Beneficence and distributive justice in a globalising world

Global Society

Volumn 20, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 251-266

  Loriaux, Sylvie ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

MORALITY; POVERTY ALLEVIATION; SOCIAL JUSTICE; UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFIT;

EID: 33747120015     PISSN: 13600826     EISSN: 1469798X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13600820600816266     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. A paradigmatic illustration of this claim is found in Beitz's well-known book Political Theory and International Relations. He argues that the current international economic interdependence is evolving into a kind of global basic structure - characterised by an appreciable degree of international law, trade, capital flows, and economic and political institutions - to which the requirements of distributive justice apply: "[t]he conclusion that principles of distributive justice apply globally follows from the premise that international economic interdependence constitutes a scheme of social cooperation like those to which requirements of distributive justice have often been thought to apply".
2. See Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 154.
3. On the difficulty to clearly distinguish between "charity" and "justice", see Allen Buchanan, "Justice and Charity", Ethics, Vol. 97, No. 3 (1987), pp. 558-575.
4. Brian Barry, "Humanity and Justice in Global Perspective", in Liberty and Justice: Essays in Political Theory 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 209.
5. Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, in Mary J. Gregor (trans. and ed.), Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 351 [8:385].
6. T.D. Campbell, "Humanity before Justice", British Journal of Political Sciences, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1974), p. 14.
7. On the difficulty of reconciling these different criteria in one overall view, see T.D. Campbell, "Perfect and Imperfect Obligations", The Modern Schoolman, Vol. 52 (March 1975), pp. 285-294.
8. In this respect, we can refer to the discussion led by libertarians, welfarists and more recently by Thomas Pogge. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974)
9. Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and US Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980)
10. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
11. O'Neill supports the view that (in the abstract) universal positive duties are not duties of justice because their imperfection prevents them from correlating with rights. For his part, Nozick considers the enforcement of universal positive duties morally illegitimate because it would imply unacceptable incursions in the life of individuals and thus violate their absolute rights to freedom and property. See Onora O'Neill, Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Justice and Development (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986)
12. Nozick, op. cit.
13. The positive/negative dichotomy cannot therefore accommodate the idea of socio-economic human rights, such as that "to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and one's family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care" (UDHR, Article 25), except by dissociating such rights from the very language of justice and conceiving them as requirements of beneficence.
14. Political obligation - moral obligation to obey the law - can be seen as arising between members of a particular political society and as being due to them not because they are human beings on whom it would be wrong to inflict suffering (by not obeying the law), but because, as cooperating members of a society, those who have restricted their liberty according to the law have a right to a similar restriction from the part of others who have benefited from their restriction. Accordingly, a political society is a kind of duty-creating situation of mutual restrictions. See H.L.A. Hart, "Are There Any Natural Rights?", The Philosophical Review, Vol. 64, No. 2 (1955), pp. 175-191.
15. The question is, of course, to decide whether enforcement is morally permissible in this case. Nozick's "minimal state" clearly rules this out. By contrast, Allen Buchanan has argued that certain forms of beneficence could be regarded as important public goods, whose realisation requires the cooperation of several agents but whose enjoyment extends to potential non-contributors, thereby encouraging free-riding. Enforcing positive duties of contribution - by establishing legal rights to the good in question, for example - may therefore prove necessary to secure the provision of a good that is very important for individuals, although they have no moral right to it. See Allen Buchanan, op. cit., pp. 562-568.
16. I am here presupposing a distinction made by T.D. Campbell between two conceptions of justice, namely formal justice which concerns the impartial application of established rules or laws and material justice which concerns the (in)justice of the very content of these rules or laws. See T.D. Campbell, "Humanity before Justice", op. cit., pp. 3-4.
17. See Onora O'Neill, Bounds of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 126.
