What Is This Thing Called Science

what is this thing
called global
justice?
What is this thing called Global Justice? explores the core topics covered on the
increasingly popular undergraduate modules on global justice including:
x world poverty
x economic inequality
x nationalism
x human rights
x humanitarian intervention
x immigration
x global democracy and governance
x climate change
x international justice.
Centered on real world problems, this textbook helps students to understand that
global justice is not only a field of philosophical inquiry but also of practical impor-
tance. Each chapter concludes with a helpful summary of the main ideas discussed,
study questions and a further reading guide.
Kok-Chor Tan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He

specializes in Political Philosophy and Moral Philosophy.
What is this thing called?
The Routledge “What is this thing called?” series of concise textbooks have been
designed for use by students coming to a core and important area of philosophy
for the first time. Each volume explores the relevant central questions with clear
explanation of complex ideas and engaging contemporary examples. Features to aid
study include text boxes, chapter summaries, study questions, further reading and
glossaries.
What Is This Thing Called Knowledge? third edition

Duncan Pritchard
What Is This Thing Called Philosophy of Language?

Gary Kemp
What Is This Thing called Metaphysics? second edition

Brian Garrett
What Is This Thing Called Ethics?

Christopher Bennett
KOK-CHOR TAN
what is this
thing called
global justice?
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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© 2017 Kok-Chor Tan
The right of Kok-Chor Tan to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Tan, Kok-Chor, 1964– author.
Title: What is this thing called global justice? / Kok-Chor Tan.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, [2017] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031255| ISBN 9781138831964 (hardback : alk.
paper) | ISBN 9781138831971 (pbk. : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781315736273 (ebook : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Social justice. | Human rights. | Equality. |
Environmental justice.
Classification: LCC HM671 .T358 2017 | DDC 303.3/72—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031255
ISBN13: 978-1-138-83196-4 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-1-138-83197-1 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-1-315-73627-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Berling LT Standard

by Book Now Ltd, London
To colleagues in Global Justice,
for setting the pace
This page intentionally left blank
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
1 Introduction 1
2 World poverty 7
3 Global economic equality 21
4 Against global egalitarianism 35
5 Nationalism and patriotic sentiments 47
6 The universality of human rights 60
7 Human rights: state sovereignty, culture and gender 72
8 Just wars and humanitarian intervention 86
9 Borders: immigration, secession and territory 105
10 Climate change justice: sharing the burden 120
11 Global democracy: cosmopolitan versus international 134
12 Conclusion 144
Bibliography 146
Index 153
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to the students in my undergraduate global justice seminars for their

challenging questions, healthy skepticism and constant reminder that a philosophy of
global justice must have real world implications. Gratitude also to Sriram Sridharan
for his excellent research assistance and Eilidh Beaton for her incisive comments and
pointed questions on the full text.
Three anonymous readers for the press went well beyond the call of professional
duty, as well as personal courtesy and generosity, in providing very extensive and
insightful comments. Their criticisms and suggestions were all invaluable and I have
tried to accommodate as many of them as possible within the confines of an intro-
ductory text. Thus, remaining shortcomings are my responsibility. I also thank the
editors of Routledge, in particular Rebecca Shillabeer, for proposing this project and
for seeing it through each stage with skill, patience and dedication. Andrea Platts’s
expert copy editing and good judgment saved me from several linguistic infelicities
and clumsiness.
Colleagues, students and friends at the University of Pennsylvania provided the intel-
lectual nourishment for the writing of this book in too many ways to record here.
Colleagues in the field of global justice, also too numerous to list, have taught me
much over the past decade and some. Most importantly, they provided the stuff of
this book.
Finally, thanks to Karen Detlefsen for constantly assuring me that a text on global
justice is worthwhile, and to Amalia for insisting that I “think about it”.
1
•
introduction
This book is intended for the reader who is new to the field of global justice as a
philosophical inquiry and who has little or no background in philosophy. My three
main objectives are to introduce such a reader to (i) some of the real world problems
of global justice and the moral and philosophical challenges they present, (ii) some
of the main positions and arguments that philosophers have proposed in response to
these problems, (iii) and the philosophical method of analyzing and evaluating these
different perspectives and arguments. If there is a grander goal tying together these
objectives, it is to show how philosophy can provide the analytical tools for clarifying
and addressing the problems of humanity.
Global justice is a philosophical inquiry that is motivated by real world problems. To
animate the subject for the reader, thus, I will adopt what we might call a “problems-
driven approach” in this book. Instead of organizing my presentation around different
theories of global justice, I will structure our discussion around real world problems
or issues of global justice that will be largely familiar to any reader. These problems
will motivate our inquiry and provide the access points into the philosophical debate.
Some of the topics we will investigate are world poverty and economic inequal-
ity, human rights and sovereignty, nationalism and cultural diversity, just war and
humanitarian intervention, and boundaries and immigration. Through a discussion of
these familiar real world problems and an examination of how the main philosophi-
cal positions and arguments attempt to address them, I hope the reader can come to
appreciate, in the spirit of John Dewey, that philosophy is not just “a device for deal-
ing with the problems of philosophers”, but is “a method, cultivated by philosophers,
for dealing with the problems of men” (Dewey 1981, p. 95).
• WHAT IS GLOBAL JUSTICE AND WHY IT MATTERS

What is global justice? This question can be interpreted substantively, to be asking
what global justice would require of us and what a just global order, or a less unjust
one, would look like. Indeed, an objective of this book is to orient the reader towards
possible (and competing) answers to the substantive question of what global justice is.
But before we begin exploring this substantive question, we should clarify what
global justice as a philosophical inquiry is. While the definition of justice, and hence
2 • introduction
the distinction between justice and other related concepts like ethics, is itself a point
of contention among philosophers (more on this below), let us take it for now, ecu-
menically, that global justice as an inquiry aims to identify our duties to one another
in the world at large beyond the confines of our country, and to clarify the basis and
form of these duties.1
Global justice as a normative inquiry

An inquiry into our duties, or what we owe to each other, is a normative inquiry.
A normative inquiry is ultimately concerned with “what ought to be” rather than
“what is the case”. A normative inquiry is thus basically interested in identifying and
justifying standards or principles for guiding action and institutional design. What
is the case – for example, how people actually behave or how institutions currently
are structured – does not necessarily reflect how things ought to be. The question
of global justice (broadly understood) is the question of how individuals and states
ought to conduct themselves in relation to others on the world stage, and how inter-
national institutions might be restructured if the world were to be more just.
We should be interested in normative inquiries. For instance, we know that extreme
global poverty is a fact of our world today. But ought the world to be that way?
We know as a fact that human rights are not respected to the same degree in all
countries. But should things be that way? Ought human rights to be uniformly and
universally affirmed and protected? Or ought there to be cultural variations in how
human rights are understood and enforced? If we appreciate that things as they are
need not equate to things as they should be, we can appreciate the importance of
normative inquiry.
That a normative inquiry is different from an empirical inquiry does not mean that
the former may ignore empirical facts altogether. For one thing, what ought to be
may be limited by real constraints in the world, including the limits of human physi-
cal nature and the limits of institutional organization. More relevantly for the field
of global justice, certain facts might be considered as part the parameters of inquiry
rather than subjects of inquiry themselves. For instance, most discussions of global
justice take it as a given that we live in a world of independent and bounded sover-
eign states, and the salient normative question for them is how we ought to conduct
ourselves or design our shared global order in light of this fact. Moreover, it can be
argued that certain facts are granted as preconditions for the inquiry of global justice.
For instance, the presumptions that humans have competing interests, that we live
in a world of moderate scarcity and that we are mortal beings, dependent on one
another and confined to the surface of the earth are the factors that make discus-
sions about global justice pertinent. There would be no need to debate about the just
allocation of material goods, or at least that debate would likely take a form wholly
unrecognizable to us, if we lived in a world of absolute material abundance, such
introduction • 3
that human beings need not compete with each other at all for resources. Finally,
to the extent that principles are useful only if there are feasible means of realizing
them, some philosophers point out that our theorizing about principles should be
influenced by the limitations of implementation.
To what extent a normative inquiry is to be constrained by facts – and what kinds of
facts are relevant for the inquiry – is itself a point of contention among philosophers.
Indeed, some of the topics we will be discussing will engage this crucial question.
The key point to note, however, is that even if a normative inquiry has to be appro-
priately sensitive to certain empirical facts, what it is concerned with ultimately is
with how things ought to be.
The distinctiveness of global justice

