Charles Beitz, Cosmopolitanism and Global Justice, Journal of Ethics, 9
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CHARLES R. BEITZ COSMOPOLITANISM AND GLOBAL JUSTICE* (Received 14 May 2004; accepted in revised form 2 June 2004) ABSTRACT. Philosophical attention to problems about global justice is flour- ishing in a way it has not in any time in memory. This paper considers some reasons for the rise of interest in the subject and reflects on some dilemmas about the meaning of the idea of the cosmopolitan in reasoning about social institutions, concentrating on the two principal dimensions of global justice, the economic and the political. KEY WORDS: cosmopolitanism, democracy, global distributive justice, global political justice, morality of states, poverty Philosophical attention to problems about global justice is flourishing in a way it has not at any time in memory. I do not need to say very much to explain why this is a good thing. We face an assortment of urgent practical problems that are not likely to be solved, if they can be solved at all, without concerted international action. Some of these involve controlling the pathologies of the states system – for example, aggressive war and oppressive government. Some are collective action problems – for example, global warming and depletion of fisheries. Some arise from the fact that the world contains such vast amounts of human suffering, much of it chronic and in varying degrees avoidable. There is at the same time the emergence of a nascent global capacity to act. This capacity is fragmentary and heterogeneous. It expresses itself in the foreign policies of states, in an eclectic variety of intergovernmental organizations, in the institutions and regimes that organize global economic relations, and in humanitarian and human *Opening address of the Mini-Conference on Global Justice, American Philoso- phical Association Pacific Division, 2004 Annual Meeting, Pasadena, California, March 27, 2004. I am grateful for comments to Darrel Moellendorf and to my copanelists Michael Blake, Kristen Hessler, Jon Mandle, Mathias Risse and Leif Wenar. The Journal of Ethics (2005) 9: 11–27 Ó Springer 2005 12 CHARLES R. BEITZ rights law and a series of largely improvised legal and political mechanisms of enforcement. Alongside and occasionally intertwined with all of this is an evolving transnational civil society comprised of a diverse assortment of non-governmental organizations. The urgency of the problems and the prospect that they might eventually be alleviated by political action explain why the rise of philosophical interest in global justice is to be welcomed. With the exception of the morality of war, philosophical understanding of problems of global justice is still at an early stage. It behooves anyone who thinks and writes about these matters to appreciate that as our understanding develops, we may learn from revisiting ideas that once seemed clear and persuasive. As a step in this direction, I would like to reflect on some dilemmas about the meaning of the idea of the cosmopolitan as it applies to the two principal dimensions of global justice, the economic and the polit- ical. These remarks are supposed to be brief, aimed more to char- acterize disagreement than to advance an argument. Inevitably they will be both incomplete and telegraphic, and for that I apologize in advance. GLOBAL JUSTICE IN POLITICAL THEORY By way of background, let me begin with an observation about the increase of philosophical attention to problems of global justice in the last 30 or so years. In 1960, Martin Wight, a leading English student of international relations, wrote an essay with the provoc- ative title, ‘‘Why Is There No International Theory?’’ He meant to deny that there is a tradition of international political theory comparable to the political theory of the state. Such international thought as there was, he wrote, was ‘‘largely repellent and intrac- table in form’’ and ‘‘marked, not only by paucity but also by intellectual and moral poverty.’’1 As a judgment about the history of international thought, this is too severe – the product of an oddly constricted view of the tradition. But it would have been a fair description of the treatment of international relations in what was then the contemporary literature of political philosophy. With the 1 Martin Wight, ‘‘Why Is There No International Theory?’’ in Herbert Butter- field and Martin Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), p. 20. The essay was first published in International Relations 2 (1960). COSMOPOLITANISM AND GLOBAL JUSTICE 13 exception of a very few works from the mid-1950s about natural and human rights, a few more about the morality of war, the appendix on international relations in Stanley Benn and Richard Peters’ important textbook in political philosophy, and H.L.A. Hart’s chapter on international law, political philosophers had given virtually no thought to any subject that could be brought under the heading of global justice since the 1930s.2 The program of this conference shows how dramatically things have changed. Today, global justice is a legitimate subject of philosophical inquiry. There is a lively and growing literature. People teach whole courses about it. Conferences are devoted to it. Thirty years is not a long time in political philosophy – barely an academic generation – and one has to say the extent of the intellectual transformation is remarkable. Whythechange?Certainlyonefactoristhebroaderrevivalofinterest in normative political philosophy since the 1960s. More important is a pervasive shift in understanding of the empirical content of global political life. Brian Barry wrote in 1965 that ‘‘in relations between states the problem of establishing a peaceful order overshadows all others.’’ He continued (interestingly, in retrospect): No doubt it is possible for substantive general principles to be put forward and widely accepted, e.g., that rich nations have some kind of obligation to help poor nations develop their economies. But any attempt to develop a detailed casuistry of political principles in the absence of a working international order seems a doubtfully rewarding enterprise.3 Barry was ahead of his time in recognizing the subject of interna- tional distributive justice, but when he described the problem of establishing peaceful order as eclipsing all else he precisely recapitu- lated the prevailing view. Today, political philosophy has absorbed a richer and more var- iegated conception of the content and structure of world politics. This is partly a reflection of changes in the academic study of international relations, where economic interdependence, transnational politics, and the political economy of international regimes have attracted 2 Stanley Benn and Richard Peters, Social Principles and the Democratic State (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959), published in the United States as The Principles of Political Thought (New York: Free Press, 1965); 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. 3 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. 14 CHARLES R. BEITZ attention since the 1970s.4 It also reflects the impact of changes in world politics itself – in particular, the assortment of economic and social phenomena conventionally known as ‘‘globalization.’’5 These phenomena have become more prominent since the end of the Cold War, which had the dual effect of encouraging a sense of political possibility and removing the principal remaining barrier to a truly cosmopolitan global market. One could not take these developments seriously without being forced to reconsider the sharp distinction be- tween the domestic and the international realms implicit in the per- ception of international relations as primarily a zone of war and peace. All of this is familiar enough. Let me add two related cautions. First, one should not think of globalization as a development peculiar to the late-20th century.6 However it is measured – whether by the volume of trade, capital flows and labor migration, by the integration of goods and capital markets, or by the sensitivity of domestic life to economic transactions elsewhere – economic globalization dates at least from the mid-19th century. Indeed, in some respects it advanced further then than it has in recent years.7 If part of the motivation of interest in issues of global justice is the thought that the extension 4 The pivotal works are Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (eds.), Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972); Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977). 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). 5 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 signifi- cance of the boundaries of at least the advanced industrial states. 6 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. 7 For example, in the openness of labor markets and in the share of international capital flows destined for developing economies [Kevin H.