POLS 374 Foundations of
Global Politics
People and Justice Lecture
People and Justice
• Is global justice possible?
• If it is, what would it involve?
• What would be required to
achieve it?
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People and Justice
Defining justice
• When thinking about how to define justice,
there are three basic approaches used by
scholars, which we can classify as:
(1) Distributive justice
(2) Justice as fairness
(3) Justice as rights
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People and Justice
Normative arguments
• Before we begin a discussion of justice it is
important to understand that any discussion
of this issue is inherently normative, which
means what?
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People and Justice
Normative arguments
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A normative discussion is a discussion of
what is right or ethical. To put it simply, it’s
about deciding what constitutes a “good
place to live” or a “good society,” as opposed
to merely accepting the world as it is.
Normative arguments are, in this sense, about
how we should go about building the best
possible world.
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People and Justice
Normative arguments
• Normative arguments, not surprisingly, are generally
controversial. They are controversial because
reasonable people will almost always disagree on
what is “moral,” “ethnical” or “good.” And, even if
they can agree on basic principles, they may
fundamentally disagree on how to achieve a better
world.
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People and Justice
Normative arguments
• Normative arguments are also controversial for a less
obvious reason: in the social sciences, many scholars
are uncomfortable talking about what ought to be;
instead, they are ostensibly only concerned with
what is. That is, some scholars believe that their
primary duty is to discover how the world really
works, to identify purely objective forces and
dynamics. They would prefer to leave normative
questions to “philosophers.”
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People and Justice
Normative arguments
• One more point: Normative questions have profound
political implications. As we’ll see in our discussion
that follows, how we as a society answer normative
questions has clear implications with regard to how
resources are used and distributed and how power is
exercised at the domestic, international, and global
levels. This is one of the underlying points the
authors are attempting to make in their chapter.
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
• This position is basically about the distribution of
material goods, and revolves around the question: Is
it moral for some people to have much more than
they need, while others don’t have enough to even
survive?
•
What do you think?
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
•
The answer to this question, of course, is
subject to a great deal of debate. In the
chapter, the authors give us two, somewhat
exaggerated perspectives of this debate, one
by Peter Singer the other by Garrett
Hardin.
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
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Singer’s Argument: Summed up in the following
sentence: “If it is in our power to prevent something
bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing
anything of comparable moral importance, we ought,
morally, to do it.”
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
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Singer’s reasoning based on philosophical position of
“marginal utilitarianism.”
•
Definitional note: Utilitarianism is the doctrine or
belief that the greatest good of the greatest number
should be the purpose of human conduct (originally
proposed by Jeremy Bentham.
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
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What do you think of Singer’s basic position?
Any problems? Any objections?
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
•
What do the authors say?
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The authors point out a number of obvious practical
and philosophical problems with Singer’s basic
position, but they also agree that his argument raises
troubling questions: What do we owe morally to
those who are neither family nor members of any out
communities of obligation, such as fellow citizens?
We could rephrases this to say, “Do we have any
moral obligations to those living outside our
borders?”
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
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If we hem and haw on these questions—if we say,
for example, that we have an obligation, but that we
have more an obligation to our fellow citizens (none
of whom we may know in any meaningful sense of
the word), are we not just moral relativists? And
aren’t we told by religious and even political leaders
that moral relativism is wrong?
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
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On the other end of the spectrum is Garrett
Hardin, who wrote a direct response to
Singer’s position in an article called,
“Lifeboat ethics: The case against helping the
poor.”
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
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Hardin’s Argument: We cannot save
everyone, so we must save ourselves. This is
the responsible and the moral thing to do.
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
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Hardin uses the metaphor of the lifeboat to illustrate
his position: He asks you to imagine that you and
several others are adrift at sea in a lifeboat. The
lifeboat is basically full and has sufficient food and
water to last until everyone in the boat is rescued. In
the water around you are a large number of people
who can still swim, but eventually will drown if they
are not saved (i.e., pulled into your lifeboat). So what
should be done? What will happen if the people in
the lifeboat start to pull others in?
