Abstract
The problem of how justice should be considered at the global level has provoked one of the most controversial discussions in contemporary political and moral philosophy. An aim of these polemics has been to find an adequate answer to the question of whether global distributive justice should be understood as social justice in the sense that the principles of justice, accepted at the national level, should be extended to all mankind or, just the opposite, if global justice should be understood as an international justice, which requires the development of the principles that would enable fair interactions between nations and countries, which should be quite different from those principles that allow interindividual equity within nations or nation states. The chapter briefly discusses the reasons why philosophers like Beitz and Pogge are convinced that the principles of justice, accepted at the national level, should also apply to the world as a whole and, on the other hand, why Rawls, Nagel, and some others think just the opposite. I argue that, from the cosmopolitan point of view, principles of global distributive justice should apply equally and impartially to all human beings (Kok-Chor Tan) as citizens of the world and that commitment to cosmopolitan principles of distributive justice does not entail commitment to a world state (O’Neill, O. (2008). Rights, obligations and world hunger. In T. Pogge & K. Horton (Eds.), Global ethics, St. Paul: Paragon House, 139–155).
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Notes
- 1.
These differences can be seen, for instance, if we take into consideration three different “cosmopolitan approaches to the problem of global poverty”: utilitarian (Singer), rights-based (Shue), and a duty-based (O’Neill) approach (Tan 2004), 40–53).
- 2.
Maffettone 2007.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Tan, Justice without Borders, IX.
- 7.
Ibid., 56.
- 8.
Vandevelde and Van Parijs 2005–2006).
- 9.
Tan, Justice without Borders, 4.
- 10.
Rawls and Kelly 2001), 42–43.
- 11.
Critical analysis of this dispute is in Van Parijs (2007, 642–649).
- 12.
Ibid., 641. They obviously agree with Rawls, who argues that the duty of assistance is sufficient for securing human rights and meeting basic needs in burdened societies. However, “if we accept that rich countries have only a duty of humanity to poorer countries, we are also accepting,” says Kok-Chor Tan, “that the existing baseline resource and wealth distribution is a just one” (Tan, Justice without Borders, 66).
- 13.
The difference between duties of global distributive justice and duties of humanity is important: “while duties of humanity aim to redistribute wealth, duties of justice aim to identify what counts as a just distribution in the first place” (ibid., 67).
- 14.
Cosmopolitans believe that individuals are “the ultimate unit of moral concern” (Tan, Justice without Borders, 1), while the so-called statists – such as Nagel and Rawls – think just the opposite, namely, that the fundamental moral units are institutions simply because “the principles of justice apply to institutions and not directly to individuals” (Sebastiano Maffettone, Un mondomigliore: GiustiziaglobaletraLeviatano e Cosmopoli (Roma: Luiss University Press, 2013), 107.
- 15.
Sebastiano Maffettone, Un mondo migliore: Giustizia globale tra Leviatano e Cosmopoli, 116.
- 16.
Ibid. This universal duty – and the correspondent basic socioeconomic right to subsistence – “rest on the characteristic of human vulnerability. They are imposed by the fact that our weakness as human beings requires a necessary support that cannot be deferred” (ibid., 119).
- 17.
Ibid., 94, 117.
- 18.
According to Pogge, the notion of “harming the poor” should be “understood as making them worse off than they should have been, i.e. how well off they would have been had the international economic order been just. To know what ‘harming’ is, one therefore needs to know what justice requires,” and “not the other way round” (Van Parijs, International Distributive Justice, 649).
- 19.
Pogge (2005), 34. The argument that he uses in order to give proof for this assertion is the following: “the duty not to assault people is more stringent than the duty to prevent such assaults by others” (ibid.). However, this does not mean that he believes – as some critics have attributed to him – “that any negative duty, including the duty to refrain from doing some small harm, is more stringent that every positive duty, including the duty to rescue thousands of children” (ibid., 34–35).
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Pogge (2008), 531.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Thomas Pogge, “Real World Justice,” 34.
- 24.
Pogge (2008), 531. These duties “do not fit well into the conventional dichotomy of positive and negative duties” because they are at the same time both negative and positive. “They are positive insofar as they require the agent to do something and also negative insofar as this requirement is continuous with the duty to avoid causing harm to others” (Thomas Pogge, “Real World Justice,” 34).
- 25.
