Global justice,sovereignty,and the problem of perspective

Abstract

This article argues that a state-centered theory of global justice exhibits an epistemic problem of perspective, and that this worry exhibits a gendered character. Within a liberal domestic theory of justice, the public/private distinction has been repeatedly shown to be bad for women because it creates a domain for injustice that becomes invisible to public policy and the law. This article argues that state-centered theories of global justice create an analogous space that is cut off from questions of global justice. The article therefore suggests that this way of framing questions of global justice is problematic, and is problematic for women in particular. Just as the public/private distinction in liberal domestic justice leaves cases of injustice outside the vision of the law, the hard distinction between the domestic (state) sphere and the international realm of justice leaves cases of injustice invisible to international law. For the question of global justice, the privileging of sovereignty and non-intervention compromises the ability of the theory to achieve its purported goal of universal justice.

Keywords

Global justice injustice multiculturalism non-intervention sovereignty

This article examines a problem in the epistemology of global injustice, which I call the problem of perspective for a theory of global justice. I intend to invoke the idea of vantage point, and a familiar claim from feminist epistemology and standpoint theory. The familiar point is this: different questions of justice are available from different vantage points and available within different framings of the issue, and possible answers may be highlighted or excluded from each such framing (Anderson, 1995; Collins, 1998; Jaggar, 1983: 353). In applying this insight to global justice debates, I highlight the way that entire sets of framings of the issues may preclude the goal of “global” justice, and may, indeed, protect and entrench existing global injustices.

I draw on an analogy between familial justice and state justice, and argue that just as there are good reasons to worry about (and reject) taking justice in the family as a separate and prior question to state justice, there are good reasons to worry about interpreting domestic state justice as a settled or prior question to debates about global justice. Moreover, many of these reasons are epistemic: interpreting idealized families or states as the building blocks of justice creates an epistemic barrier to analyzing the values realized through the existence of the family or state. That is, using the family or the state as a building block within a wider theory of justice assumes and implies that the family or state is inherently ‘just’ and therefore effectively makes it difficult to evaluate the actual justice of a particular family or particular state.

I begin by presenting some background and preliminary definitions prior to laying out the problem. Although the literature on global justice frequently invokes questions of distributive justice—and global poverty in particular—I will rely on a broader range of global justice debates inclusive of issues of human rights and their enforcement, justice in international trade, just war, and humanitarian intervention. Of these, the requirement of non-intervention is a paradigmatic example demonstrating the complexity of practical reasoning in global justice: decisions regarding humanitarian intervention require nuanced judgment about whether some wrong has reached or surpassed a threshold level to constitute an “injustice,” and moreover, what type of response is merited by any particular “injustice.” In this sense, I employ a broad definition of “global justice” that extends far beyond issues of distributive justice.

This broad understanding of “global justice” highlights certain epistemic features of practical reason in global justice. In the context of examining the moral permissibility (and, indeed, moral requirement) of humanitarian intervention, our judgments about justice have tangible and morally significant consequences. Many issues in global justice require a judgment of whether a “bad” situation has reached or passed the evaluative threshold of “injustice,” and, if so, what the morally appropriate response is. Yet some talk of “global justice” implies that these are ideal theory debates, with few if any consequences in our non-ideal world: to the extent that we fall short of the ideal of “justice,” so much the worse for us. Defining “global justice” as including humanitarian intervention reminds us that the line separating justice from injustice is tangible, and can represent “manifest failure” on the part of the state or global community of states (UN, 2014). There is something interesting about epistemic barriers for particular forms of situated reasoning, and this article examines some of these that arise in international relations.

Compounding the concern that the epistemic resources available within a theory of global justice are deficient, this article goes on to argue that a statist theory of global justice has a particular blind spot for harms to women and otherwise marginalized groups.¹ If statism is bad at identifying injustice from an outsider perspective, I will argue that it is worse at identifying internal marginalization from an outsider perspective. Within a liberal domestic theory of justice, the public/private distinction has been repeatedly shown to be bad for women and marginalized groups because it enforces a domain for injustice that becomes invisible to public policy and the law. I argue that state-centered theories of global justice, especially those that draw on a robust account of sovereignty, create an analogous space that is cut off from questions of global justice, and for this reason, I suggest that this way of framing questions of global justice is problematic, and is bad for women, children, and marginalized minorities in particular.

I will argue that just as the public/private distinction in liberal domestic justice leaves real cases of injustice outside the jurisdiction (and epistemic vision) of the law, the hard distinction between the domestic (state) sphere of justice and the international realm of justice leaves real cases of injustice invisible to international law. In both cases, the domestic and private sphere is deemed invisible from a legal and political perspective: in one case in order to protect the autonomous choices of the individual, and in the other case in order to protect the sovereignty of the state. And in both cases, the net effect is to leave a significant space for injustice. In the domestic case, any privileging of the family as an ideal is in tension with individual equality and the liberal definition of justice. Within the realm of global justice, the privileging of sovereignty and non-intervention compromise the ability of the theory to achieve universal justice because it creates epistemic space for injustice to hide.

