Economic Globalisation and Global Social Justice

Abstract

In the previous Chapter I explained how egalitarian liberals promote the idea of human rights for development, based on the principle of social justice, and how this challenges neo-liberal economists who prefer to talk of individual freedom, under the guarantors of minimal state activity and a free market. In response to the increasing interdependence of states in the course of economic globalisation, the concept and applicability of social justice is considered to extend far beyond the parameters of the nation state. This builds upon Rawls’ idea that the principle of justice in a ‘self-contained society’ is limited to the basic structure of the nation state. However Pogge rejects an inside/outside distinction, in promoting a theory of cosmopolitan global justice that ‘aspires to a single, universal criterion of justice which all persons and peoples can accept as the basis for moral judgments about the global order’ (2002: 33). On this basis, cosmopolitan scholars keenly apply the notion of a ‘difference principle’ to the well-being of disadvantaged or poor people globally, based on equality of opportunity between people and not necessarily between nation states. What does this mean in terms of nation state responsibility and accountability?