The question of what we owe to each other is one of the subjects of moral and
political philosophy. Global justice is concerned with what we owe to each other in
the world at large. So, how is global justice distinct from moral and political philoso-
phy more generally? In a sense, global justice is moral and political philosophy that
encompasses the world as a whole. In this regard, global justice is an integral part
of moral and political philosophy. Yet global justice is not simply moral philosophy
and political philosophy writ large or straightforwardly applied to the global plane.
First, global justice draws attention to specific global issues and potential problems of
injustice. These special problems can become new test cases for evaluating our moral
and philosophical theories, and can, in fact, compel us to revise them. For instance,
global justice forces us to confront this question: What does global economic equality
tell us about our theories of egalitarian justice that are traditionally conceived for the
context of a single state? Do we need to rethink our theories of egalitarianism in light
of this global fact? In short, global justice is not simply an additional site of applica-
tion for moral and political philosophy. Rather, it provides a new vantage point from
which to reexamine, and where necessary recast, our moral and political theories.
Second, the moral and political context of the world order is not simply the moral
and political context of the domestic state carried over to the global stage. Individuals
stand in very different moral and political relationships to each other globally than
in the setting of the domestic state. The international stage has institutional players
that aren’t present at the domestic level, such as independent sovereign state enti-
ties. On the other hand, the international stage lacks other forms of institutions.
There isn’t, for example, a central political authority with coercive powers on the
world stage as in the domestic arena. Thus, the moral landscape, as it were, in which
individuals interact and relate to each other in the global setting is quite different
from the domestic one. It is a matter of debate (as we shall see) as to what moral
significance these relational and institutional facts really have. Some philosophers
4 • introduction
will argue, for example, that these facts are ultimately morally irrelevant. But that is
a conclusion to be drawn. At the get-go, these institutional and relational differences
make global justice a special subject.
Why global justice matters

What is the use of global justice? What purpose is this normative inquiry supposed
to serve? Most of us agree that we live in a world that is patently unjust, and we
might think that the central obstacle to achieving a better world seems to be more a
problem of political will than of understanding. Indeed, I noted above that this book
is organized around familiar problems of justice. But isn’t a philosophical inquiry
redundant if the problems are already familiar, and agreed by us to be problems in
need of address? Or, even worse, isn’t such an inquiry rather extravagant and indul-
gent and isn’t the real task before us to change the world, not to interpret it?
Yet, to say that problems are familiar and in need of solutions, is not to say that we
have achieved a full understanding of them and that there is a consensus on how we
are to address them. Rather, it means that we can appreciate that these issues raise
moral challenges, or that we are at least aware of the questions of justice that could
be raised about them. The aim of a philosophical inquiry into these questions is to
help illuminate the nature of these problems of justice and to identify possible forms
of responses and solutions to them.
For example, does justice require that we respond to extreme global poverty? This
question might seem straightforward, morally speaking. Yet there is more to it. Even
if we all agree that extreme poverty is a bad thing and that something should be done
about it, we can still disagree why it is a bad thing, what duties we have in response
to it, and what the basis of these duties is. More challengingly, consider the question
of whether global justice requires some regulation of global economic inequality.
Even though we can understand this question, and debates about economic equal-
ity are familiar enough both as a domestic and a global issue, it is far from obvious
what the right view is. Some philosophers deny that economic inequality is really a
problem of justice, while others argue that if there is a case for egalitarianism more
generally, then global egalitarianism follows. One purpose of global justice, in this
situation, is to force us to examine more deeply what qualifies as a problem of global
justice. In this respect, global justice as a philosophical inquiry helps to guard against
moral complacency by pushing us to challenge our assumptions and to be on the
lookout for potential blind spots in our moral worldviews. It can, in other words,
provide a framework from which to see things in a new light and to uncover hitherto
obscured instances of injustice.
On the problems-driven approach to philosophy, one measure of a philosophical
theory’s success is its plausibility and reasonableness as practical guidance for addressing
the problems of humanity. To the extent that many of the urgent challenges facing us
introduction • 5
today are global in nature – such as extreme poverty, climate change and human rights
abuses – the success of any moral and political philosophical theory is cast into doubt if
it cannot or does not engage with these problems of the world.
In short, global justice is a normative inquiry into what we owe to each other glob-
ally. That is, it addresses questions of “what ought to be?” rather than questions of
“what is”. It is a distinctive subject since the global arena introduces new problems and
questions of what we owe to each other. This inquiry matters because its distinctive
problems can compel us to reexamine our conventional commitments and standard
philosophical theories, and can help expose injustices that we might be blind to.
Justice and ethics

One common view of justice, and this is just one view, is that justice is concerned
with how the basic institutions of a social order allocate persons their fundamental
rights and responsibilities. So justice is concerned with what we owe to each other,
but as this obligation is mediated via our shared institutions. The duties of justice
then are primarily duties which have to do with the kinds of institutions we should
establish, support and maintain. On this understanding, justice can be contrasted
with (one interpretation of ) ethics, which is concerned with what individuals owe to
each other interpersonally. Accordingly, global justice is concerned with the kinds of
global institutions we ought to support, and global ethics has to do with our respon-
sibilities to other persons more directly. Thus, the question of our interpersonal
responsibility in response, say, to famine is a question of global ethics, whereas the
question of what global institutions we ought to establish and support in response to
global economic inequality is a question of global justice.2
On this more exacting definition of ethics and justice, this book ought to be titled
“What is this Thing Called Global Justice and Global Ethics?” But this terminological
issue need not detain us further if we are clear on what we take “justice” to include.
We will take our main question to be that of what responsibilities we have to each
other, broadly conceived, institutionally and interpersonally. So long as the reader is
aware of the difference, our choice of label is less important for the present purpose.
Approach and organization

