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Part I
Global Justice: Should We All Be Cosmopolitans?![]()
Chapter 1
Approaching Global Justice
Should We Be Cosmopolitans or Statists?
Gillian Brock
Abstract
Within the literature there are two important positions that are thought to offer contrasting answers to central questions concerning whether national membership is salient in determining our obligations to one another in the global sphereânamely, cosmopolitanism and statism. In this chapter I address several related questions, such as how, if at all, membership in states matters to the obligations we have to one another, and how we might find space in an account of global justice for the role of states. Compatriot favoritism is a view that there are special obligationsâsuch as obligations of egalitarian justiceâthat apply among fellow citizens that are restricted to fellow citizens and do not apply across the world. I examine the force of these arguments before exploring how an account of global justice might be able to accommodate insights from both the cosmopolitan and statist traditions within it. In fact, compelling accounts of global justice can and should find adequate space for both. I also show how cosmopolitan and special duties to co-members of states are reconcilable. Indeed, these duties are not only compatible but also rather often mutually reinforcing.
1. Introduction
Issues of global justice have come to dominate much contemporary normative theorizing. Typical questions that have been the subject of recent debate in the field of global justice include these: What does global distributive justice consist in? What do people in one country owe to those in other countries? In particular, what ought people living in affluent countries to do for those in vulnerable positions in developing countries, such as those who live in extreme poverty? What responsibilities, if any, arise from our commitment to respecting human rights? If we ought to protect basic human rights, when (if ever) is military intervention permissible in the name of such protection? If there are obligations of global justice, how will these be implemented or enforced? Is global democracy feasible or desirable?
Some fear that the very talk of global justice may be inclined to ignore peopleâs important affiliations and identities, especially those that stem from their membership in states. This leads to a further set of questions that have attracted much attention, including: In endorsing global obligations must we also thereby reject special obligations to those in our state? How, if at all, does membership in states matter to our obligations to assist? Is partiality toward compatriots justified in a world filled with the more pressing needs of non-compatriots? Is there any proper scope for patriotic concern? Does respecting political self-determination conflict with commitments to global justice?
Some theorists (e.g., D. Miller, 2007; Tamir, 1993) argue that national membership can be very important to people and, moreover, people are entitled to national self-determination. We therefore need to make space in any account of global justice for respecting nations and the political autonomy they need. In contrast, some fear that in making too much space for self-determination, political autonomy or respecting peopleâs attachments to fellow members of a state, we might neglect or ignore the important duties we have to others beyond borders. How are we to navigate between duties to those within states and those beyond them?
Within the literature there are two important positions that are thought to offer contrasting answers to central questions concerning whether national membership is salient in determining our obligations to one another in the global sphereânamely, cosmopolitanism and statism. Because of their dominance in the field, we discuss the two positions in the next section. This will then position us to address several related questions, such as how, if at all, membership in states matters to the obligations we have to one another, and how we might find space in an account of global justice for the role of states. Compatriot favoritism is a view that there are special obligationsâsuch as obligations of egalitarian justiceâthat apply among fellow citizens that are restricted to fellow citizens and do not apply across the world (Blake, 2002; R. Miller, 1998). We examine the force of these arguments in Section 3. In Section 4 I outline my own position on global justice and how to accommodate insights from both the cosmopolitan and statist traditions within it. Section 5 offers concluding reflections about the state of this debate between cosmopolitans and statists.
A note about terminology might be in order before we proceed. Those identified as statists include quite a diverse variety of different positions, including liberal nationalist, civic nationalist or other conventional statist accounts. I will use the term âstatistâ to include all of these positions, since what they have in common is the view that membership in a subworld community (such as a state, people, or nation) matters in determining our obligations to one another.
2. Cosmopolitanism and Statism: Some Key Points
Contemporary cosmopolitans standardly believe that every person has global stature as the ultimate unit of moral concern and is therefore entitled to equal respect and consideration, no matter what her citizenship status or other affiliations happen to be.1 Appealing to the idea of moral equality, cosmopolitans encourage us not to let local obligations crowd out responsibilities to distant others. Cosmopolitans highlight the responsibilities we have to those whom we do not know, but whose lives should be of concern to us (Brock, 2013).
