Global justice and global realities

Introduction

The leading question of this symposium—should global political theory “get real”—can be interpreted in several ways. The question I will explore here is whether global political theory should be “non-ideal theory”: should global political theory focus on real-world failures to comply with moral duties, instead of articulating ideal visions of perfect justice that fictionally assume full compliance? My answer to this question will essentially be “yes.” I believe that at least the vast majority of global political theory has to be non-ideal theory in the sense just indicated. But I also believe that non-ideal global theory has to confront questions and obstacles that many non-ideal accounts often ignore, or at least underestimate.

I advance these claims in three stages. In the first stage, I argue for the significance of non-ideal global theory from a heterodox direction. Rather than appealing to familiar considerations regarding the urgency of real-world moral failures, and the ability to identify these failures independently of ideal visions of perfect justice, I pursue another strategy: I highlight the methodological significance of arguably the most idealistic global vision—namely, that of a world state. I suggest that our only convincing reasons to reject a world state are non-ideal—these reasons clearly concern failures to comply with moral duties and would not exist given assumptions of full compliance. Therefore, any theory assuming a world of separate states must be one that already takes compliance failures seriously and should accordingly focus on compliance failures as we witness them in the real world.

In the article’s second stage, I contend that a philosophical focus on real-world compliance failures requires nuanced engagement with the social-scientific study of flawed institutions. I argue that philosophers reflecting on global affairs should make more use of social-scientific knowledge than they currently do. Yet at the same time, philosophers should also recognize—to a greater extent than non-ideal accounts often do—the deep structural limitations of social science in a global context, especially with regard to the assessment of how global reforms might affect domestic institutions.

In the article’s third stage, I indicate some under-studied normative implications of these social-scientific limitations. One key implication, I suggest, is the need to explore liberal democracies’ non-consequentialist reasons to disentangle themselves from certain foreign practices—reasons that are more independent of social-scientific uncertainty than familiar reasons for global reform. I suggest that the force of such reasons, in turn, depends on the degree to which one accepts analogies between individual conduct at the domestic level and state conduct at the global level. I therefore end by emphasizing the need to give more philosophical attention to questions surrounding the use of domestic analogies for normative reflection on global affairs.

Why a world of separate states requires non-ideal theory

Let us start with the methodological implications of the idea of a world state. Following Rawls (1999), I will define a world state as “a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central governments” (1999: 36). I am going to assume that its global monopoly on the legitimate use of organized violence would distinguish a world government so defined from other forms of what has become known as “global governance.” Notwithstanding the dense web of international legal and economic institutions, as long as anarchy persists in the international state system—as long as there is no single global authority able to decisively coerce all actors under its jurisdiction—global integration is at best incomplete. It is not my intention to try to provide an exhaustive case here for why a political vision centered on a world state is morally compelling. Rather, I only wish to point out that a world state has some obvious advantages over a system of separate states, and that the standard disadvantages offered in the literature are either clearly disputable or clearly belong in the realm of non-ideal theory.

Let me begin with three reasons for the moral appeal of a world state. ¹ First, a world state holds important advantages when we assume a liberal perspective—one that starts with the basic equality of individuals and treats inequality as always requiring justification. From a liberal viewpoint, there should (holding everything else constant) be at least a prime facie preference for a world state over a world of separate states, since within a single global political community, individuals are less likely to experience radically unequal life prospects simply due to their place of birth. Individuals’ life prospects are clearly heavily dependent on the quality of the political institutions under which they are born. “Equalizing” political institutions for all individuals—making sure that all live under the same overarching sovereign institutions—is therefore an important way of equalizing individuals’ life chances. Note, moreover, that one does not have to be a committed luck egalitarian to accept at least some of the intuitive appeal of the desire to mitigate inequalities that cannot in any plausible way be ascribed to chosen circumstances. There is therefore at least one obvious liberal concern that a world state, ceteris paribus, can address better than separate states.

Second, at the more applied level, there are multiple global concerns that a world state would clearly manage better than a system of separate states. Separate states seeking to regulate a wide variety of global issues face acute collective action problems, given continued uncertainty about the regulatory policies pursued by other states. There is no reason to believe that these problems will disappear even in an idealized system of separate states. Yet, the existence of one overarching sovereign power—the classic solution to collective action problems—is bound to ameliorate them. A world state will have much less difficulty in toughening various kinds of regulation that currently confront “races to the bottom” across different states—whether with regard to corporate taxes, for example, to labor standards, or to environmental standards. ²

Finally, a world state would have fairly immediate advantages over a system of separate states in significantly reducing military expenditure. Any system of separate states, no matter how idealized, will see these states retaining separate armed forces for the sake of legitimate self-defense. And following much of standard international relations theory, one could imagine conflict arising in any such system without predatory “non-ideal” intent by any state—simply due to misunderstanding by peace-seeking actors. A world state will dramatically reduce such possibilities. In reducing the danger of war, it would also reduce the waste of war and of the constant preparation for it.

