Global Justice Debate Research Articles

Internalist and Integrationist Theories of (Global) Justice

The global justice debate has increasingly moved toward the analysis of concrete issues in global politics, such as trade, migration, or climate change. This raises a methodological question: should the demands of justice in these domains be theorized independently or in conjunction with one another? Integrationists have championed the latter approach, arguing that it is better suited to guide our practical judgments. In contrast, internalists maintain that each domain is governed by its own set of principles. This paper defends the plausibility of the internalist approach against integrationist challenges. By examining different interpretations of internalism, it first seeks to provide a clearer overview of the methodological dispute. It then analyzes various arguments for integrationism, showing that their implications are more limited than their proponents believe. Finally, it focuses on the question of practical guidance, highlighting the value of idealized domain-specific theorizing in guiding transitions toward just arrangements.

Global justice must be seen to be done—A defense of integrated pluralism

Over the past two decades the academic literature on global distributive justice has generated a proliferation of positions regarding the question of how to conceive a globally just distribution of goods. One important development within this global justice debate is the emergence and increasing influence of several Pluralist theorists of global justice—including, perhaps most prominently, Fraser, R. Miller, and Risse. This article argues that Pluralists have not yet sufficiently engaged with the difficulty of how their conceptions of global justice could satisfy the publicity condition. This condition requires that the demands of justice must be publicly known to be recognized and fulfilled. This article explains why meeting this condition is especially difficult for the Pluralists. Then, it outlines an Integrated Pluralist position which, by placing special emphasis on global background justice, can meet the publicity condition. This position “integrates” concerns of justice emerging from a plurality of sites of justice. Thereby it follows “Integrationist” approaches to global justice—like those of Caney and Walton—which claim that the contents of justice of a given site of justice must not be determined in isolation from contents of other sites of justice.

Reporting on African Responses to COVID-19: African Philosophical Perspectives for Addressing Quandaries in the Global Justice Debate

The first case of COVID-19 infection in Africa was recorded in Egypt on 14 February 2020. Following this, several projections of the possible devastating effect that the virus can have on the population of African countries were made in the Western media. This paper presents evidence for Africa’s successful responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and under-reporting or misrepresentation of these successes in Western media. It proceeds to argue for accounting for these successes in terms of Africa’s communitarian way of life and conceptions of self, duty, and rights; and that a particular orientation in theorizing on global justice can highlight the injustices inherent in the misrepresentation of these successes and contribute shared perspectives to formulating a framework of values and concepts that would facilitate the implementation of global policy goals for justice. The paper is thus grounded in a rejection of the insular tenets of theorizing prevalent in the global justice debate and to persistent inclinations in Western scholarship to the thinking that theorizing in the African context that draws inspiration from the cultural past has little to contribute to the quest for justice globally. On the contrary, it argues that reflexive critique of cultural history is a necessary source of normative ideals that can foster tolerant coexistence and a cooperative endeavour toward shared conceptions of justice in the contemporary world.

The coloniality of time in the global justice debate: de-centring Western linear temporality

ABSTRACT Differences between, and struggles over, plural forms of time and temporal categories is a crucial yet underexplored aspect of debates about global justice. This article aims to reorient the global justice debate towards the question of time by, first of all, critically problematising the coloniality of the Western temporal assumptions underlying the literature, and furthermore by stressing the need to account for the plurality of time. I argue that in the global justice debate, the implicitly racialised teleological narrative of linear time is particularly prevalent in the discourse on development as well as the debate on historical injustices. In order to avoid the epistemic violence resulting from the uncritical acceptance of Western temporal frameworks as universally valid, global normative theorising needs to move reflections on time to the centre of their considerations. This article suggests that relational theory offers pertinent resources for making sense of alternative ways of narrating, conceptualising, and experiencing temporality. The article encourages a conversation between Western and non-Western relational approaches, proposing the temporal dimension of feminist as well as African ubuntu thought as particularly promising starting points for contesting the epistemological privilege of analytic approaches dominating the global justice literature.