This book introduces students to the subject of global justice by inviting them to
engage in the inquiry itself. The book is thus, as mentioned, organized around certain
topics or problems of global justice. Through these topics and problems, the reader
will be introduced to the main competing philosophical positions and the forms of
arguments in support of them. If this book had a subtitle, it would be The Problems
of Global Justice.
6 • introduction
Although I will refrain from explicitly supporting a substantive position over others,
I occasionally, within the bounds of a critical introduction, raise more critical ques-
tions for some positions than others. But the reader should take this as an invitation
to counter my views, and I hope the study questions at the end of each chapter can
help facilitate this. What is important is that I present the different positions and
arguments fairly and accurately enough (which I hope I am able to do).
At the end of each chapter are references to some primary sources that can be seen
as companion pieces to the chapters. Since one of my aspirations is to provide a
reference book for students in an introductory course on global justice, my list of
primary sources reflects the seminal articles and papers that are commonly assigned
in such a course. These publications are not necessarily the most recent to appear
in the literature (although some are recent). Rather, they are seminal works that
have set, and are continuing to set, the terms of the current debate. Where it might
be helpful, I will subdivide these primary references into topics. A list of further
reading included at the end of each chapter supplements the primary sources with
suggestions for more recent works and writings that have advanced the agenda of the
primary publications.
My approach within each chapter, for the most part, is to identify the representative
positions and the outline of their arguments on a given topic, and not to engage with
the details of the particular arguments of specific authors. It is the normative per-
spective and forms of arguments that certain philosophers represent that I wish the
reader to become acquainted with first rather than the specifics of particular argu-
ments. My hope is that readers will be inspired and equipped by our discussion to go
on to study the particular arguments of specific authors on their own. Focusing on
the big picture in this way, we can better avoid losing sight of the practical problems
that drive the philosophical inquiry in the first place.
But enough talk on philosophy, methodology and organization. Let us do some
philosophy.
• NOTES
1 In some philosophical writings, obligations refer to responsibilities that are accrued
and duties are responsibilities that are more basic. In this book, we will use the
two terms interchangeably.
2 This distinction of subjects is reflected, for example, in the two edited volumes of
“seminal essays”: Global Ethics (Pogge and Horton 2008) and Global Justice (Pogge
and Moellendorf 2008). Ethics is also commonly understood to include more per-
sonal matters, such as one’s conception of the good life, in addition to interpersonal
obligations. In this respect, global ethics addresses a subset of ethical questions, the
interpersonal question of what we owe to others beyond our borders.
2
•
world poverty
According to the World Bank, over a billion people, representing 17 percent of the
world’s population, continue to live on less than $1.25/day (the Bank’s baseline for
extreme poverty), and about 2.2 billion live on less than $2/day (the baseline
for moderate poverty).1 While the World Bank acknowledges that these figures
are a significant improvement compared to the past two decades, world poverty
remains a major global problem.
The implications of severe poverty are pervasive. It results, for instance, in lower
life expectancy, poorer health outcomes, and reduced educational opportunities.
Life expectancy at birth in countries like Senegal and Malawi is 66.5 and 62.8
years respectively, compared with 81.6 and 79.1 years for Norway and the United
States respectively. Infant mortality per 1,000 births is 44.2 in Malawi and 43.9 in
Senegal, compared with 2.3 and 5.9 in Norway and the United States respectively.
Whereas Norway has 37.4 physicians per 10,000 people and the United States has
24.5, Malawi has 0.2 physicians per 10,000 people, and Senegal 0.6. Adult literacy
rates in Malawi and Senegal are 61.3 percent and 52.1 percent respectively, and
only 15.5 percent in Niger.2
Few readers would deny that global poverty is a bad thing that the international com-
munity should do something about. But what makes it a bad thing that we ought to
respond to? What is the source or ground of this responsibility? Who has the moral
responsibility to address the problem, and what does this responsibility entail? And
what are the limits of their responsibility? So, even if there is widespread agreement
that world poverty is a problem of global justice, philosophical disagreements remain
concerning the basis of this injustice, which agents have the responsibility to act, and
what form this action should take. How we ought to act in response to world poverty
as a practical matter will turn at some point on how we address these philosophical
questions.
World poverty thus presents a case that can be the subject of some philosophical
disagreement even though there is relatively widespread acknowledgement that pov-
erty is an injustice. Indeed, examining the different philosophical positions on world
poverty can provide a starting point for understanding some of the main moral theo-
ries that are at play in the contemporary debate. In this chapter, we will focus on two
main ethical approaches to the problem of global poverty. In so doing we can better
8 • world poverty
appreciate how philosophical theories can make a difference to how we understand

a seemingly obvious problem of justice, and how we should act in response. The
two approaches we will look at are utilitarianism and a rights-based deontological
approach.
• UTILITARIANISM
Utilitarianism is a species of the larger moral position known as consequentialism.
Consequentialism, as its name implies, holds that the right thing to do, or the right
set of conventions or rules for society to adopt, is that which will bring a favored
result or consequence. Utilitarianism, as a species of consequentialism, provides a
further specification of what the consequence to be strived for is. While there are
variants of utilitarianism, one dominant version invokes the greatest happiness prin-
ciple, with happiness conceived in terms of a net balance of pleasure over pain.3 That
is, the right thing for a moral agent to do, or the right set of rules or conventions for
the moral agent to help establish and support, is that which will produce the great-
est amount of happiness for the greatest number of people impartially considered.
The point about impartiality is important. It means that the happiness of all, includ-
ing the agent’s, must count equally. As the dictum famously attributed to Jeremy
Bentham has it, “everyone is to count for one, and nobody for more than one” (Mill
1863, Chap. V).
According to utilitarian morality, then, if the suffering of the global poor can be
alleviated by the rich contributing some of their resources and wealth without their
making comparable sacrifices (without, thereby, lowering overall global well-being
or utility), it is a failure of morality that the well-off aren’t contributing to counter
world poverty. We will consider one influential presentation of this argument.
Singer’s utilitarian approach