18. A parallel may be drawn with Goodin's conception of special duties. According to him, special duties are "merely distributed general duties", yet they cannot be wholly derivative from general duties, for we cannot always deduce from considerations of general duties alone who in particular is responsible for their discharge and what he is exactly responsible for doing. This does not mean that it is a matter of indifference who is chosen to bear the special responsibility. Some people are naturally better qualified than others to perform a specific task (some make, for example, better lifeguards than others). Similarly, although the duty to help, which is made perfect through institutionalisation, derives its moral force from an imperfect duty, the specific form it takes is not entirely derivative from this imperfect duty but is also dependent upon available institutions. See Robert E. Goodin, "What is so Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?", Ethics, Vol. 98, No. 4 (1988), pp. 663-686.
19. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Mary J. Gregor (trans. and ed.), Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 375 [6:214], 392 [6:237], 520 [6:388-389].
20. Duties of right and ethical duties can also be distinguished on the basis of the incentive contained in their respective lawgiving, namely, "[t]hat lawgiving which makes an action a duty and also makes this duty the incentive is ethical. But that lawgiving which does not include the incentive of duty in the law and so admits an incentive other than the idea of duty itself is juridical" (p. 383 [6:218-219]).
21. It is tempting to interpret Kant's distinction between duties of right and duties of virtue in terms of perfection or imperfection, all the more since Kant himself asserts that "Ethical duties are of wide obligation, whereas duties of right are of narrow obligation" (ibid., p. 521 [6:390]). At first sight, this identification seems to be quite plausible. The fact that ethics provides laws for principles of actions and not for actions themselves suggests that agents are left with room for free choice in the fulfilment of their ethical duties or that ethical duties are by definition imperfect duties. However, the fact that Kant explicitly admits the existence of perfect ethical duties - like the duty not to commit suicide and the duty to respect human beings - makes it difficult to maintain that the ultimate difference between duties of right and ethical duties is a matter of (im)perfection.
22. Ibid., p. 572 [6:453].
23. Even Kant's justification of the duty of beneficence rests largely on the importance that some actions be performed. He argues that the maxim of self-interest is self-contradictory when universalised and that, for this reason, acting on it cannot be called moral. However, when we examine the self-contradiction more closely, we see that what is at stake is not so much "principles of actions" as "actions". Indeed, the maxim of self-interest that consists in "being unwilling to assist other... when they are in need" is self-contradictory when made a universal law because it allows everyone to refuse his assistance whereas "everyone who finds himself in need wishes to be helped by others" (ibid., p. 572 [6:453]; emphasis added). The justification of the duty to help those in need seems here to rely only on the importance of mutual aid for a human life characterised by needs which nobody can ever be sure to have met. No reference is made to the good intention that must underlie actions of help.
24. It is worth noting that Kant's argument is a reversed version of the libertarian argument - enforcement of the duty to help those in need is not rejected because it is incompatible with the potential benefactor's absolute right to freedom (not to be interfered with), but because it is incompatible with the potential recipient's right to freedom (to conceive his happiness as he pleases). This explains why the shift made here is possible in Kant's theory, but not in the libertarian's.
25. Note that the objection raised here bears on the very validity of both the imperfection/perfection and the non-enforceability/enforceability dichotomies, since it contradicts the thesis that perfection and enforceability are distinctive of duties of justice.
26. The argument developed in this section will not consider rectificatory justice and the question of whether the global rich may be said to have special positive obligations towards the global poor on the gounds that they have been harming them. It will focus on distributive justice, that is, on how major institutions are to distribute advantages and burdens among their participants. Thereby it assumes that the duties of global (economic) justice need not necessarily be conceived in terms of special positive duties deriving from a previous violation of universal negative duties. It assumes that their applicability does not necessarily depend on whether globalisation may be said to make some societies worse off than they would have been in a non-cooperative situation. Nor, for that matter, on whether by "allowing harm" - for example by allowing the perpetuation of severe poverty - globalisation is actually "causing harm" - for example by producing severe poverty.
27. It must be noted that Rawls himself reserves this expression for domestic societies and denies that the world as a whole could already be seen as a cooperative venture. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 4
28. The Law of Peoples with the Idea of Public Reason Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 116.
29. For a discussion on the issue of global equality of opportunity, see Bernard Boxill, "Global Equality of Opportunity and National Integrity", Social Philosophy and Policy, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1987), pp. 143-168
30. and Simon Caney, "Cosmopolitan Justice and Equalizing Opportunities", Metaphilosophy, Vol. 32, Nos. 1-2 (2001), pp. 113-134.