Review: Global Justice, Global Institutions

Abstract

GLOBAL JUSTICE, GLOBAL INSTITUTIONS Daniel Weinstock, editor Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007. 386 pp, $44.95 paper (ISBN 9780919491311)How should we think about the subjects, scope, and demands of justice at the global level? What institutional implications follow from various conceptions of global justice? Does the globalization of claims of distributive justice require the globalization of democratic institutions or a world state? In addition, what can philosophy contribute to the resolution of contemporary global problems such as environmental crises and severe poverty? These types of questions preoccupy the distinguished cast of contemporary political theorists and philosophers contributing to this robust edited volume, which originally appeared as a 2005 supplementary volume ofthe Canadian Journal of Philosophy.The stimulating collection of essays reveals some emerging as well as enduring divides among theorists in considering global justice and its institutional implications. One of these divides has to do with the moral significance of the distinction between the international and the domestic. Can we think about justice between political societies in essentially the same way that we have conceived it within a single political society? Or should there be a built-in asymmetry between principles of justice within political societies and between them (69)? The cosmopolitan theorists in this volume - Charles Jones, Simon Caney, Cecile Fabre, Kok-Chor Tan, and Gillian Brock - offer one answer to this question. They posit the moral equality of persons and see individuals as the ultimate unit of moral concern in both domestic and global relations. Given this starting point, the international-domestic distinction has no moral significance. As Fabre argues, it is fundamentally unjust that one's prospects for leading a fulfilling life depend so much on the arbitrary or contingent fact of where one resides.Ofthe thinkers in this group, Tan and Brock offer the most interesting arguments. Both acknowledge principles or values that are conventionally understood to conflict with cosmopolitan accounts of distributive justice, yet both show that such principles or values have moral force only when global distributive justice is operational. For example, Brock asks whether citizens of affluent countries have any robust obligations to work for poverty eradication worldwide. Her relational conception of economic desert leads her to argue that if one endorses desert-based arguments for the acquisition of property rights through market transactions, one should be concerned that the lack of fair global background conditions perverts the principle of equality of opportunity, undermining all claims of desert in the economic sphere (125). Tan's contribution demonstrates that defenders of patriotism must be concerned with achieving globally just conditions, otherwise their practices of giving priority to compatriots' interests and concerns constitute a morally illegitimate form of favouritism. Although James Bohman is not a cosmopolitan theorist, he presents a similar argument. His major claim is that democracy must be disciplined by justice, which means that democrats must be open to the globalization of democratic institutions and committed to realizing the global conditions conducive to democratic moral legitimacy.The two strongest essays in this volume, by Joseph Heath and Nancy Kokaz, challenge the settled divides between cosmopolitans, patriots, and realists, and make important and exciting theoretical and practical contributions to thinking about global justice and global institutions. Both essays clarify and elaborate on the work of John Rawls, the leading liberal political philosopher ofthe 20th century. When Rawls's last work, The Law of Peoples, was published in 1999, leading liberal theorists such as Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge criticized it for failing to extend liberal principles of justice properly to the global realm. …