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
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According to Hardin, the situation is clear: pulling
people in may result in the lifeboat sinking; then
everyone will die. Alternatively, pulling only a few
people in, means you will less food and water and
thereby diminish everyone’s chances for survival.
Beyond this, though, is the question of who should
be saved?
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
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Connecting this metaphor to the real world, Hardin
argues that the rich countries simply don’t have the
resources to save the poorer countries; moreover,
whatever help is extended will likely only exacerbate
an already bad situation by encouraging poor
countries to produce more children.
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
•
•
What do you think of Hardin’s position?
Even if you disagree, isn’t it true that no
matter how uncomfortable we may be with
his conclusions, most of us tacitly if not
explicitly accept this his position?
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
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One more question: Even if Hardin is right
about how most of us accept the position of
protecting our own—of having no moral or
other obligation to anyone who is not a bona
fide, legal citizen of our country—is this
really a justifiable moral position?
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
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One point on the logic of Hardin’s position: To a
large extent, Hardin’s position is dependent on a
zero-sum view of the world’s resources. He
assumes, in other words, that the world’s resources
are inherently limited and largely fixed, which
implies that if the rich give something up, it means
that we have less and somehow else has more
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
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Consider the metaphor of a sliced pie: If
someone gets a bigger piece it necessarily
leaves everyone else with less.
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
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The problem, however, is that wealth per se
is not a limited resource, and food and other
resources are not “fixed slices” either. For
example, the production of food, over the
past century, has more than kept up with the
increase in people. It’s also important to
understand that the world’s population, while
it may be increasing, is increasing in part
precisely because of poverty.
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People and Justice
Justice as distribution
•
•
In other words, as poverty in poor countries
decreases, it is certainly possible that the
growth rate in population will also decrease.
On this point, consider the case of Japan: As
the country’s prosperity increased, the birth
rate declined dramatically. Today, in fact,
Japan’s overall population is shrinking at a
fairly fast rate.
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Justice as distribution
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It is important to understand that defining justice simply in
terms of the allocation of material resources is a limited, and
some might say, fatally limited perspective.
•
Others argue that, before we talk about distributive justice, we
need to talk about why things are the way they are. That is, why
do such vast inequalities in control over resources exist in the
first place? What are the “rules” or practices that have created
and maintained the obvious disparities that exist in the world?
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People and Justice
Justice as fairness
• Some scholars, most notably John Rawls, argue that
we need to understand that societies are organized in
ways that tend to institutionalize injustices so that,
for example, the unequal distribution of resources is
largely pre-determined. That is, the rich have more
because the rules of the system essentially guarantee
that they’ll have more.
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People and Justice
Justice as fairness
•
To Rawls and others, then, it is not the unequal distribution of
resources per se that is the problem; instead, it is an unfair,
highly biased system of rules that is.
•
Recognizing this is important, for it allows us to take a different
approach to justice. To Rawls, this approach centered on
identifying the fundamental principles that would increase the
level of fairness in society. Moreover, once its members
recognized the centrality of such principles in seeking and
achieving just outcomes, they would willingly accept those
principles and the outcomes, however unequal the results.
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People and Justice
Justice as fairness
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To see how this might be achieved, Rawls
devised a thought experiment, which he
called “decision-making from the original
position, behind a veil of ignorance.”
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People and Justice
Justice as fairness
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Imagine this: a situation in which no one knows anything about
his own circumstances: his wealth, education, lineage, skin
color, nationality, and so on. Rawls assumed that this set of
circumstances would most clearly reflect an “original position,”
that is a position in which no one had an advantage deriving
from an “accident of birth”
•
The situation of not knowing anything about your original
circumstances also reflects the “veil of ignorance,” which
guarantees that all decisions about distribution will be made
“disinterestedly,” that is, people will make decisions based on
what is right rather than on what would be best for themselves.
