Cooperation, pervasive impact, and coercion: On the scope (not site) of distributive justice

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 35, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 318-358

  Abizadeh, Arash ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 36748998924     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2007.00116.x     Document Type: Article

References (89)

1. In this article, unless otherwise noted, the term justice refers to distributive justice, and not to what Rawls called natural justice; by cosmopolitan I simply mean the view that the scope of distributive justice is global, by anticosmopolitan the view that it is not.
2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 4, 96, 7; cf. p. 457: The "boundaries"of "the basic structures of well-ordered societies...are [assumed to be] given by the notion of a self-contained national community."
3. I say "Rawlsian" rather than "Rawls's" because (as an Editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs has pointed out) whether Rawls himself was ultimately committed to the basic structure argument is a matter of some interpretive ambiguity. On the one hand, in Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, paperback ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), Rawls presented his anticosmopolitanism merely as a provisional but methodologically useful assumption. He did not provide an explicit argument for his anticosmopolitanism and, in The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), when he did provide one, he did so without explicitly appealing to the basic structure argument. On the other hand, the basic structure argument is arguably implicit to Theory of Justice. When in that work Rawls relaxed the assumption of closed, self-sufficient societies to consider the issue of international justice, he did not conclude that "justice between states" requires distributive justice but, rather, that it requires principles familiar from traditional international law for "adjudicat[ing] conflicting claims among states" (pp. 377-79). The implicit assumption backing this conclusion seems to have been that while empirical reality requires relaxing the assumption of self-sufficiency, it does not require relaxing the assumption that there is no global basic structure: Even when he relaxed the assumption of self-sufficiency to consider issues in international justice, he continued to assume that "we have already derived the principles of justice as these apply to societies as units and to the basic structure" (p. 377, my emphasis). Moreover, as
4. Allen Buchanan, "Rawls's Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World" Ethics 110 (2000): 697-721,
5. J. Donald Moon, "Rawls and Habermas on Public Reason," Annual Review of Political Science 6 (2003): 257-74,
6. I borrow the expression "comparative principles" from David Miller, "The Limits of Cosmopolitan Justice," International Society, ed. David R. Mapel and Terry Nardin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 164-81, at p. 169. As I define the terms, Andrea Sangiovanni's recent article denies that principles of distributive justice (which, in my sense, are concerned with equality) are global in scope.
7. "Global Justice, Reciprocity, and the State," Philosophy & Public Affairs 35 (2007): 3-39.
8. Michael Blake, "Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy," Philosophy & Public Affairs 30 (2002): 257-96
9. Thomas Nagel, "The Problem of Global Justice," Philosophy & Public Affairs 33 (2005): 113-47.
10. See Thomas W. Pogge, "Do Rawls's Two Theories of Justice Fit Together?" in Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia?, ed. Rex Martin and David A. Reidy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), for questions about whether Rawls's assumptions about the moral integrity of peoples is compatible with the moral individualism he defends in Theory of Justice. Although I do not make the case here, I believe that Rawls's toleration of peoples argument in Law of Peoples is detachable from his theory of justice as fairness as a whole.
11. See, e.g., Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, pp. 169-70. For the debate concerning contemporary levels of globalization, see David Held etal., Global Transformations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999) and the articles collected in The Global Transformations Reader, ed. David Held and McGrew Anthony (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
12. See Moon, "Rawls and Habermas on Public Reason," p. 265. As noted above (n. 3), in Theory of Justice Rawls was willing to relax the assumption of self-sufficiency but not that the basic structure is domestic in scope.
13. This important distinction, between scope and site, has not been adequately appreciated in the literature. Andrew Williams, for example, uses the term "scope" to refer to what I call site. See his
14. "Incentives, Inequality, and Publicity," Philosophy & Public Affairs 27 (1998): 225-47,
15. As we shall see, this is Samuel Freeman's interpretation, according to whom an already existing shared basic structure is a necessary condition for relations of justice to arise in the first place ("Distributive Justice and The Law of Peoples ").
