Blake, Global Distributive Justice-Why Political Philosophy Needs Political Science

PL15CH07-Blake

ARI

11 April 2012

ANNUAL REVIEWS

Further

13:59

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

Click here for quick links to Annual Reviews content online, including: t
Other articles in this volume t Top cited articles t Top downloaded articles t
0VS
DPNQSFIFOTJWF
TFBSDI


Global Distributive Justice: Why Political Philosophy Needs Political Science Michael Blake Department of Philosophy and Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195; email: [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012. 15:121–36

Keywords

First published online as a Review in Advance on March 8, 2012

poverty, development, cosmopolitanism, constructivism, coercion, institutions

The Annual Review of Political Science is online at polisci.annualreviews.org This article’s doi: 10.1146/annurev-polisci-070209-162922 c 2012 by Annual Reviews. Copyright ! All rights reserved 1094-2939/12/0615-0121$20.00

Abstract The philosophical literature on global distributive justice has become both more substantive and more rigorous in recent years. This article surveys some recent positions within that literature and notes that the differences between them often involve different views about the empirical facts underlying global wealth and poverty. This suggests that some headway might be gained in arguments about global justice by a greater engagement between political philosophy and empirical political science.

121

PL15CH07-Blake

ARI

11 April 2012

13:59

INTRODUCTION

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

Normative theorizing about global justice has become remarkably sophisticated in a very short period of time. In 1971, John Rawls was able to cordon off international justice to four pages on the laws of war, and to ignore the issue of international poverty entirely (Rawls 1971, pp. 377–80). When this latter issue was dealt with explicitly by political philosophy, it was often through concepts like charity or humanitarian duties—comparatively weak visions of what the rich might owe to the global poor. Forty years later, things have changed significantly. There are now sustained and sophisticated discussions of how and why we ought to think of international poverty as a violation of stringent moral duties, whether or not those duties are understood through the terminology of justice. We tend to agree that there is something profoundly morally wrong about international poverty, and that the conceptual vocabulary of charity does not capture the moral gravity of the wrong in question. There is disagreement strewn throughout such discussions, of course; we disagree about how to understand why international poverty is morally wrong, about what economic justice would demand, and disagree still more about how to move from our present just world to a more just one. Our core of agreement is dwarfed by our increasingly significant disagreements about how to think seriously about the global poor. This article is not intended to solve these theoretical disagreements. It is, instead, intended to offer one partial explanation of the tremendous diversity of positions within the literature on the moral evaluation of international poverty. It should not be supposed to offer a comprehensive review of global distributive justice, as my primary focus here is on our moral evaluation of global poverty. Still less should this article be taken as a comprehensive review of global justice generally, which includes many issues not reducible to issues of poverty and wealth. It is a selective survey of some positions taken in the literature, and the point of this survey is to show how many of the positions taken crucially rely upon empirical analyses—or fail to so rely, to their detriment. The extent to which we disagree within the field of global distributive justice, I will argue, reflects the extent to which we do not have empirical agreement about what international institutions can actually do. We do not agree about domestic justice, but by and large we agree about the powers of the domestic state—and the range of actions that can be attributed to such a state. Internationally, we have no similar framework of empirical agreement. The result has been that we disagree even more about global distributive justice than we do about domestic distributive justice, as many of us who write about global distributive justice are writing with different assumptions about the empirical realities we describe. If this is a problem, it suggests at least the possibility of a solution: it may be the case that the amount of controversy we face over global distributive justice might be reduced—although not, of course, eliminated—by greater interaction between normative thinkers and empirical social and political science. I will proceed to make this case in four parts. The first will lay out the extent to which there is greater empirical disagreement about the nature and powers of international institutions in comparison with domestic institutions. The second will examine theories of global distributive justice that do not rely upon any particular empirical preconditions for the applicability of their concepts of justice, and why this failure to engage often makes these theories less attractive than their competitors. The third will examine the claim that international institutions have causal responsibility for global poverty and therefore create strong obligations to alleviate such poverty. The fourth will examine theories of distributive justice that argue that international institutions represent a site within which discursive political acts of negotiation and reason-giving occur; as such, global poverty might be wrong because of its effects upon our ability to reason together globally as equals. These last two arguments, I suggest, rely upon controversial empirical premises; 122

Blake

PL15CH07-Blake

ARI

11 April 2012

13:59

much of our disagreement over their moral applicability would be solved if we had more empirical agreement about the nature and powers of international institutions. I will conclude with a plea for greater empirical attention to global distributive justice, to make clearer those theoretical disagreements that rely upon moral disagreements—and those that could be dispelled with a greater understanding of empirical political realities.

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS: HOW DO THEY COMPARE? Theorists of justice disagree with one another, of course; where there is no disagreement, the very project of theorizing about justice might seem rather silly. But at the heart of disagreement, there is frequently an underexplored set of agreed-upon assumptions. In the case of domestic distributive justice, I think there is a great deal of agreement about what the state can do—and what results, here and now, ought to be attributed to the state’s agency. Both of these are important. Together, they form the backdrop of empirical agreement within which we develop our theories of domestic justice. Let us proceed to examine them in turn. We share, to some degree, a vision of what the state can actually accomplish. We certainly share some agreement about what the state cannot accomplish. When the Kingdom of Camelot insists that winter is forbidden until December and exits March the second on the dot, we understand that the political society of Camelot is either foolish or operating in a universe quite unlike our own (Lerner & Lowe 1981). Our agreement extends over more than natural facts, though, and includes a set of shared understandings of the extent to which the state can reform individual agents. This fact is reflected in Rousseau’s famous dictum that we must take men as they are, and laws as they might be; the laws have only a limited and imperfect reach into the hearts of humans (Rousseau 1997, p. 48). Turning to the positive side, we seem to have some rough and ready agreement about what it is that the state can in fact change. In a functioning political community, there is a set of legal instruments defining (inter alia) what counts as property, who shall be taken as the owner of such property, and how that property might be transferred. When we change the legal instruments, moreover, we actually change the effective property rights as understood and experienced by the inhabitants of that state. In any functioning domestic society, disputes over property may be fully and finally resolved with reference to the legal norms of that society, and changing legal norms effectively changes the rights and remedies available to property holders. I emphasize this because I want to emphasize how much different theorists of justice agree upon this simple fact: the state can, and should, develop rules about what counts as whose property, and when the state changes its rules, something can actually be counted upon to change in the world. Different theorists of distributive justice disagree about what the rules should be, but by and large they tend to accept that the state can make the rules and make them effective. Call this the capability of the domestic state. We share, further, some agreement about what results can actually be laid at the state’s door. I mean, here, to invoke only responsibility in the attributive sense; we understand that some events in the world are properly regarded as due to the state’s agency, and some events are not. By and large, we agree about what the state can be taken as having done, even when we disagree about what the state should in fact do. When the United States of America raises its marginal tax rate, we do not regard our complaints as legitimately pressed against the IRS agent charged with reviewing our file. This is because we properly recognize the United States itself as the (institutional) agent responsible for the rules under which we are now liable for payment; responsibility, in the sense I use it here, simply means that it is this agent that is best regarded as having brought these rules

