global distributive justice

Question 1

exam prep

Answer 1

!!!slides he didn’t get to last time -> we’ll skip

first teaser about what the exam will be about

60 MC = 20 questions (simple, basic understanding, easy) = done well
long answer = 40% - 4 questions (out of 6) = 10 points each
- it will say on the exam how many words (like not too long, 100-200 or smth)
- 10/15 sentences, enough to argue but not a full sentence

MC example

liberals believe first and foremost in

1. community preferences
2. equality
3. individual rights
4. substantive goods

(they do believe in the other things, but the individual rights most important)

long answer: what is a liberal case against equality

MC:

Nozickean state is necessarily:

1. procedural
2. minimal
3. trans-generational
4. distributive

!!pay attention to the wording, necessary, first and foremost etc.

long answer: for Nozick, how can a state be justified?

kinds of questions for open question:

1. critique (luck egalitarianism)
2. defend x
3. defend x against y (Rawls against Sandel, Berlin against Arendt)
4. identify the x critique of y (what is Hirschmann’s critique of liberalism)
5. define x (cosmopolitism)
   - not too narrow, big concepts
6. which theory (among a,b,c) best supports X (e.g. a carbon tax)

essential!!!!

• argument: counterargument/rebuttal
• optional/recommended = example, textual citation
• e.g. you can give a good answer about communitarianism without naming Sandel and still get all the points

Question 2

global justice: the basics

Answer 2

what do we owe the global poor? = question of poverty

• does it matter that they are concentrated in specific regions?
• and even in specific states?

the question = should states:

• “transfer some of the wealth which they create to foreigners … We allow distant strangers to live under conditions of deprivation which we would not tolerate at home … The question, then, is whether we are entitled to do so. Put bluntly, is the tie that binds us to, say, fellow Britons, Germans, Americans, etc., such as to justify the view that we can do more for them than we ought to do for people who are starving in Ethiopia?” (Fabre 2007: 96).

general range of positions:

• Our obligation of justice towards fellow nationals are the same as our obligations of justice towards foreigners
• We have obligations of justice towards both foreigners and fellow nationals, but we owe more to the latter than we do to the former.
• We have obligations towards fellow nationals and foreigners but whereas our obligations to the former are obligations of justice, our obligations to the latter are more properly called humanitarian

Question 3

liberal egalitarianism - cosmopolitanism

Answer 3

supports the move from social justice to global justice

social justice (did not go into this at all)

• this is developed by Rawls’ in a A theory of justice: “I shall be satisfied if it is possible to formulate a reasonable conception of justice for the basic structure of society conceived for the time being as a closed system isolated from other societies”
• note: he imagines an original position among nations… the outcome of this woud be fairness between states, but aso non-intervention - a strong sovereignty thesis

global justice

• Charles Beitz (political theory and international relations) argues the original position should be global
• why? if the parties of the original position don’t know arbitrary facts about themselves, then this shoud include territory
• if so, people wil seek a distributive framework that minimizes the risk that they end up in a poor country

Question 4

liberal egalitarianism - cosmopolitanism
Spotlight: Pogge

Answer 4

(world poverty and human rights)

central moral question:

1. how can extreme poverty continue in spite of the moral and technological progress of the west?
   - west gets more developed and extreme poverty more extreme
2. why do citizens in the west not find it troubling that the playing field of world politics is titled in our favor?

problem = we get biased by proximity, we just care more about who is close to us

part of the problem is that proximity matters - we care more about people we know (about) and interact with
- “We live in extreme isolation from severe poverty. We do not know anyone earning less than $30 for a 72-hour week of hard, monotonous labor … [This encourages] two common moral prejudices:

1. that the persistence of severe poverty abroad does not require our moral attention, and
2. that there is nothing seriously wrong, in regard to world poverty, with our conduct, policies, and the global economic institutions we forge

so should we care more about co-nationals than foreigners? Pogge says NO:

due to our global econ systems, we are actually causing harm to peoples in other countries. thus we have a moral obligation to alleviate poverty:

• “I deny that our imposition of the existing global order is not ACTIVELY CAUSING POVERTY, not harming the poor … I argue that [we] can justify prioritizing fellow-members and group interests only if the institutional framework structuring the competition is minimally fair”
• we can justify more towards our fellow citizens IF THE INSTITUTIONS are fair, but they aren’t (i think this is what he said but was not paying attention)

Question 5

global justice - liberal egalitarianism 2 = non-cosmopolitans (statists)