16. I borrow the term "existence condition" from
17. Charles R. Beitz, "Cosmopolitan Ideals and National Sentiment" The Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983): 591-600, at p. 595.
18. I quote Rawls's most mature formulation, from Justice as Fairness, p. 10, which follows very closely the wording of Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 7. See also Thomas W. Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 20-23.
19. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 258, and Justice as Fairness, p. 10. Cf. Theory of Justice, p. 7.
20. See Thomas Scanlon, "Rawls's Theory of Justice," Reading Rawls, ed. Norman Daniels (New York: Basic Books, 1974), especially pp. 192-93.
21. The principles of justice as fairness "do not apply directly to or regulate internally the institutions and associations within society. Firms and labor unions, churches, universities, and the family are bound by constraints arising from the principles of justice, but these constraints arise indirectly from just background institutions within which associations and groups exist, and by which the conduct of their members is restricted." Justice as Fairness, p. 10; see also pp. 7, 162-68.
22. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 283.
23. Freeman, "Distributive Justice and The Law of Peoples," p. 245. The assumption that Rawlsian distributive justice is in the first instance addressed to the allocation of goods is one of the shortcomings of Joseph Heath's recent defense of anticosmopolitan Rawlsianism in "Rawls on Global Distributive Justice: A Defence,"in Global Justice, Global Institutions: Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume 31, ed. Daniel Weinstock (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005).
24. Political Liberalism, pp. 265-69; Justice as Fairness, pp. 52-55.
25. Political Liberalism, p. 266.
26. Justice as Fairness, p. 54. The instrumental character of Rawls's division of labor argument for taking the basic structure as the primary site of justice assumes that a normative aim of both institutions of the basic structure and the individuals who inhabit them ought to be distributive justice. The division of labor argument simply asserts that as a matter of empirical fact the best way to realize this aim is to apply the principles directly to the basic structure. This means that, given the way that
27. Liam B. Murphy, "Institutions and the Demands of Justice" Philosophy & Public Affairs 27 (1999): 252-91,
28. Justice as Fairness, p. 6.
29. It might be argued that, for Rawls, a (just) basic structure is a constituent part of the ideal of justice, not merely an instrument for realizing it. This would not undermine the argument that follows, because (unlike existence conditions) constitutive and instrumental conditions both merely impose feasibility limits on the scope of justice.
30. Something like this view is advanced by Brian Barry, "Humanity and Justice in Global Perspective," in Ethics, Economics, and the Law: NOMOS XXIV, ed. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (New York: New York University Press, 1982), pp. 232-33. Barry argues that duties of "justice as fair play" arise only from social coordination that meets "conditions for reciprocity."
31. Charles Beitz makes a similar point in his example of slaves forced to contribute to a scheme of social coordination against their will without any advantage to themselves (Political Theory and International Relations, p. 131).
32. Others, including Barry himself, have worried that a status quo bias plagues Rawls's theory of justice. See Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Cf.
33. Aaron James, "Constructing Justice for Existing Practice: Rawls and the Status Quo," Philosophy & Public Affairs 33 (2005): 281-316.
34. James's reconstruction of Rawls ("Constructing Justice") identifies an existence condition for Rawlsian justice as well, but James fails to distinguish social interaction as such from a basic structure (or social interaction regulated by it). As a result, his discussion tends to slide from invoking mere social interaction (p. 295: any "principle of social justice has as a condition of its application the existence of some social practice") to invoking basic structure (p. 298: "among the many and various existing social practices...we should attend first to the most 'basic'of existing social structures"). But this slide from social practices in general to the basic structure in particular, which leads James to conclude that the "very existence" of a basic structure "cannot be socially just or unjust" (p. 314), rests on a confusion. The cooperation theory's justification for focusing on social practices in general, and, even more generally, on social interaction, establishes mere social interaction as an existence condition of justice. The justification for focusing on the basic structure, by contrast, does not establish it as an existence condition: The cooperation theory's appeal to the basic structure is instrumental. It is hence no surprise that when James himself justifies the focus on the basic structure, he appeals to its pervasive impact (pp. 298-99).