Peter Singer’s landmark paper, “Famine, Affluence and Morality” (1972), offers the
most influential argument of this form, and continues to frame the discussion more
than three decades since its original publication. Although the impetus of Singer’s
essay is the problem of famine and other urgent humanitarian crises – Singer was
writing when the Bengal famine of 1971 was in the news – his arguments extend
quite naturally to the more general problem of world poverty and the avoidable
suffering it creates.
Singer’s argument is powerful in its clarity and simplicity. He proposes, for his moral
starting point, the utilitarian principle that when we can do something to minimize
pain at no comparable cost to ourselves, we ought to do so. For Singer, this means
assisting the needy up to the point where we are just marginally better off than they
are. There are different ways in which we can discharge our duty to this cause. Singer is
world poverty • 9
not requiring that we each personally deliver goods or resources to individuals in need.
As a utilitarian, who is concerned with results, we should seek out the most effective
means of improving the situation of the needy. To get the “best bang for the buck”, so
to speak, we should normally seek out and contribute to effective non-governmental
organizations, such as Oxfam and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN).
A utilitarian is not interested just in altruism but in effective altruism.4
But the basic utilitarian requirement, undiluted, will require each of us who are rela-
tively affluent to adjust our lifestyles and revise our life expectations considerably.
What we might take to be a morally legitimate personal expenditure – buying the
new upgraded smart phone you have been saving up for – is called into question if
the money to be spent could be redirected elsewhere to increase overall utility.
Singer provides a famous analogy to reinforce this utilitarian principle of effective
rescue. Most of us agree, says Singer, that if we could rescue a drowning toddler with
minimum risk to ourselves, we ought to do so. This precept, as a moral principle, log-
ically extends to distant needy persons whom we can rescue with minimum personal
harm to ourselves. Our duty to rescue people in need, short of subjecting ourselves
to comparable risks, Singer claims, is unaffected by geographical distance. Proximity
is morally irrelevant in itself. Spatial relations can matter if they affect the efficiency
or success of a rescue attempt. But Singer points out that in the world we live in, the
physical problem of distance is easily overcome by modern communication, technol-
ogy and effective international organizations. If this observation held true in 1972,
when Singer first published his essay, it is even more true today.
The utilitarian approach, guided as it is by the dominant moral goal of maximizing
global utility, is thus a rather demanding one. Indeed (as Singer himself acknowl-
edges), it seems to eliminate the distinction between charity and duty. We typically
think that there are certain morally commendable actions that are good to do but not
morally required of us. These are supererogatory actions. Many people will think that
contributing to organizations like Oxfam is an act of charity, a supererogation. But
we don’t neglect a moral duty when we don’t contribute. However, some utilitar-
ians (like Singer) are prepared to bite the bullet on this point. If moral conventions
are at odds with the requirements of utilitarianism, then so much the worse for
conventional morality, they will insist. After all, historically, many of our traditional
moral categories were proven to be indefensible and upended with moral progress.
So why take the particular conventional distinction between charity and moral duty
to be any different? Isn’t the critical evaluation of our existing, and even entrenched,
conventions and moral beliefs one core purpose of making moral arguments?
Moral obligations are meant to impose demands on moral agents, and moral argu-
ments are meant to challenge our moral complacencies, including questioning our
conventional moral categories and beliefs. So, the claim that it is demanding and
fails to line up with our existing moral practices and beliefs can’t, by itself, count as
a blow against utilitarianism.
10 • world poverty
But for many critics of utilitarianism, the problem is that it seems fundamentally
mistaken in the way it understands our moral obligations and what we, as human
beings, have reasons to value. Not only is the conventional distinction between charity
and duty threatened, but other more basic and seemingly morally valuable distinctions
are also put under pressure. For instance, on the utilitarian view, our own personal pro-
jects and relationships have no special moral significance for us. Their value or worth
ultimately reduces, instrumentally, according to how they further pleasure or mini-
mize pain, impersonally, for the greatest number. On the utilitarian account, favoring
the needs of our families or friends over the comparable needs of strangers, let alone
their more urgent needs, is a form of parochialism that we should strive to transcend.
But does this not make morality demanding in a way that is morally counter-intuitive?
Does utilitarianism not fail to take into account our agency and the forms of life we
value by dismissing the various kinds of commitments and relationships and projects
that are considered part and parcel of a meaningful human life?
For instance, it is morally wrong for you to devote attention and resources to family
members or friends in instances when redirecting your attention and resources, say,
to the needy individuals in your neighborhood, will better increase overall utility?
Would it be all right for a parent to devote time to reading to her child when she
could do more good, impartially considered, with her time for the neglected child
down the street? What about personal projects that are really important to you?
Suppose you are working at a job and saving up for backpacking trip around the
world as a graduation reward. Ought you instead to donate your money to a repu-
table charity? The critics do not claim that our own projects and relationships count
for everything and the welfare of strangers for nothing. But it is altogether a differ-
ent matter, they say, to think that there is no non-instrumental moral significance to
personal projects and relationships.
Utilitarians have responded to these criticisms in different ways. Some “pedal” back
towards commonsense morality by arguing how permitting or even requiring people
to attend to special relations and personal projects within certain limits can, in fact,
cohere with the utilitarian principle. For example, some might argue that meaning-
ful bonds of affection and attachments among persons is constitutive of personal
happiness, and therefore these special concerns and relationships must be factored
into the utility calculus. The challenge for such attempts at back-pedaling is whether
utilitarianism can accommodate these non-utilitarian values in ways that do not
mischaracterize the phenomenology of social relations and undervalue them. For
instance, can our understanding of the practice and role of friendship as we experi-
ence it and its value support the claim that the worth of a friendship are ultimately
reducible to its social utility? This is an ongoing and important debate within utili-
tarianism itself.
Singer recognizes the demandingness of his proposal, and offers a more modest
requirement to help his position gain practical traction. Instead of contributing to
the point of diminishing return, we are asked, on the modest proposal, to contribute
world poverty • 11
only up to the point where further contribution will result in a “morally significant”
sacrifice for us. This proposal is presented as a compromise of the ideal but, even so,
it will make a world of difference if we follow through with it. But, the modest pro-
posal is not a capitulation to the demandingness objection. In principle, Singer stands
by the implication of his utilitarian theory. In this regard, the modest proposal seems
rather ad hoc and not reflective of what the utilitarian position logically demands. If
we find the modest proposal morally more palatable, is this not because we find the
demandingness objection compelling?
In sum, the utilitarian approach to world poverty appears to its critics to be unrea-
sonably overly demanding. This problem of overdemandingness is not just a problem
for utilitarianism as it is applied to the problem of world poverty but points to a
fundamental challenge for utilitarianism itself as a philosophical position. There is
the danger, according to one line of criticism, that utilitarianism wants to shoehorn
human beings into a moral theory instead of constructing or identifying a moral
theory suitable for human beings. But whether this is so is, of course, a matter of
dispute. Thus, what their critics regard as a reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism,
utilitarians might consider the point and a virtue of the theory. Utilitarianism is still
a serious moral theory and its overall success as a theory of right and wrong is one
staple debate in contemporary moral philosophy.
• RIGHTS-BASED DEONTOLOGICAL APPROACHES

An alternative moral position to consequentialism is deontological ethics.
Deontological moral theories do not derive the rightness or wrongness of an act sim-
ply from the consequences of the act (as in utilitarianism) but from some notion of
the rights and obligations that agents independently have.5
One deontological approach to world poverty that is diametrically opposed to
utilitarianism takes the respect and protection of basic rights, instead of utility
maximization, as the starting point. On this view, persons have a human right to
subsistence, and this right imposes obligations on others to act and respond in certain
ways. These include not just the obligation to avoid depriving anyone of her subsist-
ence but also the obligation to take positive steps to help ensure that everyone’s
subsistence needs are met.
An important difference between the rights-based approach and the utilitarian
approach to world poverty is that there is a built-in cut-off in the rights approach. If
a right that individuals have is the right to a certain standard of living, then our obli-
gations to them with respect to this right are discharged when they are able to meet
this threshold. Different rights-based theories can define the threshold of subsistence
differently, some being more exacting than others. Thus, it is important not to think
that the duty to provide for basic needs is an easily discharged duty. On the contrary,
respecting and protecting the right of persons to subsistence will likely require some
non-negligible “personal sacrifices” from those who are able to assist. The point,
however, is that on the rights approach, there is a principled cut-off that the utilitar-
ian approach does not admit. A rights approach, in principle, can avoid the inherent
“demandingness” problem that confounds the utilitarian globalist.
The main philosophical challenge for the rights approach is that of establishing the
case for a “positive right” to subsistence. A positive right is a right that generates obli-
gations on others to take positive steps to help realize this right. For example, if I say
I have a positive right to food, then my right to food creates an obligation on some
person to take positive steps to provide me with food or the means thereto. If the
big problem with utilitarianism is the problem of unreasonable demandingness in its
recommendation for action, the main problem with the rights approach is that of the
philosophical demandingness of its fundamental moral principle. By this, I mean that
its basic moral premise involves a controversial claim about moral responsibility that
has to be substantiated. We can more easily agree that persons can have “negative
rights” that will put the rest of us under an obligation not to deprive them of those
rights. An example of such a right is what philosophers refer to as a “libertarian right”.
This is the right to equal liberty that imposes on others only the “negative” duty not
to interfere with another’s freedom without cause. Thus, if I have (only) a libertarian
right to food, it means that all other people are obliged not to steal my food or inter-
fere with my means of procuring food. But no one is obliged to provide me with food
or the means of procuring it. On the other hand, the claim that persons have positive
rights that impose obligations on us to act in some ways (for example, to provide them
with subsistence) is more controversial.
The right to subsistence belongs to what some philosophers would describe as “wel-
fare rights”. Unlike libertarian rights, welfare rights impose “positive” duties on
others, that is, duties that require some action on their part rather than mere for-
bearance. In the first instance, then, it does seem that subsistence rights are relatively
controversial and will require some justification. After all, I can understand why I
should not interfere with your freedom, but why should I be required to support
you? This seems like a wholly different matter, morally speaking.
Some authors dive into the philosophical thicket of the issue, arguing in a Kantian
spirit, for example, that universal respect for personal autonomy or agency requires
some positive obligations to provide individuals with basic needs (O’Neill 2000).
Others appeal to some conception of human flourishing to make the case that
basic human rights, including positive subsistence rights, are necessary to ensure
the capabilities of persons to achieve human flourishing (Nussbaum 1995). These
forms of arguments get into core philosophical issues regarding human agency,
moral responsibility and ideas of human flourishing. Arguments of these kinds,
that are based on foundational moral claims, are subject to reasonable philosophi-
cal disagreements because they invoke moral theories that reasonable persons can
reasonably object to.
Shue and subsistence as a basic right