With these advantages in mind, I want to briefly consider some of the standard arguments against a world state. I wish to show that these arguments either lie firmly in the realm of non-ideal theory or are clearly disputable.

Consider, for example, the worry that it would be impossible to transition to a world state in morally viable ways. This worry goes back to the canonical texts of political thought, but also appears in contemporary theorizing, driving, for example, Thomas Pogge’s (1992) remark that “a world state—involving, as it does, the annihilation of existing states—would seem reachable only through revolution or in the wake of some global catastrophe” (1992: 63). One immediate response to this worry is that it is unclear why we cannot envision a gradual rather than traumatic transition to a world state. One does not have to agree with Alexander Wendt (2003) that a world state is “inevitable” (2003: 503) in order to agree with his claim that economic, geopolitical, and technological transformations gradually give existing states more and more incentives (and less disincentives) to pool their resources together. A related thought is that, particularly given the historical trend of a decreasing number of political units in the world, we could also imagine a world in which several regional blocs emerge, perhaps in a way not dissimilar to the European Union. ³ If each of these regional blocs eventually becomes a state, it is not impossible that the bloc-states will gradually join together to form a world state.

However, regardless of whether one believes in the possibility of a gradual transition to a world state, what is crucial for our purposes is that the fear of the moral costs of transition must be a non-ideal one. After all, the worry cannot be that existing governments are intrinsically valuable, such as that their dissolution would, in and of itself, undermine values that are of significance to us in ideal theory. Rather, the fear must be much plainer: that a world state could only arise through the violent dissolution of existing governments. The worry is that the pursuit of a world state will lead agents to actions that are clearly morally impermissible, even if done for the sake of moral ideals.

The same point applies to the even more canonical worry about a world state—the Kantian concern, adopted by Rawls (1999: 36) that a world state will necessarily be despotic. We can certainly question why exactly a world government would have to be despotic, but even if one grants, arguendo, that this is a real concern, it is still clearly a non-ideal concern: the worry is that a global sovereign will manifestly fail to comply with very basic moral duties, which can presumably be recognized prior to and independently of any ideal theory.

An argument from secession—that a world state will witness constant efforts at secession by “various regions and peoples” (Rawls, 1999: 36)—might appear more within the realm of ideal theory. Yet in order to feature as an ideal theory consideration, this argument must take a very specific form. This is because, if secession efforts are caused by the antecedent despotism of a world government, we might again say that this is not really an ideal theory problem. From an ideal theory perspective, we should respond not by doing away with the idea of a world government, but simply by designing a more benign world government. Therefore, the argument must begin with secession attempts that are blocked by a world state: the secession effort antecedes oppression by the world state and causes the world state to become despotic, rather than the other way around. It is far from clear that this much narrower concern, however, is decisive.

For one thing, the fact that existing states currently (claim a right to) prevent secession by groups under their jurisdiction is not usually challenged, nor is this fact taken to qualify separate states as despotic. Furthermore, it is not clear why so many separate regions and peoples will be so keen to secede from the world state if we assume the world state is at least minimally just. Finally, related, many regions and national minorities within existing states are content with various forms of cultural, administrative, and economic autonomy that falls short of full independence. We do not think current states cease to exist as states when they grant this autonomy. Analogously, a world state can exist while granting robust autonomy to various peoples and regions. ⁴

Equally weighty problems afflict other ideal theory arguments against a world state. Consider, for example, the concern that a world state will endanger morally valuable pluralism. “Some cultures and most orthodox religions,” Michael Walzer (2004) for instance writes, “can only survive if they are permitted degrees of separation that are incompatible with globalism. And so the survival of these groups would be at risk; under the rules of the global state, they would not be able to sustain and pass on their way of life.” (2004: 172, 176)

It is not clear, however, why cultural pluralism can be sustained within existing states but not within a global state: at what size of territory or population, exactly, should we expect a polity to lose the ability to sustain cultural pluralism? Assuming we cannot identify any such fixed level, why should we assume from the outset that a world state will not be able to sustain desired forms of pluralism?