www.annualreviews.org • Global Distributive Justice

123

ARI

11 April 2012

13:59

into being.1 We tend to agree, I think, about which results in the world are properly laid at the feet of the state, as it were. We disagree, naturally, about what the state should seek to do, but this disagreement is not met with a similar disagreement about which actions and norms are properly attributed to the state. Call this the culpability of the domestic state. The capability and culpability of the domestic political community are often significant within our political thinking about justice. John Rawls’s basic structure, for example, explicitly limits the scope of political justice to the results produced by the basic institutions of a domestic political society; the concept simply fails to apply, for Rawls, in cases other than that (Rawls 1989). Where the shared public institutions of a society are not responsible for a set of outcomes, then, those outcomes are not subject to evaluation from the standpoint of justice. Many of Rawls’s critics disagreed with him on this point, of course, and wanted justice to range over practices and agents left out in Rawls’s political analysis (Okin 1991, Cohen 2001). Even these figures, though, tended to assume that the goal was to reformulate the policies and practices of the political institutions of the society in question. They thus took for granted the truth of many empirical propositions, including the fact that the state would continue to exist, that the state could effectively constrain the decision making and behavior of its citizens, and that properly redeploying the power of the state would effectively make the society more just. However much we disagree about what justice means, and how we might best pursue it, we have tended to operate with a remarkably similar vision of the empirical backdrop to the pursuit of domestic justice. We tend to agree with one another, in broad outline, about what sorts of outcomes the state might actually achieve, and what sorts of things the state is actually responsible for doing right now.2 We disagree widely about what policies and practices the state ought to pursue, but we tend to agree about the nature, and powers, of the state itself. This widespread agreement, I think, forms the (usually) unarticulated backdrop of agreement to our discussions of domestic justice. The fact that we can reason together about justice, without having to argue about what domestic states are actually like, means that we have avoided a great deal of confusion and controversy in our thinking about domestic justice. In our thinking about international justice, in contrast, I think we have gotten into some difficulty precisely because we do not entirely agree with one another about what international institutions actually do—and what they actually can do. We can see this in both the capability and the culpability of the international institutional set. As to the former, we do know, in international law, what actions any international legal institution is formally able to take. We know, however, far less about what it actually means when an international institution acts. Domestically, when a given act is made illegal, we can count on that fact being significant from the standpoint of the options open to an agent subject to that legal system; the fact that the legal system has taken this action makes a significant change to the

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

PL15CH07-Blake

1 No particular moral conclusions always follow, of course, from whether or not the state has done something; the state may be morally required to do something it has not yet done. I mean, here, only to highlight the fact that we tend to agree about what the state has actually done. 2 I do not want to overstate the degree of agreement regarding either culpability or capability. On the former, we may well disagree with one another over which results are attributable to state agency, and which to global forces beyond the state’s control. We may also disagree about the extent to which a given state is actually free to make its own policy, especially in a world containing both superpowers and microstates. All this, however, should not diminish the extent to which we are, not without right, more confident in our ability to describe the domestic consequences of a state’s action from the analogous consequences of some international entity’s action. It is a difference in degree rather than in kind, but I think it is a significant difference nonetheless. Similar conclusions hold true about capability. There is, of course, disagreement about what the state can, in fact, accomplish; we might disagree with one another about the extent to which the state can change the hearts and minds of its citizens, for example. Marxists and anarchist theorists might want, further, to challenge the very existence of the state itself. I am, at present, only identifying a point of widespread agreement rather than making the statement that everyone does (or should) agree on this point. I am grateful to Nancy Rosenblum for urging me to be more precise on this point.