The first section defines and describes two rival liberal methodologies within the global justice debate. These, I refer to as “statist” and “cosmopolitan” liberal theories of global justice. The next section offers a brief examination of feminist concerns about liberal domestic accounts of justice. Two features of liberalism in particular give rise to epistemic blind spots. First, is the public/private distinction, frequently highlighted by feminist critics of liberalism. The second is an atomistic definition of individual choice, implicit in liberal prioritization of “autonomy” and free choice, which elides certain types of personal choices. This feature has also been widely criticized. From an outsider’s perspective, these features make the internal justice of any particular family, group or association difficult to judge. Next, I will draw out the structural similarities between hidden domestic injustices and hidden global injustices. The parallel is most pronounced on a statist framing of liberal global justice, but nonetheless remains present on a liberal cosmopolitan account. I will argue that these liberal framings of global justice inherit several problematic features from their domestic progenitors. From the perspective of a just liberal state, the internal justice of any other state is difficult if not impossible to judge. Finally, I will explicate the epistemic lessons that can be drawn from a comparison between the two cases, focusing on how I conclude that liberal statism’s prioritization of self-determination and toleration make the problem particularly acute, while cosmopolitanism faces its own dilemma of dual perspectives. Each liberal theory requires judgments of justice, but differs with respect to the epistemic resources available for making these judgments, and each is ultimately burdened with epistemic barriers that make identification of injustice, and determination of the form of injustice, difficult.

Liberal theories of global justice

Liberal theories of global justice fall generally into one of two broad methodological approaches, or so I argue. These are the approaches that I will call “statism” and “cosmopolitanism.”² Both share common roots as liberal theories privileging the values of liberty, equality, and autonomy. Furthermore, both take liberal domestic justice as broadly settled, and examine questions of global justice while holding domestic justice as fixed. They nonetheless disagree on several counts—notably, on the scope of distributive justice, on the permissibility of humanitarian intervention, and on the appropriate scope of human rights content. For my purposes, however, the primary distinction is analytic and methodological, and is to be found in their respective definitions of the perspective and entity on behalf of which questions of global justice are to be decided.³

For statists, such as Rawls, Miller, Sangiovanni, and Nagel, questions of global justice are to be decided as the questions of foreign policy for a liberal state (Blake, 2001; Miller, 2007; Nagel, 2005; Rawls, 2000; Sangiovanni, 2008).⁴ These theorists view liberal domestic justice as a settled question such that variations between definitions of justice qualify as reasonable disagreement and therefore fall under the purview of self-determination. As a result, the state has priority in analysis of questions of global justice, and questions of justice fall into either the category of “domestic justice” or “global justice.” Questions of “global justice” are to be decided separately from questions of “domestic justice,” and the definitions of “justice” vary between these contexts. The state has analytic priority for the theories that I group together under the heading of “statism,” such that the idea of a state plays a significant role in analysis of questions of justice.

For cosmopolitans, such as Beitz, Pogge, Tan, and Caney, there is only one definition of “justice.” Liberal questions of global justice, like liberal questions of justice generally, ought to be decided on the basis of individual interests or individual preference satisfaction (Beitz, 1975, 1999, 2000; Caney, 2005, 2006; Pogge, 1992, 2002; Tan, 2004, 2005). The individual therefore has analytic priority for these theories, and questions of global justice ought to foreground the interests of individuals irrespective of the status afforded to states and other interests in association.

The Rawlsian and statist methodology defines domestic justice as fundamental and prior to questions of global justice. “Justice” is always limited in scope, and changes depending on referent. My contention is that an epistemic barrier arises on these theories in virtue of the analytic priority, because the analytic priority entails a situated domestic perspective for evaluating the justice of any other state, institution, or regime. In this respect, it shares some epistemic virtues and vices with realism in international relations: a “just” national interest, suitably defined, will inevitably remain a consideration within the framework of a liberal statist decision-making process. As a result, the situated perspective from which deliberations take place is neither an empty nor an inherently unbiased perspective, but might yet carry some deliberative baggage. Note, however, that many types of legitimacy questions must be decided from this situated and potentially biased vantage point, which is necessarily external to the state whose justice or legitimacy is in question. Questions ranging from legitimate trading partners and legitimate objects of public criticism to legitimate targets of humanitarian war must be decided from this perspective (Buchanan, 2013; Tan, 2005; Tesón, 1998). Tesón (2006) relies on liberal premises to argue that governments have (1) obligations to respect human rights at home and abroad, (2) prima facie obligations to rescue victims of tyranny when such rescue can be accomplished for a reasonable and proportionate cost, and that these obligations entail (3) permissibility of rescuing victims of tyranny.⁵ Yet, in application, the decision about whether – and if so how – to intervene in Syria has been explicitly made from an Anglo-American liberal democratic perspective or from a Russian perspective, but not from a putatively “neutral” U.N. perspective. Tesón (2006) relies on liberal premises to argue that governments have (1) obligations to respect human rights at home and abroad, (2) prima facie obligations to rescue victims of tyranny when such rescue can be accomplished for a reasonable and proportionate cost, and that these obligations entail (3) permissibility of rescuing victims of tyranny.⁵

