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RESPONDING TO GLOBAL INJUSTICE: ON THE RIGHT OF RESISTANCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2015

Simon Caney
Simon Caney*
Affiliation:
Political Theory, University of Oxford
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Abstract:

In the debates surrounding global justice, the overwhelming focus has been on the duties that fall to the affluent and powerful, and the emphasis has been on their duties to comply with various principles of justice. In this essay, I examine what those who bear the brunt of global injustice are entitled to do to secure their own entitlements and those of others. In particular, I defend an account of what I term the “right of resistance against global injustice.” To do so I advance several methodological and substantive claims. On the methodological level: I argue that in deriving and defining this right of resistance we can (a) learn from the normative accounts developed to analyze war, humanitarian intervention, civil disobedience, revolution and anti colonialism. However, (b) the right to resist global injustice raises some distinct problems; and, thus, the normative principles that should inform any right of resistance against global injustice are not reducible to those that govern the appropriate kinds of response to other kinds of injustice. Turning now to the substantive component, I propose an account of resisting global injustice that specifies (i) who may engage in resistance, (ii) what would constitute a just cause for engaging in resistance, (iii) against whom those engaging in resistance may impose burdens, (iv) what methods resistors can employ, and (v) in what circumstances resistance is permissible.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , Fall 2015 , pp. 51 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2015 

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References

1 Washington, James Melvin, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 292.Google Scholar

2 Pogge, Thomas, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2008)Google Scholar; and Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. with new afterword (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

3 For a rare exception, see the interesting discussion by Blunt, Gwilym David, “Transnational Socio-Economic Justice and the Right of Resistance,” Politics 31, no. 1 (2011): 1–8 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Blunt focuses on Pogge’s analysis of global justice and argues that if it is correct, then there is a case for a right of resistance.

4 I leave the sixth question aside to explore at a later date.

5 There is now an important literature on global justice and waging wars. See Fabre, Cécile, Cosmopolitan War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 3; Lippert–Rasmussen, Kasper, “Global Injustice and Redistributive Wars,” Law, Ethics and Philosophy 1 (2013): 65–86.Google Scholar

6 Hohfeld, Wesley N., Fundamental Legal Conceptions, As Applied in Judicial Reasoning and Other Legal Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), 38–39, 40–50.Google Scholar

7 Fundamental Legal Conceptions, 36, 38.

8 Klare, Michael T., The Race for What's Left: the Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012), 198–201 Google Scholar. For further analysis of the normative issues see Pogge World Poverty and Human Rights, 118–20 and Wenar, Leif “Property Rights and the Resource Curse,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, no. 1 (2008): 2–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 For a compelling account of just how deeply entrenched is the idea that states must always repay loans, see Lienau, Odette, Rethinking Sovereign Debt: Politics, Reputation, and Legitimacy in Modern Finance (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Caney, Simon, “Climate Change, Human Rights and Moral Thresholds,” in Humphreys, Stephen, ed., Human Rights and Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 69–90.Google Scholar

11 I also believe, third, that to the extent that there are similarities between the right of resistance and these other cases that is because they all draw on a more general basic normative framework for addressing injustice. So any similarities between the Right of Resistance and Just War theory, for example, arise not because Just War theory is more basic and the Right of Resistance is conforming to it, but because both are grounded in a more fundamental normative framework. I shall not argue for this here.

12 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 319.Google Scholar

13 For an important recent discussion of revolution see Buchanan, Allen, “The Ethics of Revolution and Its Implications for the Ethics of Intervention,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 41, no. 4 (2013): 291–323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 In an interesting discussion Tony Honoré argues that the concept of a right includes within it an endorsement of the right of resistance (Honoré, “The Right to Rebel,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 8, no. 1 [1988]: 34–54, esp. 35, and Honoré “Rights and the Rightless” in Making Law Bind: Essays Legal and Philosophical [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987], 241–55.) Honoré’s argument strikes me as being too quick, but I lack the space to raise my concerns here.

15 See Joseph Raz The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press), chapter 7, 180f.

16 Note that, although both Rawls and Hart agree that unjust institutions do not generate binding obligations, they differ on how they characterize this: H. L. A. Hart “Are There Any Natural Rights?” The Philosophical Review 64, no. 2 (1955), 185–86, and Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 96–98.

17 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 99–100.

18 Buchanan, Allen, “From Nuremburg to Kosovo: The Morality of Illegal International Legal Reform,” Ethics 111, no. 4 (2001): 673–705 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), chap. 11; Goodin, Robert E., “Toward an International Rule of Law: Distinguishing International Law-Breakers from Would-Be Law-Makers,” Journal of Ethics 9, nos. 1–2 (2005): 225–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 McMahan, Jeff “Just Cause for War,” Ethics and International Affairs 19, no. 3 (2005): 11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 I will explore what upper limits there might be on the means used in the next section. My point here is that the means I have outlined in Section I are, as a rule, less harmful (sometimes inflicting very little harm) than those sanctioned by war.

21 Geras, Norman, “Our Morals: The Ethics of Revolution,” Socialist Register 25 (1989): 188–89Google Scholar; Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg (London: Verso, 1983), 141ff.

22 Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 2nd ed. with new introduction (Montreal and Buffalo: Black Rose Books, 1986 [1971]), 67–68, 70; Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2003 [1923/1924]), 261–63.

23 That said, there are cases in which practicing the ideals that constitute the good society is the only — or most likely — way in which to help realize such a society. For a strong version of this claim see Gandhi’s discussion of “brute force” in “Indian Home Rule [or Hind Swaraj]” in Anthony J. Parel, ed., “Hind Swaraj” and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1909]), 79.

24 Geras, “Our Morals,” 188 (numbers added).

25 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 321.

26 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 322.

27 For a powerful repudiation of the use of violence for similar reasons see Havel, Václav, “The Power of the Powerless” in Vladislav, Jan, ed., Living in Truth (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 92–93.Google Scholar

28 Raz, Joseph, “A Right to Dissent? I. Civil Disobedience,” in The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 267.Google Scholar

29 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 322.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid., 323.

32 For pertinent discussion see McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), esp. 218–21; 221–35 (respectively, on liability for burdens that fall short of killing, and the killing of civilians).

33 Or so I have argued in “Climate Change and the Duties of the Advantaged,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 13, no. 1 (2010): 203–28.

34 For a discussion of benefiting from injustice, see Butt, Daniel, Rectifying International Injustice: Principles of Compensation and Restitution Between Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 117–33.Google Scholar

35 See Buchanan on this (Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination, 446ff).

36 In an interesting discussion, Ned Dobos suggests that those engaged in self-protection, by contrast with those engaged in humanitarian intervention, are subject to weaker normative constraints. First they are, in certain circumstances, exempt from the prospects of success principle (e.g., when conditions like (ii) as specified do not hold); and, second, they may disregard certain side-effects resulting from their response to injustice when they are calculating whether their response is proportionate, (Insurrection and Intervention: the Two Faces of Sovereignty [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], chap. 3). I do not agree with this but lack the space to argue this here and plan to address it in subsequent work.

37 This view is suggested (if cryptically) by Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 89 Google Scholar; “The Moral Standing of States: A Response to Four Critics,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 9, no. 3, (1980): 214–16. Walzer, though, couches his argument in communitarian terms, referring to the rights of communities, whereas my commitment here is to the self-determination of individuals.