Egalitarianism and Global Justice

From a Relational Perspective

Kevin K. W. Ip

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137514073
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica asiatica

In this book, Kevin Ip articulates and defends an egalitarian conception of global distributive justice grounded on the value of equality as a normative ideal of how human relations should be conducted. Arguing that relationships of equality, rather than those characterized by domination or exploitation, are a requirement for a just system, Ip spells out the real-world implications of this approach. Ip defends the ideal of equality against the diverse objections which have been brought to bear, and the responsibilities we bear in our aspirations towards global justice.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Kevin K. W. IpEgalitarianism and Global Justice10.1057/978-1-137-51407-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Kevin K. W. Ip¹

(1)

Office of University General Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

End Abstract

1.1 An Unequal World

The world we are living in is strikingly unequal in socio-economic terms. ¹ Based on the most recent data generated by household survey, Christoph Lakner and Brankco Milanovic estimated that, in 2008, the global Gini index was around 0.70 (which is higher than any “tolerable” level of inequality within a domestic context); the richest decile receives 57% of the global income while the poorest receives merely 0.6 %. ² But the affluent could enjoy such a high standard of living without the poor working to produce to the goods they consume, or a system of border control which excludes many potential migrants from poorer societies. These facts seem to raise some issues of distributive justice which merit our attention. But until relatively recent debates about distributive justice have often taken it for granted that equality as a demand of justice applies only within the domestic context, that is, within the bounds of a given political community. This book, however, addresses the question: what form of equality, if any, should be pursued in the global context? It aims to develop and defend equality as an ideal of how human relations should be conducted—the relational ideal of equality—and argues that such an ideal applies globally. This relational view on equality has been defended by some theorists as a social and political ideal within a democratic society. ³ However, there has only been limited discussion about what this ideal of equality may imply for global distributive justice. This book will consider the distributive implications of equality as a relational ideal and defend a set of principles of global distributive justice entailed by this ideal. These include a principle of equal freedom from domination, a principle of non-exploitation, and a principle of global equality of opportunity. It is perhaps tempting to think that luck egalitarianism—the view that justice requires mitigation of the impacts of morally arbitrary factors or luck on people’s distributive shares—offers a straightforward argument for global equality. In a world with relatively closed borders, one’s citizenship or place of residence is like an inherited status which largely defines one’s life prospect, and yet being born into a poor country is just as arbitrary from a moral point of view as being born into a poor family or being born with disability. It is therefore unfair if someone faces worse opportunities due to her national identity or place of residence. I am not convinced by this line of argument for two reasons. First, luck egalitarian arguments are insensitive to the nature of our relations to one another and so they cannot capture other more fundamental objections to inequalities. In addition, not all inequalities are just or morally acceptable even when they stem entirely from the voluntary choices of individual agents. Although this book is not intended to be a critique of luck egalitarianism as such, it will pursue an alternative path to global egalitarianism which remains relatively unexplored by exploring the connection between egalitarian distributive justice and the relational ideal of equality. It will therefore steer a middle course between the strong globalist view that the demands of equality apply everywhere with the same strength and the strong statist view that we should only object to inequalities among individuals living in the same society. It may be worth noting that the view I am proposing in this book does not depend on luck egalitarianism being wrong. Another point to note is that my concern in this book is largely restricted to the problem of global distributive justice, understood broadly to include not only the allocation of burdens and benefits among individuals but also issues regarding the fundamental terms of social and economic cooperation in the global context. I shall not, however, address the problems of political justice in this book—such as the possibility of having a cosmopolitan democratic political order or the defensibility of the idea of global democracy. ⁴

