Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mathias Risse is professor of philosophy and public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

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"Risse's new book is ambitious in scope and diverse in intellectual resources. In his explorations of the leading questions of international justice, he is admirably sensitive to the wide range of grounds--including common humanity and natural, social, and political relationships--that ought to shape the answers. His account of common ownership of the earth diversifies our historical resources as well, by putting Grotius's work to use in addressing deep, current controversies."--Richard Miller, Cornell University

"This book takes the global justice debate to the next level and sets a new standard for philosophical depth, practical relevance, and sweep of vision. Unrivaled in its scope, sophistication, and scholarship, this tremendous achievement marks a turning point in political theory."--Leif Wenar, King's College London

"This broad, comprehensive, and challenging book on global justice combines a critical survey of the recent literature with a new and provocative view that the author calls pluralist internationalism. There is no other recent work on global justice of comparable philosophical ambition or scholarly breadth."--Charles Beitz, Princeton University

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"Risse's new book is ambitious in scope and diverse in intellectual resources. In his explorations of the leading questions of international justice, he is admirably sensitive to the wide range of grounds--including common humanity and natural, social, and political relationships--that ought to shape the answers. His account of common ownership of the earth diversifies our historical resources as well, by putting Grotius's work to use in addressing deep, current controversies."--Richard Miller, Cornell University

"This book takes the global justice debate to the next level and sets a new standard for philosophical depth, practical relevance, and sweep of vision. Unrivaled in its scope, sophistication, and scholarship, this tremendous achievement marks a turning point in political theory."--Leif Wenar, King's College London

"This broad, comprehensive, and challenging book on global justice combines a critical survey of the recent literature with a new and provocative view that the author calls pluralist internationalism. There is no other recent work on global justice of comparable philosophical ambition or scholarly breadth."--Charles Beitz, Princeton University

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On Global Justice

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface..........................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments..................................................................................................................xiiiChapter 1: The Grounds of Justice................................................................................................1Chapter 2: "Un Pouvoir Ordinaire": Shared Membership in a State as a Ground of Justice...........................................23Chapter 3: Internationalism versus Statism and Globalism: Contemporary Debates...................................................41Chapter 4: What Follows from Our Common Humanity? The Institutional Stance, Human Rights, and Nonrelationism.....................63Chapter 5: Hugo Grotius Revisited: Collective Ownership of the Earth and Global Public Reason....................................89Chapter 6: "Our Sole Habitation": A Contemporary Approach to Collective Ownership of the Earth...................................108Chapter 7: Toward a Contingent Derivation of Human Rights........................................................................130Chapter 8: Proportionate Use: Immigration and Original Ownership of the Earth....................................................152Chapter 9: "But the Earth Abideth For Ever": Obligations to Future Generations...................................................167Chapter 10: Climate Change and Ownership of the Atmosphere.......................................................................187Chapter 11: Human Rights as Membership Rights in the Global Order................................................................209Chapter 12: Arguing for Human Rights: Essential Pharmaceuticals..................................................................232Chapter 13: Arguing for Human Rights: Labor Rights as Human Rights...............................................................245Chapter 14: Justice and Trade....................................................................................................261Chapter 15: The Way We Live Now..................................................................................................281Chapter 16: "Imagine There's No Countries": A Reply to John Lennon...............................................................304Chapter 17: Justice and Accountability: The State................................................................................325Chapter 18: Justice and Accountability: The World Trade Organization.............................................................346Notes............................................................................................................................361Bibliography.....................................................................................................................415Index............................................................................................................................453

Chapter One

1. When Thomas Hobbes devoted De Cive to exploring the rights of the state and the duties of its subjects, he set the stage for the next three and a half centuries of political philosophy. Focusing on the confrontation between individual and state meant focusing on a person's relationship not to particular rulers but to an enduring institution that made exclusive claims to the exercise of certain powers within a domain. Almost two centuries after Hobbes, Hegel took it for granted that political theory was merely an effort to comprehend the state as an inherently rational entity. And 150 years later, the American philosopher Robert Nozick could write that the "fundamental question of political philosophy is whether there should be any state at all" (1974, 4).

Two central philosophical questions arise about the state: whether its existence can be justified to its citizens to begin with, and what is a just distribution of goods within it. As far as the first question is concerned, philosophers from Hobbes onward have focused on rebutting the philosophical anarchist, who rejects the concentrated power of the state as illegitimate. For both sides of the debate, however, the presumption has been that those to whom state power had to be justified were those living within its frontiers. The question of justice, too, has been much on the agenda since Hobbes, but it gained centrality in the last fifty years, in part because of the rejuvenating effect of John Rawls's 1971 A Theory of Justice. Again, the focus was domestic, at least initially.

However, real-world changes, grouped together under the label "globalization," have in recent decades forced philosophers to broaden their focus. In a world in which goods and people cross borders routinely, philosophers have had to consider whether the existence of state power can be justified not just to people living within a given state but also to people excluded from it (e.g., by border controls). At a time when states share the world stage with a network of treaties and global institutions, philosophers have had to consider not just whether the state can be justified to those living under it but whether the whole global order of multiple states and global institutions can be justified to those living under it. And in a world in which the most salient inequalities are not within states but among them, philosophers have had to broaden their focus for justice, too, asking not only what counts as a just distribution within the state but also what counts as a just distribution globally.

My focus in this book is on the last of these new problems, although what I have to say will be relevant to the other two new problems as well. I consider the question of what it is for a distribution to be just globally and offer a new reply: a new systematic theory of global justice, one that develops a view I call pluralist internationalism. Up to now, philosophers have tended to respond to the problem of global justice in one of two ways. One way is to say that the old focus on justice within the state was, in fact, correct. The only distributions that can be just or unjust, strictly speaking, are within the state. The other response is to say, by contrast, that the old focus on justice within the state was completely wrong. The only relevant population for justice is global. Leading theories of justice within the state, such as Rawls's, should simply be applied straightforwardly to all of humanity. This usually yields the result that global distributions are radically unjust.

This book defends a view between those two, one that improves on both. I agree with the second view that we can talk about global justice, that global distributions are just or unjust. But I agree with the first view that nonetheless, the state has a special place in accounts of justice. Domestic justice—justice within the state—and global justice have different standards, and the former are more egalitarian. Theories of domestic justice like Rawls's cannot simply be transferred to the global scene. That means that the global distribution of various goods is not as radically unjust as it would be if domestic justice did apply straightforwardly. Nonetheless, global distributions turn out to be unjust in various important ways.

I defend my view by developing a pluralist approach to what I call the grounds of justice. These, roughly, are...