Tax Justice Beyond National Borders-International or Interpersonal?

Recent times have seen growing calls for considerations of justice to be given a greater role in international taxation. The main driver of these calls are distributive concerns, although agreement is still missing as to what this means both in principle and in practice. This article asks whether it is the task of international tax law at all to implement principles of distributive justice beyond the national context and gives an overview of how the ‘global justice debate’ in contemporary political philosophy bears on this question. When it comes to distributive duties with respect to taxing rights, it is crucial to differentiate between the collective and the individual level. Absent a robust assumption of a benevolent and capable government on the recipient side, the reallocation of taxing rights from state to state does not necessarily help when it comes to fulfilling duties of justice towards individuals.

Criticism of language and analysis of law. A pragmatics of normativity and social (de)ontology

One important methodological challenge to normative disciplines like political or legal theory is if the method in question is purely descriptive or can be used to justify norms. Secondly, trying to incorporate ordinary language in the analysis of political concepts, this part utilizes arguments employed in the global justice debate. So, I will divide the paper into three parts: 1. Is the feasibility interpreted as a requirement of normative political theories? Firstly, I clarify the relation between experience and normativity; then I take a look at how the proto-normative and normative structures gained from experience become norms with a “critical” function. Finally, I will (re-)consider the normative feasibility criteria suggested by Hahn and by Räikkä. 2. After building a connection between the epistemic conception of criticism and the conception of politics within Kantian work, I first present Michelle Kosch’s Fichte, but then criticizing Fichte’s argument. Then, as Dworkin’s account of participation in coercion is challenged, I briefly elaborate on a roughly Dworkinian account of political equality. Lastly, I want to look into the relation between technical and ordinary definitions for political concepts, using elements taken by semantic and pragmatic old models, using populism as a case study. 3. In the concluding appendix, the connections between law and linguistic analysis of normative sentences will be examined, under the perspective of the Genoa Legal Realism.

Debts, Poverty and Justice

In this article, I make the idea that poverty outcomes are not necessarily morally relevant for assessing policies as clear as possible by discussing a specific case within the global justice debate: sovereign debts. The claim I would like to defend is that generating poverty among the population of a poor state as a result of a loan is independent from the fact that such debt is morally binding. People might become poorer as a result of a loan, and the loan might still be binding; and people might not be negatively affected as a result of a loan, and the loan might be non-binding. It is of course often the case that there is something wrong with lending that generates massive poverty. However, in my view, the fact that lending and poverty exist parallel to each other is not what makes a loan binding or non-binding. Thus, it is misguided to measure poverty as a way of testing the bindingness of a debt. I will proceed as follows. First, I will explain in some detail Pogge’s view about lending and justice, as he is the main defender of the outcome-view that I am trying to refute. Second, I will show two possible worries about Pogge’s view. I will call the first one the “agnosticism objection” and the second one the “normative limitation objection”. Third, I will briefly describe my own account of the conditions under which lending would count as non-binding. This account does not necessarily rely on outcomes.

The implications of being implicated. Individual responsibility and structural injustice

Within the global justice debate the demandingness objection is primarily aimed at utilitarian theorists who defend a version of the ‘optimizing principle of beneficence’ to deal with the problem of global poverty. The problem of demandingness, however, is hardly ever raised within the context of the dominant institutional theories of global justice that see severe poverty as a human rights violation. Nor are the fundamental underlying questions posed by most of these theorists. Which specific responsibilities do individual moral agents have regarding institutional and structural forms of injustice (1)? Which political spheres, organized public spaces, or political practices are necessary to create a setting in which these responsibilities can be discharged (2)? Does a ‘defensible and psychologically feasible conception of responsibility’ (Scheffler 2002, 62) exist that is restrictive – yet demanding – enough to deal with the complex challenges of our globalizing age (3). This paper addresses questions (1) and (3) on the basis of a critical analysis of Iris Marion Young’s social connection theory of responsibility.

Should African Thinkers Engage in the Global Justice Debate?