Another instance of a disputable ideal theory argument against a world state is that such a state will lack the kind of social solidarity necessary to sustain the stability of justice. Humanity as a whole does not feature the “common sympathies” (Rawls, 1999: 23) that (are said to) characterize separate sovereign peoples. In the lack of global civic solidarity, there can be no global “sense of justice” (Pogge, 1994: 219), meaning that while separate just states might be stable, a just and stable world state is impossible. As long as we are philosophizing within the realm of ideal theory, however, there is no reason why we cannot invert the relevant causal relationship. If we believe that it is because of living under just institutions that we develop a sense of justice, and if justice in ideal theory requires a world state, then one cannot cite “sense of justice” reasons to explain why we ought to reject a world state. The fact that we lack a sufficiently robust global sense of justice might just be due to the fact that we do not yet have sufficiently robust global institutions. If we should and did have these institutions, then the desired “sense of justice” might follow, bringing the desired stability with it. ⁵

I would like to suggest, however tentatively, that all other objections to a world state which might be put on the table fall into at least one of the two categories presented here: they are either clearly disputable or clearly non-ideal objections. This can only be a tentative suggestion, because I have not given a comprehensive proof that any possible objection to a world state falls into these categories. Nonetheless, I hope to have made the following thought seem at least plausible: if we have compelling moral reasons to reject a world state, these are non-ideal reasons. If we accept this thought, in turn, we must also be committed to the view that any normative theorizing about a world of separate states is non-ideal theorizing—theorizing which focuses on real-world failures to comply with moral duties. I now want to show that this focus has important implications for how global political theorists should engage social science.

Non-ideal global theory and flawed institutions

Much of the “non-ideal movement” in contemporary political philosophy revolves around the part that social science should play in philosophical inquiry. A key complaint among non-ideal theorists has been that political philosophers must take much more serious account of social-scientific research than they typically do. The claim is that instead of focusing on overly “transcendental” visions of perfect justice, political philosophers should rigorously engage social science when thinking about how to reform actual moral failures (Sen, 2011). Elaborate visions of perfect justice are not necessary to identify these failures as morally disturbing, nor are such visions necessary or sufficient to tell us how to respond to failure. Instead of ideal theory, what political philosophers need is an integration, as David Wiens (2012) for example puts it, of “applied ethics and applied social science” (2012: 53).

Later on, I will say more about the “applied ethics” in this formulation, but in this section I want to focus on the social-science side. Social-scientific work can produce important insights regarding failures of social institutions, failures that often involve moral stakes. I have just argued that normative reflection on a world of separate states must be seen as necessarily non-ideal theory, focusing on moral failure. It should therefore not be surprising that I agree with many non-ideal theorists about the need for more philosophical engagement with social science: I believe that philosophers reflecting on global affairs should pay much more attention to social-scientific research than they often do. However, I also believe that philosophers need to be cognizant of the deep structural limitations of this research in the global context. If global normative theory is truly going to “get real,” then it needs to be more aware of useful social-scientific knowledge, but also aware of what social-scientific knowledge we lack and are extremely unlikely to have. I elaborate each part of this claim in turn. ⁶

Theorizing global reform from a non-consequentialist perspective

Some might think that there is an obvious and familiar alternative to consequentialist arguments for global reform—namely, rights-based arguments. I believe, however, that there are significant question marks surrounding these arguments at several levels, and that these question marks, in turn, lead to fundamental methodological issues which global political theory should explore in much greater detail.

We can start to make our way toward these issues by asking what is the best way to frame rights-based arguments for global reform. It may at first seem tempting to frame such arguments in terms of realization of the rights of the world’s poor and oppressed. But such framing is not a compelling strategy to bypass the obstacles that social-scientific uncertainty poses for global reform, because it merely recreates these obstacles. The aforementioned problems of system justification, collective action, and self-seeking rationalizations of the status quo, for example, all apply to reforms meant to realize the rights of the world’s poor and oppressed. Social-scientific uncertainty yields fears that deviations from the status quo will not better realize the rights of the world’s poor and oppressed. Social-scientific uncertainty can similarly reinforce global collective action problems, by leading each state to emphasize that the sacrifices it is called to make will be ineffective in realizing rights. And the same uncertainty can support self-seeking rationalizations of the status quo, leading powerful actors to argue that their profit-maximizing behavior is in fact conducive to the maximal realization of the rights of the world’s poor and oppressed that is attainable under real-world circumstances.

Now, it may appear that proponents of rights-based arguments for global reform have an easy answer to this problem. The point about global reform, such proponents might say, is not—or at least not directly—the realization of the rights of the world’s poor and oppressed. Rather, the immediate point is simply about each agent stopping to violate the rights of the world’s least fortunate, independently of what other agents do and independently of uncertain consequences for the right-bearers.