The cosmopolitan account, in contrast, prioritizes a universal definition of justice, and therefore relies on a global or universal perspective to evaluate the internal justice of any state. Cosmopolitans rely on the individual as the fundamental unit of analysis for any question of global justice. Hence, cosmopolitanism can analytically prioritize either an external, objective, “view from nowhere” perspective, or an aggregation of individual, situated perspectives. These perspectives offer their own epistemic challenges. The external, objective, “view from nowhere” perspective has both the virtue (in terms of bias) and the vice (for ease of deliberation) of being unsituated and extremely abstract. Indeed, it may offer little to no substance for deliberation, while being unburdened by much of the bias that follows from interconnected and situated perspectives. An aggregation of individual, situated perspectives suffers from problems of incommensurability and aggregation, in addition to the burdens of intercultural epistemic barriers.⁶

I will argue that cosmopolitanism’s dual vantage point offers better epistemic resources from which to determine the form that injustice takes, but that statism offers a clearer account of the responses and solutions available. Each of the three epistemic perspectives—the situated state perspective offered by statism, the cosmopolitan situated individual, and the cosmopolitan universal view-from-nowhere—gives rise to its own set of advantages and challenges, and these will be explored in what follows. Ultimately, I argue that the statist account is at a disadvantage in this calculation given that it does not have access to a second perspective to counter-balance the biases of its first.

Feminist critiques and liberal domestic justice

Liberalism values the equal dignity of persons, and part of this dignity stems from free, autonomous agency (Nussbaum, 1997; Patten, 2012). This feature is shared by liberal multiculturalism, liberal feminism, liberal statism, and liberal cosmopolitanism (Robinson, 2010). While liberalism has been criticized for its reliance on an overly and problematically individualist conception of reason or agency (Khader, 2018; Khader, 2011; Pateman, 1988; Robinson, 2010; Taylor, 1985), various liberal theorists have attempted to respond to these objections,⁷ by proposing a more nuanced liberalism that understands free individuals as embedded in relationships, that makes space for personal development, and that better accounts for the complex interconnectedness of persons (see, for example, Kymlicka, 1995; Nussbaum, 1997; Okin, 1987, 2005a).

This critique of liberalism draws to some extent on the application of feminist epistemology of science to the arena of politics. Science is not, and has never been, “objective” in the sense of not relying on any value assumptions. Feminist epistemology of science reminds us that “values embedded in background assumptions help determine what counts as evidence and an explanation, how the evidence should be represented, and what direction the evidence points to” (Anderson, 1995: 29). The apparent neutrality of science, then, belies its value-laden background assumptions. Liberalism has sometimes relied on a similar appearance of “neutrality,” and has often been criticized for it (see Patten, 2012). The background assumptions of liberalism are therefore epistemically problematic in that they determine which features will count as evidence or explanation, and which conclusions can be drawn from any given collection of evidence.⁸

Feminist critiques of liberalism point to ways in which the same practices that demonstrate equal respect for dignity and worth of persons might embed epistemic problems within liberalism: what counts as evidence and explanation for problems within the state, and which solutions are available may be embedded within the “neutral” assumptions of liberalism (Jaggar, 1983: 355–356). Differences in respect for human dignity, or inequality of agency may not be equally visible from each and every perspective. This problem arises with liberal assumptions themselves rather than necessarily arising with minority accommodation (Jaggar, 1983; Young, 1990: 48). There are several important lessons that can be drawn from feminist critiques of liberalism. In particular, I will highlight the ways that the feminist critique problematizes both the public/private distinction and the liberal understanding of free choice.