This article asks under what conditions and on what terms current African thinkers can and should engage in the global justice debate. Following summary overviews of the Western-led global justice debate and post-independence African philosophy as two essentially separate, non-intersecting philosophical discourses, I go on to argue that the current generation of African thinkers can fruitfully intervene in the global justice debate if it succeeds in building on philosophical insights of the first-generation of African thinkers. In particular, current African thinkers might fruitfully engage the notion of ‘false universals’ developed by first generation African thinkers to challenge Western philosophical conceptions in general in order to re-invigorate recently neglected critical inquiry into the status of many of this more particular debate’s unreflective universality claims. Re-invigorating these more distinctively philosophical aspects of the global justice debate is particularly important against the background of an international research climate that increasingly favours ‘impact-oriented’ approaches to philosophy and to the humanities more generally.

Justice, Injustice, and Critical Potential Beyond Borders: A Multi‐Dimensional Affair

AbstractUntil fairly recently, positions within the global justice debate have been quite polarised along the statism/cosmopolitanism dichotomy. Recently, the dichotomy has been challenged (although somewhat unsystematically), but the idea that the proximity of a view to cosmopolitanism also tracks its critical potential in political terms has not. This article rejects this premise. In order to do so, it also provides a novel, more systematic challenge to the statism/cosmopolitanism dichotomy. The main suggestion is that we should consider two aspects simultaneously, and identify positions within the debate on the basis of how they relate to both of these. First of all, participants in the debate can make three different kinds of claims, which I shall call moral, political, and institutional. Secondly, views position themselves within a spectrum in each of the three dimensions, rather than deciding between cosmopolitanism and statism – and at different at different points of the spectrum with regard to their moral, political, and institutional commitments respectively. This account gives us a better grasp of what taking a stand in the global justice entails. Crucially, it enables us to understand that the transformative and critical potential of a specific view depends on a variety of factors, and not only on its stand at the moral level. One can be fairly critical of the status quo without endorsing a cosmopolitan, or even nearly cosmopolitan, moral outlook. In short, the moral story is not the whole story.

The Uselessness of Rawls's 'Ideal Theory'

Over the years a few authors have argued that Rawls’s ideal theory of justice is useless for the real world. This criticism has been largely ignored by Rawlsians, but in the light of a recent accumulation of such criticisms, some authors (in particular Holly Lawford-Smith, A. John Simmons, Zofia Stemplowska and Laura Valentini) have tried to defend ideal theory. In this article I will recapitulate the precise problem with Rawls’s ideal theory, argue that some of Rawls’s defenders misconceive it, and show that recent attempts to rescue Rawls’s ideal theory from the charge of being useless fail. While there are useful kinds of ideal theory, Rawls’s is not one of them. In addition, Rawls’s very tentative suggestions for some kind of bridge between ideal and non-ideal theory are contradictory insofar as they implicitly presuppose the non-existence of the problem they are meant to solve. Thus, Rawls’s “non-ideal theory,” too, is useless, and not so much a theory at all but a set of ad hoc stipulations. Finally, I will show that certain attempts within the global justice debate to use some variation of the original position to directly derive guidelines for the real world are misguided and yield no useful results.

What is a Free State? Republican Internationalism and Globalisation

This article addresses an underexplored area of investigation within the global justice debate: To what extent does globalisation structurally undermine the freedom of states? And if it does, what type of injustice does this constitute? It is argued here that a republican theory of freedom as non-domination is better equipped than existing cosmopolitan and social liberal accounts to explain the systemic connections between domestic, international and global injustice. The forms of unchecked power that globalisation sets off create new opportunities for the domination of states – by other states as well as by non-states actors. And when citizens live in dominated states, they are themselves exposed to domination. The upshot is a normative analysis of the global arena that attributes a central role to states, yet is deeply critical of the status quo.

