What’s Wrong with ‘Global Justice’?

Milton Fisk
Indiana University

There is renewed interest in the topic of global justice sparked by the appearance of works by Charles Beitz, Brian Barry, Thomas Pogge, and John Rawls. Much is worthwhile in the discussions these works have generated. They have stressed the need to go beyond a theory of justice whose scope is limited to individual states. They have laid out the problems faced by a cosmopolitanism that substitutes a world state for the multiplicity of individual states. They raise the question whether the freedom and equality that ought to be the right of citizens of any state should extend to persons in general. However, many of the contributors to the volume Global Justice, edited by Thomas Pogge, start from a position that obstructs progress toward an adequate concept of global justice. In showing this, I shall not be criticizing just a handful of writers but also a larger troubling tendency, which I shall call the ‘global justice school’.

1 Equal respect and the Global Justice School

This school sets out from an egalitarian morality that treats persons as equally worthy of respect and of autonomy from an impartial standpoint. From here, the school moves to conclusions about the equal treatment of persons, a distributional matter. Some members of the school think that, in the absence of prior commitments to unequal distributions, equal distributive shares follow from equal respect among people engaged in a cooperative project. Others hesitate to go this far and limit equal treatment to the political and social arenas. But whatever their differences, there tends to be a common starting point – equal respect. One author puts it even more forcefully, saying that “This fundamental idea of equal respect for all persons and of the equal worth of all human beings is accepted as a minimal standard by all leading schools of modern Western political and moral culture. Any political theory making a claim to plausibility must begin with this notion of equality and cannot abandon it.” After such a confident declaration, one might hesitate to break ranks by spurning the lead of leading schools.

Before accepting the principle of equal respect, one needs to examine its use by members of the global justice school. They tie equal respect to the idea of autonomy. One cannot respect a person if one overrides his or her autonomy. To grant a person his or her autonomy, one must not expect him or her to adopt a norm with which he or she could not reasonably agree. More generally, if you insist that everyone follow a certain norm, then in order to grant everyone his or her autonomy you need to assure yourself that the norm is one nobody could reasonably reject. In view of this link between equal respect and autonomy, I shall often refer to the principle of equal autonomy alongside a reference to the principle of equal respect.

2 Equality rights and justice as protectors of cooperation

How does this school reach justice by starting from equal respect and autonomy? It is not altogether clear how they reach it. They might accept a way that adopts Rawls’ view of a close connection between justice and cooperation. For him, one of the important circumstances needed for justice to apply in a society is cooperation. Absent cooperation, there is a “state of nature” where justice and injustice are not applicable. Another circumstance is potential or actual conflict, pulling in the opposite direction from cooperation. One can consider those norms designed to maintain cooperation by resolving conflict norms of justice. One is certainly not showing respect for others by doing things that promote strife and thus breakdown the cooperation on which people depend to satisfy their needs. Likewise, one is denying autonomy by imposing decisions on others with which they cannot reasonably agree. This would also lead to a breakdown of cooperation with force replacing it. Thus, justice involves following the path of equal respect and autonomy.

When the circumstance is one of global cooperation between countries, the norm that avoids conflict can be a norm of justice. It would then promote cooperation by reducing potential conflict. Yet it could not do this in the absence of mutual respect between the countries. To be a genuine norm of justice it must pass the test of mutual reasonable acceptance. Thus at the global level too, equal respect will lead to justice. Of course, one might go beyond countries to consider justice between non-state entities. The rules of global justice might apply to relations non-state organizations, like General Electric and the Red Cross, have or to relations movements, like those advocating accessible AIDS drugs or an end to sweatshops, have.

3 The incompatibility of capitalism with equality rights and justice

What then is the problem I have with all this? It does not have to do with the importance of equality of respect itself or of justice. Nor does it have to do with the expansion of these concepts in the global direction. The problem is the lack of a healthy skepticism about whether it is appropriate to call states just or unjust, at least when justice is understood as coming from the ideals of respect and autonomy rather than as coming from the pragmatic demands of governability.

One can trace this lack of skepticism to ignoring the question whether states are either internally or externally cooperative. This is important since most of the volume’s authors make states the focus of their discussions. In looking for a healthy skepticism, I am not adopting Hobbes’ view of a war of each against all, whether at the level of individuals or states. For, I am talking about a fissure based on the structure of capitalism, not random fissures based on individual wills. One suspects that there is such a lack of skepticism about cooperation in this volume judging from the absence of a discussion of capitalism as it affects justice. The fissure capitalism creates in and across states goes unobserved, leaving unquestioned the assumption of most of the authors that the circumstances of justice can be present in a capitalist society and a capitalist world. I shall argue that, in order to encounter the circumstances in which one can speak about justice, in the ideal rather than the pragmatic sense, one needs to consider movements rather than states.

