Global Justice Secondary Literature

Below are some selections from the global distributive justice literature. If any of you are thinking of writing your first 3-4 page papers on this topic, or of expanding your first papers to take up this topic in the longer second/final paper, you may find some of the following helpful. If you want more guidance on what would be specifically useful for you, email me and based on the kind of argument you are developing vis-a-vis Rawls, Mill, or another liberal I can make more precise selections.

Global Justice Literature

General Overviews Online
Blake, Michael. “International Justice” at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/international-justice/>.
Scheurman, William. 2006. “Globalization” at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online at <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/globalization/>.

Cosmopolitans
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Beitz, Charles. 2000. “Rawls’s Law of Peoples” in Ethics 110 (2000): 669-96.

Beitz, Charles. 1983. “Cosmopolitan Ideals and National Sentiment,” Journal of Philosophy 80, October 1983.

Beitz, Charles. 1979. Political Theory and International Relations. Princeton: Princeton University, 1999.

Buchanan, Allen. 2000. “Rawls’s Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World” in Ethics 110 (2000): 697-721.

Habermas, Jürgen. 2004. “Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?” in Habermas, Ciaran Cronin (ed. and trans.), The Divided West. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.

Held, David. 1995. Democracy and the Global Order. Stanford: Stanford University, 1995.
Pogge, Thomas. 2005. “World Poverty and Human Rights” in Ethics and International Affairs 19/1 (2005): 1-8.

Pogge, Thomas. 1994. “An Egalitarian Law of Peoples” in Philosophy and Public Affairs 23, no. 3, Summer 1994.

Tan, Kok-Chor. 2004. Justice Without Borders. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2004.

Westphalians (Nationalists)
Blake, Michael. 2002. “Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy” in Philosophy and Public Affairs 30 (2002): 257-96.

Nagel, Thomas. 2005. “The Problem of Global Justice” in Philosophy and Public Affairs 33 (2005): 113-47

Rawls, John. 1993. “The Law of Peoples” in Rawls, Collected Papers.

Rawls, John. 1999. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge: Belknap, 1999.

Risse, Matthias. 2005. “How Does the Global Order Harm the Poor?” in Philosophy and Public Affairs 33 (2005): 349-76.

Intermediates (Regionalism, Pluralism)
Bohman, James. 2005. “From Demos to Demoi: Democracy Across Borders” in Ratio Juris 18, no. 3, (2005): 293-314.

Bohman, James. 2007. Democracy Across Borders. Cambridge: MIT, 2007.

Cohen, Joshua and Sabel, Charles. 2006. “Extra Rempublicam Nulla Justitia?” in Philosophy and Public Affairs 34 (2006): 147-75.

Gould, Carol C.. 2004. Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2004.

Gould, Carol C.. 2006. “Self-Determination beyond Sovereignty: Relating Transnational Democracy to Local Autonomy” in Journal of Social Philosophy 37, no.1, (2006): 44-60.

Weinstock, Daniel. 2006. “The Real World of (Global) Democracy” in Journal of Social Philosophy 37, no. 1, Spring 2006: 6-20.

Young, Iris Marion. 2002. Inclusion and Democracy, Final Chapter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Associativists
Hurka, Thomas.1997. “The Justification of National Partiality” in McKim and McMahan (eds.), The Morality of Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University, 1997.

Miller, David. 1995. On Nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Scheffler, Samuel. 1994. “Families, Nations, and Strangers” in Boundaries and Allegiances. Oxford: Oxford University, 2001. Also published by University of Kansas in The Lindley Lectures Series.

Scheffler, Samuel. 1997, "Relationships and Responsibilities" in Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (1997): 189-209.

Waldron, Jeremy. 1993. “Special Ties and Natural Duties” in Philosophy and Public Affairs 22, no. 1, (1993).

Moralists/Developmentalists
Murphy, Liam. 1993. “The Demands of Beneficence” in Philosophy and Public Affairs 22, no. 4, Fall, 1993.

O’Neill, Onora. 1975. “Lifeboat Earth” in Philosophy & Public Affairs volume 4 (1975): 273-92.
Singer, Peter. 1972. “Famine, Affluence and Moralitiy” in Philosophy & Public Affairs volume 1 (1972): 229-43.

More??
See <http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/files/global_justice_bibliography.doc>

Pogge, Justice, and Distribution

Pogge suggests that the problem of global poverty could be easily solved by a certain degree of redistribution. This claim seems to rely on an analogy to the operation of redistribution in what we might consider well-ordered societies. Here, borders are to a certain extent closed and population grows at a slow rate. This means that the amount of goods within the society exists relative to a somewhat static population. Contrastingly, on a global level, from a Malthusian point of view, population seems to exist on the margins of resource availability: For Malthus, redistribution would not help, because population would always exist on the margin of available resources.
At the same time, within well-0rdered societies, standards of living seem to exist relative to an ever-expanding and growing conception of what qualifies as a good life - this reflects Rousseau's conception of inequality. Given these two bounds - on the one hand, ever-growing resource dependence as wealth increases, and, on the other hand, increases in population relative to the amount of resources available as wealth decreases, to what extent is just redistribution possible on a global scale? To what extent is the structure of global inequality, which Pogge criticizes, a function of biological/demographic constraints, rather than a matter of moral choice? Is there a reason, as per Nagel, that the sovereign state limits our capacity for redistribution? To what extent would a restructuring of inequality change the dynamics of population growth? Finally, how does the entire issue of human wealth clash if we add the earth as a third party affected by not just resource distribution, but resource production?