International Law and Global Justice: On Recent Inquiries into the Dark Side of Economic Globalization

Emmanuelle Tourme-Jouannet. What is a Fair International Society? Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2013. Pp. 252. £30.00. ISBN: 9781849464307 Chios Carmody, Frank J. Garcia and John Linarelli (eds). Global Justice and International Economic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 320. $35.99. ISBN: 9781107438514 Iris Marion Young. Responsibility for Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 224. $36.95. ISBN: 9780195392388 Thomas Pogge. Politics as Usual. What Lies Behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric. Polity Press, 2010. Pp. 224. �22.80. ISBN: 9780745638935 Global economic justice as a topic of moral philosophy and international law is back on the intellectual agenda and figures prominently in feuilletons, blogs and academic publications. A wave of recent studies by both international lawyers and moral philosophers on the dark side of economic globalization and the role of international law in this context is as such a remarkable phenomenon. The essay engages with diverging scholarly perspectives on global justice and international law as represented in the four volumes under review. Three substantive questions structure the non-comprehensive sketch of the global justice debate: (i) Is the current international economic order unjust? (ii) Can existing international legal rules and institutions be transformed or developed into a more just economic order? (iii) What is the potential role of international lawyers in this context?

Freedom beyond the threshold: self-determination, sovereignty, and global justice

In current debates about global justice, statist and nationalist theories appeal to the right to self-determination in argument against egalitarianism beyond borders, and in general as a reason for caution about substantive international duties of justice, lest the exercise of self-determination would be too tightly constrained. Has self-determination—an important heritage of decolonization—no longer a role to play in the argument against international inequality and disempowerment? In this article, I examine a dominant interpretation of self-determination in the global justice debate, as defended prominently by John Rawls and David Miller and find it wanting. Specifically, two challenges are raised: at the conceptual level this interpretation leaves unclarified the distinction and relationship between sovereignty and self-determination; at the normative level, this interpretation adopts a sufficiency view of international distributive justice that neglects that problem of relative extents and measures of self-determination, beyond the threshold. While the article's argument is mainly of a critical scope, it is suggested that a more robust theoretical account is required of the content of the right of self-determination, and in particular of the freedoms that the right confers to the right-holders in the socioeconomic domains and their extents.

Wacky races: Miller, Pogge and Rawls, and conceptions of development in the global justice debate

David Miller criticises Thomas Pogge for placing excessive emphasis on the global environment in identifying the sources of global poverty. Miller argues that despite some structural obstacles, ‘careful drivers’ are able to negotiate their way along the road to development and it is wrong to place responsibility solely on those who have constructed the route. This article questions the analogy. It is argued that the complexities of global poverty make any attempt to identify straightforward outcome responsibility problematic, and that both Miller and Pogge’s interpretations of its causes may be regarded as partial. Furthermore, the analogy deployed by Miller reflects a reified notion of development, either explicit or assumed in arguments on global justice. An analogy of development as an anarchic car race is presented to initiate these criticisms, and as a premise for articulating John Rawls’ duty of assistance as a promising alternative – one that avoids the question of outcome responsibility, while being less prone to the accusation of ‘parochialism’.

Deparochializing the Global Justice Debate, Starting with Indian Political Theory

Deparochializing the Global Justice Debate, Starting with Indian Political Theory

Do We Have a Negative Duty Towards the Global Poor? Thomas Pogge on Global Justice

Who has the duty to guarantee that basic human rights are fulfilled globally? This is one of the central questions in the current global justice debate. The answer to this question must be based on some principle of justice that distributes rights and duties in the global sphere. This paper analyses Thomas Pogge’s answer to this question, which does not rest on notions of charity, benevolence, or supererogatory duties, but on the negative duty not to harm the global poor. His central claim is that “we, the citizens and governments of the affluent societies, in collusion with the ruling elites of many poor countries, are harming the global poor by imposing an unjust institutional order upon them.” Although I am sympathetic to Pogge’s project, my discussion of it is mainly critical of his negative duty argument. Section 48.2 discusses Pogge’s explanatory globalism arguing that global poverty is caused by a global institutional order, and that affluent societies, by setting up this global institutional order in an unjust way, are responsible for global poverty. Section 48.3 describes and discusses Pogge’s argument that we, the citizens and governments of affluent societies, have a negative duty not to cause global poverty. Although Pogge’s explanatory globalism is convincing, his negative-duty argument cannot be sustained. The main problem in his argument is the unspecified “we” that have a duty: does it refer to governments of affluent societies, their citizens, or both?