Before looking into the recent literature I would like to make a few remarks about the meaning of egalitarianism or egalitarian justice. In this book I use the term “egalitarianism” to refer to any view which holds that justice at a fundamental level places significant limits on the permissible range of socio-economic inequalities between individual persons. As Michael Blake has observed, egalitarianism is committed to reducing relative deprivation even when no one suffers from absolute deprivation. ⁵ Although egalitarianism does not deny the moral significance of avoiding sufficiency shortfalls, it firmly rejects the view that, above a certain basic minimum, inequalities in individuals’ life prospects simply become morally irrelevant. ⁶ It may be objected that to talk about equality is misguided because whatever good reasons one might have to be moved by egalitarianism these reasons actually appeal to some fundamental values distinct from equality itself. ⁷ This objection rests on the mistake that egalitarians must somehow think that equality is intrinsically valuable, and it is rather dogmatic to insist that any genuinely egalitarian doctrine must appeal to nothing but equality itself particularly if “equality” is understood as an abstract distributive pattern which commends our allegiance apart from all other values. But not every egalitarian has to endorse the teleological claim that it is in itself bad that some people are worse off than others. ⁸ Many egalitarians argue, for example, that inequality is objectionable because it is unfair for someone to be worse off than others through no fault or choice of one’s own, or it is unfair for equally deserving people to be unequally well off. ⁹ Although these arguments invoke some account of fairness to vindicate the egalitarian claim, they have been widely regarded as the prominent examples of contemporary egalitarianism. Also, it is perfectly legitimate for an egalitarian to argue that social and economic inequalities should be reduced because such inequalities may give rise to objectionable forms of domination by some over the others. The underlying idea is that preventing domination is itself an egalitarian reason for favoring social and economic equality as it forms part of the background conditions under which people can live with one another as equals, and it goes beyond meeting basic needs. ¹⁰

In the rest of this introduction I shall first provide a survey of the recent literature on the question of global equality, and then an outline of the structure of this book.

1.2 Recent Literature on Global Equality

Much theorizing about global distributive justice in the recent literature is framed by the debates between cosmopolitan theorists and their opponents. ^{11 , 12} It is widely accepted by contemporary moral and political philosophers from a variety of theoretical perspectives that each person qua person is entitled to a certain level of resources which is necessary for a minimally decent life. ¹³ However, once we go beyond eradicating extreme poverty, there are profound disagreements about the existence of more robust distributive obligations. It is also interesting to note that many political philosophers who have defended some forms of egalitarianism in the domestic context affirm only minimal principles of distributive principles on a global level.

1.2.1 Egalitarian Accounts of Global Distributive Justice

A number of arguments have been made in favor of global equality. One strand of these arguments is non-relational in the sense that they defend an egalitarian account of global justice by appealing to what individuals are owed in virtue of their moral status as human beings independent of their relationship to one another. Their arguments can be summarized as follows. First, a global egalitarian could apply the luck egalitarian doctrine to the global context. As noted earlier, in a world with relatively closed borders, one’s place of birth is a part of one’s unchosen circumstance which has enormous impacts on one’s distributive shares. Cecile Fabre, for example, argues that residence in a less-developed country could be considered an involuntary disadvantage for which people should be compensated. ¹⁴ One way to implement this egalitarian principle is to regard birthright citizenship of affluent, stable countries as a special kind of inherited property the transfer of which can be taxed for global redistributive purposes. For instance, a birthright privilege may be placed on the windfall recipients of citizenship in an affluent country. The revenues so raised can be devoted to development projects which promote opportunities of children who are disadvantaged by being born into a poor country. ¹⁵ Also, it has been argued that the principle of fair equality of opportunity should be applied globally. Simon Caney defends this position by arguing that the internal logic of the justification of fair equality of opportunity in the “domestic” case—that it is unfair for a person to have worse opportunities because of his cultural identity—entails that the scope of this principle of justice should be global. ¹⁶ Alternatively, a global egalitarian may insist that equality is a morally privileged benchmark in thinking about global justice. Brian Barry, for example, applies the Scanlonian test to the global case and contends that all transnational inequalities of rights, opportunities, and resources have to be justifiable in ways that cannot be reasonably rejected by those who get the least. ¹⁷ In a similar vein, Pablo Gilabert contends that we could move from commitment to the moral equality of persons and cosmopolitan justifiability to some egalitarian principles of global justice without appealing to any associative grounds. ¹⁸ Finally, a global egalitarian may, like Hillel Steiner, argue that everyone is entitled to an equal share of the values of the world’s unimproved natural resources. ¹⁹ Unlike these authors, I argue that what equality demands of us cannot be wholly insensitive to the degree and nature of interactions and interdependence among the individuals in question and I believe there are other more fundamental objections to inequality other than the mitigation of morally arbitrary or unchosen inequalities.

In contrast to these non-relational arguments, some theorists adopt a relational perspective on global justice, according to which the demands of equality apply only to individuals who stand in som...