Justice without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Patriotism - Part 1

Justice without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Patriotism (Contemporary Political Theory) was written by Kok-Chor Tan.

This is an essay I wrote in response:

Cosmopolitanism is a philosophy that requires citizens of the world to be more than just inhabitants of their respective countries. It holds the individual as the basic unit of society, irrespective of national boundaries. Tan believes that principles of justice should apply equally to all citizens of the world as a whole. This perspective is an intriguing one, and if practically applied, could alleviate a lot of suffering in the world.

There are different types of justice. Economic justice involves the equal distribution of material goods, while political justice is concerned with protecting civil liberties. Tan mainly focuses on economic justice for the purpose of this book.

Before cosmopolitan alternatives can be applied to our current global system, we need to be convinced of the moral force of the cosmopolitan view. This necessitates addressing some perceived weaknesses of position that even cosmopolitans themselves acknowledge, which mainly involve nationalism and patriotism.

Boundaries are the driving force of nationalism, while cosmopolitanism is transcendent in that respect. It is possible, however, for cosmopolitanism to accommodate nationalism without reducing the importance of the special attachments people of a nation feel for their compatriots. In Justice without Borders Tan identifies the need for cosmopolitan justice, identifies some conceptions of cosmopolitan justice, and addresses the relationship of cosmopolitan justice and liberalism.

Many of those who are opposed to the cosmopolitan principle would say that humanitarian aid sufficiently addresses the world’s problems, therefore a cosmopolitan system of global justice is unnecessary. Duties of justice and duties of humanitarian assistance differ greatly in the respect that duties of global justice operate at a more fundamental level. Duties of humanitarian assistance are short term commitments with specific goals that do not directly address the causes of the problems they are meant to treat, while duties of justice are more ongoing since they aim to regulate inequalities.

The fact that almost 3 billion people in the world live on less than 2 dollars a day and a fifth of the population lives on less than 1 dollar a day cannot be remedied by something as simple as humanitarian aid. Problems like these are within the background structure of the global system, and duties of justice involve finding the source of the problems so as to prevent them from happening again. Our current global economic structure perpetuates inequality and poverty. This includes the practices of organizations like the IMF, WTO, and the World Bank.

When Tan talks about globalization, he is specifically referring to economic globalization and “the process of increasing integration and interdependency of national economies,” among other things. Things that used to occur within states’ boundaries are now happening on a global scale. The neoliberalist assumption that the globalization and liberalization of the world’s economies will narrow the gap between the global north and south has so far proven incorrect. This neoliberal ideology that is driving the globalization process needs to be challenged instead of taken for granted. Since we must now consider economics on a global scale, this globalization also has to be reflected in our moral concerns and considerations of justice. Kant, in his 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” stated this perfectly:

“The peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is therefore not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity.”

Once it has been proven that a theory of global justice is needed over a system of humanitarian aid, it is still necessary to prove that a specifically cosmopolitan theory is warranted. Focusing solely on justice between states is not good enough when you take into consideration the fact that we are moved by global injustices in the first place because of the pain and suffering inflicted on individuals rather than on the state as a whole. It is not that states are irrelevant, just that they cannot be seen as the primary unit of global distributive justice if we hope to remedy the many problems that impact individual lives.

Utilitarianism measures the justness of institutions on the amount of happiness they create for society as a whole, while deontological theories of justice consider rights to be indispensable. According to Henry Shue rights involve three main duties: nonviolation, protection, and assistance. He identifies the right to security and the right to subsistence as two basic rights; basic because they are necessary in order to enjoy other rights. When we reason about ideal justice, we do so in a context that assumes that people’s basic rights are already met.

When we think about rights, we often forget that there is usually no specific person responsible for making sure those rights are fulfilled. The impoverished people of the world have a right to better lives, but there is no one in particular who is obligated to provide them this relief. These empty rights are called manifesto rights. Unless obligations to feed the hungry are transformed from manifesto rights into duties of justice, where someone accepts responsibility for the fulfillment of these rights, the rights of the poor will remain essentially meaningless.

A Theory of Justice: Original EditionAttempts at developing a theory of global justice have really been attempts at “globalizing” Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, since it is generally considered to be the foremost account of a rights-based justice in contemporary philosophy. However, Rawls believed states to be self sufficient and isolated units, which goes against the very core of cosmopolitan theory. The interesting thing is that Rawlsians argue against Rawls. They believe that he must adopt a more global perspective on his own principles based on his own reasoning.

Thomas Pogge likened nationality to things like race, gender, and social class, and said that “within Rawls’s conception, there is no reason to treat this case differently from the others.” Instead of simply taking nationality to be a given with moral standing, we should adopt a system in which individuals of the world are represented, and the closed system is “the world at large.” Beitz did not agree with Rawls’s conception of states as self sufficient and isolated units. He pointed to increasing international trade and investment and other effects of globalization as evidence to the contrary.

Basically Rawls’s followers believe that according to Rawls himself, the world should be viewed as a single entity to which his principles of justice apply. Rawls’s difference principle is very general in that it does not deal with how we do business within a given global scheme, but that very scheme itself. Basically the point is that we need to envision an alternative global scheme.

Rawls says that societies that are better off have a duty of assistance to burdened societies but that this does not include distributive justice. Compared to the current state of things Rawls is rather progressive, but his account of global justice does not go far enough and lacks a commitment to distributive justice.

Rawls’s two reasons for rejecting distributive justice are (1) since humanitarian assistance is already required, distributive justice is redundant, and (2) global distributive principles would have unacceptable results. While humanitarian duties aim to redistribute wealth, duties of justice aim to identify what counts as just distribution in the first place.

Duties of justice involve changing the basic framework; humanity works within the existing system. This means the difference between redistribution and correcting an initial unjust distribution. As long as humanitarianism takes place within the present global arrangement, it is only treating the symptoms of injustice rather than its underlying cause. It appears to some that distributive justice would reward poorer nations for their bad choices instead of just countering the effects of inequality by circumstance. Rather than compensating for bad choices, distributive justice would combat inequalities that happened irrespective of the control of the country.

There is a shift in Rawls’s reasoning between his domestic and international theories. His domestic theory holds individualism to be fundamental, while his international theory is more “communitarianist,” which means it values societies over individuals. Rawls also believes that nonliberal societies would reject distributive justice and therefore liberal societies would have to respect that since it goes against liberal policy to force the issue. He says that nonliberal societies reject liberalism in all forms. This is not exactly true.

Nothing stops nonliberal societies from rejecting liberal principles of economic justice, even though they explicitly reject all liberal principles of political justice. The liberal principles of economic justice would actually be good for the leaders of the nonliberal states because that just equalizes them with other states; it does not really give the citizens any advantage. A liberal Law of Peoples accommodates nonliberal states. This is because Rawls believes that an ideal theory “presents a conception of a just society that we are to achieve if we can.”

A Law of Peoples that, in the words of Tan, “tolerates great inequalities between states as part of its ideal theory is setting our sights too low.” Idealists see the absolute best possible scenario, so it makes sense that the ideal world view for the future would be a cosmopolitan one. All of the arguments against cosmopolitanism that Tan set out to disprove have been proven false. Maybe cosmopolitanism is the one thing that could really help our increasingly globalized society become a better place.