This rejoinder can play an important role in justifying global reform in some contexts. Yet it nonetheless encounters two worries. One worry is that of possible consent. The deep uncertainty as to the effects of reform might very well push the victims of rights-violations to prefer the status quo, however flawed, over attempts at reform of the practices that violate their rights. Another, related, worry has to do with potentially excessive rigorism: a rigorist stance, insisting on each agent respecting victims’ rights entirely independently of the consequences for these victims, seems to produce special moral unease when applied to global politics.

It might be useful to illustrate both of these problems through a concrete example. Let us consider then another global reform proposal tied to natural resources: the much-discussed proposal to prohibit corporations based in liberal democracies from purchasing natural resources controlled by dictatorships. A prominent normative argument emphasizes that at least some dictators ought not be recognized as legitimate vendors of natural resources, because they cannot claim valid authorization to sell these resources from their peoples—the real owners of state property. In the lack of such authorization, at least some dictators should be seen as stealing state property from their people. Corporations based in liberal democracies who transact with these dictators should accordingly be seen as trafficking in stolen goods. ¹⁶ Most philosophers who have discussed natural resource trade with dictators have accordingly taken it for granted that this trade ought to be reformed, and that the challenges involved concern institutional design, rather than any normative conundrums. ¹⁷

However, even if one endorses the idea that dictators are violating their peoples’ property rights over natural resources, one has to confront the deep implications of social-scientific uncertainty. Social science can provide no assurance that stopping natural resource trade with dictators will make the peoples living under them better off. ¹⁸ And in the lack of such assurance, the peoples living under dictators might very well prefer that customary trade in their natural resources will continue. Thus for instance, many ordinary Russians might view Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship as a “third world kleptocracy” that is systematically stealing the Russian people’s natural resource wealth (see, for example, Harding, 2012: 21–22). But there is no certainty that disrupting customary ties with Putin’s regime will make ordinary Russians better off. And so ordinary Russians might very well prefer that customary transactions in their natural resources continue. Similarly, consider the claim that by purchasing oil from the Saudi Royal family, and by making such purchases legal, the corporations and governments of liberal democracies are heavily implicated in the Royal Family’s violations of the property rights of the Saudi people. ¹⁹ Social science can provide no guarantee that ordinary Saudis will be better off if the Royal family could no longer sell oil to liberal democracies. And so, even if a growing number of Saudis complain that the Royal family is illicitly treating the vast oil riches that are public property as private “spoils,” ²⁰ ordinary Saudis might nonetheless prefer liberal democracies to continue their customary transactions with the Saudi Royals.

In these and other cases, the peoples whose property rights are being violated by customary trade in natural resources might very well consent to this customary trade persisting. This possibility complicates appeals to victims-related reasons as justifications for reform of customary trade. ²¹ The case of customary trade in natural resources also demonstrates the worry about excessive rigorism. To insist on reforming this trade simply as a matter of inherent right, independently of consequentialist considerations, is bound to strike many as morally lopsided. But I do not think that this is because such a rigorist insistence will employ flawed reasoning. It is hard to reject, even from a very cosmopolitan direction, the idea that sovereign societies have at least certain property rights over state-owned natural resources. It is also hard to reject the claim that these resources belong to the people, rather than to those who exercise de-facto political power, even if one considers “the people” at best a morally arbitrary historical artifact. It is equally hard to reject the conclusion that massive-scale violations of property rights are taking place at least in some dictatorships, legitimized by our elected governments to the profit of our corporations. Yet, the outcome of this progression—a democratic duty to stop trading with a significant number of regimes around the world simply as a matter of inherent right—might nonetheless strike many as too rigid to really warrant political action.

I elaborated on the example of customary trade in natural resources, because I believe it is instructive in showing how a rigorist rights-based approach to global reform can trigger instinctive unease. Some, to be sure, may want to simply brush this unease aside and insist that political philosophy is at its best when it shows how heterodox conclusions follow from orthodox premises. Such hard-liners might say, for example, that even if the demand that democracies boycott the natural resource exports of dozens of regimes might produce a certain discomfort, this does not detract from the force of the demand. This demand remains not a reductio of a rigorist rights-based approach, but simply a QED.

I think this response is not without merit. ²² But there is another response which is also worth entertaining, and which goes deeper. According to this response, insofar as rigorist judgments about international affairs trigger instinctive unease, this should lead us to re-think the domestic analogies on which such judgments often rest. Consider again the example of customary trade with dictators, and how a rigorist stance on such trade might be driven by domestic analogies. We recognize that individuals cannot claim property rights over private resources they have seized through force, and that other individuals will also be violating property rights, if they know that the vendors from whom they are purchasing goods have no valid title to what they are selling. It is tempting to then simply extend the same thought to the international realm: to public property, to de-facto rulers who control public property, and to foreign governments’ regulation of resource transactions with such rulers. ²³ But somewhere along the way, the normative parallel between individuals’ domestic conduct and governments’ international conduct breaks down. If we really want to give an exhaustive response to those suspicious of international rigorism, we need to be able to explain why this parallel does not work.