35. Freeman, "Distributive Justice and The Law of Peoples," p. 245-47. Despite his claim that the absence of a world state makes claims for global principles of justice "absurd," Freeman adopts a cooperation and not a coercion theory of justice, as he makes clear when distinguishing his position from Nagel's, on p. 259, n. 4.
36. Samuel Freeman, "The Law of Peoples, Social Cooperation, Human Rights, and Distributive Justice," Social Philosophy & Policy 23 (2006): 29-68,
37. Joseph Heath provides another example of the failure to see the instrumental role of the basic structure in the cooperation theory: "far from instrumentalizing social institutions" of the basic structure, he claims, Rawls "takes them as his point of departure. "The putative "absence of a basic structure at the international level" is thus not "merely an implementation problem" the "rule of law" enforced by effective institutions of the basic structure is, rather, an existence condition of justice: "the absence of the rule of law at the international level is not simply⋯an implementation problem" (Heath, "Rawls on Global Distributive Justice," pp. 200, 201, 205). Heath's thesis is problematic on several fronts. First, his primary argument consists in pointing out that the basic structure is the "subject" of justice (p. 200), hence equivocating between site and scope. Second, he argues that certain "types of free-rider problems," whose resolution may be necessary for realizing social cooperation in Rawls's normative sense, "can only be resolved through" coercive enforcement via institutions of a basic structure (p. 204). Heath's point, then, is that justice requires social cooperation (in Rawls's sense) and social cooperation requires terms of cooperation coercively enforced by a basic structure. This may be true, but on the cooperation theory that Heath apparently favors, coercive enforcement is "required" only in the instrumental sense; enforcement is not an existence condition of justice. Finally, Heath argues that Rawlsian justice is constituted by considerations of both equality and efficiency, meaning that "Efficiency questions, for Rawls, are normative, not instrumental." As such, "the loss of efficiency" that would result from "global redistribution of national savings" would "trump the gain in equality" (p. 211). The problems with this final argument are at least two. First, Heath's argument against global redistribution of national savings proceeds by applying his interpretation of the Rawlsian principle of distributive justice to the globe, not by showing that it is inapplicable. Second, his distinction between "instrumental" and "normative" considerations fails to distinguish between two kinds of normative considerations. He merely shows that efficiency considerations specify constitutive conditions of justice, but not, as his anticosmopolitan argument requires, existence conditions.
38. Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 4.
39. Beitz, "Cosmopolitan Ideals and National Sentiment," p. 595. Compare with Beitz's afterword to the revised edition of Political Theory and International Relations, p. 203. See also Richards, "International Distributive Justice,"p. 292.
40. As such, one could argue that Beitz's own original reformulation of the Rawlsian account in Political Theory and International Relations, which avoids including cooperation in the idealized sense as an existence condition of justice, already avoids the conflation.
41. Barry, "Humanity and Justice," p. 227.
42. "Justice as fair play arises not from simple exchange but from either the provision of public goods that are collectively enjoyed⋯or from quasi-insurance schemes for mutual aid"(Barry, "Humanity and Justice," p. 233). Sangiovanni's proposed existence condition of reciprocity is even more restricting: He argues that comparative principles of distributive justice arise only "among those who support and maintain the state's capacity to provide the basic collective goods necessary to protect us from physical attack and to maintain and reproduce a stable system of property rights and entitlements" ("Global Justice," p. 20).
43. Discussing the principle of fairness or fair play, Rawls says: "We are not to gain from the cooperative labors of others without doing our fair share. The two principles of justice define what is a fair share in the case of institutions belonging to the basic structure. So if these arrangements are just, each person receives a fair share when all (himself included) do their part" (Theory of Justice, p. 112, emphasis added).