124

Blake

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

PL15CH07-Blake

ARI

11 April 2012

13:59

risks and rewards of the various actions open to the agent. A state unable to effectively enforce its rules within its territory is, under one frequently cited definition of statehood, not a state at all. Max Weber’s analysis that the state has a monopoly on the deployment of violence within its jurisdiction is relevant here; the fact that the state is actually able to coerce those within its jurisdiction is a key precondition for our assertion that the state actually exists as a state, both in philosophy and in law (Montevideo Conven. 1933, Weber 1994). Internationally, in contrast, things are not so clear; enforcement of international norms is more diffuse—there is, famously, no international executive power—and states differ widely in power and ability to resist international norms. The result is a significant degree of empirical variability in what results we can actually regard as likely to occur when there is a change in institutional practices. Oona Hathaway’s work has demonstrated, for instance, that the acceptance of a new human rights norm by a country is generally correlated with worse compliance with that norm, rather than with better compliance; what actually leads to greater compliance is subject to enormous empirical variation (Hathaway 2002, Simmons 2009). This is not, to be clear, the same as saying that international institutions such as human rights treaties make no difference; they can, and sometimes do. The only point to be made, here, is that how such institutions make a difference, and what sorts of results they can realistically achieve, is subject to an enormous amount of empirical complexity—and, naturally, disagreement. In the international context, there simply is no unarticulated backdrop of empirical agreement against which we can confidently offer our normative theories. This is as true in the case of culpability as it is in the case of capability. We take for granted that the political institutions of domestic society effectively define property rights, property holders, and how property rights may be transferred between holders. In this, we tend to agree that there is a comprehensible sense in which the property distribution that emerges is attributable to the political institutions. This agreement, though, seems absent from the international sphere. The executive agents of international politics are still, by and large, states. We have seen, in recent decades, a proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and treaty regimes—but these regimes are, however important, still agreements between states, and their enforcement depends upon individual states acting to defend these agreements. I do not want to say that such institutions are not important; they are of enormous importance, or at least can be. I want only to say that the extent to which we are able to ascribe agency to the institutions themselves, as opposed to individual states acting and citing these institutions as (partial) justification, is subject to some disagreement, and that much of this disagreement is empirical in character. This disagreement comes to the fore in our thinking about distributive justice. Domestically, the fact that one person has more money than another is effectively explained by the rules set up by domestic institutions to define how property is to be held and transferred. The fact that you are rich and I am poor may reflect our choices, but these choices are made within a set of effective legal rights that set up the rules defining our interactions—and the inequality between us may be legitimately attributed to this latter set of institutions. Internationally, the extent to which we can ascribe responsibility to international institutions seems subject to much more disagreement. The comparative wealth of South Korea relative to North Korea is not, I think, easily explainable with reference to some agreed-upon set of international rules within which both Koreas operate. I want to be clear, here, that I am not saying that some such institutional explanation is not possible; that would be to prejudge a difficult empirical issue. The only point I am trying to make is that multiple alternative explanations seem plausible and await empirical verification. We might, for example, think that the difference is attributable entirely to North Korea because of its malign political leadership (or to South Korea for its opposite). We might ascribe some responsibility to the United States for its actions in defense of South Korea since the Korean War. We might ascribe some responsibility to the international system itself. But all of these are, at most, plausible guesses www.annualreviews.org • Global Distributive Justice

125

ARI

11 April 2012

13:59

until some empirical work is done. We do not (yet) know whether to assign responsibility to the international institutions, as opposed to individual states, and we do not (yet) know how to divide up responsibilities between the multiple states to which some responsibility seems due. In the domestic context, we can theorize together easily because we tend to agree about the empirical realities within which we are theorizing. Internationally, I am suggesting, we cannot. All this has been merely a preamble to a discussion of recent thinking about global distributive justice, to which we can now turn. We can, I believe, divide recent thinking about global justice into two large groups, based on how they understand the relationship between global distributive justice and institutions. The first group includes theories that do not rest the demands of distributive justice upon institutional membership; all human persons are entitled to protection by certain norms of distributive justice regardless of the institutions in which those persons are situated. The second group explicitly ties distributive duties to the members of some institutional set, and derives distributive justice from the nature and actions of that institutional set. We can examine these possibilities in turn.

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

PL15CH07-Blake

COSMOPOLITANISM ABOUT DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE: DO WE EVEN NEED TO ASK THE EMPIRICAL QUESTIONS? Cosmopolitanism, as a concept, is susceptible to multiple interpretations (Caney 2010). Taken historically, it invokes citizenship in the world, but we have disagreed with one another over the precise form such “citizenship” might take. For our purposes, we might think of cosmopolitanism as that form of political theory that urges us to overcome local and partial ties, in the name of a loyalty to what is universal or global. This is why, I think, the label has come to be applied to those theorists of global justice who have insisted that the reasons we have to care about distributive justice do not depend upon shared citizenship, or some form of local or institutional tie. For the cosmopolitan, the fact of being human counts in determining one’s basic rights; in contrast, the fact of being Canadian matters either very little or not at all. If it is right to worry about the relative wealth and poverty of Canadian persons, then, it is similarly right to worry about the relative wealth and poverty of persons more generally. For our purposes, we can define a cosmopolitan, as it regards distributive justice, as a theorist for whom distributive justice as a concept applies regardless of the institutional relationships in which people are situated. There are any number of ways of developing and defending a cosmopolitan framework. Most modern cosmopolitans understand themselves as offering an interpretation of egalitarian liberalism; I will focus on this trend in the present context and largely ignore the utilitarian tradition (on the latter, see Unger 1996, Singer 2002). Cosmopolitans of this bent will disagree about the appropriate metric of egalitarian respect. Charles Beitz, for example, understands the thing to be distributed in Rawlsian terms of primary goods (Beitz 1983, which revises the vision given in Beitz 1979); Simon Caney defends the idea of opportunity as that which is to be equalized (Caney 2005); and Martha Nussbaum defends an idea of capabilities to achieve valuable functionings (Nussbaum 2001). What is important is not the metric with which we judge the relative holdings of individuals but that individuals deserve some measure of justice in the distribution of that metric, and deserve it because they are human beings. (See also, for related arguments, Shue 1996, O’Neill 2000, Tan 2004.) Cosmopolitans are able to develop powerful arguments in defense of their positions, but perhaps none is more powerful than the simple appeal to consistency. If we accept the basic liberal idea that all humans are alike in moral worth and value, and a given metric of egalitarian respect is valued within the political community, how could it fail to be similarly valuable outside that community?

