Global Justice, Global Institutions

Global Justice, Global Institutions Global Justice, Global Institutions Edited by Daniel Weinstock © 2005 Canadian Journal of Philosophy University of Calgary Press Calgary, Alberta, Canada ISSN 0229-7051 ISBN 0-919491-13-6 © 2005 The Canadian Journal of Philosophy. All rights reserved. University of Calgary Press 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, Alberta Canada T2N 1N4 www.uofcpress.com Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Global justice, global institutions / edited byDaniel Weinstock. (Canadian journal of philosophy. Supplementary volume, ISSN 0229-7951 ; 31) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-919491-13-6 IV. Title. V. Series. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmit- ted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777. We acknowledge the fi nancial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Alberta Lottery Fund—Community Initiatives Program for our publishing activities. Printed and bound in Canada. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Table of Contents Introduction .............................................................................................. vii Daniel Weinstock Institutions with Global Scope: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Political Practice...................................................................................1 Charles Jones Cosmopolitanism, Democracy and Distributive Justice .....................29 Simon Caney Institutions for Global Justice ..................................................................65 Nancy Kokaz Global Distributive Justice, Entitlement, and Desert .........................109 Gillian Brock Global Distributive Justice: An Egalitarian Perspective ....................139 Cécile Fabre Cosmopolitan Impartiality and Patriotic Partiality ...........................165 Kok-Chor Tan Rawls on Global Distributive Justice: A Defence ...............................193 Joseph Heath Constituting Humanity: Democracy, Human Rights, and Political Community .......................................................................227 James Bohman The Basic Structure as Object: Institutions and Humanitarian Concern ..........................................................................253 Leif Wenar Cosmopolitan Luck Egalitarianism and the Greenhouse Effect ...................................................................................279 Axel Gosseries Domination and Destitution in an Unjust World. Case Study: The HIV/AIDS Pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa ..............................311 Ryoa Chung The Convention on Biological Diversity: From Realism to Cosmopolitanism ....................................................................................335 Virginie Maris Notes on Contributors ............................................................................363 CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY Supplementary Volume 31 Introduction1 DANIEL M. WEINSTOCK Political philosophy has become global of late.2 Whereas political philosophers have until recently more or less tacitly assumed that the principles for which they argue and the institutions that they recommend to realize these principles apply to the nation-state,3 recent real-world developments have made that tacit assumption problematic. Among the developments that have impressed upon philosophers the need to think about how the affairs not just of this or that country might be governed, but indeed how principles and institutional forms might be found to govern the entire planet, the following bear mentioning. First, some of the most urgent problems faced by affl uent nations in the West are global in their scope. That is, even if we in the West were inclined to consider only the problems that directly affect our well- being, a lucid analysis of these problems reveals that they cannot be effectively handled without attention being turned to the rest of the world. Environmental problems know no borders. The great public 1 In preparing the fi nal manuscript, I have received invaluable assistance from the following people: Alex Sager, Dominic Martin, Louise Taylor, and Will Colish. I extend my heartfelt thanks to all of them. 2 Countless volumes and special issues of journals have been devoted to global issues in recent years. Two very recent examples are Harry Brighouse and Gillain Brock, eds., The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Journal of Ethics 9 (2005). 3 John Rawls makes this assumption explicit in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971). vii Daniel Weinstock health challenges that we face in the years to come require that we attend to the poverty and associated squalid hygienic conditions in which a great proportion of the world’s population lives. The events of September 11 and beyond reveal quite plainly that the “technologi- cal divide” is no protection against low-tech but awesomely effective threats to our security, especially when those who perpetrate them are willing to die in the process. Beyond prudence, there is of course also morality. It is becoming increasingly diffi cult to avert our eyes from the abject misery in which enormous numbers of human beings live their lives. A huge proportion of the world’s inhabitants live in conditions of absolute poverty, where the struggle simply to survive consumes all energy, and makes a mockery of the concerns that liberal political philosophers have had with defi ning the domestic conditions for the “good life.” More and more, political philosophers seem to have been reaching the conclu- sion that there is something bordering on the obscene in spending as much time as philosophers have in puzzling over the ingredients of human “fl ourishing” when so many of our fellow humans languish in conditions of complete deprivation.4 Until fairly recently, it could be thought that our gut-level moral reaction to the extent of human suffering in many parts of the world could best be cashed out under the rubric of “duties of charity.” According to this view of things, it speaks well of us that we take it upon ourselves to contribute to the alleviation of suffering in distant parts of the world, but it is not something that is strictly speaking required of us. Because we are not causally responsible for the creation and maintenance of conditions of abject poverty, any help that we do proffer is supererogatory – that is, admirable, but not obligatory. Consequentialists like Peter Singer tended to deny this, committed as they are to the doctrine of negative responsibility, according to which we are responsible for harms that we fail to prevent, when such pre- 4 For a forceful expression of this point, see Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). For other prominent recent discussions of the responsibilities of the global rich toward the global poor, see Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002); Peter Singer, One World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Garret Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affl uence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). viii Introduction vention lies within our power. But taking on the dubious doctrine of negative responsibility seems a heavy price to pay to give expression to our pre-theoretical intuition that we are somehow responsible for the amelioration of the fate of the global poor. The past ten years or so have added an important dimension to our understanding of the nature of the relationship that obtains between humans across national boundaries. That dimension has to do with the nebula of properties of the contemporary world scene that has come to be known as “globalization.” There are as many ways of cashing out what globalization actually means as there are theorists that have written about it.5 But for our purposes, what is of interest is that it has given rise to a third way of understanding the relationship between the global rich and the global poor, one that avoids both the moral laxity associated with the view that aid is a matter of charity rather than of obligation, and the moral demand- ingness of the view according to which we are as responsible for the suffering we allow to happen as we are for the suffering that we directly cause. According to this view, the fate of the global rich is not as causally independent of the plight of the global poor as had previously been thought. Multinational corporations, international organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and powerful states enact rules and create institutions from which the global poor cannot realistically exit, and which causally contribute to the misery of much of the world’s population. According to this view, globalization makes it the case that our obligations toward the global poor are obligations of justice rather than of charity, ones that we discharge not by the kinds of massive transfers of resources that consequentialists have imagined, but rather by desisting from actions that produce harms. In other words, what is required is the respect of people’s rights. Just as child labour and other exploitative labour practices have gradually come to be adjudged as unjust

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