Laura Valentini: Justice in a Globalized World: A Normative Framework

Abstract

Laura Valentini’s Justice in a Globalized World presents, with admirable clarity, a new, hybrid conception of global justice that builds on insights from both cosmopolitans and statists, especially their relational variants. Relational cosmopolitans generally argue that substantial economic cooperation and interdependence (i.e., the relevant economic relations) trigger robust obligations of distributive justice. They then argue that, as a matter of fact, these relations obtain globally in virtue of intensifying global trade, capital flows, and labor migration. Thus, relational cosmopolitans conclude that obligations of distributive justice directly apply to the global economic order. Relational statists, by contrast, argue that obligations of distributive justice are trigged by coercive, political relations. Furthermore, these coercive relations only obtain—and can only be justified—within a state. As a consequence, the global order is a ‘secondary site’ of justice that ought to be concerned with assisting and protecting legitimate states but does not directly trigger obligations of distributive justice. Valentini’s view occupies a conceptual space that borrows from both the cosmopolitan and statist conceptions. From the statists, she agrees that obligations of distributive justice are triggered by coercion. Yet, pace the statist conception, Valentini argues that the global order is itself coercive. Thus, Valentini argues that, on the statists’ own view, they ought to be committed to globally-oriented obligations of distributive justice. While cosmopolitans argue for uniquely global obligations of justice because globalization has led to economic cooperation, Valentini argues that globalization—and its concomitant institutional regimes as described by the cosmopolitans—actually creates sources and loci of coercive power. So, Valentini accepts the normative conception of statists—at least in its general terms—but she rejects the statist application of that conception to the global order. Statists miss the coercive nature of the global order, argues Valentini, because they have an impoverished view of coercion that fails to detect these new sources of global power. Statists have, incorrectly, thought that the only relevant kind of coercion is ‘interactional,’ which is defined as “Agent A coerces another agent B if A foreseeably and avoidably places non-trivial constraints on B’s freedom, compared to B’s freedom in the absence of A’s intervention” (130). This type of coercion is ascribable to a single agent, and represents a rights violation. Yet, the Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2014) 17:587–588 DOI 10.1007/s10677-014-9509-9