requirements to reform international institutions. The upshot is that philosophers’ arguments must engage in causal analysis to a greater extent than is typical.

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Notes

  1. Despite using the more general terms “political philosopher” or “philosopher” throughout, I wish to make clear that my argument targets only philosophical work done under the familiar headings of “international political theory” or “global political theory.”

  2. I put the point in terms of the content of the claims that must be incorporated to forestall the worry that I am simply ratcheting up the burden of proof philosophers must bear in showing that P is feasible or likely to improve upon the status quo. I do not argue here that philosophers must bear a heavier burden of proof than they have heretofore borne (although I think this is true). I argue that arguments regarding the practical demands of global justice must include among their premises claims that are about actual causal processes. Extant arguments typically leave out such claims.

  3. The term “international institutions” denotes the system of organizations, practices, and norms that govern the conduct of international actors, including states, nongovernmental organizations, corporations, and private individuals.

  4. I discuss feasibility at length in Wiens (2012, unpublished manuscript).

  5. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to make clear that the relevant constraint here is resistance to being appropriately motivated, not motivational incapacity.

  6. Some might want to say that A could have a duty to motivate others to implement P, if doing so is feasible. Such a duty is covered by my appeal to dynamic duties above.

  7. I defend this view in Wiens (2012, unpublished manuscript).

  8. For convenience, I’ll drop this qualification for the remainder of the paper. But it should be read into any subsequent claim regarding P’s feasibility, unless explicitly noted otherwise.

  9. For a more detailed introduction to causal mechanisms and their role in social explanation, see the essays in Hedström and Swedberg (1998).

  10. Pogge (2005a, 60) advances four necessary conditions for holding an agent morally responsible for observed human rights deficits: (1) the agent “must cooperate in imposing an institutional order” that engenders the deficits; (2) the institutions in question must foreseeably engender the deficits; (3) the deficits must “be reasonably avoidable in the sense that an alternative design of the relevant institutional order would not produce comparable” deficits; and (4) the “availability of such an alternative design must also be foreseeable.” Conditions (3) and (4) are the important ones for my purposes here.

  11. The points made in this paragraph are drawn from Pogge (2008, 211ff).

  12. And, indeed, Pogge charges defenders of the status quo with a burden to prove that there are no feasible alternatives; see Pogge (2008, 215).

  13. Caney also offers a non-instrumental reason for adopting his framework, namely, that individuals have a moral right to “hold accountable—through democratic bodies—the social and economic institutions that exert an impact on what they are able to do” (Caney 2005, 156). This may be a good reason to adopt Caney’s institutional proposals, but it is irrelevant for thinking about whether they satisfy the efficacy condition.

  14. See Hardin (1982) and Olson (1971) for general discussions of collective action problems.

  15. I stress “on its own terms” because philosophers sometimes lapse into meta-level discussions about the limits of social scientific research methods when what is called for is ground-level criticism of an explanation’s capacity to account for the relevant data. Risse (2005, 87ff) provides an example of such a lapse.

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Acknowledgements

Audiences at the Australian National University, University of Michigan, and the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association provided helpful feedback on earlier versions. Many thanks to Sean Aas, Elizabeth Anderson, Christian Barry, Zev Berger, Simon Caney, Bob Goodin, Jonathan Harmon, Thomas Pogge, Peter Vallentyne, Leif Wenar, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (award #752-2007-0083) is gratefully acknowledged.

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Wiens, D. Demands of Justice, Feasible Alternatives, and the Need for Causal Analysis. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 16, 325–338 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9347-6

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