Another strategy seeks to defend welfare rights without getting directly into
foundational philosophical issues. This strategy attempts to show that there is no
fundamental moral difference between certain accepted libertarian rights and wel-
fare rights, such as the right to subsistence. In other words, it argues that if one is
prepared to accept libertarian rights then, on pain of moral inconsistency, one must
also endorse some kinds of welfare rights. Henry Shue, in his groundbreaking Basic
Rights (1980), makes the case for the basic right to subsistence along these lines.
Shue starts by pointing out that many people accept that the right to security is a
basic right because it is a right that one must have if one is to be able to enjoy the
other important human rights, such as the right of free speech, the right of associa-
tion, the right of political participation, and so on. Shue’s next move is to show that
there is no morally significant difference between the right to subsistence and the
right to security. Like security rights, subsistence rights are basic rights in that they
are rights that need to be respected and protected if the rights of persons to other
important things are to be exercisable. Thus, if one accepts security as a basic right,
then one must, to be consistent, accept subsistence as a basic right.
Shue responds to the objection that security rights and subsistence rights must, at
bottom, be logically distinct since security rights are negative rights in the sense that
they generate only a duty of forbearance, whereas subsistence rights are positive rights
in the sense that they require positive acts of assistance. He counters that both secu-
rity and subsistence rights structurally entail (negative) duties of non-interference
as well as (positive) duties of protection and assistance (Shue 1980). The objection
trades on a misconception, he points out, that security rights require only negative
duties of non-interference. On the contrary, security rights in fact require positive
actions by members of a community, such as the creation and support of legal and
enforcement institutional mechanisms pertaining to personal and societal security.
The right to subsistence is therefore not unique in its requirements for positive obli-
gations. As with the basic right to security, individuals’ basic right to subsistence
can impose corresponding duties on others, not only to avoid depriving them of the
means of subsistence, but to also provide assistance to them when their subsistence
needs cannot otherwise be met.
Shue’s basic goal then is to show that there are structural similarities between the
basic right to security and the basic right to subsistence, such that if we accept one,
we must also endorse and acknowledge the other. But would the libertarian be per-
suaded? The libertarian is one who believes that the only duty we have to others is
to leave them alone, and not to interfere with their freedom. So the basic right to
security follows from this duty of non-interference. Moreover, the libertarian can, in
principle, allow for derivative positive duties if these are seen as instrumentally nec-
essary for ensuring the right of persons not to be interfered with. A libertarian state
can after all be in the business, consistent with the libertarian premise, of providing
basic protection and security of individuals, including their property rights. But the
libertarian will simply deny, at the ground level, that there is such a right as the right
to subsistence that imposes duties on others to provide for this right. Thus, the liber-
tarian will say that there is nothing inconsistent with affirming a basic right to security
while denying that there is a basic right to subsistence. There is perhaps therefore a
need to confront the libertarian challenge more directly.
Still, the burden of proof bounces back to the libertarian: why are our rights-based
moral duties limited to the negative duties of not interfering with or injuring others?
While the libertarian premise may seem morally neutral and therefore uncontro-
versial, it is in fact a morally loaded claim and is as much in need of defense as the
opposing view that there are positive rights and duties. Moreover, international prac-
tice and foreign policies of countries are increasingly affirming that there is a human
right to subsistence and development, and that the international community has a
moral obligation to try to realize these rights. Thus, if anything, from the perspective
of emerging international practice on world poverty, the libertarian position carries
the burden of proof.
Duty to alleviate poverty as compensation for harms

Another influential response to world poverty seeks to escape the philosophi-
cal debate over positive and negative rights even more completely. Thomas Pogge
(2001) argues that, even if we grant that there are only libertarian rights, it is still
the case that the global rich have reasons of justice to take steps to address the plight
of the global poor. His argument for this is that, even if there were only the nega-
tive duty not to interfere with others or to injure them, the global rich are, in fact,
contributing to and participating in a global institutional structure that has been and
is injuring the global poor. Since the basic duty to do no harm has already been or
is being violated by the global rich, there is the follow-up responsibility of justice
on their part to make amends, including the responsibility to take positive action to
alleviate and reduce the harm that has been or is being caused.
As just one example, Pogge refers to the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) norms
and agreements that are highly detrimental to the poor but highly advantageous to
the rich, and that are imposed on the poor by delegates representing the global rich.
He writes that the WTO rules allow rich countries to enact protectionist measures
against cheaper imports from poorer countries, by imposing tariffs, anti-dumping
duties, import quotas, and providing subsidies to domestic producers. These meas-
ures limit export opportunities for poor producing countries and (through subsidies)
give rich countries an advantage in selling their goods in the world market. The main
reason for the unfairness of WTO rules is the uneven bargaining power of states
at the negotiating table where these terms are ironed out. This passage from the
Guardian on the 2011 Doha WTO talks is representative:
No sooner was the proposal [that would be favorable to poor countries]