First, the public/private distinction has been widely criticized for its potentially detrimental effect on the status of women, and this detrimental effect is not mitigated by the fact that it may occur in a context that aims for equality (Collins, 1998; Pateman, 1988). Liberal theory and practice often imply a distinction between the public sphere and the private sphere, such that the public sphere encompasses political and economic life, and these are protected by a constitution or constitutional practice (Okin, 2005a: 239). The private sphere includes family life, religious practice, and issues of love and care (Collins, 1998; Robinson, 2010). The legal system applies to and bridges these two spheres, but in many respects remains better grounded in the public sphere alone.⁹ The familiar feminist critique of liberalism points out that the gendered division of labor has tended to fall along these lines, often leaving women with the greater proportion of the responsibility for unpaid reproductive and domestic labor, and thereby effectively excluding women from the public sphere while freeing men’s time to pursue paid labor in the public labor market.¹⁰ In addition to the possibility that the public/private distinction may hide injustice along gendered lines, it may also obscure injustices along other vectors. In particular, injustices within the family can amplify marginalizations within wider society, such as those associated with age, racialization, or disability¹¹ (Collins, 1998: 65; Okin, 1998). To the extent that liberalism views the family as a building block for a just society, differences within families (including inequalities, hierarchies, and power imbalances) are built in to the liberal structure at the outset.

Among the epistemic assumptions of liberalism, and layered on top of these problems with the public/private distinction, is the issue of free choice. Individuals are assumed to be capable of making free choices, and to exercise this choice both in the public and the private spheres. Feminist criticism has emphasized that decisions in the public sphere are the subject of justice, but decisions within the private sphere are not (Collins, 1998: 63; Okin, 1987, 2005a: 239, 241; Rawls, 2000: 160). The public sphere is governed by collective agreement moderated by an ideal of collective good. The private sphere is governed by the ideal of individual pursuit of the good life, and by autonomous choice.¹² The private sphere is deemed to be the realm of private decisions and personal preference, and is therefore protected regardless of the extent to which it is actually the result of choice, and irrespective of the extent to which such choices are fair or equitable. The private sphere is protected from state interference by such liberal ideals as freedom of choice, freedom of thought and freedom of conscience. As a result, choice of a marriage partner, most of the choices regarding child rearing, and questions of religious affiliation remain unregulated as though they were necessarily and inherently the product of un-coerced and free decision-making. Of course, we know that they often are not, and moreover that decision-making within the family is often structured by relationships of love and care that would be problematically and reductively explained in individual autonomy terms (Baker, 2001; Collins, 1998; Khader, 2011; Khader, 2018).

Okin’s liberal objection to multiculturalism is just one of many examples of the ramifications of the public/private distinction. The many problems with this distinction can be found in the paradigms of gender roles in many societies, Western and non-Western, minority and majority (Okin, 1998). Given the gendered dimensions of the private sphere, state non-interference in domestic affairs on the basis that they are the product of individual choice makes it extremely difficult for the state to identify domestic violence and other forms of oppression within the home as illiberal, illegitimate, or unjust (Okin, 2005a: 239). First, the state turns its blinders on and agrees not to peer into the internal workings of the domestic sphere on the basis that it is the product of free choice. But even on the most charitable reading of free choice, care ethics has taught liberalism to remember that individuals often prioritize the preferences of those they love, and thereby complicate the assumption of free, atomistic, individual preference (Okin, 2005a: 239; Robinson, 2006).

In this context, to the extent that the state agrees to regulate the internal workings of the family or the private sphere, as an outsider, the state is left in a poor epistemic position from which to judge the relationship between an individual’s preferences and her choices, and hence the internal justice of the family or the private sphere. Hierarchies within the family are naturalized, made less visible, and thereby entrenched by liberalism’s idealization of the family¹³ (Collins, 1998: 65; Okin, 2005a: 239). As a result, hierarchies can remain hidden through deference to personal choice or self-determination. Perceived harm within the family might turn out to be the product of individual choice, or individual choice within the family might be another illusion that follows from the atomistic and individualistic assumptions of liberalism. Once we examine the ways in which choice can be perceived to be free at the same time as it is limited by oppressive contexts, the state faces a dilemma regarding the extent to which it ought to limit free choice in order to prevent real harm.

Now, liberal states have improved in this regard in the last few decades. Marital rape has been recognized as a crime in many Western liberal democracies where it was not previously, and criminalization and prosecution of domestic violence have become more common and more effective than they once were (Nussbaum, 1997). The state regularly reaches through the epistemic barrier of the illusion of the happy family in order to protect abused children, and to punish those who would use religious and cultural protections in order to hide crimes committed against individuals. In these and other ways, liberalism has overcome its aversion to regulating the domestic and private sphere, and moreover has taken small steps toward overcoming its assumption that the internal workings of the family are necessarily the product of free choice. But these steps remain relatively small, and the liberal state still has a long way to go if it is to overcome the epistemic barrier of the assumption of free, fair, and just internal workings of the family.