126

Blake

PL15CH07-Blake

ARI

11 April 2012

13:59

Liberalism has historically had the moral equality of persons at the heart of its self-understanding (Dworkin 1973). Thus, Martha Nussbaum asks why our shared liberal values stop at the morally arbitrary line in the earth called the border: [W]hy should these values, which instruct us to join hands across boundaries of ethnicity, lose steam when they get to the borders of the nation? By conceding that a morally arbitrary boundary such as the boundary of the nation has a deep and formative role in our deliberations, we seem to deprive ourselves

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

of any principled way of persuading citizens they should in fact join hands across these other barriers. (Nussbaum 1996, p. 14)

Joseph Carens, similarly, regards membership in a developed country as the last remaining feudal birthright privilege defended by liberal thinking (Carens 1987). The image is, or should be, striking; liberalism prides itself on overcoming caste and inherited hierarchy. But if the borders of a state indicate the borders of a distributive principle, may not those excluded by that state regard themselves as treated unjustly? The idea is that distributive shares—and, thus, life chances—should not depend so deeply upon brute bad luck. Cosmopolitan principles tend thus to have two parts: a defense of a particular metric of fair distribution, and an argument as to why this metric should not be limited to any particular subset of humanity. The result is that cosmopolitan principles tend to be radical principles. Insofar as they are applied within a world of radical inequality—inequality, it must be said, on more or less any particular metric of human well-being or functioning—they tend to insist upon fairly radical revision of the institutions and assumptions that generate easy acceptance of the status quo. When we accept a principle of distributive justice that begins with humanity as a whole having an equal right to some good thing, we will discover that we are far away from that principle. We do not have to do any analysis of why particular people or particular peoples are less endowed with some particular good than others. The simple fact that they are is enough (Tan 2004, Caney 2005). This simplicity is part of cosmopolitanism’s appeal. It is also, however, part of why we may worry about cosmopolitanism’s soundness. The simple fact is that by refusing to engage with the empirical analysis of why wealthy states are wealthy, cosmopolitanism may end up clashing with some moral intuitions that many of us take seriously, about how capability and culpability relate to distributive justice. Imagine, for example, the following fact pattern. The world is as just as you could want it to be, on whatever metric of distribution you choose. Everyone has an adequate quantity of whatever good is taken as the metric of distributive justice, and no one has sufficiently greater of that good to count as a violation of the norms of distributive justice. Imagine, now, that the dark side of the moon makes its presence known. The inhabitants of the moon turn out to be human—or, if not human, sufficiently personlike to count as entitled to treatment as moral equals—and wealthy. The average “Lunan” has roughly twice the amount of whatever good thing you have chosen to be the focus of your distributive principle. Do the Lunans have an obligation to give away their goods until the resulting distribution is as fair as the distribution was prior to the Lunans’ arrival? (This case is discussed in Blake 2011.) For the cosmopolitan, I think the answer has to be yes; insofar as the cosmopolitan’s principle does not depend upon any particular institutional relationship being in place, it cannot demand that the Lunans and the Terrans share any particular relationship prior to the introduction of some principle of distributive justice. It is enough that both groups are comprised of human persons. The fact that the average Terran has less of some particular good than the average Lunan is unjust, if birth as a Terran is merely an accident—that is, bad brute luck. The Terrans have a right to redistribution, and the Lunans have an obligation to consent to that redistribution.

www.annualreviews.org • Global Distributive Justice

127

ARI

11 April 2012

13:59

The difficulty here, I think, is that this simply seems unwarranted. The reason many of us care about distributive justice is that we want to see people treated with equal concern and respect, and we recognize that there are contexts in which material inequality constitutes a form of objectionable disrespect. But this particular context is not one of them. The Lunans did not cause the (relative) poverty of the Terrans; they do not share institutions to which their relative distributive shares might be attributed. The rights of the Terrans were fully defended and protected prior to the encounter. Why should we think that things have changed after it? To say that the Terran population was treated justly before but objectionably after the arrival of a wealthier population comes perilously close to simply resting distributive justice on envy— which is hardly the most noble, or persuasive, ground for distributive justice. In particular, it seems that—without some empirical story to make it clear why we should link the two—the mere comparison between the two can give rise to a legitimate complaint. A flourishing life does not become a bad one simply because we now are able to see others with greater opportunities than ourselves; the response, again, comes perilously close to simply being a defense of envy as an ethical principle. Now, many noncosmopolitan theories give an account of why distribution matters within a given context: in particular, they argue that it is because some specific forms of inequality make the development of justified legal institutions impossible (Blake 2001, Nagel 2005, Risse 2006). The worry about cosmopolitan justice here is that avoiding engagement with the complex empirical reality about how to understand distributive results ignores some morally relevant information about those results. It does not risk entanglement with empirical controversy, as other theories will, but it obtains this benefit by undermining its own plausibility (Anderson 1999). Work is continuing on developing the cosmopolitan vision. I do not want to dismiss this work; it offers many valuable insights and ideas. I want only to make the following, limited claim: insofar as cosmopolitanism abstracts away from empirical notions of attribution and responsibility for distributive outcomes, it stands in tension with some of our moral convictions. It is always possible that the cosmopolitan vision is right, and those of us who are moved by our pre-theoretic ideas of attribution and responsibility are wrong. So far, though, I think the burden remains on the cosmopolitan to show why this is so.

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

PL15CH07-Blake

INSTITUTIONAL THEORY, PART ONE: DO GLOBAL INSTITUTIONS CAUSE POVERTY? Cosmopolitanism relies on the idea that a concern with relative distributive shares is always important, regardless of what institutions exist between persons. Institutional theory, in contrast, argues that a concern with relative distributive shares is only sometimes important, for particular and contingent reasons. In particular institutional contexts, a particular distribution of goods can count as an injustice. This sort of theory is, by its very nature, diverse. Theorists disagree about what these particular contexts might be, and what stories we would tell about why these contexts are appropriate. They will also face disagreement, I will argue, about how to understand the nature of the institutions actually existing in the global economy today. To make this case, I will examine two exceptionally important forms of institutional argument about distributive justice. The first, stemming from Thomas Pogge, argues that we have economic obligations that stem from our role in coercively imposing an international regime upon the world. In particular, we have obligations specifically to the global poor to alleviate their poverty; this obligation emerges from our participation in a global system of institutions that creates and perpetuates their poverty. The second, associated with a variety of present theorists, looks to the political nature of global 128