I do not have the space here to offer anything like a complete explanation. But I do want to note three possibilities which might play a part in such an explanation, and which I believe have important implications for the research agenda of global political theorists. First, if we mistrust rigorist intuitions in the international realm much more than we do in the domestic realm, this might show that the domestic scenarios we employ to ground rigorist judgments are often under-described. In particular, domestic analogies are prone to under-describe international dynamics by “hiding” consequentialist desiderata going against a rigorist stance (when I think about my duty not to buy your property from someone who robbed you, for example, I am unlikely to really have in mind adverse consequences that my observing this duty could produce for you). Hence, at the very least, our intuitive unease about the rigorist upshots of our domestic analogies should push us to deepen these analogies—to construct them in a more subtle way which will better capture the moral complexity that we actually seek to confront. ²⁴

A second potential problem with domestic analogies as grounds for international rigorism is that there might be salient differences between the agents from whom rigorist conduct is expected—that is, between individuals at the domestic level and polities at the international level. In particular, it seems—at least initially—that there is a key difference between individuals and polities in the following sense. Individuals might claim to have non-consequentialist reasons of integrity—reasons stemming from their identity-grounding commitments—to refrain from entangling themselves in rights violations. ²⁵ Yet, such reasons are much less familiar in the case of polities. It is fairly easy to make sense of the thought that a morally conscientious person is endangering his identity-grounding commitments by repeatedly dealing with the mafia, for example, independently of the consequences that such dealings may or may not produce for the mafia’s victims. But much more argumentation is needed in order to show that we can meaningfully speak about a polity as the kind of agent that can have morally important “integrity.” Accordingly, another important task for those who wish to theorize global reform from a non-consequentialist direction might be to grapple with the idea of political integrity—to examine whether it is plausible to ascribe integrity to a polity and to treat this integrity as morally salient. ²⁶

Finally, there is one more possible explanation for why rigorist judgments that appear relatively secure at the domestic level, with regard to individual conduct, seem less secure when we move to examine a polity’s international conduct. Domestic analogies focus on one normative context—that of personal conduct—and derive from it parallel lessons bearing on a polity’s conduct in the international realm. But upon reflection, it seems more plausible to think that questions regarding a polity’s international conduct in fact represent a hybrid of two normative contexts: alongside the realm of individual morality, a polity’s international conduct clearly interacts with questions regarding the design of social institutions—questions that lie in the realm of political justice rather than individual ethics. ²⁷

This observation, in turn, should be particularly important to those who insist that different normative contexts can have different regulative principles. ²⁸ For such theorists, even the most exhaustive defense of non-consequentialist principles at the level of individual morality may not yet establish non-consequentialist principles as a guide to a polity’s international conduct. In fact, even the most comprehensive defense of non-consequentialist principles as guides to domestic public policy may not suffice to establish that such principles are warranted as a basis for a polity’s international conduct: the regulative principles for this conduct may belong to a distinct third category that does not simply replicate neither individual morality nor the design of domestic social institutions. Whether there is indeed such a distinct category and what exactly is its relation to the normative categories of individual morality and domestic justice are perhaps the most challenging methodological questions that a realistic global theory must confront.

Conclusion

We can now take stock of our inquiry and its three stages. In the first stage, I have employed the idea of a world state to suggest that global political theory should indeed “get real” and focus on questions involved in real-world failures to comply with moral duties, rather than on ideal visions of perfect justice that assume full compliance. In the second stage, I emphasized the social-scientific obstacles that those interested in realistic global questions must confront. In the third stage, I tried to show how these obstacles in turn point to under-explored questions concerning the methodology of global political theory.

I suspect that some readers may find this conclusion surprising. Some might think that an emphasis on real-world problems does not square very well with giving continued attention to “remote” methodological issues. Yet I believe that we should resist such thoughts. We should resist the temptation to think that realistic political theorists cannot advance systematic justifications of their normative commitments, including justifications that go deep into foundational issues of the kind indicated above. The pursuit of such justifications seems to me vital if political theorists are going to make a distinctive contribution to thinking about realistic global problems. Indeed, to refuse to engage in such foundational inquires is arguably to reduce global political philosophy into social science. The limitations of global social science suggest that this is not a promising strategy. And philosophers’ social responsibilities mean that this is not a morally satisfactory strategy either.