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People and Justice
Justice as fairness
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With this in mind, a group is asked to divide the
riches of a society or the world. How would this be
done?
•
Rawls argues that it is likely that such a group would
decide to divide the wealth equally. Everyone would
consider this the fairest distribution of resources, and
because of this, inequalities that may arise after the
original distribution of resources are also considered
fair and just.
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People and Justice
Justice as fairness
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Of course, the real world is nothing like the situation Rawls describes:
We all start off in different original positions: some of us are born into
wealthy families, some into poor families, some of us are born in rich
countries, some in utterly poor countries; some of us born with
intelligence or good looks, or some other genetic endowments that
give us tremendous advantages or disadvantages over others.
•
These original endowments will, over time, result in inequality; some
of us can also use our endowments to increase inequality (to get more
for ourselves at the expense of others). At the same time, these
circumstances are not necessarily considered unfair; after all, the
people who were lucky enough to be born in the right place at the right
time with the right attributes didn’t do anything wrong. Why should
they then suffer just because others weren’t quite as lucky?
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People and Justice
Justice as fairness
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This wasn’t the point Rawls was trying to make in
his thought experiment; rather his goal was to derive
principles of justice about which everyone could
agree, regardless of their original positions.
•
Rawls concluded that two principles follow from this
exercise: first, an equality of basic rights, and
second, what he called the “difference principle.”
The difference principle regards any inequality as
unjust unless its removal makes worse the situations
of the worst-off members of society.
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People and Justice
Justice as fairness
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Rawls, it is important to understand, is a philosopher
first and foremost; for this reason, perhaps, he didn’t
offer any concrete ways to achieve a just society;
instead, he only hoped that recognition of these rules
of fairness would stimulate discussion and lead to
practical principles that would create a more just
society. To a large extent, he was successful: since he
originally published his ideas 30 years ago, there has
been an immense amount of debate on the principles
of justice and fairness
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People and Justice
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A few aspects of this debate are covered in
the remaining sections of the chapter, which
cover such issues as “Justice as rights,”
“justice as opportunity,” and “justice as
recognition, respect, and dignity”
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People and Justice
•
There is a lot of stuff covered in these three sections,
probably too much for us to digest in class (really,
we could devote a whole quarter to a discussion of
justice)
•
So instead of covering each of these three sections in
detail, let me highlight a few general points.
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People and Justice
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First, it is important to understand that, in any
discussion of justice, there are a number of
underlying tensions or contradictions that can
complicate the discussion immensely.
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Consider the question of human rights: Human rights
are based on two kinds of rights, “positive liberty,”
that is the freedom to do as we please, and “negative
liberty,” that is, the freedom from control by
outsiders.
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People and Justice
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Yet, to have positive liberty, there have to be rules
that control what individuals can do. How, for
example, can you have freedom of expression if
someone else immediately beats you up for speaking
your mind? Yet, in controlling the freedom of others
to “beat up” whomever they please, we are limiting
liberty. At the extremes, positive liberty erases
negative liberty and vice versa.
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This tells us that “rights” and “justice” can never be
absolute.
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Second, and in a strongly related vein, justice or
rights require some sort of coercive entity(that is,
states) capable of enforcing law. This creates a
paradox: states are often the worst offenders of
rights, but they are also necessary for rights to exist
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This creates all sorts of practical as well as
philosophical questions. How, for example, is it
possible to transcend national borders to achieve a
sort of universal rights? Is this even desirable?
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Consider this example: What happens when one
country’s definition of justice contradicts a
supposedly universal standard of human rights? On
this point, consider the issue of the death penalty,
which is considered just punishment in the United
States but a violation of human rights by most other
countries in the world. Or how about torture? Torture
is condemned by international laws, norms, and
treaties, but the Bush administration continues to
insist that has a right and duty to use any means
necessary to extract information from enemy
combatants.