Blake

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

PL15CH07-Blake

ARI

11 April 2012

13:59

institutions and argues that we may have distributive obligations that stem from the prerequisites of just participation in the institutions creating the rules governing the interactions between states. I will examine these in turn. We can start our analysis of Thomas Pogge by noting the starkness of his conclusion: In his analysis, global poverty represents not just an unmet humanitarian obligation but an ongoing human evil, perhaps the greatest one in history. Pogge’s argument insists that international poverty and underdevelopment—and the death and wasted potential this entails—find their causal origin in a set of global institutions created and imposed by the wealthy nations of the world upon the global poor (Pogge 2002, 2010a). As such, the poverty of the underdeveloped nations is not simply a fact in the world, to be dealt with by comparatively weak moral notions of humanitarian benefit and charity; it is, instead, a violation of the rights of the poor. It is a violation not merely of their legitimate expectations; they might expect to be helped, for instance, and we are not merely refraining from doing that. It is a violation of their negative rights to be free from harm. The poorer inhabitants of the world have rights that are being violated, on a massive and unprecedented scale, by the wealthy states. The primary mechanism for this violation is the ascription of the resource and borrowing privilege to any organization able to take effective political control of a territorial jurisdiction.3 A group does not have to truly represent the interests of a place’s inhabitants, on the rules set up by international law, in order to sell that place’s resources. So long as an agent is able to effectively control and repress the inhabitants, it has the ability to speak in their name in international treaty making—regardless of how badly it treats these inhabitants. The result, for Pogge, is that the institutions of global society have set up incentives by which undemocratic regimes are rewarded and encouraged in the underdeveloped countries, and in which resources predictably flow from these countries to those already blessed with wealth. These institutions are, in the end, accountable only to the wealthier nations that set these institutions up, and whose participation is necessary for their survival as institutions. They serve only to impose a set of property rules upon the poorer nations that guarantee their continued poverty and underdevelopment. Pogge’s analysis is powerful and wide-reaching, and offers a number of valuable positive suggestions about how we might begin to rectify these defects—including revisions in how pharmaceutical research is incentivized, and mechanisms for a global tax on resource use. For our purposes, though, I want to focus on the criticisms Pogge’s work has incurred, much of which reflects concerns about Pogge’s argument that the global institutional set causes the poverty of the underdeveloped world. Many of Pogge’s critics agree with his contention that international poverty is unjust, in addition to being a violation of humanitarian duties. These critics, though, have frequently questioned whether or not Pogge has made his case that this poverty is causally ascribable to the international institutional set—and that simple revisions in this set could dramatically decrease global poverty. They have, in my language, questioned whether or not Pogge’s assumptions about the global institutional set’s culpability and capability are warranted. We can examine these in turn. The first form of critique begins with that of Pogge’s idea that global institutions cause international poverty. The worry here begins with the idea that the notion of a cause can, without certain controversial assumptions, be easily ascribed to anything as complex as the global institutional set. In particular, for an institution to be said to have caused a result, there must be a

3 Pogge also argues that the history of colonialism and violence, along with the attendant inequality in resource extraction and use that has followed, has partial responsibility for global poverty. I will not emphasize this part of Pogge’s argument here, but I think similar worries to those I describe might be applied to this strand of his thought.

www.annualreviews.org • Global Distributive Justice

129

ARI

11 April 2012

13:59

comprehensible baseline of expectations to which the existing result might be compared. Alan Patten and Mathias Risse have each provided a version of this critique. Patten argues that Pogge illegitimately smuggles in a moralized baseline of expectations, in which the inhabitants of the poorer nations obtain the resources and rights they would have under ideal justice; this baseline is what the poor deserve, argues Patten, but it is a stretch to say that the wealthy nations cause the poverty of the poor when they fail to bring about ideal justice (Patten 2005). Mathias Risse offers an even more pointed criticism, noting that the usual baseline for causation to be ascribed to an interaction consists of the expectations that would hold in the absence of such interaction (Risse 2005). Risse points out that the statistical baseline for most of humanity throughout history has been radical poverty and misery. In this analysis, the interaction between the poor and the rich might be taken to have increased the wealth of the poor rather than having caused their poverty. This is compatible, of course, with the existence of duties of justice as regards the benefits of industrialization and globalization; the poor may have become slightly better off, but the wealthy have undoubtedly gotten much, much richer, and we might develop theories that condemn this gap. Pogge’s contention that global poverty is caused by the wealthy societies of the world, though, seems—to Risse and Patten—simply incorrect. Joshua Cohen echoes these concerns. He, too, begins with the difficulty of saying that the poverty of the global poor is caused by the wealth of the global rich (Cohen 2010). He challenges, that is, the extent to which the global institutions imposed by the wealthy are culpable for global poverty and underdevelopment. His analysis, though, draws more on modern development economics and notes that modern theorists have identified various factors that might determine why some countries are poor and some are rich: they include the institutions described by Pogge, but they also include such endogenous factors as geography, resource allocation, and political culture (Easterly 2008). The precise weighting and power of these various factors are, of course, a matter of tremendous disagreement and controversy, and much of the field of development economics is devoted to developing more complete and powerful analyses of how the relative wealth and poverty of nations are to be explained. This is a difficulty for Pogge, argues Cohen, because his analysis of poverty includes only two possibilities: either the poor nations of the world are responsible for their own poverty, which is implausible, or the rich nations of the world are responsible for that poverty. Cohen’s conclusion is that Pogge has not adequately come to terms with the empirical complexity of how poverty is to be explained and that as a result, his conclusions about international culpability for poverty are simply unmotivated. This worry infects Pogge’s story about capability, as well. Pogge insists that the international system could effectively mitigate much poverty with certain simple changes. This is true, however, only if Pogge is right about what is causing poverty in the first place; and this is a burden, says Cohen, that he has not met. My goal, in this article, is not to decide these controversies. Pogge has responses, and potentially plausible ones, to most of these worries; he notes, for instance, that the institution of slavery can be said to have harmed the slaves, even if there is no simple baseline of expectations against which their status as slaves might be compared (Pogge 2010b). For the moment, all I want to do is say that there is a great deal of controversy here that has an empirical element to it. Some of the controversy is conceptual, and deals with the conceptual framework invoked by causation. Much of it, though, relies upon particular notions of what actually explains poverty, and how much of it can be attributed to the globally wealthy nations of the world. Greater empirical clarity, then, would at the very least make our normative arguments here more tractable, by narrowing the range of controversy to those possible positions that are empirically defensible.