The problem remains that liberal theory creates a tension with its own provisions for freedom of conscience and freedom of religion when it interferes in domestic affairs. Liberal protections of the private sphere on the basis that it is the product of personal choice are at odds with liberal protections of freedom and equality and the very idea of choice, and prosecution of domestic violence is an excellent example of where the tension arises. Although liberalism aims at individual liberty and individual freedom, it has also come to recognize that individuals can be coerced by the people they love, and that the complex web of human interrelations has an effect on the context of choice. This internal tension in liberalism generally, and liberal multiculturalism in particular, has been made abundantly clear by feminist critics such as Pateman, and Jaggar. In this sense, we can see how the public/private distinction, while putatively protecting individual choice in a liberal state, can also hide limitations on free choice and other real harms to individuals, especially in the private sphere (Collins, 1998: 67; Pateman, 1988; Robinson, 2010: 135).

Liberal statism and hidden global injustice

Moving on from familiar epistemic elements of the feminist objection to liberalism, I turn to an analogous objection in international affairs. According to statist accounts of global justice, states are valuable associations that further the interests of their members, and “justice” is an institutional virtue defined by success in this regard (Nagel, 2005: 120, 140; Sangiovanni, 2008). According to these accounts, in the absence of state sovereignty or non-interference, the state and the individuals that make up the state cannot adequately support democracy, civil liberties, equality of opportunity, and social justice generally. In other words, justice requires sovereignty or non-interference. For the most part, liberal statists note that no global state exists, hence the space available for justice is finitely defined by the borders of just states. In any case, if there were a global “justice,” it would require a different definition of justice. Liberal justice and global justice are at least conceptually distinct.

Liberal statism is once again contrasted with the cosmopolitan account that holds individuals to be the primary analytic unit of global justice (Pogge, 1992, 2002). Recall that a key distinction is in the value afforded to the state and to sovereignty: a cosmopolitan can argue that a state is instrumentally valuable to the pursuit of individual interests and rights. The state cannot be necessary for justice, nor can sovereignty and non-intervention be anything more than pragmatic principles. Justice, on this view, is defined in human and individual rights terms, and so the state can only be just if it furthers these individual interests.

Note that for both statists and cosmopolitans, the definition of a just state remains the same. The difference is in the necessity of the state to the pursuit of “justice.” For cosmopolitans, justice (merely) requires equality of individuals. Accordingly, institutions including states are only just to the extent that they help realize equality. A global state or individual states might be instrumentally justified in the pursuit of global justice, but in either case, global justice will be defined by the freedoms and capacities of individuals globally. Finally, notice that according to liberal cosmopolitanism, justice is universal. A cosmopolitan justice has a global range that includes all people, regardless of the internal makeup of the state they happen to find themselves in. This can contrast with statism, which implies that justice merely ranges over just states, and hence does not necessarily range over all states.

The concern I want to highlight in this article is that the way the statist creates a space for justice can also result in the creation of a space for injustice. Positing statehood and internal sovereignty as necessary to the pursuit of justice gives internally unjust states an advantage. The analogy I draw with feminist epistemic arguments is meant to suggest that privileging the state as an ideal is dangerous in precisely the way that privileging the family as an ideal is. In both cases, the paradigm motivating the ideal is the result of free and fair choices (self-determination) by individuals, and protecting these free and fair choices from external interference creates a social value that would not be attainable otherwise. Yet, in both cases, the internal structure of the institution has the potential to be hierarchical, unequal, and therefore unjust in liberal terms (Collins, 1998). Worse still, an external perspective is unlikely to reveal the extent of violence, marginalization, or other internal forms of injustice, and moreover might err on the side of bias or imperialism in its judgments. Therein lies the problem: privileging and idealizing the sovereign state on a theoretical level has epistemic implications. To the extent that state sovereignty is taken to be a precondition of justice, the actual internal justice of the state becomes more difficult to judge, but judgment-making remains an imperative.

The family can easily put on a public face of equality and harmony while concealing domestic inequality or internal violence; similarly, a state may put on a public diplomatic face of justice while persecuting its citizens (Collins, 1998: 64; Nussbaum, 2001: 64–65; Tan, 2005). Yet both are protected by liberal policies of non-intervention: the state is expected not to interfere with the family’s internal makeup, and global institutions are expected not to interfere with the sovereign state’s internal makeup (Collins, 1998: 68, Nagel, 2005: 134; Tan, 2005). In both cases, the justification for non-intervention assumes that the internal makeup of the family or state is already the product of a set of free and fair individual choices. This policy of toleration regardless of internal makeup is explained in part with reference to the value of association, and is furthermore how liberal statists have typically proceeded in their dealings with unjust states. But the analogy with the family is revealing. The practice of non-interference in the internal affairs of the family has had a legacy of making domestic violence and child abuse invisible (Collins, 1998: 66). And non-interference in the internal affairs of unjust states has protected genocides and disappearances among a multitude of human rights violations and harms to individual freedom.