44. Richards, "International Distributive Justice," has made the same point about Barry's argument.
45. Rather than a constituent, this overlapping consensus may be a necessary means for realizing justice (or, at least, for maintaining its stability over time).
46. See Jürgen Habermas's critique of Rorty's interpretation of Rawls, in Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), chap. 2, particularly pp. 58-63. See also Beitz, "Cosmopolitan Ideals and National Sentiment," p. 596.
47. The same point can be made regarding Andrew Williams's claim that the public recognition of rules is a constitutive feature of the institutions of the basic structure ("Incentives, Inequality, and Publicity"). The public recognition of rules is a constitutive condition of justice, not an existence condition.
48. See Scanlon, "Rawls's Theory of Justice," p. 202.
49. Kok-Chor Tan makes this point in Justice without Borders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 33-34, 169-70, 174.
50. Or, more weakly, social coordination may be a normative demand of broader normative considerations (not necessarily of justice), and demands of distributive justice may arise not only when a scheme of social coordination exists, but also when it ought to exist. In either case, the demands of justice would arise, as Rawls puts it when specifying the circumstances of justice, when "human cooperation is both possible and necessary" (Theory of Justice, p. 126). For discussion of potential duties to create institutions of social coordination and cooperation, see
51. Pablo Gilabert, "Contractualism and Poverty Relief" Social Theory and Practice 33 (2007): 277-310.
52. Buchanan, "Rawls's Law of Peoples."
53. Intolerably unjust because the question is not whether the ideal is fully realizable in practice, but whether attempts to realize the ideal through a basic structure would undermine or contribute to the realization of the ideal. One can extrapolate the claim that it would be intolerably unjust from Rawls's assertion that "a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central governments⋯would either be a global despotism or else would rule over a fragile empire torn by frequent civil strife" (Law of Peoples, p. 36). This kind of argument, it seems to me, rests on rather old-fashioned Hobbesian views about the indivisible and centralized nature of sovereignty. A more plausible Rawlsian argument for why a (just) global basic structure is unfeasible appeals to the claim that a just basic structure requires an overlapping consensus, and that the overlapping consensus required by Rawlsian justice in particular-about the freedom and equality of persons-is not a part of whatever global public political culture there is. (A "well-ordered society," Rawls argues, is one whose basic structure is effectively regulated by a public conception of justice accepted by all its members [Theory of Justice, pp. 453-54; cf. Justice as Fairness, p. 9].) But, if an overlapping consensus is an instrumental or constitutive condition rather than an existence condition for a just basic structure, then the existence of such a consensus is not the issue here: The issue is whether such a consensus is feasible. For if an overlapping consensus about the equality and freedom of persons is instrumentally or constitutively necessary for realizing or stably maintaining Rawlsian justice over time, then Rawlsian justice would demand the recognition of the equality and freedom of persons. It is not at all clear why such recognition is not feasible at the global level in the long run; the secular trend since World War II arguably points in such a direction.
54. Robert E. Goodin, "What Is So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?" Ethics 98 (1988): 663-86, at p. 683.
55. See footnote 59 in Justice as Fairness, p. 176.
56. Justice as Fairness, p. 10. Cf. Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 96: "The primary subject of justice...is the basic structure of society. The reason for this is that its effects are so profound and pervasive, and present from birth." In Political Liberalism, p. 269, Rawls also says that "the basic structure shapes the way the social system produces and reproduces over time a certain form of culture shared by persons with certain conceptions of their good." See also Justice as Fairness, pp. 52-57. Cf. Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 96: "The primary subject of justice⋯is the basic structure of society. The reason for this is that its effects are so profound and pervasive, and present from birth." In Political Liberalism, p. 269, Rawls also says that "the basic structure shapes the way the social system produces and reproduces over time a certain form of culture shared by persons with certain conceptions of their good." See also Justice as Fairness, pp. 52-57.