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

PL15CH07-Blake

130

Blake

PL15CH07-Blake

ARI

11 April 2012

13:59

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

INSTITUTIONAL THEORY, PART TWO: ARE GLOBAL INSTITUTIONS POLITICAL ASSOCIATIONS? In his work, Pogge has tried to make poverty relief a matter of negative duties. The wealthy nations of the world are actively harming the global poor, thereby violating their rights, and they have an obligation to stop doing this. Pogge has developed this work as an alternative to a more conventional analysis of justice, which regards the political morality of equality as an extension of the sorts of analyses used to evaluate distributive justice within a domestic society. This earlier sort of analysis, which is perhaps more familiar to us, relies upon a notion of distributive fairness in the allocation of some good, within the context of some form of cooperative enterprise. Pogge himself—along with Charles Beitz—was instrumental in the development of this methodology (Beitz 1979, Pogge 1989). This sort of analysis might be thought to have had two distinct historical moments. The first, in which Pogge and Beitz were writing, developed the concept of international distributive justice explicitly as an extension of Rawls’s justice as fairness. On this analysis, Rawls’s limitation of his difference principle to the domestic realm was unjustifiable. His principle applied—or, perhaps, should have been applied—within any context in which social institutions distributed basic goods against a backdrop of economic and social cooperation. Because this latter notion could be as accurately used as a description of the global economy as of a domestic political society, these writers regarded global inequality as unjustified for the same reason as domestic inequality. This moment might be taken to have ended with the publication of Rawls’s The Law of Peoples (Rawls 2001; see also Martin & Reidy 2006), in which Rawls explicitly rejected the interpretation of his work as proposing that the global economy was as much a “basic structure” for the purposes of social justice as the domestic political community. International redistribution was limited to a duty to assist “burdened societies,” to let them become full members of the society of peoples; no moral concern for the relative wealth and poverty of states was included within Rawls’s conception of global justice. Rawls was, however, not entirely transparent about why this difference was justifiable. Rawls took it for granted that the reasons that made the difference principle a valid implication of the domestic original position simply failed to hold true for the international original position. The next phase in discussions of international distributive fairness might be thought to have emerged from the discussions that happened after The Law of Peoples. In the years after the publication of this book, many theorists addressed the differences between the domestic and international political contexts, with a view toward demonstrating why distributive egalitarianism was a valid implication in the former—but not the latter—context. These theorists invoked coercion, or reciprocity, or the authorship of law, or some combination of all of these to demonstrate that the international sphere had aspects that made distributive egalitarianism an inappropriate demand in this realm (Blake 2001, Nagel 2005, Risse 2006). This attempt, of course, gave rise to its own critique, in which theorists concerned to demonstrate the importance of international distribution argued that there were indeed reasons in the international realm to take relative wealth and poverty as morally significant. What was new, though, was that this new version of global justice thinking did not rely upon analogies to the domestic state and the theories developed to analyze it. Instead, these thinkers began increasingly to examine international institutions on their own merits, developing theories that might deal with the powers and institutions of global politics as they actually are rather than as pale imitations of territorial state governments. This is, I think, an entirely salutary development; however, as before, it opens up these theories—and their competitors—to empirical critiques. The new thinking about international fairness in distribution is interesting, and philosophically rich, but it stands in need of empirical help. www.annualreviews.org • Global Distributive Justice

131

ARI

11 April 2012

13:59

We can examine two theories in detail as well-developed exemplars of this new approach. Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel have developed a theoretical approach to justice that takes off from the idea that institutions in which reasons are given in justification of outcomes have an obligation to structure themselves in such a way as to make the giving and hearing of these reasons as fair as possible. The international institutional set is, they say, exactly such a site; it contains within it a host of administrative bodies that adjudicate decisions emerging from treaty regimes. The decisions of these bodies are important, even if the decisions are ultimately enforced by state action. The set of these institutions should thus be recognized as a site of justice, in that certain procedural and substantive aspects of fairness are required before the decisions of these bodies could be regarded as legitimately imposed on its participants. Cohen and Sabel do not commit to any particular proposition about what norms of distributive justice this would require; they note, instead, only that the anti-egalitarian conclusions of Thomas Nagel, for whom the concept of justice simply cannot apply internationally, are incorrect (Cohen & Sabel 2009). Darrel Moellendorf is more explicit about the link between cooperative institutions and distributive justice. For him, any institution having certain characteristics has an obligation to ensure distributive justice among its participants. What Moellendorf shares with Cohen and Sabel is a concern that the norms and rules emerging from any complex pattern of interaction should be dealt with by the concept of social justice. Just as Cohen and Sabel are concerned with fairness within international institutions considered as a complex institutional site, so Moellendorf is concerned with fairness in the development of norms constitutive of large social institutions generally:

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

PL15CH07-Blake

The idea is that duties of social justice exist between persons who have a moral duty of equal respect to one another if those persons are comembers in an association that is (1) relatively strong, (2) largely nonvoluntary, (3) constitutive of a significant part of the background rules for the various relationships of their public lives, and (4) governed by norms that can be subject of human control. (Moellendorf 2009, pp. 45–46; see also Moellendorf 2011)