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Third, discussions of justice cannot be divorced
from the larger social context. For example, there are
a number of scholars who say that justice does not
require equality in outcomes (re “justice as
opportunities” or “justice as fairness”). In the
abstract, these are reasonable arguments, but they
cannot hold water in the real world. On this point,
consider what John Isbister had to say (quoting from
pp. 135-6):
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People and Justice
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“This reasoning [about justice] leads to the possibility that
equality of opportunity actually requires equal outcomes. This
possibility exists because we live our lives over a period of
years, our generations overlap, and our societies continue over
time. My opportunities are determined in large measure by the
resources—including economic, educational, technological, and
moral resources—given to me by my parents and by my
society. If my parents and society are vastly different in their
access to these resources from yours, you and I will be unequal
at the starting blocks. Until each person has an equal
opportunity to develop his or her talents—something that
cannot exist while the distribution of outcomes in the world
remains unequal—we cannot be equal at the starting line.
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While Isbister may make a good point, his
argument, too, has all sorts of practical and
philosophical problems: Would making the
starting line the same for all disadvantage
others (i.e., those that already were in front)?
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Fourth, given the foregoing discussion, the last point I want to
highlight is simply this: Discussion about justice can make your
head hurt because they end up becoming too complicated, too
messy, and just too hard to resolve. Plus, as the authors note,
too many philosophers fall into the old “ought-is” trap. That is,
they argue about the need for social change without specifying
how this might be accomplished. To be fair, this isn’t how many
political philosophers see their job: their job is to conceptualize
the conditions under which a particular objective might be
achieved; it is the job of other social scientists to discover the
lever that could “move the world.”
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What, then, is the solution?
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The authors don’t necessarily offer the solution, but
they offer us a map for finding the right path to a
solution.
•
They do this, ironically, by discussing another set of
philosophical positions, between communitarianism
and cosmopolitanism
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Cosmopolitanism is reflected in Singer’s position,
while communtarianism is reflected in the position of
Hardin.
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In communitarian view, justice is something that is
inherently limited to fellow citizens: people only
have a right and duty to protect their own. This
implies that we can, without shame, turn our back on
injustice when it is committed by or against noncitizens. They are simply not our concern.
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In Singer’s extreme cosmopolitan view,
everyone is deserving of rights essentially
without limits. But, according to the authors,
this is a non-starter. It’s a non-starter, in part,
because Singer’s view of rights is simply to
abstract. Other cosmopolitans, however,
provide a more grounded approach.
•
On this point, the authors are particularly
interested in the work of Onora O’Neill.
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Unlike Singer, O’Neill focuses on obligations as
opposed to rights. As O’Neill explains it, “There are
reasons enough to show that obligations provide the
more coherent and more comprehensive starting
point for thinking about ethical requirements,
including the requirements of justice. Although the
rhetoric of rights has a heady power, and that of
obligations and duties few immediate attractions, it
helps to view the perspective of obligations as
fundamental if the political and ethical implications
of normative claims are to be taken seriously.
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Obligations, in short, are more personal.
When speaking of obligations, moreover, we
immediately start to focus on agency: we
must act in order to be just and achieve
justice, and we must do so regardless of
states, governments, or even co-nationals.
Better yet, we should do so with others, as a
collective political project.
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This last point, although not one the authors end their
chapter with, helps us tie everything discussed thus
far to the relationship between justice and people. In
an important sense, the authors are suggesting that
justice, whether at the local, national, regional,
international, or global levels starts with the actions
of individuals acting alone and, better yet, in groups.
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Ultimately, as they put it, “Justice demands that we
believe all our fellow human beings are worthy of
dignity and respect; that we act in ways that facilitate
and foster dignity and respect among human beings;
and that we provide the material necessities that
enable people to live dignified lives worth of respect.
Indeed, we are obligated to do these things and also
to help to construct a discourse that will propagate
justice and embed it in institutions at every level of
life.”
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