announced than the most powerful countries began to resist, with the US in
particular demanding benefits to its own economy in return for any concessions
to developing countries. This is in part symptomatic of developed countries’
obsession with not giving too much to emerging economies like China, India
and Brazil, an obsession that has been allowed to overshadow the development
agenda.6
The WTO is just one specific institution that Pogge believes is violating the rights of
the poor. The same kinds of criticisms can be made of other global institutions like the
World Bank and the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS) administered by the WTO. There are also more basic ways in which
the global order as a whole harms the poor, according to Pogge. He refers to some
basic norms of international relations, such as (what he calls) the “resource privilege”
and the “borrowing privilege”. These are the privileges, respectively, accorded (by
international practice) to any de facto state governments to sell natural resources as
they see fit and to borrow money from international and foreign commercial banks
at high interest rates. The internationally sanctioned “resource privilege” creates
perverse incentives for parties within a well-endowed country (diamonds in Sierra
Leone; oil in Nigeria) to take over the government of the country in order to claim
resources that it can sell in the global market for personal profit. The “borrowing
privilege” enables dictators to borrow money to fund personal accounts and to sup-
port military suppression of dissension, and has the detrimental effect of crippling
a country with a high-interest debt that is recognized by international banking laws
to have been lawfully incurred, even when the dictator has been deposed. These
“norms” of international relations are not natural facts, but are conventions that the
international community upholds, and upholds to the advantage of affluent coun-
tries who now have easy (unquestioned) access to natural resources and whose banks
may profit from lending money to corrupt rulers.
These background institutional injuries that the global rich are inflicting on the poor
have moral implications. The global rich, because of this, owe it to the global poor
to reform the global economic order and to provide other forms of protection and
aid to the poor in order to repair the harms that they are doing and have done. Pogge
therefore claims that the debate concerning our responsibility with regard to world
poverty is a “factual” rather than a philosophical one (Pogge 2002, p. 14). Even if
the basic moral duty is merely the modest and negative one of not doing harm, if it
can be shown that the global rich are in fact harming the poor, then they have the
derivative duty of justice to attend to the harms done. For Pogge then, the problem
of world poverty is not to be understood in terms of assisting the poor but in terms
of not unjustly harming the poor.
But does Pogge’s approach evade philosophical controversies entirely? Consider
the conception of harm that is presumed in Pogge’s “factual” claim that the global
institutional order is unjustly harming the poor. How is this order harmful to some?
It cannot be that it is harming some people simply because it is making their lives
worse in comparison to some other (previous) arrangement, because, if anything,
as Pogge himself acknowledges, the present world order on the whole benefits the
global poor more than some previous ones. It cannot be that it is harming some
persons because they would have done better living in a pre-institutional condition,
or a global “state of nature”, because we don’t have the slightest notion what such a
condition would be like. For all we know, it could be a miserable Hobbesian condi-
tion of a state of war of all against all, a situation in which human life is “solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish and short” (Hobbes). In that case, the present global order must
count as an advancement on the human condition. (For a short discussion on the
idea of the state of nature, see the Appendix to this chapter.)
Pogge, in the end, holds that the affluent are harming the global poor because they
are imposing on the poor a global order that is depriving them of access to basic
goods when an alternative less restrictive arrangement is available. That is, the pre-
sent order harms the poor because a more felicitous order could be adopted instead
by the rich (2002, pp. 16, 139). Pogge needs to understand harm by way of com-
parison to available institutional alternatives because he needs to be able to say that
the present global order is harming the poor even though it could be superior to
the state of nature. But if this is the argument, then Pogge has to explain why the
affluent have the obligation to opt for a more propitious global framework over the
less friendly framework. In particular, how is this positive duty to offer and support
a global order of a particular kind compatible with the libertarian assumption that
moral agents have only the negative duty to avoid harming others (Risse 2005; Tan
2010)? On the contrary, Pogge’s conception of unjust harming seems to presuppose
a strong positive duty on the part of moral agents to establish and support the institu-
tions that are conducive to meeting basic needs.7
If the above criticism is accepted, then Pogge’s ecumenical aspiration is unachiev-
able. That is, he cannot grant the libertarian moral premise and still say that the
global order is harming the poor because there are better feasible alternative arrange-
ments. Why should anyone have the duty to bring about and support such alternative
arrangements if the only duties we have are negative ones? What is the basis of this
seemingly positive moral duty from the libertarian standpoint?
Pogge, if these criticisms stand, is forced back to philosophical discussion, this time
over the notion of harm. If so, we might as well confront the libertarian challenge
head on and, instead of accommodating it, attempt to deny its premise that we have
only negative duties of justice (of forbearance) to each other.
To take stock, we introduced three ways a philosopher can make the case that there
is a human right to subsistence. One is to argue, at the foundational level, that there
are such things as welfare rights that impose positive duties on agents. The other is
to show that there is no logical difference between the basic rights that we already
endorse and defend, and subsistence rights. The third argues that even if the only
duty we have to each other is the negative duty of not unjustly harming others, the
fact that we are harming or have harmed others triggers responsibilities on our part
to take appropriate steps to mitigate these harms.
A duty-based approach
The above discussion introduces deontological approaches to world poverty that are
rights based. In contrast, others have argued that the better deontological approach
is a duty-based one, one that begins with and emphasizes duties rather than rights.
The duty-based approach claims that the rights approach is not very helpful to the
poor because it fails to identify a specific duty-bearer corresponding to each rights-
claimant. Under this approach, the poor have the basic right to subsistence and, it
is true, this triggers duties on others to attend to their deprivation. But who is the
specific agent responsible for discharging the obligation? And what exactly is owed
to the claimant beyond the general exhortation that her basic needs be met?
Onora O’Neill’s writings are representative of this alternate deontological approach,
which she takes to be truer to Kantian morality since it begins from duties rather than
rights. As O’Neill writes, “enforcement [of rights] cannot be discussed or take place
until obligations are identified and allocated” (1991, p. 296; 2000, pp. 135–136).
And without this enforceability, basic rights are merely, following Joel Feinberg,
“manifesto rights” (Feinberg 1980); that is, they are empty. At best, these rights cor-
respond to “imperfect” obligations on the part of others. Imperfect obligations are
obligations that are unassigned and unspecified. So, on the rights-based approach,
the criticism goes, although someone has the duty to respond to world poverty in
some way, no one in particular can be demanded to act, let alone be responsible
for acting in some specific way. Rights are identified, but they are left unfulfilled
because the assignment of duties and agents is unspecified.
The challenge posed by the duty-based approach serves as an important reminder
that we need to attend to duties in our analysis of world hunger and global justice.
Human rights defenders must surely attend to the important business of assign-
ing and allocating responsibilities to promote and protect human rights. In this
regard, the duty perspective crucially supplements the rights-based approach to
world poverty. But it is less clear if it is a conceptual and analytical alternative to a
rights-based approach, as the approach is typically presented. Does the duty-based
approach really identify and motivate specific obligations that a human rights-based
approach cannot compel? Or are the duty approach and rights approach, at the end
of the day, only different sides of the same coin?
Taking duties seriously can compel us to act. But then, a rights theorist might say, so
does taking human rights seriously. An advocate of the duty-based approach might
insist that we have duties that are not human rights related, such as the duty to
provide subsistence. But would the human rights advocate not ask how this is dif-
ferent from, if not also less effective than, arguing that subsistence is a human right?
And if the objection is that subsistence can’t be a human right because there are no
assigned actors to take on this responsibility, the human rights defender can reply:
“Then let’s assign these duties.” The challenge then is recast as a practical rather than
a conceptual one.
• SUMMARY
The utilitarian and deontological (rights-based) approaches to world poverty have
their strengths and weaknesses. The utilitarian approach will appeal to some readers
for its simplicity and for the fact that it carries little normative (especially meta-
physical) baggage about individual rights. But a major difficulty for utilitarianism,
as illustrated in the case of its application to the problem of world poverty, is that it
seems unreasonably demanding to some of its critics. A rights approach, unlike the
utilitarian approach, allows for a principled cut-off point to any rights-generated
duties. In this respect, it is not inherently unreasonably demanding. The philosoph-
ical challenge this approach faces, however, is how to justify the existence and the
moral force of a right to subsistence. One key challenge for a rights-based approach
is the libertarian one, that our moral duties are limited to the negative duties of
not injuring, interfering with or harming other moral agents. (We have looked at
two arguments – Shue’s and Pogge’s – that attempt to evade, to different degrees,
philosophical contentions of this sort.)
• APPENDIX
The idea of a “state of nature” is invoked by political philosophers for the purpose of
contrasting a pre-institutional and lawless human condition with a lawful social order
under a government. In early modern western political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes,
John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are well-known examples of philosophers
who introduced the idea of a state of nature to explain why individuals would choose
to enter into a social contract with each other to form a political association in favor
of the state of nature.
For Hobbes, the state of nature is conceived as a condition of “war of everyone against
everyone” and in which human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. In
this perilous condition, where “justice has no place”, individual preservation is never
secure. Since only an absolute sovereign with indivisible powers can avert this miser-
able situation, so Hobbes argues, it is therefore rational for individuals to submit to
such an absolute sovereign.
Locke, in contrast to Hobbes, takes the state of nature to be a “state of liberty but
not a state of license”. It is a state in which individuals stand in some moral relation-
ship with each other and are recognized bearers of moral rights. However, there
are certain inconveniences in the state of nature, even so. The rights of individuals,
such as the right to property, remain insecure in a state of nature where there is
no authorized protector and enforcer of our rights. Thus, rational and reasonable
individuals will agree with each other to leave the state of nature and to form a civil
society governed by law. Yet, since the purpose of government is to further and
protect the rights of individuals, it would not be rational for individuals to consent
to an absolute sovereign, contra Hobbes. What rational individuals would agree to
is a limited government.
Rousseau has yet another view of the state of nature. For Rousseau, the true state of
nature is one of innocence, one in which, if humans are neither good nor bad, they
are certainly not vicious. To oversimplify, for Rousseau, one of the rationales for
individuals to form a political association through a social contract is that, by creating
a state in which we are citizens, we acquire new rights and moral capacities, and are
able to live in cooperative arrangements with others while remaining free.
Thus, there is no single standard conception of the state of nature. One might say
that a philosopher interprets the state of nature as it suits the type of political author-
ity he or she wishes to justify. The key point for our purpose is that there are differing
conceptions of the state of nature, as a state of war of all against all at one extreme, to
a state of moral innocence at the other. Thus, whether we think individuals are made
worse off under any global institutional order than they would be under some imagi-
nary global state of nature will depend on how we conceive of that state of nature.
• STUDY QUESTIONS
1 Is the utilitarian approach to world poverty objectionably overly demanding of
persons who are in the position to respond? Give reasons for your response.
2 Can a utilitarian permit some room for moral agents to pursue ends or activities
that aren’t utility maximizing? Why, or why not?
3 Can there be a positive duty corresponding to the right to subsistence?
4 Are security rights and subsistence rights equally basic and morally on a par?
5 What are some advantages and disadvantages of a utilitarian approach to world
poverty versus a deontological approach?
6 Which of the two philosophical approaches – utilitarian or deontology – provides
better guidance for how we are to respond to world poverty?
• NOTES
1 See http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview. Last accessed September
2015.
2 The gross national income per capita for Norway is $64,992, and $52,947 for
the United States. For Senegal it is $2,188, and for Malawi it is $747. Figures are
from the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report
2015 (last accessed June 2016). Available at: http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/
files/2015_human_development_report.pdf
3 See Jeremy Bentham (1780) and John Stuart Mill (1863) for the classic statements
of utilitarianism.
4 See Singer (2015) on “effective altruism”. See also Singer’s TED Talk, “The why
and how of effective altruism” at https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_singer_the_
why_and_how_of_effective_altruism?language=en [7 Sept. 2016].
5 See Kant (2008 [1785]) for one classic statement of deontological ethics.
6 “WTO fails the poorest – again”. Available at http://www.theguardian.com/global-
development/poverty-matters/2011/jul/29/wto-doha-fails-poorest-countries
[7 Sept. 2016].
7 For more discussion on Pogge’s work, see the essays in Jagger (2010).
8 To minimize clutter, for complete bibliographical information on all texts listed in
the References and Further reading sections, see the Bibliography.
• REFERENCES8
Onora O’Neill, “Transnational Economic Justice”, in Bounds of Justice (2000).
Thomas Pogge, “General Introduction” and “Eradicating Systemic Poverty”, in World
Poverty and Human Rights (2001).
Henry Shue, “Security and Subsistence” and “Correlative Duties”, in Basic Rights (1980).
Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (1972).
• FURTHER READING
Peter Singer continues the discussion in Practical Ethics (2011), and discusses “effective
altruism” in The Most Good You Can Do (2015). Nicole Hassoun (2012) puts the case
for a duty to address world poverty by arguing that the global order would be illegitimate
otherwise, since individuals lacking subsistence could not be said to have consented to
that arrangement. Pablo Gilabert (2012) makes a deontological case for humanitarian
duties by appealing to the “contractarian” idea that we ought to act on principles that
no one could reasonably reject. For discussions on Pogge’s writings, see Jagger’s edited
volume, Pogge and His Critics (2010).
3
•
global economic
equality
Is global economic inequality an injustice? That is, is this inequality a wrong that puts
the international community under an obligation to regulate? One response is that
economic inequality is an injustice to the extent that it results in the impoverishment
of some. That is, if we take world poverty to be an injustice, and if economic ine-
quality causes poverty, we then have an instrumental reason for treating economic
inequality as a problem of global justice, and to take action to control the economic
gulf between countries.
But while inequality and poverty are causally related, inequality and poverty are none-
theless conceptually distinct matters. We can imagine, for example, a world in which
every country rises above the extreme poverty benchmark but in which economic
inequalities remain. Consider, for example, the gross national income per capita of
Norway is $64, 992, whereas that for Malaysia is $22,762, and for Costa Rica $13,413.
Both Malaysia and Costa Rica are ranked “high” on the UNDP’s human development
scale. But there is a not insignificant income inequality between them and Norway,
and this inequality can translate into inequalities in other areas of life, such as educa-
tional opportunities. The average expected length of schooling in Malaysia is 12.7 years,
compared with 17.5 in Norway.1 Are these international inequalities an injustice even
though the less well off countries cannot be described as impoverished? Is the fact that
some persons have fewer life options an injustice, per se?
This is not just a question of speculative or conceptual interest. Egalitarianism, after
all, is a matter of serious debate in public political discourse in the domestic context.
Some philosophers believe that economic inequality between citizens in a society can
be a problem of justice for reasons besides that of its potential causal connection to
poverty. Is economic inequality in the global context a morally salient topic as well?
No doubt, the more urgent moral problem remains that of extreme global poverty,
but this does not mean that the question of economic inequality is of no practical
importance. For one thing, when we identify what justice requires beyond the obvi-
ous, we can better guard against potential moral blind spots and complacencies.
Before beginning, it will be useful to clarify some basic concepts. First, a commitment
to economic equality does not entail a commitment to equal economic outcomes. That
22 • global economic equality
is, it does not mean that everyone must have the same amount of resources (or what-
ever economic goods the egalitarian might favor) when the dust of redistribution has
settled. Indeed, few egalitarians, if any, argue for equality of outcome in this sense.
Most egalitarians are egalitarians in that they believe economic inequality ought to
be regulated or limited by an appropriate principle of distribution. Typically, an
egalitarian distributive principle takes an equal distribution of some economic goods
to be the benchmark, and specifies the conditions under which departures from the
benchmark of equality are acceptable. (For example, we might take the relevant
economic goods to be material resources like income and wealth. At the end of this
chapter, we will look at different views on the metric of distribution.) Different
egalitarian theories thus offer different explanations for why equal distribution is
the default, and propose different justifications for admissible deviations from the
egalitarian default.
Second, economic equality among persons is distinct from the question of the equal
moral worth of persons. Indeed, the more interesting dispute in the literature on
economic equality begins from the basic ideal that all persons have equal moral
worth and are entitled to equal respect. Where the disagreement with respect to
economic equality lies is in how we are to understand the idea of moral equality or
equal respect. Does the ideal of equal respect for persons require economic equal-
ity among persons? Not all commentators think so. For example, most libertarians
would hold that all persons are moral equals. But precisely because they are moral
equals, economic equality is unacceptable since that will violate the equal liberty of
persons in their property, which libertarians take to be basic. Indeed, the interesting
arguments against global economic equality do not deny, but in fact affirm, the ideal
of global moral equality of persons. What they deny is that the moral equality of per-
sons entails some commitments of global economic equality. For clarity, following
one standard usage, I will use the term “egalitarianism” to refer to the specific ideal
of economic equality, and proponents of global economic equality will be referred
to as “global egalitarians”. Adopting this terminology, someone can believe that all
persons in the world are moral equals, entitled to equal respect, without necessarily
endorsing global egalitarianism.
Finally, for the moment, the discussion will mostly presume that it is economic
resources like income and wealth whose distribution an egalitarian principle seeks
to regulate. But the question, “Equality with respect to what?” is a matter of debate
within political philosophy and we will comment on this at the end of the chapter.
• HOW TO ARGUE FOR GLOBAL EGALITARIANISM