According to Moellendorf ’s analysis, global economic institutions have a duty to create egalitarian distributions among their membership; these institutions help determine who shall receive what share of the advantages of cooperation, and do so in a way that is subject to the decision making of human beings. As such, human beings have an obligation in justice to ensure that only fair distributive outcomes emerge. Once again, I think we can see that the soundness of these analyses will depend upon the truth of certain empirical premises about what the international institutions we share actually are doing— and what they can do. We can look at these in turn, starting with the less important worry about the capability of the global institutional system. Both theories are concerned with making the decisions of the international system as procedurally fair as the decisions of a domestic state would be in ideal justice. It is not clear, though, that this is as feasible internationally as it is domestically—even if we acknowledge how far we are from such an ideal domestically. There is a great deal of discussion about how justice might be understood in a democratic society, and what it would take for justice to be procedurally administered. We have had, moreover, several centuries of experimentation, to learn—at least—some common ways of getting things wrong. Internationally, I think we have less theoretical knowledge, less historical wisdom, and—crucially—empirical problems that require a mix of conceptual and empirical thinking. To take one simple example: in the domestic state, all individual persons are roughly alike in size and power, at least to the extent that no individual person is essentially immune from the danger posed by other persons. In the international realm, though, we face a much greater range of diversity. The agents to international regimes include 132

Blake

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

PL15CH07-Blake

ARI

11 April 2012

13:59

microstates such as the Comoros and global powers such as the United States. As long as states exist as we know them, the Comoros will always be much more vulnerable to the United States than the reverse. This is not to justify any particular moral conclusion: I am, in particular, not saying that the United States is permitted to take maximal advantage of its greater wealth and power. I am saying, though, that notions of procedural fairness might have to take some accounting of what sorts of structural differences exist between states, and this may require knowledge of exactly what those differences are. If, politically, ought implies can, then we have some reason to know what, exactly, can be done to make the procedures used by all states fair to those states—and this requires knowing a rather specific set of information about what those states are actually able to do and to be. The more important worry, though, begins not with capability but with culpability. The question we have to ask is a variant of the one pressed against Pogge: what, exactly, is the range of causal powers ascribed to the global institutional set? With Pogge, we wanted to know how fully the poverty of the world could be laid at the feet of these institutions. With the present theorists, we want instead to know which acts and policies ought to be ascribed to the institutions—and which to the powerful states that act to create and sustain them. I think we have to imagine that the institutions in question act independently of such states, in order to regard them as sites of justice. If this were not possible, I worry that the institutions do not have the right sort of causal efficacy to make them appropriate starting points for analyses of global justice. Imagine, for example, a version of the United Nations that served as a focal point for debate, but whose pronouncements were routinely ignored by its members—call it the Philosophical Nations (PN), in that it offers a place for the giving of reason, but no particular hope of independent agency. If the United States comes to the PN to give reasons, and hears reasons from the developing countries, but then regards this as only interesting information—can we really say that membership in the PN gives rise to duties of justice that would not exist in its absence? I find it hard to see how it could. Joining the PN might help states to understand their duties, or to specify particular forms of cooperation that might make the fulfillment of these duties more likely or more tractable, but I cannot think that this membership is itself the thing acting to create these duties. At this point, the relevance of empirical analyses to our discussion of justice should become apparent. Moellendorf, Cohen, and Sabel are convinced that the institutions they discuss actually do have power over all their members, such that the rules formulated by these institutions bind not only in foro interno but in foro externo. For my part, I think it is entirely possible that some hegemonic powers like the United States can frequently treat these institutions as I have imagined states treating the PN. The United States is able to deviate unilaterally from the decisions of the United Nations, for example, in a way that is not open to smaller states (Blake 2012). I do not want, of course, to say that it should in fact do so; that is a discussion for another day. I only want to say that I find it plausible that the United Nations does not have the effective power over the United States that is presupposed in the image of justice discussed by these theorists. To the extent that the empirical assumptions they make do not hold true, their theories simply fail to apply to a world with the United States in it. This does not mean—in my view—that there are no duties incumbent upon the United States to alleviate global poverty, and potentially to work toward a world in which such radical inequalities in power do not exist. I mean only to say that, on my reading, the arguments that begin with the power of shared institutions over all states ignore the empirical realities of great power global politics, and do so at their peril. The problem, of course, is that both sides in this debate are relying upon empirical assumptions, and neither side is especially able to justify their claims. I find my version of the United Nations and its powers plausible, but I imagine those who disagree with me feel the same about their www.annualreviews.org • Global Distributive Justice

133

PL15CH07-Blake

ARI

11 April 2012

13:59

own versions. In all this, normative theorizing awaits solid answers about which facts actually obtain.

