International Justice in an Age of Globalization

INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Grigor Demirchyan January 2013 © 2013 Grigor Demirchyan INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION Grigor Demirchyan, Ph.D. Cornell University 2013 Abstract The topic of international justice has become, in the last two decades, a prominent part of political philosophy and an important subject for political philosophers to address. But there is yet a good deal of disagreement about the role that a conception of international justice should play in regulating the terms of international cooperation. Some argue that international justice has a limited role to play, specifying norms for state conduct for a rather narrow set of issues. Proponents of this limited view do not think that norms of international justice should include principles of distributive justice, which they take to be limited to domestic conceptions of justice. On the other hand, there are those who argue for a very robust conception of international justice, one that essentially replaces the domestic conception and calls for economic redistribution spanning the whole world. In the papers that follow, I engage with each of these positions on international justice, and sketch my own account of the right approach. I contend that it is a mistake to limit the role of justice, including distributive justice, to only the domestic sphere, arguing instead that it should be extended to transnational systems of cooperation. We have, I suggest, vast global economic interdependence as well as international legal coercion, both morally relevant phenomena that require the application of principles of distributive justice; for, as I point out, there is much that takes place on the international stage that eventually makes its way to the level of individual citizens and affects their prospects in a significant way. I do not, however, go so far as to suggest that we simply replace domestic conceptions of justice with an international one. It is my view that both domestic and international conceptions of justice are necessary, each working to address the subject-matter specific to it. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Greg Demirchyan was born in the city of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in the former Soviet Union. He immigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1980. His undergraduate degree in Philosophy is from the University of California at Berkeley, from where he also earned a J.D. Greg currently resides in Berkeley, California, where he works in the areas of human rights and the rule of law. v To my loving parents and spouse, who were always there for me. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe a debt of gratitude to the Cornell Philosophy Department for supporting me throughout these years. Cornell provided a wonderfully intellectual and stimulating environment for someone like me who was interested in many different topics in philosophy, including problems requiring an interdisciplinary approach. I am very grateful to all my past advisors: Henry Shue, Karen Jones, and Michele Moody-Adams. Although their academic paths eventually took them elsewhere, while they were at Cornell, I was richly rewarded by their erudition and thinking. I also want to thank Erin Taylor and Michelle Kosch, who came on board as my advisors much later in my academic career. I especially appreciate their willingness to advise a rather senior graduate student who was involved in somewhat unconventional interdisciplinary research. To Dick Miller, I owe much. Dick was always there to support me, and became a great friend who advised me on more than just philosophy. Without his help and friendship, my work on international justice would never have been completed. Dick always made me think that I had something valuable to say and contribute to the field. I also have to thank my friends at Berkeley: Donald Stanford, Richard Buxbaum, and Michael Schwartz. With their support and help, I was able to find the strength to make the final push to finish the dissertation. Finally, I must express my deepest gratitude to my partner, Sudha Lakshmi, and my parents. It was their understanding, patience, and support that sustained me through many difficult years. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface…………………………………………………………………… x Chapter One Overview and Introduction………………………………………… ……... 1 Chapter Two Economic Globalization and International Distributive Justice…………. 25 Chapter Three A Response to Nagel and Blake……………………………………………. 91 Chapter Four International Intellectual Property, Coercion, and the Need for an International Conception of Justice………………………………………... 175 viii LIST OF TABLES Table One……………………………………………………………...... 67 Table Two……………………………………………………………….. 68 Table Three………………………………………………………………. 78 Table Four………………………………………………………………… 79 ix PREFACE In the last two decades, international justice has become an important topic in political philosophy, and at the same time a deeply challenging one in the face of increasing globalization. Though globalization is a process that has been extant for centuries, its accelerating pace after the end of the second World War has left our world deeply commingled and entangled. Effects of the decisions made in a particular state, once localized, now often resonate throughout the world, reaching places that were insulated from them not too long ago. The complexity of a globalized world is relevant to political philosophy, not so much in virtue of the complexity itself, but because of the moral problems it generates, problems that, in my view at least, are best examined from the standpoint of justice. One important question concerns the method we use to address the complexity of the globalized world. Should we simplify things as much as possible in order to formulate an abstract picture of the world, or should we confront the complexity head- on? The former strategy comes with the prospect of elegant solutions, and has been by far the dominant approach in political philosophy where questions of international justice are concerned. My own approach, however, hews closer to the second strategy. The central issue in much of the literature on international justice concerns the role of justice in the international, as opposed to the domestic, sphere. One common position takes justice to have a very circumscribed role internationally, restricting the application of distributive principles in particular to the domestic sphere. An equally x popular account, in contrast, treats international justice as the primary normative ideal, superseding domestic conceptions of justice, which are treated simply as particular cases of the general international conception. Common to both of these approaches, however, is the method employed, which is to start with a more abstract conception of our complex, globalized world, with many of the actual details expunged. While this method allows us to evaluate the merits of the relevant accounts of international justice more or less on purely philosophical grounds, this comes at the cost of abstracting away many details that, in my view, are ultimately deeply relevant to answering the very questions about justice that the fact of globalization leaves us with. As I see it, the most serious problems with the accounts of international justice that favor such an abstract approach arise from the fact that they miss certain important details, especially with respect to the two issues most central to assessing the role of justice internationally: the level of international coercion and the extent of global interdependence. The poor empirics underlying much of the work on international justice is in large part what led me to confront the complexity of a globalized world more fully and directly in my work. One of the papers in my dissertation is an attempt to give a more precise estimation of the extent of global economic cooperation, a task rarely attempted in the philosophical literature. I do this by adapting a set of methods used in econometrics to the problem of measuring how much the economic output of particular states depends on the economic activities that take place outside them. My results here suggest that the level of global economic interdependence is considerable. For example, according to my methods of estimation, roughly 50% of the total xi economic output of South Korea depends on economic activities outside it; the number is even higher in the case of the Netherlands – around 70%. In my view, the sheer amount of global economic interdependence does make it morally significant with respect to questions of justice. Another paper in my dissertation focuses on legal coercion. It is often argued that since legal coercion is a feature only of domestic societies – the laws of a state generally apply only within its boundaries – such coercion generates duties of justice only within domestic society. Even where legal coercion appears to operate internationally, the prevailing view has been to see it as playing so limited a role as not to generate significant duties of justice. (Indeed, even those who think that the duties of justice apply internationally tend to dismiss the role played by legal coercion in generating these duties, grounding them instead in economic interdependence or purely humanitarian concerns.) My approach to this issue is once again driven by an appreciation of the actual ways in which coercion operates. I focus on one particular case – the intellectual-property

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