To return to the liberal options for international justice, neither liberal statism nor liberal cosmopolitanism aims to tolerate injustice. Both statists and cosmopolitans can theoretically differentiate just from unjust states, and both share a definition of just states relying on liberal terms. For both theories, a just state is defined as one that supports and pursues the interests of its members. Hence, for both statists and cosmopolitans, an unjust state will be one that thwarts its members’ interests. But since many statists examine the realm of global justice as a society of states, they have limited epistemic resources with which to examine the internal justice of a foreign state.¹⁴

Recall that Rawls takes toleration to be a fundamental component of global justice. Rawls (2000: 61) argues, “it is surely, ceteris paribus, a good for individuals and associations to be attached to their particular culture and to take part in its common public and civic life.” Toleration requires a high level of respect for the forms of association with a common public and civic life. Indeed, he argues,

It is … part of a people’s being reasonable and rational that they are ready to offer to other peoples fair terms of political and social cooperation […] The criterion of reciprocity applies to the Law of Peoples in the same way it does to the principles of justice for a constitutional regime. This reasonable sense of due respect, willingly accorded to other reasonable peoples, is an essential element of the idea of peoples who are satisfied with the status quo for the right reasons. (Rawls, 2000: 35)

For Rawls, provided that a society’s basic institutions satisfy the criteria for decency, fairness dictates that they should be accorded respect. And the point from a statist perspective like Rawls’s is that “liberal” and “just” are not identical. It is unfair to the members of a potential state association to deny that any non-liberal forms of association could ever meet the requirements of justice, especially given that according to the statist view non-association can never qualify as just (Nagel, 2005: 120; Rawls, 2000: 60–62).

The problem that I am attempting to highlight, however, is a different one: even if there are non-liberal but nonetheless just states, the liberal statist has an epistemic disadvantage. From any given liberally just state’s perspective on global justice, judgments about the internal justice of any other state are difficult if not impossible to achieve. Yet these judgments are constantly required in order to understand, and moreover implement, a liberal form of global justice.

So while both cosmopolitan and statist accounts object to internally unjust states, the statist model is saddled with an additional problem of perspective that is analogous to the feminist objection to liberal privileging of the ideal of the family. The concern arises at the level of the epistemic, but the epistemic problem leaves the theory unable to affect needed change. The statist believes in toleration of states because of the possibility that they could be internally just. But through a default policy of non-interference, the liberal statist makes it incredibly difficult to identify whether a given state actually meets the requirements of internal justice, and hence leaves states in a position where they must err on the side of toleration of the intolerable.

A significant complication, and one inspired by Okins’ and Collins’ respective discussions of oppression within the family,¹⁵ is the potential for blind tolerance of variations in self-determination to exhibit both gendered and racialized patterns. More generally, the worry is that anyone already marginalized along one or more identity vector or marker within a society will be more significantly affected by a policy of blind toleration. These are social groups for whom the status quo is often predictably worse than reform. For both the liberal domestic case and the statist form of global justice, the injustice hidden by an insider/outsider bifurcation is intersectional and more likely to affect women, children, the disabled, and other marginalized groups. For reasons pointed out by Okin (1998, 2005b), the unequal status of women and children is often seen as particularly central to maintaining what is important or valuable within a culture. That is, women and the domestic sphere are often painted as the locus of culture, and culture is often interpreted in a conservative and static manner by those whose power is safeguarded by conservatism. As such, the liberalization and equality of women is seen as a particular affront to culture, in a way that the liberalization of men and boys is not.¹⁶ In the same way, I would suggest that global equality of women under a cosmopolitan framing can be perceived as an affront to the value and diversity of culture. Yet, from an oppressed woman’s perspective, the value and diversity of culture might be required to cede priority to women’s individual rights.¹⁷

My suggestion, in drawing the analogy, is that women’s marginalization is particularly likely to be hidden by both liberal protections of the family and liberal statism. The idea of toleration and accommodation of difference is leveraged in both cases, and I am arguing here that it is leveraged to similar effect. Within the statist account of global justice, this privileging of state sovereignty is particularly bad for marginalized groups including women, just as the public/private distinction is particularly bad for women because significant yet predictable harms to women occur within the private sphere.

A cosmopolitan epistemology of injustice

Lest liberal cosmopolitanism be seen to avoid this objection, liberal cosmopolitanism also faces a worry that it is at best unclear about its perspective on questions of global justice. Cosmopolitanism’s universalism and emphasis on individual human rights seems at times to require that questions of justice be settled from the perspective of a universal ‘view from nowhere’, and at other times to require individual perspectives, perhaps defined through democratic practices, to take precedence. I will examine the epistemic virtues of these two perspectives in turn.

