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Liberal global justice and social science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2015

SHMUEL NILI
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Abstract

My aim in this article is to ask how both the findings and the limitations of social science should inform the debate on global economic justice among liberal political philosophers. More specifically, I make three claims. First, I show that social science research casts doubt on key premises of important liberal global justice theories. However, second, I also suggest that empirical questions pivotal to these theories bring to the fore important limitations inherent to social science work on global issues. These limitations lead me to argue, third, that new normative concerns should feature in liberal discussions about global reform.

Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 136 - 155
Copyright
© 2015 British International Studies Association 

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Footnotes

*

Thanks to Thad Dunning, Shan Ge, Lisa Herzog, Thomas Pogge, Michael Ross, and Ian Shapiro for comments and discussions of the themes of this article. Thanks also to three anonymous reviewers for helpful and generous feedback. Finally, I am particularly grateful to Elisabeth Wood and to participants at her comparative politics seminar at Yale for excellent critiques – especially Consuelo Amat Matus, Alyssa Battistoni, Natasha Chichilnisky-Heal, Elizabeth Krontiris, and Paul Linden-Retek.

References

1 Beitz, Charles, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

2 Pogge, Thomas, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity, 2002)Google Scholar (hereafter WPHR).

3 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (rev. edn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar (hereafter TJ).

4 TJ, p. 6.

5 TJ, p. 119.

6 See the final statement of the two principles in TJ, section 46.

7 See, for example, Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 67.

8 ‘The basic structure’, Rawls writes, ‘is the primary subject of justice, because its effects are so profound and present from the start.’ TJ, pp. 6–7.

9 Pogge, ‘The incoherence between Rawls’s theories of justice’, Fordham Law Review, 72 (2003–4), pp. 1739–59 (pp. 1751–2. I focus on the question of an empirical analogy between a domestic and a global ‘basic structure’. Whether or not there is a normative analogy between domestic and global institutions – and specifically, whether there exists a global basic structure in a strictly Rawlsian normative sense – is a matter of considerable dispute, which depends on the precise way in which one reads Rawls’s domestic theory. For the details of this dispute, see my ‘A Poggean passport for fairness? Why Rawls’ theory of justice did not become global’, Ethics & Global Politics, 3 (2010), pp. 277–301.

10 For the ambitious version see Pogge, , ‘An egalitarian law of peoples’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 23 (1994), pp. 195–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar; I discuss Pogge’s later view, as an example of a more minimal version, in Section III. As will become clear there, the cogency of Pogge’s claims regarding a global basic structure depends, among other things, on how one sees the intervening role of domestic basic structures in shaping individual prospects.

11 See TJ, p. 64.

12 TJ, p. 156.

13 Beitz, , Political Theory and International Relations, pp. 137–143Google Scholar.

14 For only a few examples from recent years see Hayward, Tim, ‘Global justice and the distribution of natural resources’, Political Studies, 54 (2006), pp. 349–369CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paula Casal, ‘Global taxes on natural resources’; Hillel Steiner, ‘The Global Fund: A reply to Casal’; Pogge, Thomas, ‘Allowing the poor to share the Earth’ – all in Journal of Moral Philosophy, 8:3 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kolers, Avery, ‘Justice, territory and natural resources’, Political Studies, 60 (2012), pp. 269–286CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Armstrong, Chris, ‘Justice and attachment to natural resources’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 22 (2014), pp. 48–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 On Pogge’s influence see the introduction to Jaggar, Alison (ed.), Thomas Pogge and His critics (London: Polity, 2010)Google Scholar.

16 Beitz, , Political Theory and International Relations, p. 138Google Scholar. I am assuming here that Beitz has in mind, primarily if not only, subterranean natural resources.

17 Beitz, , Political Theory and International Relations, p. 137Google Scholar.

18 Ibid. Note that there is controversy – both in general and within a Rawlsian framework in particular – over the exact relationship between rights to the revenue flowing from an object and rights of ownership over that object. For a recent discussion, see my ‘Rawlzickian global politics’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 21 (2013), pp. 473–95. Additionally, one might argue that Beitz’s claims for redistribution of natural resource wealth render Rawlsian principles more ‘luck egalitarian’ than they actually are. See Scheffler, Samuel, ‘What is egalitarianism?’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 31 (2003), pp. 5–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, this is another dispute on Rawls interpretation which I shall put aside.

19 See Shachar, Ayelet, The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

20 Wenar, , ‘Property rights and the resource curse’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 36 (2008), pp. 2–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 3).

21 Ross, Michael, The Oil Curse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 48–49Google Scholar.

22 See Maravall, Jose Maria and Przeworski, Adam (eds), Democracy and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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25 See also Wantchekon, Leonard, ‘Why do resource dependent countries have authoritarian governments’, Journal of African Finance and Economic Development, 5 (2002)Google Scholar; Smith, Benjamin, Hard Times in the Land of Plenty: Oil Politics in Iran and Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

26 Gerring, John, Bond, Philip, Barndt, William T., Moreno, and Carola, ‘Democracy and economic growth: a historical perspective’, World Politics, 57 (2005), pp. 323–364CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 336).