Answer 5

position 1 = We owe more to nationals than foreigners (although we do owe something to foreigners)

Rawls’s law of peoples (1999):
*widely mocked book: everyone that applies Rawls does it like Beitz (borders are arbitrary)

• states have right of liberty + what they do ought to help out other states
• strong defense of self-determination: if you take liberty seriously, you ought to take self-determination seriously
• not justify a global difference principle
• no global difference principle
• principles that apply domestically are different than those that apply globally
• national self-determination matters, bc of “responsibility”
• borders matter as markers for self-determination

this is a WEAK commitment to global justice

• but it follows from our commonsense intuition, which is to think that borders do matter

POSITION 2: we owe something to foreigners, but not due to the demands of justice
- it is just not about justice

Nagel (2005): justice only exists at the nation-state level

• bc justice is a property of institutions/organizations that can coerce responsibility from its members
• no justice without coercion -> all effective systems of coercion exist on state-level
• this is his “political conception of justice”, which is kept within state borders
• addendum: if IOs began to operate with real coercive power, and dealt with individuals, rather than states, then under these conditions, global justice might be possible

Question 5

global justice; liberal egalitarianism other variants

Answer 5

LUCK EGALITARIANISM

• what is the morally arbitrary thing they are trying to correct for?
• primarily it is that RESIDENCE - i.e. where a person was born and lives - is morally arbitrary in the same way as race or gender
  = accident of birth, where you are born = morally arbitrary
• since borders are morally arbitrary, foreigners are owed the same resources as co-nationals
• this is a STRONG variant of cosmopolitanism

SUFFICIENCY

• For proponents of sufficiency (Anderson 1999) or capabilities (Nussbaum 2000; Sen 1992), borders are also irrelevant
  = borders are morally irrelevant, but for sufficiency it is relevant
• If justice requires us to have enough resources, there is no reason to limit this claim to national communities.
• But whereas we should distribute everywhere, we don’t have to distribute the same amount everywhere, because living standards are higher some places than others – thus while borders are morally irrelevant, they are practically relevant.
• This is a weak version of cosmopolitanism, because once the sufficiency threshold has been crossed, it is fine to privilege co-nationals over foreigners

non-cosmopolitans (statists)

Question 6

global justice: communitarianism

Answer 6

= position is similar to statism: particularist commitments contra universalist principles

• social justice must be based on local decision-making and deliberation
• thus no obligations of justice
• this doesn’t mean that we can’t do more to redistribute globally, only that we don’t have to

what do we make of this position?

• weakness: we do hold certain positions to be universally just/unjust and thus not the purview of particular communities (a claim we hold against communitarians in general)
• strength: it reveals the importance of self-determination - both national and political

Question 7

communitarianism - spotlight Miller

Answer 7

(national responsibility and global justice)

what would a communitarian position look like?

Miller believes that the answer lies in human rights – there is an obligation to protect “basic human rights”.
= there is some obligation that should be universal, the rest should be national

So how do we establish what a human right is? He shows the minimal and maximal versions:

• “The purpose of human rights is to set standards with which all states are expected to comply. There is, however, an ambiguity as to how this standard-setting role is to be understood. On the one hand, human rights might serve us as a minimal standard, a way of demarcating the morally tolerable from the morally intolerable … On this understanding of their purpose, we would expect the list of human rights to be fairly short. Only essential rights, such as rights to life and physical security, belong on a list whose aim is to set a minimum standard separating the tolerable from the intolerable. On the other hand, human rights might be understood as setting a target, something to which all peoples and all states should aspire … In the light of this purpose, the list of human rights could properly extend to include many items that would not appear on the basic list, for instance extensive rights to liberty, democratic rights, and rights to non-discrimination” (Miller 2007: 165-6).
• minimal e.g. medicine for curable diseases, access to water
• maximal is e.g. education

His approach is minimal: to focus on needs. There is an obligation of justice to protect basic needs, but that’s it.

Question 8

global justice: libertarianism

Answer 8

not surprisingly, we have a view that we only care for property rights abroad

(actually really good at creating global principles)

Hilel Steiner:

1. justice is global
2. but we owe nothing to foreigners outside of ownership rights, thus
3. a just (global) arrangement is one that protects and enforces those rights

in other words = a violation of rights of ownership are invalid, regardless of whether the subject is a co-national or a foreigner

libertarianism thus offers a defense of why our (minimal) claims for justice do in fact cross borders

q: is this obligation weak or strong?

• answer = stronger than you think