Injustice defined in liberal human rights terms seems to rely fundamentally on an individual perspective. But justice is not an individual virtue. Rather, justice is a virtue of collectives and associations, so a determination of justice cannot be made directly on the basis of an individual perspective. Some form of aggregation or systematic analysis is required in order for individual experiences to amount to knowledge of injustice. The individual situated perspective on injustice therefore faces three problems. First, individual experiences of injustice face the problem of incommensurability. A holistic evaluation of injustice will require similar wrongs to be counted similarly, with the worst transgressions counting with the greatest gravity. But how are rape and torture to be compared? Is the systematic persecution of a very small minority group worse than random transgressions against an equally powerless but more numerous group? The incommensurability of human rights violations will amount to a problem for determining whether injustice within a particular state has passed a threshold that makes intervention permissible, or whether the state retains enough legitimacy to preserve sovereignty and rights to non-intervention.

The injustices with which global justice is concerned include such transgressions as genocide, summary justice, and systematic suppression of free speech. In order to count as “injustice” in the sense relied upon by theorists of global justice, these transgressions must be systematic. The second problem, then, is that the individual victim of a human rights violation may be in a very weak position from which to view the systematic nature of these transgressions. To the extent that individual testimony is sufficient to demonstrate serious human rights transgressions against the individual, it may not be sufficient to demonstrate or even testify to full-blown “injustice.” Rather, it may appear from the individual perspective to merely qualify as an immoral act, rather than a full-blown “injustice.”¹⁸

Finally, the individual perspective faces many of the same intercultural communications barriers as statism. Once injustice is discovered from an individual perspective, and appropriately aggregated to demonstrate its systematic nature, the advocate of global justice must additionally overcome a linguistic and cultural epistemic barrier in her attempts to demonstrate that this transgression qualifies as an instantiation of the universal “injustice.” So, the specificity of the individual perspective makes the systematic nature of injustice difficult to perceive, while also making it difficult to communicate even where it can be made visible.

The virtue of the individual perspective is, of course, that the individual by definition understands the value, or disvalue, of the practice in question to its participants. But here a different aggregation problem arises: who speaks on behalf of a practice? If there is disagreement over the value of a practice within a culture, cultural elites have often spoken on behalf of a practice, and these have typically defended conservative interpretations of practices that define them as elite. Hence, dissenting voices offer an important perspective on practices that they feel are unjust. But are all dissenting views to be taken at par? How much dissent is required to define a practice as unjust?

The alternative perspective available to the cosmopolitan is a “universal” perspective, sometimes objected to by labeling it a “view from nowhere.” One problem with this perspective on injustice is its abstract impersonal nature, while a second problem is its outsider perspective on cultural matters. It remains difficult from the universal outsider perspective to understand the value of a practice to its participants, which is why statism errs on the side of toleration of the intolerable when faced with a similar dilemma.

If a universal perspective is required, then it may face the same epistemic barriers as the outsider perspective of statism. Or, inasmuch as cosmopolitanism relies on situated individual perspectives, it overcomes one epistemic barrier only to face an objection arising from incommensurability. So, although my focus in this article has been on an epistemic burden faced by statist accounts of global justice, the question of perspective for global justice will be a complex one even if we reject statist accounts. The solution for the cosmopolitan theorist seems to be mediation between individual situated perspectives and universal aggregations. And this does indeed seem to amount to a small advantage of cosmopolitan epistemology over statist epistemology.

Conclusion

Within a liberal domestic theory of justice, the public/private distinction has been repeatedly shown to be bad for women because it creates a domain for injustice that becomes invisible to public policy and the law. I have argued that state-centered theories of global justice, especially those that draw on a robust account of sovereignty, create an analogous space that is cut off from questions of global justice.

Statist and cosmopolitan theories of global justice agree on many important points regarding the practical implications of their respective theories. After all, they share a starting point in liberal domestic theory. They agree that humanitarian military intervention may occasionally be a permissible response to state perpetrated injustice, and that lesser injustices may warrant lesser violations of sovereignty. Statists and cosmopolitans furthermore agree that non-intervention and non-interference in global contexts is a privilege and not a right. Non-intervention is practiced on the condition that the state remains internally legitimate, or, ideally, should the state be found fully just. The practical implications of both formulations of liberal global justice are therefore heavily reliant on practical judgments about the justice or injustice of a practice, of a government, of a regime, or of a state in its entirety. In this qualified sense, they therefore face the same epistemic problem: how to make the determination of justice or injustice, and furthermore how to calculate the relative extent of injustice or illegitimacy.