The fissure between classes in capitalism appears in the enduring conflicts within them and complexities of relations between them. When a powerful state develops a project with another state, it may act together with the elite of that other state against the interests of that other state’s lower classes. The complexity of the relation between the two states is not faithfully described as cooperation. Despite this fissure and the obstacles it creates for genuine cooperation, one can easily find areas of cooperation, but cooperation in these areas fails to sew up the seam that the class division opens up. That open seam destroys both the reality and the possibility of equal respect and autonomy across it.

What makes it feasible to claim this? We have been assuming, along with the global justice school that equal respect fails when one denies the autonomy of others to make their minds up on matters of principle. However, capitalism cannot run on a basis of equal autonomy. It has to resort to the tyranny of management in the workplace, the tyranny of money in state politics, and the tyranny of elite international bodies in world trade and politics. Such tyrannies make decisions based on principles with which the working and impoverished majority could not reasonably agree. The lack of agreement shows itself in many ways, including the formation of unions for protection against the power of employers, of community environmental associations opposed to industrial pollution, and of global protests over the abuse of intellectual property rights. These expressions of disagreement are symptoms of the failure of the principles of equal respect and autonomy needed for cooperative association. The breakdown of cooperation, not just in individual cases, but also right down the class divide across the world signals the impossibility of a global justice that would protect such cooperation in a capitalist world.

Does this not miss the point of the global justice school? Members of that school know that we live in a flawed world. Yet, their message is that to escape from it we need to follow the principles of equal respect and autonomy. Only this can shore up the kind of cooperative society that they assume we would all want, whether we are Marxists, Liberals, or maybe even Post-Modernists. Nonetheless, I am attacking their message, for behind it is their assumption that cooperation and hence justice flowing from equal respect and autonomy are indeed possible in a capitalist world.

Despite their implicit agreement that capitalism is compatible with there being circumstances for justice, as flowing from equal respect and autonomy, there are explicit disagreements among members of the global justice school. In this volume, these disagreements center on how rich a view of global justice one should adopt and hence how cosmopolitan one’s outlook should be. The benchmark from which they depart is the modest view of Rawls that though we should aspire to make other societies internally just there is, due to insufficient interaction between societies, no basis for applying a full set of principles of justice between societies. However, some who agree that there is limited interaction claim that there is nonetheless a thin, but sufficient, basis of interaction for, if not distributive justice along the lines of Rawls’ difference principle between nations, at least for political justice both within and between them. Others venture farther, claiming that equal respect justifies distributive equality at the international level. None of the authors accepts a form of global justice that assumes a world without multiple states and hence applies only to individuals and non-state entities.


4 Permanent and changing norms

If the general message of the global justice school is vulnerable on grounds that the circumstances for justice do not arise in a capitalist world, then how might one formulate an alternative view of global justice? One might take either of two routes. The first would lead one to admit the error of leaving the capitalist world in place instead of replacing it with a world fitted with the circumstances for applying the normative structure of equal respect and equal autonomy. Though the world would change, the normative structure would not. Without a change of sense, equal respect and equal autonomy would remain the basis for global justice. Having or lacking circumstances in which it is appropriate to speak of equality of respect and autonomy would not affect the sense of this equality.

The second route would lead to a change away from not only the capitalist world but also the normative structure of equal respect and autonomy used by the global justice school. Why change the normative structure as well? We would not treat the presence or absence of appropriate circumstances as external to equality rights and justice. They would not be so abstract that one could formulate them without including the circumstances in which they would apply. Along this route, one will need to embed norms with certain features of social goals pursued in hope of a better world. The price of not doing this is that the connection between the norms and their circumstances for application remains purely accidental. If it is accidental, then one could do as the global justice school does when it ignores the problem their assumed economic context poses for applying their theory of global justice.

5 Cooperation as a circumstance for equality rights and for justice

To decide which route to take, it is worth pointing out that, even though cooperation plays a key role in these matters, our authors say almost nothing about what cooperation is. They say only that social cooperation is what an appropriate normative system can help sustain. We need to go further though.