The Practice-Dependence Red Herring and Substantive Reasons for Restricting the Scope of Justice

A number of views about the scope of justice in this debate have come to be grouped together under the heading of 'practice-dependence' in the literature. This is because they have something special to say about the relationship of moral principles to a practice. There are three questions that I wish to consider here. The first (sections 3 and 4) is whether there is a distinctive approach, different from standard moral reasoning that can be described as 'practice-dependence.' I shall argue that there is, both in human rights theory and in justice theory. The second (section 5) is whether that view is plausible in the light of an important moral test. That is a test for justifiability of a methodological premise when using such a premise in an account of justice will have a significant substantive upshot (an upshot affecting the entitlements and obligations people can be said to have). I argue that the practice-dependence view fails this test quite dramatically. In fact the approach has very little going for it in terms of rational motivation. Thirdly (section 6), I will consider whether the practice-dependence approach has been rightly attributed, by endorsers and critics of the approach alike, to moral theorists who put forward principles of justice that have social, or institutional, triggering conditions. These include Dworkin and Rawls. In answer to this I show that a number of theorists that have been identified as having practice-dependent approaches, both by endorsers and by critics of the approach, do not share in the distinctive premises of the approach. They in fact hold views incompatible with those, practice-dependence premises. In the concluding section (section 7), I argue that not only is the practice-dependence approach lacking in rational motivation and wrongly attributed to a particular group of theorists, it also distracts attention away from what is at stake in the scope-of-justice debate. By focusing on apparently methodological premises, the account overlooks the value-based reasons a theory might have for restricting the scope of principles of justice. Plausible value-based approaches exist, yet these have been mistakenly described as practice-dependence views in the literature, which has generated confusion as to their methodological commitments. Once properly understood, I argue, these views have the merit of at least addressing the justifiability test, which practice-dependence views do not. For those reasons, I conclude that practice-dependence is a red herring, raising more questions than it answers, for the global justice debate.

Justice and authority in the global order

AbstractThe global justice debate has largely ignored law. But that debate presupposes a legal order within which principles of justice could be implemented. Paying attention to law alters our understanding of global justice by requiring us to distinguish principles that are properly prescribed and enforced within a legal order from those that are not. Given that theories of global governance depreciate law and that cosmopolitan and confederal theories are utopian, the most promising context for a realistic global justice discourse is one that is focused on strengthening, not transcending, the international legal order.

Marx, Morality, and the Global Justice Debate

Marx’s disdain for moral discourse is well known, and it is therefore hardly surprising that he barely rates a mention in the global justice debate that has developed apace over the last two decades. However, it is questionable that the debate, addressing as it does systemic inequalities in power, should simply ignore Marx’s analysis of exploitation in capitalism and its implicit ethical grounding in the alienation thesis. Conventional Marxist positions can be critical of liberal arguments about justice, but offer no alternative within moral discourse. However, if the ethical significance of Marx’s social theory is admitted, it could produce a radical and constructive contribution to global justice. This paper argues for such an engagement on two grounds. First, that Marx’s hostility to moral discourse was a tactical choice rather than a rejection of morality as such, and that this choice is no longer justifiable. Second, there is an ethics explicit in his early writings and implicit in his mature political economy that could be developed to produce an ethics of self-realisation. The point of access to existing debates in global justice is the work of Martha Nussbaum, one of the few contributors to make use of Marx’s philosophical views on human flourishing. A Marxist perspective could give qualified support to her capabilities approach, as applied to global justice in Frontiers of Justice (2006), while clarifying its limitations in not dealing with the realities of global economic power.