Global egalitarians normally avoid reinventing the wheel. Instead of coming up with
new arguments for egalitarianism as such, their arguments more typically take the
form of modifying and extending available influential arguments for egalitarianism
(normally constructed for the domestic case) to the global context.
global economic equality • 23
There are two broad classes of egalitarian arguments that global egalitarians can
exploit. One class of argument takes egalitarianism to be something owed to moral
agents as such. That is, duties of egalitarian justice are duties persons have to each
other simply as moral beings independently of any particular associative relations
they might be in. Let us call this approach the moral conception of egalitarianism.2
The other class of argument takes egalitarianism to be owed only to persons who are
in (or ought to see themselves to be in) some relevant type of associative relations,
and not something that is owed to persons as such. That is, duties of egalitarian jus-
tice apply only among persons participating in the right kind of association, that is,
as members of a particular social group, and not between moral persons per se. Thus,
in contrast to the moral approach, this one takes egalitarianism as an association-
dependent value. This is known as the associative approach to egalitarianism.
We will look at these two approaches in turn below. But since some of the main
arguments for global egalitarianism are attempts at extending domestic egalitarian
arguments to the global stage, it will be helpful to digress briefly to look at one
influential theory of justice, that of John Rawls. There are several reasons why we
would start with Rawls. First, Rawls’s is the egalitarian ideal that is most frequently
adopted by global egalitarians. Familiarity with Rawls’s egalitarianism will provide
useful background for some of the global arguments that we will be considering.
Second, Rawls’s theory of justice is itself a major contribution to political philosophy
and therefore worth getting familiar with in its own right. Third, Rawls himself,
in his latest works, when he moves from domestic justice to international justice,
explicitly rejects global egalitarianism. Understanding Rawls’s theory of justice will
help us to better appreciate one line of argument against global egalitarianism and his
own take on global justice (both of which we will be turning to later). Readers who
are already acquainted with Rawls’s work may skip ahead to the section on Moral
arguments for global egalitarianism.
• JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS
In his influential work A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls offers a social con-
tractarian methodological alternative to utilitarianism, and a defense of a liberalism
that takes economic equality seriously. Rawls believes that a society that is regarded
as a fair system of social cooperation between free and equal citizens has to be one
in which the basic political, economic and social institutions of society that assign
citizens their fundamental rights and responsibilities ought to be institutions that
each, as free and equal rational agents, could consent to. Under this social con-
tract method then, individuals are presumed to be in an initial contracting situation
wherein they are to agree on the principles of justice that are to regulate their basic
institutions – what Rawls calls the “basic structure” of society. To ensure that indi-
viduals in this “original position” are indeed symmetrically situated in relation to each
other (i.e., free and equal), certain conditions have to be introduced. One condition
we accept, Rawls believes, is that factors that are “arbitrary from the moral point of
view”, such as the social class one is born into, the distribution of persons’ natural
talents, one’s gender and ethnicity, ought not to “improperly influence” our distribu-
tive shares (Rawls 1971, p. 71).
In order to best factor out these kinds of contingencies that can distort our delibera-
tion about justice, Rawls stipulates that parties in the original position put themselves
behind an imaginary “veil of ignorance” wherein they are to assume that they have
no knowledge of their conceptions of the good life, their social class, their natural
talents, their gender and ethnicity and the like. Thus situated, individuals are free
and equal in relation to each other qua parties to the contract since none will have
superior bargaining power or knowledge of his or her special interests.
In the original position, situated behind the veil of ignorance, the parties will ration-
ally opt for the following two principles of justice over standard forms of utilitarianism
(Rawls 2001, pp. 42–43):
1 Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal
basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties
for all.
2 Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions:
a they are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of
fair equality of opportunity;
b they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society
(the difference principle).
For instance, utilitarianism could allow for the restriction of the liberties of some if
that would indeed increase overall utility for the whole; or utilitarianism could allow
the deprivation of material goods for some if this would mean more goods overall
for society. But it is not rational for parties in Rawls’s original position to support
utilitarianism since any of them could find themselves on the losing side. Rawls’s
proposed two principles of justice provide guarantees against such eventualities and
thus serve as the more rational option. Since these principles of justice are the out-
come of a contracting situation that is fair, Rawls calls his theory of justice, “Justice
as Fairness”.
Of special significance for the present discussion is the second principle on social
and economic inequalities (which we can call the principle of economic justice for
short). As stated, this principle has two parts, both of which specify the limits of
admissible economic and social inequality among citizens. The first part is the prin-
ciple of equal opportunity, which requires that any inequalities between citizens
(say income inequality) are acceptable only if they are the result of people holding
different offices and social roles (say jobs) that are open to all under “fair equality of
opportunity”. The second part further specifies that inequalities are acceptable only
within a social scheme that is most beneficial to the worst-off class of individuals. To
illustrate, imagine that we have before us a range of different feasible socio-economic