In a world dominated by capitalism, mutually obeying a contract often takes the place of genuine cooperation. The contract serves to give the appearance of equality where the parties are unequal in power. There is no need for autonomy and respect to protect contracts among unequals since unequal power serves to protect them. Thus, coercion enters into the wage contract since wage labor becomes the means of making a living for the overwhelming majority. One has to take some job even though the desired one is unavailable.

There is still plenty of room within capitalism for cooperation. One finds it, among other places, in struggles against oppression. In these struggles, cooperation involves reaching wide agreement over not just social goals but also strategies for reaching them and methods for sharing the benefits of achieving them. Without wide agreement over goals, those who set the goals are in a position to control the distribution of the benefits of achieving them.

The circumstances for talking about justice and injustice are genuinely cooperative undertakings. We do not find such undertakings spanning the fissures within capitalism. We do find them among the movements of resistance to oppression, movements that may be local, regional, or global. Justice is, then, what protects these undertakings. It assures that their goals, strategies, and distributions will remain widely agreed to within a given movement of resistance. The agreement comes about through a process that has broad participation in that movement. Since equal respect and autonomy lead to justice, they too will serve to keep an undertaking genuinely cooperative. The circumstances for equal respect and autonomy become, then, widespread agreement on goals, strategies, and distributions. These circumstances are ones of roughly equal power.

The circumstances of having the right to equal respect and autonomy appropriate for resistance do not exist when one comes to examine these rights in transactions between the two sides of one of capitalism’s fissures. The global justice school, however, would prefer to treat these forms of equality, along with the justice associated with them, as unlimited in their application, as moral universals. The school then assumes that one can find across the fissures within capitalism circumstances that allow us to use these universals to evaluate the undertakings of capitalism. These circumstances, as we have already noted, cannot be genuinely cooperative undertakings. Thus, there will be different circumstances for equal respect and autonomy in this case than we found in the case of a resistance movement. However, as the global justice school sees the matter, circumstances of application are external to the sense of equality rights and justice, saving thereby their character as moral universals.

6 Primacy of social goals in the teleological approach to equality rights and justice

I speak of the circumstances of equality and justice because it is common now to do so. I think though that speaking this way hides the important relationship just sketched out between the meaning of norms of equality and justice and human projects directed at social, rather than personal or special interest, goals. We need to go beyond stating merely that, where we can affirm or deny that there is equal respect or justice, we also find in the background widespread agreement on social goals. For, this makes it look like the relation is no more than one of regularity.

Instead, as suggested above, norms inhere in the human projects that we are calling their circumstances. The norms inhere in the projects in the sense that what we would consider the success of those projects depends on satisfying these norms. Calling the projects circumstances of justice fails to convey the fact that the norms do not transcend the projects since they depend on the nature of those projects. They are projects that involve cooperation in agreeing to them, in deciding how to achieve them, and in setting the distributive shares from achieving them. Because this element of cooperation is part of what they are, the projects cannot succeed without mutual respect and equal autonomy. It is an easy step from here to see that justice itself, whether local, regional, or global, is an order called for by cooperative projects for social goals.

This is in effect a turn from the deontological approach of the global justice school to a teleological approach. The deontological approach starts with equal respect and autonomy as principles of right that transcend circumstances. Thus, though there may be different circumstances appropriate for these principles for the fissures in capitalism than for a resistance movement, the principles themselves would be unchanged. It does not matter that cooperation will be absent in applying the principles to span the fissures in capitalism. The teleological approach denies such a transcendence of the principles of equality and justice. Rather, these principles have their meaning from the structure of the undertakings to which they are applicable. The cooperative structure of such undertakings is, on the teleological view, a necessary feature for applying the principles of equality and justice to them. The second route mentioned above is the one compatible with this teleological approach.

The consequences of this turn to the teleological are striking. For, we can no longer separate norms for making a better world from struggles. The constancy of oppression leads to a continual struggle to reduce and ultimately eliminate it. Social goals adopted in agreement among those in struggle and pursued with mutual respect will guide these struggles. The variety of these goals will be large since oppression comes in a variety of forms. There will be goals shaped by issues of recognition, issues of access, issues of control, and issues of liberty. When those affected by any of these issues cooperate in deciding on goals, on strategies for reaching them, and on the distribution of the benefits, they stand as equals due to their oppression and thus have more reason to show equal respect and practice equal autonomy than do those with unequal power. From their social goals, we can read the norms of equal respect and equal autonomy, and hence of justice.