27 See Haber, Stephen and Menaldo, Victor, ‘Do natural resources fuel authoritarianism? A reappraisal of the resource curse’, American Political Science Review, 105 (2011), pp. 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 See Dunning, Thad, Crude Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 See Morrison, Kevin, ‘Oil, nontax revenue, and the redistributional foundations of regime stability’, International Organization, 63 (2009), pp. 107–138Google Scholar.

30 Note in this context that even those social scientists who do argue for a ‘resource-blessing’ emphasise the centrality of institutions. See Gavin Wright and Jesse Czelusta, ‘Resource-based growth past and present’, in Lederman, Daniel and Maloney, William (eds), Neither Curse nor Destiny: Natural Resources and Development (Stanford University Press and World Bank Publication, 2006)Google Scholar.

31 This is the line of thought suggested in Beitz’s later writing. See his ‘Cosmopolitanism and global justice’, Journal of Ethics, 9 (2005), pp. 11–27. I discuss below another possible line, that even if a global redistribution of natural resource wealth will have minimal impact on individual prospects, it is morally warranted.

32 Robinson, James, Torvik, Ragnar, and Verdier, Thierry, ‘Political foundations of the resource curse’, Journal of Development Economics, 79 (2006), pp. 447–468CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 450). See also Haber and Menaldo, A Reappraisal of the Resource Curse; Boschini, Anne, Pettersson, Jan, and Roine, Jesper, ‘Resource curse or not: A question of appropriability’, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 109 (2007), pp. 593–617CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 See, for example, Ross, , The Oil Curse, pp. 9–10Google Scholar.

34 A parallel thought is suggested in Haber and Menaldo, Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism.

35 For claims along similar lines see Landes, David, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998)Google Scholar.

36 See US Energy Information Administration, available at: {http://www.eia.gov/countries/analysisbriefs/Norway/norway.pdf}.

37 For a sober assessment of the difficulty with global conterfactuals, see Tetlock, Philip and Belkin, Aaron, ‘Introduction’, in Tetlock and Belkin (eds), Counterfactual Thought Experiments in world politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; for a more optimistic view see Lebow, Richard, Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 The number comes from Pogge, , ‘Severe poverty as human rights violation’, in Pogge (ed.), Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right – Who Owes What to the Very Poor? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, p. 30.

39 Risse, Mathias, ‘Do we owe the poor assistance or rectification’, Ethics and International Affairs, 19 (2005), pp. 9–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 9).

40 Both terms are from Joshua Cohen’s ‘Philosophy, social science, global poverty’, in Jaggar, Pogge and His critics.

41 Pogge, , Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

42 See Pogge, ‘Reply to critics’, in Jaggar, Pogge and His critics, pp. 20–1.

43 WPHR, p. 137.

44 WPHR, p. 137.

45 WPHR, p. 64. I bracket some philosophical challenges that one can raise regarding this argument, such as whether it makes more sense to simply say that individuals’ institutional responsibilities are a distinct category which cannot be understood neither as familiar ‘negative duties’ nor as ‘positive’ ones. For this and related challenges, see my ‘Rigorist cosmopolitanism: a Kantian alternative to Pogge’, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 12 (2013), pp. 260–87.

46 Pogge, , Severe Poverty, p. 44Google Scholar.

47 Ibid., p. 30.

48 Ibid, all italics are author’s unless noted otherwise.

49 Wenar, ‘Realistic reform of international trade in resources’, in Jaggar (ed.), Pogge and His critics, p. 127.

50 Pogge, , ‘Reply to critics’, p. 181Google Scholar.

51 Ibid.

52 As emphasised, among others, in Risse, Do We Owe the Poor Assistance or Rectification.

53 Pogge, , World Poverty and Human Rights (2nd edn, Cambridge: Polity, 2008), p. 17Google Scholar.

54 For an extensive discussion, see Pogge’s Politics as Usual: What Lies behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).

55 Cohen, ‘Philosophy, social science, global poverty’, in Jaggar, Pogge and His critics, pp. 20–1. Among other things, Cohen and Pogge provide radically conflicting estimates as to how much the elimination of protectionist trade barriers will (by itself, independently of other structural changes) benefit the global poor. See Cohen, Philosophy, Social Science, Global Poverty, p. 27; Pogge, Response to Critics, pp. 182–4.

56 Pogge, , ‘Recognized and violated by international law: The human rights of the global poor’, Leiden Journal of International Law, 18 (2005), pp. 717–745CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 For extended discussion of these points see my ‘Global taxation, global reform, and collective action’, Moral Philosophy and Politics, 1 (2014), pp. 83–103.

