Why ‘We’ Should Care About ‘Them’?: The Future of Cosmopolitan Justice in a Fragmented World

We? Them?

We

Them

Wealth Distribution 2013

We

Limpopo HIV/AIDS Refugee Camp

Them

Cosmopolitan Justice

• The idea that we have duties of justice to all human beings based solely on their humanity alone, without reference to nationality, citizenship, ethnicity, race, religion, gender or other particularities.

• If justice is defined as ‘just treatment and the quality of being fair and equitable.’

• Then cosmopolitan justice refers to just treatment of all humans and the quality of being fair and equitable to those beyond our borders.

Relax ‘we’ Really Don’t Have to Care Too Much

• Justice requires a sense of national solidarity and cultural identification.

• Justice is only about institutional structures, if they don’t exist, justice does not exist.

• Justice is about reciprocal relationships where expectations are generated.

• Justice only applies where ‘relational conditions’ exist, since this is not the case at the global level, justice remains an internal matter for states.

• Duties for assistance, but not justice.

Why ‘We’ Have to Care

• It is a matter of happenstance where a person is born. Determining just treatment on the accident of birth is arbitrary and untenable.

• There are global institutions that greatly alter the lives of those beyond our borders.

• Globalization creates ‘relational conditions’ that demand social cooperation, where the scope of justice applies.

Self-interest and Harm

Even if you don’t buy the positive moral argument….

• Negative argument – would you knowingly want to harm another human being?

• A condition of global justice could be in your self-interest.

• What’s the alternative? Business as usual?

Justice is too difficult!

• Yeah, but how can one person make a difference?

• Yeah, but what about cultural relativism?

• Yeah, but it’s Western imperialism!

• Yeah, but it’s a realist world out there!

• Yeah, but it is too idealistic and it is never going to happen!

A failure of political imagination

• States are political associations for collective action – You are not meant to do it alone.

• Cultural relativism demands equality between cultures, so surely this requires justice too.

• A fallacy to assume that just because something comes from a certain place that it is wrong.

• Is realism as real as it thinks? Global conditions and cosmopolitan stepping stones.

• Everything normatively important was considered politically idealistic in the beginning.