Cosmopolitanism and global justice

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 9, Issue 1-2, 2005, Pages 11-27

  Beitz, Charles R ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Cosmopolitanism; Democracy; Global distributive justice; Global political justice; Morality of states; Poverty

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950398984     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s10892-004-3312-0     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Martin Wight, "Why Is There No International Theory?" in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), p. 20.
2. The essay was first published in International Relations 2 (1960).
3. Stanley Benn and Richard Peters, Social Principles and the Democratic State (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959)
4. published in the United States as The Principles of Political Thought (New York: Free Press, 1965)
5. H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), Chapter 10. In fact, Hart's book was published a year after Wight's essay first appeared.
6. Brian Barry, Political Argument: A Reissue with a New Introduction (New York and London: Wheatsheaf Harvester, 1990), p. lxxiv (1st ed. 1965). These passages occur in the 1965 Introduction, near the end.
7. The pivotal works are Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (eds.), Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972);
8. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977).
9. Also, see the last chapter (on normative issues) in Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
10. These phenomena resist easy summary. An inventory would include dramatic growth in international trade and investment, increased integration of goods and capital markets, the articulation of transnational regimes for trade, finance and development, the proliferation of non-governmental organizations and a series of changes in the organization of cultural life that have diminished the social significance of the boundaries of at least the advanced industrial states.
11. This is, among other things, a self-criticism, since one of the central themes of Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) (1st ed. 1979) was that the growth of economic interdependence after World War II had transformed international relations in such a way that it had become appropriate, for the first time, to worry about international distributive justice. This exaggerated the novelty of the postwar changes.
12. For example, in the openness of labor markets and in the share of international capital flows destined for developing economies [Kevin H. O'Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999)]. O'Rourke and Williamson demonstrate that high levels of integration of commodity, capital, and labor markets were achieved by the late-19th century and that these forms of globalization produced very significant domestic economic and political consequences.
13. Henry Sidgwick's Elements of Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1897), Chapters. 15-18, contains four substantial chapters devoted to moral issues in foreign policy, interestingly including free trade and immigration.
14. These three conceptions are distinguished in Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, Introduction, Conclusion, and passim. For doubts and second thoughts about the basic distinction, see the Afterword in the 1999 reissue.
15. See E. de Vattel, Le droit des gens [The Law of Nations], trans. Charles G. Fenwick (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1916), Volume III, Introduction, Sections 2-6, and II, Chapters 1, 3, and 5.
16. Thomas W. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 169.
17. Also see Charles Beitz, "Cosmopolitan Liberalism and the States System," in Chris Brown (ed.), Political Restructuring in Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 124.
18. Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 112;
19. Simon Caney, "Review Article: International Distributive Justice," Political Studies 49 (2001), p. 977.
20. In this respect cosmopolitanism is like political equality, well described by Giovanni Sartori as a "protest ideal" which operates primarily as a basis for criticizing certain institutional arrangements rather than as a basis for choosing any particular one [Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited (Chatham: Chatham House, 1987), Part 2, pp. 337-338].
21. See text accompanying note 23.
22. Scheffler, "Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism," pp. 114-115;
23. Caney, "Review Article: International Distributive Justice," pp. 975-976;
24. David Miller, "The Limits of Cosmopolitan Justice," in David R. Mapel and Terry Nardin (eds.), International Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 166.
25. I drew attention to the possibility of conflict between cosmopolitan and nonderivative sectional values - I now think in a slightly Delphic way - in Charles Beitz, "Cosmopolitan Ideals and National Sentiment," The Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983), pp. 591-600.
26. "Apparent reasons for action" - reasons that suggest themselves to us in practical reasoning, before they have been subjected to a process of critical inspection [see Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 65].
27. Peter Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972), pp. 229-243.
28. Though at an increasingly sophisticated level; see, e.g., Liam Murphy, Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). This book illustrates how the attempt to resolve problems that arise in the international context can produce contributions to moral and political theory of quite general interest.
29. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), Section 16.
30. For an explanation of the significance of these features, see Leif Wenar, "The Legitimacy of Peoples," in Pablo De Greiff and Ciaran Cronin (eds.), Global Justice and Transnational Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 65-67.
31. However, he is skeptical that outside financial assistance can help a society to develop the capacity to satisfy its people's needs in the absence of internal change. He writes, for example, that "merely dispensing funds will not suffice to rectify basic political and social injustices (though money is often essential)" and that "throwing funds at [a burdened society] is usually undesirable" (Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pp. 108-109, 110).
32. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 38;
33. see also p. 37 and Sections 15-16.
34. With respect to international cooperative organizations (such as might manage the trade regime), he writes, "should these cooperative organizations have unjustified distributive effects between peoples, these would have to be corrected, and taken into account by the duty of assistance" (Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 43). He does not say how a baseline might be established to identify "unjustified distributive effects."
35. Miller, "The Limits of Cosmopolitan Justice," p. 171.
36. It would be reasonable to wonder how Miller's conception of non-comparative justice at the global level differs from beneficence. In introductory comments, he gives as an example of a "weak cosmopolitan" distributive obligation what might be interpreted as a duty of beneficence (p. 167).
37. However, in the substance of the discussion, he refers to the non-comparative principle that establishes an obligation to contribute to the satisfaction of people's vital interests as a principle of justice. Elsewhere, he distinguishes explicitly between considerations of humanity and considerations of justice and holds that under certain circumstances there can be obligations of international justice (specifically, "in cases where people's basic rights were put at risk and it was not feasible for their own national state to protect them") [David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 108].
38. I apologize for the crude formulation. See Michael Blake, "Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy," Philosophy and Public Affairs 30 (2001), pp. 257- 296;
39. Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 195-202.
40. These domestic-level sources include "the political culture, the political virtues and civil society of the country, its members' probity and industriousness, their capacity for innovation, and much else. Crucial also is the country's population policy ⋯ ." He adds: "But ⋯ the duty of assistance is in no way diminished" (Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 108).
41. Pogge describes a variety of mechanisms that bring about this result (Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, Chapter 6).
42. I adopted the first model in Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations. In my defense, I observed that aid and international economic reforms had to be considered as supplementary to a largely indigenous process of economic development (p. 173, note 82).
43. For the second model, see Brian Barry, "International Society from a Cosmopolitan Perspective," in David R. Mapel and Terry Nardin (eds.), International Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 153-156.
44. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), Section 43.
45. See also Richard Krouse and Michael MacPherson, "Capitalism, 'Property-Owning Democracy' and the Welfare State," in Amy Gutmann (ed.), Democracy and the Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 78-105.
46. Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
47. I borrow here from Charles Beitz, Political Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), Chapter 5.
48. The exceptions include David Held, Democracy and the Global Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995);
49. James Bohman, "International Regimes and Democratic Governance," International Affairs 75 (1999), pp. 499-514;
50. Allen Buchanan and Robert O. Keohane, "Governing the Preventive Use of Force," Ethics & International Affairs 18 (2004), pp. 1-22.