Thomas Pogge, “Real World Justice,” 33, 36. However, this does not mean that the existing global economic and institutional order is the only cause of world poverty. He admits that bad national policies, bad social institutions, and corrupt and incompetent leaders are in poor countries causal factors as well. But despite this, the global institutional order is one which “powerfully shapes the national regimes especially in poor countries as well as the composition, incentives, and opportunities of their ruling elites. For example, corrupt rule in poor countries is made much more likely by the fact that our global order accords such rulers” (ibid., 49). Another example of the impact of the global institutional order on poor countries: “In the WTO negotiations, the affluent countries insisted on continued and asymmetrical protections of their markets through tariffs, quotas, anti-dumping duties, export credits, and subsidies to domestic producers, greatly impairing the export opportunities of even the very poorest countries” (ibid., 50).
- 26.
Singer (2008), 3. However, his argument is also “deliberately vague, since he wants his conclusions to follow logically from a variety of ethical positions—from his own consequentialism, on which we would have a duty to transfer our own resources to the point where marginal utility could not be increased, to a comparatively weaker position which would only entail that we give up wealth until something “of moral importance” needs be sacrificed” (Blake 2013).
- 27.
Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” 3. By saying that “without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance” Singer means “without causing anything else comparably bad to happen, or doing something that is wrong in itself, or failing to promote some moral good, comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent” (ibid., 3). Singer gives an explanation on how to understand the second premise in the following way: “If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing” (ibid., 3).
- 28.
Ibid., 4–5.
- 29.
Ibid., 4.
- 30.
This objection is presented and critically discussed in Dower (2000, 279).
- 31.
Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” 5.
- 32.
Miller (2007), 237, n. 8. David Miller argues that Singer’s drowning child example is “a very bad analogy for thinking about responsibility for global poverty” since he “asks no questions about outcome responsibility for global poverty: he does not ask why so many are poor, whether responsibility lies with rich nations, with the governments of poor nations, etc. – he treats poverty as if it were a natural phenomenon like earthquake” (ibid., 234–237). But even if this critic is correct, it is at the same time irrelevant to such conceptions of positive duty to help as are conceived and defended by Singer and Maffettone. These duties require us to help whoever is suffering from extreme poverty, regardless of who is responsible for global poverty.
- 33.
Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” 7. “Supererogation” is a term which means “paying out more than is due (super-erogare),” and it is used as a name “of actions that go beyond the call of duty.”
- 34.
Onora O’Neill, “Rights, Obligations, and World Hunger,” in Pogge, Horton, Global Ethics, 148. Charity lies beyond one’s duty. It is not required by justice: giving what is owed to one as his right. For this reason, it is not the fulfillment of a duty for others’ rights.
- 35.
According to Thomas Nagel, charity – which is still the mechanism that is the most frequently used in order to help those who are in extreme difficulty – is not enough “because of limits on what it can achieve.” In addition, charity is for him problematic in the context of global poverty “because of what it presupposes” as a condition of its successful functioning: “it is not threatening for those asked to give.” There are two reasons for this. “First, it is left to them to determine when the sacrifice they are making for others has reached a point at which any further sacrifice would be supererogatory. Second, it does not question their basic entitlement to what they are asked to donate. The legitimacy of their ownership, and of the processes by which it came about, is not challenged. It is merely urgent that, because of the severe need of others, those who are well off should voluntarily part with some of the wealth to which they are morally quite entitled. For this reason people are especially happy to donate help to the victims” of natural catastrophes (Nagel 2008), 52–53). Looking from this perspective, we can see that the difference between charity and intermediate duties, defended by Pogge, is not only in the fact that charity is voluntary while intermediate duties are obligatory for rich states and their citizens but rather in that what they presuppose. Charity presupposes that the rich states and their citizens are simply generous and, of course, innocent regarding global poverty, while intermediate duties presuppose just the opposite, namely, that they are both directly and indirectly responsible for severe global poverty.
- 36.
Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” 6–9.
- 37.
Sebastiano Maffettone, Un mondo migliore: Giustizia globale tra Leviatano e Cosmopoli, 116.
- 38.
Article 25 of the UNDHR states: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services ….” In Article 11.1 of the ICESCR, it is stated: “The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions. The States Parties will take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right, recognizing to this effect the essential importance of international co-operation based on free consent.”
- 39.
ICESCR, Article 11.2.
- 40.
I have discussed some problems regarding the fulfillment of the universal right to education in a similar context elsewhere (Kodelja (2013), 15–23).
- 41.
Pogge (2001), 187.
- 42.
It seems that poverty and absence of education are caught in a vicious circle: poverty causes lack of education, and in turn, lack of education causes poverty.
- 43.
- 44.
Ibid., 118–119.
- 45.
O’Neill (2001), 180–195.
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Kodelja, Z. (2016). Cosmopolitan Idea of Global Distributive Justice. In: Papastephanou, M. (eds) Cosmopolitanism: Educational, Philosophical and Historical Perspectives. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30430-4_7
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