57. G. A. Cohen, "Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice," Philosophy & Public Affairs 26 (1997): 3-30,
58. See Samuel Scheffler's discussion of the "distributive objection" in Boundaries and Allegiances (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
59. Thomas W. Pogge, "On the Site of Distributive Justice" Philosophy & Public Affairs 29 (2000): 137-69,
60. See Buchanan, "Rawls's Law of Peoples,"for the argument that there is indeed a global basic structure (which he construes in terms of institutions having profound and pervasive impact). Rawls claims that the life chances of persons in impoverished, politically weak states are mostly determined by the country's own "political culture-its members'political and civic virtues"(Law of Peoples, p. 117). Domestic factors surely matter as well, but Rawls flatly ignores how international factors help shape precisely those domestic factors he thinks decisive in the first place. For a critique of Rawls's "explanatory nationalism,"and the pervasive role of international financial institutions, see Thomas W. Pogge, "Human Rights and Human Responsibilities,"in Global Justice and Transnational Politics, ed. Pablo De Greiff and Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 151-95, and World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).
61. "Coercion, not cooperation, is the sine qua non of distributive justice, making relevant principles of relative deprivation"(Blake, "Distributive Justice,"p. 289). Cf. Nagel, "Problem of Global Justice," p. 128.
62. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 369, 154.
63. See ibid., pp. 377-78; Blake, "Distributive Justice," p. 270.
64. Blake, "Distributive Justice," pp. 272, 265.
65. Ibid., p. 280.
66. Ibid., pp. 260, 289.
67. Ibid., pp. 258, 264, 265.
68. Ibid., pp. 258, 276.
69. Since according to the autonomy principle A1 all ongoing acts of state coercion require justification, I shall henceforth drop the qualifying parenthetical phrase "requiring justification."
70. Blake "Distributive Justice," p. 265.
71. Ibid., p. 287.
72. For analysis of the nature of border coercion, see Arash Abizadeh, "Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders," Political Theory, forthcoming. Blake's recognition that coercion "in the international arena "may" exist in forms other than state coercion" ("Distributive Justice," p. 265) ignores the fact that states are themselves institutions who act in the international arena. Indeed, states are arguably the most important actors in the international arena, and they regularly act in that arena coercively. It is true that there is no world state that acts coercively against the world's population, but there certainly are states that do. On different types of state coercion, see
73. A. J. Julius, "Nagel's Atlas" Philosophy & Public Affairs 34 (2006): 176-92,
74. Blake, "Distributive Justice,"p. 280, n. 30, emphasis mine. Cf.: "There is no ongoing coercion of the sort observed in the domestic arena in the international legal arena. It is⋯only this form of coercion that makes a concern for relative deprivation relevant for a liberal political theory⋯.Material equality becomes relevant only in the context of certain forms of coercion, forms not found outside the domestic arena" (ibid., pp. 280, 284, emphasis mine).
75. Ibid., p. 280.
76. Ibid., p. 282, emphasis mine.
77. "International legal institutions⋯do not engage in coercive practices against individual human agents"(Ibid., p. 280; cf. p. 279).
78. Ibid., p. 284.
79. Nagel, "Problem of Global Justice," pp. 128-29.
80. Ibid., p. 129.
81. On this point, see Julius, "Nagel's Atlas," pp. 179-83.
82. Blake, "Distributive Justice," pp. 281-82, emphasis mine.
83. Though not because it is regulated by laws: Its coerciveness is sufficient to require justification. The justification, to be successful, may in turn require the rule of law.
84. Blake, "Distributive Justice," p. 265, emphasis mine.
85. Blake has in fact argued this in a personal communication to me.
86. For some doubts, however, see Sangiovanni, "Global Justice," pp. 10-13.
87. See
88. Mathias Risse, "What We Owe to the Global Poor" The Journal of Ethics 9 (2004): 81-117,
89. For ethnographic evidence of the tremendous significance of this point, see Charles V. Carengie, Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002). On the historical origins of the enforcement of membership-boundaries as an economic tool, see Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), especially pp. 64-72.