Being a cosmopolitan is most often characterized in terms of being a citizen of the world. This idea of being a citizen of the world captures the two central aspects of cosmopolitanism as it is frequently understood todayânamely, it is often taken to involve a thesis about identity and one about responsibility. As a thesis about identity, being a cosmopolitan indicates that one is a person who is influenced by various cultures. Cosmopolitanism as a thesis about identity also maintains that belonging to a particular culture is not an essential ingredient for personal identity or living a flourishing life: one can select elements from diverse cultures, or reject all in favor of non-cultural options that are perceived as yet more important to particular people in living a flourishing life, as Jeremy Waldron (1992) maintains. Cosmopolitanism as a thesis about responsibility generates much debate. For many cosmopolitans, the idea is that as a cosmopolitan, one should appreciate that one is a member of a global community of human beings. As such, one has responsibilities to other members of the global community. As Martha Nussbaum elaborates, one owes allegiance âto the worldwide community of human beings,â and this affiliation should constitute a primary allegiance (Nussbaum, 1996, p. 4).
An important distinction is often drawn between moral and institutional cosmopolitanism. The core idea with moral cosmopolitanism is that every person has global stature as the ultimate unit of moral concern and is therefore entitled to equal consideration, no matter what her citizenship or nationality status. Thomas Pogge has an influential synopsis of the key ideas, as he sees them:
Three elements are shared by all cosmopolitan positions. First, individualism: the ultimate units of concern are human beings, or personsârather than, say, family lines, tribes, ethnic, cultural, or religious communities, nations, or states. The latter may be units of concern only indirectly, in virtue of their individual members or citizens. Second, universality: the status of ultimate unit of concern attaches to every living human being equallyânot merely to some sub-set, such as men, aristocrats, Aryans, whites, or Muslims. Third, generality: this special status has global force. Persons are ultimate units of concern for everyoneânot only for their compatriots, fellow religionists, or such like. (Pogge, 1992, p. 48)
Considerable debate surrounds what the cosmopolitan commitment requires. Indeed, cosmopolitanismâs force is often best appreciated by considering what it rules out. For instance, it rules out positions that attach no moral value to some people, or weights the moral value some people have differentially according to their race, ethnicity or nationality. Furthermore, assigning ultimate rather than derivative value to collective entities, such as nations or states, is prohibited. If such groups matter, they matter because of their importance to individual human persons rather than because they have some independent, ultimate (say, ontological) value.
A common misconception is that cosmopolitanism requires a world state or government. To avoid this mistake, a distinction is often invoked between moral and institutional cosmopolitanism. Institutional cosmopolitans maintain that fairly deep institutional changes are needed to the global system in order to realize cosmopolitan commitments adequately, and such transformations would yield a world state (Cabrera, 2004). Moral cosmopolitans need not endorse that view; in fact, many are against radical institutional transformations. Such theorists maintain that our cosmopolitan responsibilities (such as protecting everyoneâs basic human rights or ensuring everyoneâs capabilities are met to the required threshold) should be effectively discharged; however, they often argue that several arrangements might do this well. There are various possibilities for global governance that would not amount to a world state.
What does cosmopolitan justice require? Accounts of justice that can plausibly lay claim to being cosmopolitan can originate from a number of theoretical perspectives. There are, after all, many different conceptions of how to treat people equally, especially with respect to issues of distributive justice, and this is often reflected in these different accounts. Cosmopolitan justice could be argued for along various lines, including: utilitarian (prominently but somewhat misleadingly, Singer, 1972); rights-based accounts (Caney, 2005; Jones, 1999; Pogge, 2002; Shue, 1980); along Kantian lines (OâNeill, 2000); Aristotelian or capabilities-based (Nussbaum, 2000, 2006); contractarian (Beitz, 1979; Brock, 2009; Moellendorf, 2002; Pogge, 1989); and sometimes using more than one approach (Beitz, 1979, 2009; Pogge, 1989, 2002). So we see that there are many views of what cosmopolitan justice consists in.