CONCLUSION

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

I end this review with a prediction, and a plea. The prediction is that the problem I have identified here—the relative empirical complexity of the international realm, and the need for empirical scholarship to guide normative thinking—is not going to get much better in the years to come. To the extent that predictions can be made about the issues that will exercise us in the near future, we can make the following statement with some confidence: these problems will rely upon extremely technical and complicated questions of fact. Climate change, for example, can only be adequately analyzed by someone who knows about how climates work; this, in turn, requires a commitment not only to getting the moral arguments right but the empirical facts right as well (Gardiner 2004). Immigration and refugee flows, too, have complicated explanations and complicated effects; social science is needed to explain why people leave their countries, and what happens to the places they leave and the places they adopt as their homes. These are only examples, based on issues we already recognize as important; the world of politics will, I think, surprise us with new problems on a fairly regular basis. All I claim here is that we will need factual knowledge to deal with them. I do not want to say that the factual knowledge will replace the moral argument; political philosophy is not replaced by (empirical) political science. But political philosophy done without knowledge of the capability and culpability of international institutional sets is likely to be bad political philosophy, and it is likely to be bad because it simply fails to describe the world in which it is to be applied. Many normative thinkers have written brilliant theories that do not so much disagree with each other as apply to subtly different worlds. It would be of enormous use to these thinkers if we had more knowledge of the world in which we actually live.4 The plea is for sustained empirical work by social and political scientists on matters of normative importance. I do not think we need armchair social science done by philosophers and political theorists not trained in the methods of empirical analysis. This is, I think, the wrong sort of interdisciplinarity; we might call it disciplinary imperialism—the crossing into a discipline’s territory without noticing the people who are already there. Philosophers, for instance, are trained in philosophical methods, and they do no favors for the world when they pretend that they can do empirical social science on the side. An adequate engagement with global justice requires an actual engagement between normative and descriptive theorists, and this requires actual collaborative work. Some of this is already happening—see, for example, Sanjay Reddy’s collaboration with Thomas Pogge on the evaluation of poverty (Reddy & Pogge 2010). More should be done soon. The clearer we are about the empirical realities of global poverty, the clearer we will become about the methods and concepts appropriate for the moral evaluation of that poverty. Working against global poverty is a worthwhile and urgent task; the sooner we develop the theories needed to understand and address it, the better off our world will be. 4 I would emphasize that none of this is intended to reject radical or ideal theory. I do not mean to criticize those who insist that the world in which we live is radically unlike the world we should build. I want, instead, to insist that we do better—even, I think, at writing ideal theory—when we share some sense of how to understand the world in which we are living. I have argued that we might eliminate some difficulties in our debates by seeking greater clarity about the empirical facts of the world as it stands. I emphatically do not want to say that these empirical facts should be taken as indicative of what the world ought to be. I am grateful to Nancy Rosenblum for urging me to be clearer on this point.

134

Blake

PL15CH07-Blake

ARI

11 April 2012

13:59

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks go to Patrick Taylor Smith and Nancy Rosenblum for extensive comments on previous versions of this review.

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

LITERATURE CITED Anderson E. 1999. What is the point of equality? Ethics 102:287–337 Beitz C. 1983. Cosmopolitan ideals and national sentiment. J. Philos. 80:591–600 Beitz C. 1979. Political Theory and International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press Blake M. 2012. International law and global justice. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Law, ed. A Marmor, pp. 335–47. London: Routledge Blake M. 2011. Coercion and egalitarian justice. Monist 94:555–70 Blake M. 2001. Distributive justice, state coercion, and autonomy. Philos. Public Aff. 30:257–97 Caney S. 2010. Cosmopolitanism. In Ethics and World Politics, ed. D Bell, pp. 146–63. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press Caney S. 2005. Justice Beyond Borders. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press Carens J. 1987. Aliens and citizens: the case for open borders. Rev. Polit. 49:251–73 Cohen GA. 2001. If You’re An Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press Cohen J. 2010. Philosophy, social science, global poverty. In Thomas Pogge and His Critics, ed. A Jaggar, pp. 18–45. Malden, MA: Polity Cohen J, Sabel C. 2009. Extra republican nulla justitia? Philos. Public Aff. 34:147–75 Dworkin R. 1973. The original position. Univ. Chicago Law Rev. 40:500–33 Easterly W, ed. 2008. Reinventing Foreign Aid. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Gardiner S. 2004. Ethics and global climate change. Ethics 114:555–600 Hathaway O. 2002. Do human rights treaties make a difference? Yale Law J. 111:1935–2041 Lerner AJ, Lowe F. 1981. Camelot. New York: Hal Leonard Martin R, Reidy D. 2006. Rawls’s Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia? New York: Wiley Blackwell Moellendorf D. 2011. Cosmopolitanism and compatriot duties. Monist 94:535–54 Moellendorf D. 2009. Global Inequality Matters. New York: Palgrave MacMillan Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (Montevideo Conven.). 1933. 49 Stat. 3097, T.S. 881, 3 Bevans 145, 165 L.N.T.S. 19 Nagel T. 2005. The problem of global justice. Philos. Public Aff. 33:113–47 Nussbaum M. 2001. Women and Human Development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press Nussbaum M. 1996. Patriotism and cosmopolitanism. In For Love of Country, ed. J Cohen, pp. 3–20. Boston: Beacon Okin S. 1991. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books O’Neill O. 2000. Bounds of Justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press Patten A. 2005. Should we stop thinking about poverty in terms of helping the poor? Ethics Int. Aff. 19:19–27 Pogge T. 2010a. Politics as Usual. Malden, MA: Polity Pogge T. 2010b. Responses to the critics. In Thomas Pogge and His Critics, ed. A Jaggar, pp. 175–250. Malden, MA: Polity Pogge T. 2002. World Poverty and Human Rights. Malden, MA: Polity Pogge T. 1989. Realizing Rawls. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press Reddy SG, Pogge T. 2010. How not to count the poor. In Debates on the Measurement of Global Poverty, ed. S Anand, P Segal, JE Stiglitz, pp. 42–85. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press Rawls J. 2001. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press www.annualreviews.org • Global Distributive Justice

135

PL15CH07-Blake

ARI

11 April 2012

13:59

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2012.15:121-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Virginia on 06/07/13. For personal use only.

Rawls J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Rawls J. 1989. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia Univ. Press Risse M. 2006. What to say about the state. Soc. Theory Practice 32:671–98 Risse M. 2005. Do we owe the global poor assistance or rectification? Ethics Int. Aff. 19:9–18 Rousseau J. 1997. Of the social contract. In The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. V Gourevich, pp. 39–152. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press Shue H. 1996. Basic Rights. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. 2nd ed. Simmons B. 2009. Mobilizing For Human Rights. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press Singer P. 2002. One World. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press Tan K-C. 2004. Justice Without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Patriotism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press Unger P. 1996. Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press Weber M. 1994. The profession and vocation of politics. In Weber: Political Writings, ed. and trans. P Lassman, R Speirs, pp. 309–69. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press

136

Blake