Liberal statists and cosmopolitans, in virtue of their liberal assumptions, ultimately agree that the account of justice on which these judgments rest should be defined in individual or human rights terms. A “just” state will be one that protects and enforces human rights suitably defined within its borders, and furthermore promotes human rights generally; an unjust or fully illegitimate state’s failure will be definable in human rights terms, and it will therefore lose its claim of non-interference.¹⁹ Humanitarian intervention or humanitarian interference may thereafter become permissible, but the question only arises if and because the state has been recognized as unjust and illegitimate (Tan, 2005; Tesón, 1998: 57). Moral examination and judgment is the first stage in the process of taking moral responsibility for justice and injustice. The “unjust” and “illegitimate” state will require further scrutiny and further judgment to determine whether intervention is required, feasible, or even permissible. Yet each liberal theory differs with respect to the epistemic resources available for making such judgments, and each is burdened with epistemic barriers that make identification of injustice, and determination of the form of injustice, difficult.

Just as the public/private distinction in liberal domestic justice leaves real cases of injustice outside the jurisdiction (and vision) of the law, the hard distinction between the domestic (state) sphere and the international realm of justice leaves real cases of injustice invisible to international law.²⁰ In both cases, the domestic and private sphere is deemed invisible from a legal and political perspective, in both cases in order to protect the autonomous choices of the individual, and in the statist case in order to protect the collective self-determination or sovereignty of the state. And in both cases, the net effect is to leave a significant space for injustice to remain hidden, and therefore to persist. Within the state, this privileging of sovereignty is particularly bad for marginalized groups including women, just as the public/private distinction is particularly bad for women because women are more likely to be marginalized within the family. The privileging of sovereignty and non-intervention thus compromises the ability of statist theories to fully achieve the egalitarian aims of global justice. For these reasons, this article concludes that statist accounts of global justice have a serious epistemic weakness.

Cosmopolitans, on the other hand, may inherit a level of indeterminacy from their dual reliance on a view from nowhere and an aggregated individual perspective, but they are therefore better positioned in their ability to mediate between insider and outsider perspectives. Statists, and cosmopolitans when they rely on a universal perspective, are explicitly tied to an outsider perspective, and this gives rise to the epistemic problem that has been the focus of this paper.

While both liberal statist and liberal cosmopolitan accounts of global justice may have difficulty making the determination of whether a particular state is just and hence entitled to the privilege of non-intervention, statist accounts in particular are burdened with a specific and explicit perspective from which to make such decisions. Cosmopolitans on the other hand, are burdened with a choice of epistemically weak perspectives from which to make the same determination. The worry, then, is that statism and cosmopolitanism in their universal guises will both be vulnerable to errors that arise in virtue of an explicit outsider perspective. Statism will have the advantage that it offers an explicit national interest, hence that its perspective includes normative context related to the judgment of injustice, but this advantage will be undermined by its difficulty in making international, inter-cultural determinations of what constitutes injustice. And cosmopolitanism in its situated individual perspective will lose any perspectival advantage through the requirement of aggregation. Both liberal statist and liberal cosmopolitan theories explicitly require states to make frequent practical judgments about whether a foreign state is legitimate, and, hence, whether worthy of trade, aid, or non-interference.

And it is this practical judgment requirement that entails that any epistemic barriers to judgments of injustice—and I have argued that these arise for both types of liberal theory—will undermine both the feasibility and the justifiability of human rights enforcement. Feasibility will be undermined for both statists and cosmopolitans because it may become impossible to determine when a particular state or set of institutions has crossed a threshold into unjust practices. And the justifiability of human rights enforcement will be undermined because of a persistent worry that the wrong reasons are ultimately holding too much weight, as I have argued elsewhere (Szende, 2012). For cosmopolitans, the appropriate epistemic perspective from which to determine the justice or injustice of a state may be one of two equally abstract perspectives: either a “view from nowhere” or an aggregation of situated individual perspectives. And statists may, indeed, have to adopt this cosmopolitan insight in order to overcome their epistemic barrier. The worry ultimately remains that liberal theories of global justice require judgments of justice and injustice, but remain saddled with epistemic barriers that prevent them from making these judgments.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article benefited tremendously from thoughtful and insightful feedback or commentaries from Barrett Emerick, Christine Koggel, Jan Narveson, Cindy Holder, Danielle Wenner, Margaret Moore, Will Kymlicka and two anonymous referees for the journal. Previous incarnations of this article were presented at the American Philosophical Association, the Canadian Philosophical Association, CSWIP, CS-IVR, ROME conference, and the University of Guelph.

Notes

ORCID iD

Jennifer Szende

Author biography

Jennifer Szende is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University, where she works on social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, environmental philosophy, and human rights. She completed her PhD at Queen’s University, Canada, in political philosophy focusing on human rights and justice in international relations. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Center de Recherche en Éthique at l’Université de Montréal, and at the University of Guelph, Canada. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Global Ethics, the Encyclopedia of Global Justice edited by Deen Chatterjee, and the volume Just Food: Philosophy, Justice and Food edited by J. M. Dieterle. Her current project brings the insights of feminist theory and relational autonomy to bear on questions in environmental political theory and international relations.

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