Cosmopolitan approaches to justice are often contrasted with âstatistâ accounts. For statists, states are an important factor in determining our duties of justice, and they frequently maintain that the kinds of duties we have to fellow members of our state are different from, and typically stronger than, the duties we have to non-members. Cosmopolitans tend to place individuals front and center of their theorizing about justice, though there might well be derivative implications about duties concerning states that flow from their analyses (Moellendorf, 2009). Statists, however, give the fact of membership in a state a certain kind of primacy of standing that cosmopolitans do not. There is a prominent debate between John Rawls and his critics that nicely follows some of these tracks and will provide a good illustration of the differences between the two approaches. Furthermore, this exchange has been enormously influential in current debates between cosmopolitans and statists, so we discuss this briefly next.
In Rawlsâs theory of justice for the international realm, our membership in a âpeopleâ makes for a very different justice context compared with the views he famously argues for in A Theory of Justice (1971). One of the core principles that Rawls believes should govern relations among peoples in the international domain is that we should respect each people as free and equal (1999, p. 37). Goods such as self-determination and political autonomy are therefore prominent on his account. In respecting equality among peoples (rather than individual persons), liberals will need to adopt a foreign policy that tolerates much diversity, especially in allowing non-liberal peoples to be admitted as full and equal members of the international community of states in good standing. Rawlsâs account has disappointed many cosmopolitans who argue that in tolerating non-liberal peoplesâand tolerating a situation in which individuals may be severely disadvantaged by the operation of non-liberal principles in those societiesâRawls does not adequately respect individual human persons, a fundamental requirement for all liberal theorists. But such is the importance that Rawls gives to membership in a people and the respect we ought to give different peoples that this consideration appears to be less important for him compared with the importance of recognizing peoplesâ rights to be free and equal in determining their collective lives. Rawls urges us to recognize that there are a number of ways that decent peoples might reasonably choose to organize their societies and we must not coercively insist that all peoples adopt liberal principles. Of course, there are some minimum standards that should apply in order to be granted this respect, but many non-liberal peoples qualify as decent peoples, as Rawls defines these (1999, pp. 64â67), and meet these standards.
While respect for the self-determination and political autonomy of peoples constitutes one important facet of what liberal foreign policy should consist in, another important feature is the nature of our duties to assist âburdened societiesâ to achieve political autonomy such that they are âable to determine the path of their own future for themselvesâ (1999, p. 118). While liberals do have duties of assistance toward these burdened societies, these should not take the form of a globalized difference principle, as such a principle would not have a target or a cut-off point. By contrast, Rawls believes an appropriate target and cut-off point are provided by his account that aims at all peoplesâ political autonomy and self-determination.
Cosmopolitans have expressed many criticisms of these views, especially the ideal that we can aim for meaningful self-determination and political autonomy in a heavily globalized world. For instance, some cosmopolitans claim that Rawlsâs ideal of political autonomy ignores the extent to which unfavorable conditions may result from factors external to the society and that there are all sorts of morally relevant connections between states, notably that they are situated in a global economic order that perpetuates the interests of wealthy developed states with little regard for the interests of poor, developing ones. Such facts mean that there is a context of global cooperation such that distribution according to a global difference principle is appropriate (Beitz, 1979; Moellendorf, 2002).
Thomas Pogge has done much to advance arguments that show the involvement of affluent developed countries in perpetuating poverty in developing ones (1994, 2001, 2008, inter alia). The so-called international borrowing privilege and the international resource privilege provide good examples of such involvement. Any group that exercises effective power in a state is recognized internationally as the legitimate government of that territory, and the international community is not concerned with how the group came to power or what it does with that power. Oppressive governments may borrow freely on behalf of the country (the international borrowing privilege) or dispose of its natural resources (the international resource privilege), and these actions are legally recognized internationally. These two privileges can have disastrous implications for the prosperity of poor countries (for instance) because these privileges provide incentives for coup attempts, they often influence what sorts of people are motivated to seek power, they facilitate oppressive governments being able to stay in office, and, should more democratic governments get to be in power, they are saddled with the debts incurred by their oppressive predecessors, thus draining the country of resources needed to firm up new democracies. Local governments have little incentive to attend to the needs of the poor, since their being able to continue in power depends more on the local elite, foreign governments and corporations. Because foreigners benefit so greatly from the international resource privilege, they have an incentive to refrain from challenging the situation (or even to support oppressive governments). For these sorts of reasons, the current world order largely reflects the interests of wealth...