7 Struggle and movements of the oppressed as the places for justice

The global justice school gives us principles of equality it sees as leading to rules of justice. It gives us, though, no reason to accept those principles. In view of their clash with the capitalist world order, they get no support, beyond lip service, from that quarter. In contrast, the teleological approach helps in this regard by showing that these principles are ones that can protect and maintain movements around the denial of the means to satisfy basic needs and interests. Nonetheless, support for the capitalist world order floods the media and penetrates every sector of society, including academe.

Hence, it is important to be clear on how the teleological approach rescues these principles of equality. The teleological approach can recover the principles of equality needed for justice from within the struggles of the oppressed – those denied basic needs. One cannot recover them by looking to the other side of the fissure, the side of privilege. The teleological approach makes principles secondary to struggles against oppression – struggles around the privatization of water, the inaccessibility of medicines, the tyranny of capital, and the uncertainty of peace. These struggles, as cooperative ones resting on wide and uncoerced agreement, take place with and give normative status to equal respect and equal autonomy. There is no question of ignoring their incompatibility with capitalism since they come about due to major initiatives of capitalism.

The approach of the global justice school tries to extend to the global arena an approach to justice that shows its weaknesses already at the domestic level. It assumes principles, from which rules of justice are to arise, that of themselves do not pertain to any context. This abstractness makes it doubtful how they can answer the relevant questions. Should there be economic equality? Some would say that equal respect implies equality of shares and hence economic equality between the slum dweller in a Third World country who has had to leave a small plot behind and the Wall Street banker. Others would say that this is only a prima facie demand since there may be agreement on a prior claim that makes for inequality. How might one assess a prior claim that would override equality? The theory seems to have no way of answering this question due to its having abstracted from the economic and political frameworks that might help us decide. This question is easier to handle when there is a context given by a struggle to reach certain social goals. Those goals could tell us the compromises we are free to make with a demand for equal shares.

The approach I counterpose to that of the global justice school does not start with assumed universal principles of equality and justice. In Global Justice, however, we are treated to principles so abstract that they do not help decide a practical course and are even treated as compatible with capitalism. However, under the teleological approach, the struggle against oppression and the social goals that struggle generates are prior to principles of equality and justice. Those who do not struggle or ally themselves with struggles fail to hear the message of justice. The priority of struggle comes from the fact that struggle leads to agreement on goals, which in turn set the standard for rights of equality and justice. For, such agreement rules out failures of equal respect as well as failures to allow others to decide for themselves. This does not mean starting with fragments, that is, with disparate struggles, since the focus from the start is on their shared feature of leading to agreement on goals

8 From cosmopolite to activist

This approach of starting with struggles reduces the relevance of discussions within the global justice school as to what kind of cosmopolitanism is correct. One view, globalist cosmopolitanism, claims that one set of rules of justice applies to the global community. The role of multiple states would disappear, and problems of justice between states, regions, or cultures would transform into problems of justice between individual members of the global community. Another view, statist cosmopolitanism, holds that one set of rules of justice holds for relations between states. This excludes appeals by powerful states for exceptionalism in foreign policy without denying that internally states may have different rules of justice for their citizens. A middle position, moralist cosmopolitanism, claims that any rule of justice must pass some form of autonomy test. This test requires that we not impose rules on others they could reasonably reject. This test still allows for a moral and cultural pluralism between states while however limiting such pluralism.

These distinctions are relevant so long as we are discussing states or societies. One, nonetheless, has to reckon with the fissures within states and societies. Because of the fissures, the goals that states and societies pursue are for the most part goals advanced by elites and imposed on peoples. They do not have the consensual character of what I have called social goals. Requirements of justice are not, then, inherent in these state goals. If there is justice associated with states or societies, it is only in the form of compromises to limit the excesses of the powerful on the pragmatic ground that otherwise governance or cohesion will give way to instability.

Justice emerges where there are struggles of relatively integral movements for social goals. It is on these movements that our hopes for justice should focus. We make no progress toward justice by relying on abstractions such as the global community, fair relations between states, or equal autonomy among people. Relying on these abstractions is a way of ignoring the fissure that capitalism creates. Do we focus on the millions in the peace movement who opposed the war in Iraq and the occupation or on the state actors – Bush’s regime in the US and Saddam’s in Iraq? Do we focus on the international labor movement with its demands found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or on the G-8 states’ resistance to ratification of covenants for these rights?