Nagel and Sovereignty

“[T]he nation-state is the primary locus of political legitimacy and the pursuit of justice, and it is one of the advantages of domestic political theory that nation-states actually exist” (PPA 113)

Nagel seems to show his hand with this quote. Especially in its practical aspects, I can’t help but agree with Nagel’s thesis that a global body with centralized powers would allow for a much more expedient implementation of global justice. However there are a few nagging doubts in the back of my head: Nagel’s reliance on Hobbesian theory may not suit his purposes, for while it is Hobbes’ conviction that life before the nation-state was “nasty, brutish and short”, this is not necessarily supported by the archeological/anthropological evidence and it might be argued that the thousands of years of existence of hunter/gatherer tribes before the nation-state arises suggests that humans, while not “benevolent” creatures in the moral sense, might have a capacity for helping one another beyond theories of justice or legality. This would then suggest that a sovereign global political entity might not be an absolute necessity in perpetuating global justice, that we could possibly rely on a slow but steadily improving network of NGO’s, in conjunction with helpful government programs, to help out those in dire need. At least there seems to be a possibility (a possibility that seems to be already in the process of actualization), one that might be more palatable than a centrally sovereign global political body.

Nagel: The Problem of Global Justice

Nagel ends his piece with: "the path from anarchy to justice must go through injustice," (pg 147). He says that strong suprantional institutions will at first not aim at justice but pursue common interests; after these institutions are stabilized and recognized, they can be revised to pursue justice. I feel like this is Nagel's expanded version of Rawls' notions of overlapping consensus and reflective equilibrium. If so, could we then attempt to apply Rawls' (domestic) difference principle globally?

Finding Secondary Articles on Mill and Rawls

A good resource for locating secondary articles in philosophy is "The Philosopher's Index" which UCSC library has a subscription to. You can access it from here:

http://library.ucsc.edu:8080/Zope//eresources/bytool/ArticleDatabases/#P

The "Sage Full-Text Political Science" collection is also useful and you can find it in the same place.

Go into the databases and search for terms like "Rawls, Basic Structure" or "Mill, Harm Principle" etc.. You may need to do more refined searches for very specific topics to get articles that are of value to you.

If anyone has questions about articles or book chapters they have found do not hesitate to email me.

Also I should mention that if you want to share 1 or 2 of your articles with each other that is fine, just so long as it is clear that you have each individually read the articles and provided your own summary abstract of the article. Hopefully you and a friend will not each turn in abstracts for the same three articles but sharing 1 or 2 amongst each other is just fine.

Rawls limited Principles of Justice

Rawls advocates that the potential principles of justice are put into a list and distributed to the people in the original position. Included on the list are the "more important conceptions of political justice found in our tradition of political philosophy" along with alternative principles of justice. The people in the original position all have to agree upon one alternative on this list. For Rawls, the original position serves as a 'selection device' and in the people in the original position would still end up with his two principles of justice. I feel that they do not encompass all possible forms of justice and that there should be more than just two principles. I am curious to know if other people are 1. in agreement with Rawls or i 2. f you have any suggestions for additional principles of justice?

Does the Original Position have any meaning in the real world?

I have some questions concerning Rawl’s Original Position. The OP is a thought experiment, not a real conference that ever actually took place. Rawls wants to use the OP to help illustrate how we ought to work together to establish social agreements. Given that, how is such an idealized hypothetical useful is helping us deal with real-world (in Rawlian terms, practical political-philosophical) concerns? Historically, the times where social agreements are made or changed tend to be marked with conflict and highlighted “social positions” rather than anything approaching a veil of ignorance or an aim of fair agreement. So, to respond to dlaz, can a period of conflict, like the Constitutional Convention in revolutionary America, even begin to approach the OP? The Constitutional Convention certainly did a better job than most colonial approaches to new social agreements, but what about the three-fifths rule? The electoral college?

Veil of Ignorance

Broadly speaking, the purpose of the Veil of Ignorance (VI) is the determination of the just/unjust through means of a "thought experiment". It is a "device of representation" (pp. 85) which seeks to extricate "special psychologies" (e.g. envy, spite, aversion to risk or uncertainty) from the perspective of parties. Rawls explains, "however rational it might be for the parties to favor principles framed to promote the determinate and known interests of those they represent, should they have the opportunity, the constraints of right, joined with the limits on information make that impossible" (pp. 86) Further, Rawls also argues under the publicity condition, "that parties in the O.P. are to take into account the consequences, social and psychological, of public recognition by citizens that these principles are mutually acknowledged and that they effectively regulate the basic structure" (pp. 86) How is it impossible to operate on "special psychologies" if parties are to consider the consequences of the publicity condition (e.g. parties accounting for the public recognition of principles)? by what process does the publicity condition work, how does it account for public recognition? it seems that there are two versions of rationality developing, that of only an individual (unlimited rationality) versus that of a member of a party (limited by VI) or in the most complicated case, both. Is it Rawls position that the same individual may operate under both forms of rationality?