60 See Pogge, WPHR, ch. 6; Wenar, Property Rights and the Resource Curse; Wenar, , ‘Clean trade in natural resources’, Ethics & International Affairs, 25 (2011), pp. 27–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; as well as my ‘Democratic disengagement: Towards Rousseauian global reform’, International Theory, 3 (2011), pp. 355–89; and ‘Our problem of global justice’, Social Theory and Practice, 37 (2011), pp. 629–53.

59 The term comes from Pogge, , ‘Achieving democracy’, Ethics and International Affairs, 15 (2001), pp. 3–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 See Waldmeir, Patti, Anatomy of a Miracle: the End of Apartheid (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997)Google Scholar.

61 Lea Ypi provides a recent general articulation of this duty in ‘What’s wrong with colonialism’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 41 (2013), pp. 158–91.

62 As Rawls notes, even a position with a non-consequentialist foundation cannot be indifferent towards consequences: such indifference would be ‘irrational, crazy’. TJ, p. 26

63 See Pogge’s discussion of the ‘sucker exemption’, in WPHR, ch. 5.

64 Pogge, , ‘Loopholes in moralities’, Journal of Philosophy, 89 (1992), pp. 79–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is sometimes thought that a key problem with predictions made under heavy uncertainty arises when those who make the predictions are unlikely to incur serious costs if they turn out to be wrong. Nassim Taleb’s treatment of decision-making under uncertainty, for instance, is heavily concerned with this lack of ‘skin the game’, as he puts it. See Taleb’s Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (New York: Random House, 2012). Here I am pointing to the problem of too much ‘skin in the game’ – where the fact that the predictors are heavily invested in the results of their predictions should give us reason to doubt both their motives and their accuracy.

65 See, for example, Goodin, Robert, Utilitarianism as Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 69. But see also Leopra, Chiara and Goodin, Robert, On Complicity and Compromise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a more accommodating view of self-regarding concerns.

66 The most famous example remains Bernard Williams, ‘A critique of utilitarianism’, in Bernard Williams and J. J. C. Smart, Utilitarianism – For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

67 To the best of my knowledge, the sole (and partial) exception is Ronald Dworkin’s discussion of ‘law’s integrity’ in his Law’s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

68 See Elster, Jon, ‘Excessive ambitions’, Capitalism and Society, 4 (2009), pp. 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Examples go all the way from Smith’s critique of ‘the man of the system’ to Popper’s insistence on ‘the Poverty of historicism’. See Adam Smith, ‘Of the character of Virtue’, in part six of Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [orig. pub. 1759]); Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1994 [orig. pub. 1957]).

70 The fact that Rawlsian liberalism has been so dominant in domestic political theory is fortuitous in this sense, insofar as a key feature of Rawlsian thinking is its emphasis on a non-consequentialist foundation for public policy. Indeed, it is probably too often forgotten that Rawls spends a third of A Theory of Justice arguing against various types of utilitarianism, the most influential consequentialist doctrine.

71 In brief: it is (arguably) easier to take distance from consequentialism at the global than at the domestic level, because at the global level it is easier to draw a moral distinction between what the state’s laws officially call for and what consequences the state’s laws bring about (since these consequences are clearly tied to the laws of other states). This is a distinction that consequentialism, at the most foundational level, cannot accommodate. And because it is easier to sustain this non-consequentialist distinction at the global level, it is easier to adopt a non-consequentialist perspective at this level. For related discussion see my ‘Between domestic and global justice’, Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2 (2015), pp. 55–81.

72 See Dunning, , Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

73 Rawls, , The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, p. 89.

74 For a useful survey of the debate surrounding this claim see Valentini, Laura, ‘Ideal vs. non-ideal theory: A conceptual map’, Philosophy Compass, 7 (2012), pp. 654–664CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Simmons, A. John, ‘Ideal and non-ideal theory’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 38 (2010), pp. 5–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 24).

76 See David Colander, ‘Muddling through and policy analysis’, New Zealand Economic Papers 08/2003, DOI: 10.1080/00779950309544384; Colander, David and Kupers, Roland, Complexity and the Art of Public Policy: Solving Society’s Problems from the Bottom Up (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a rare acknowledgement of this point from the perspective of ideal theory see Herzog, Lisa, ‘Ideal and non-ideal theory and the problem of knowledge’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 29 (2012), pp. 271–288CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 See Rawls, , The Law of Peoples, p. 12Google Scholar.

78 Note that this is a more fundamental point than merely arguing – as many ‘non-ideal’ theorists have – that visions of perfect justice should be put aside for practical purposes because they are ‘uninformative’ about what we ought to do in the here and now, or are too ‘transcendental’. See, for example, David Wiens, ‘Against ideal guidance’, Journal of Politics (forthcoming); Sen, Amartya, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.