schemes. To oversimplify, think of each scheme as a scheme with different taxation
rates for the upper class. Under each arrangement, there will be varying levels of
economic inequality. The “difference principle”, as this part of the second principle is
called, requires that we choose the scheme in which the worst-off class benefits most
in comparison to how they would benefit in the alternative arrangements.
While some commentators have attempted to globalize Rawls’s project, as we will
see in this chapter, it is important to note that Rawls himself explicitly denies this
extension of his method and arguments in his book, The Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999),
a rejection already hinted at in A Theory of Justice itself. We will address Rawls’s own
reluctance to endorse global egalitarianism in the next chapter. For now, let’s see
how some global egalitarians have, in different ways, attempted to globalize argu-
ments for distributive equality, such as Rawls’s, in spite of his own intention. Can the
ideal of fair equality of opportunity apply in the global domain? Can there be a global
difference principle, such that we ought to create and support the global institutional
order (the set of institutions governing trade rules and relations, economic interac-
tions, international law, international property rights and the like) under which the
worst-off class of individuals in the world will benefit most?
• MORAL ARGUMENTS FOR GLOBAL EGALITARIANISM

Let’s now turn to arguments for global egalitarians. The moral conception holds that
persons owe egalitarian commitments to each other simply because of their com-
mon status as moral agents. One influential argument for egalitarianism as a moral
concern is “luck egalitarianism” (see Cohen 1989, Arneson 2011, Knight 2009, and
Lippert-Rasmussen 2015). As its name implies, luck egalitarianism holds that a dis-
tribution of the relevant economic goods is just when it tracks individual choices and
ambition, and unjust when it tracks their individual good or bad luck. The intuition
behind luck egalitarianism is that while it is acceptable for a person to do better in
life because of her hard work or ambition (choice), it is unfair if she has a worse life
prospect just because of circumstances outside her control (i.e., bad luck). Thus it is
unjust when some individuals do better than others merely because of the social class
that they were accidentally born into. Likewise, it is unjust when socio-economic
institutions disadvantage or even discriminate against persons based on arbitrary
traits like gender and ethnicity. The aim of distributive justice then is to counteract
the effects of the myriad contingencies on persons’ life opportunities. Distributive
egalitarian principles serve to correct for the differences in persons’ life prospects due
to circumstances as well as the misfortunes of life.
The luck egalitarian ideal extends easily to the global context. Like social class, indi-
viduals don’t choose the countries they are born in. Yet, like social class, indeed more
so, one’s country of birth has profound implications for one’s life opportunities. Some
countries happen to sit on more natural resources. Others may do better because of
better economic institutions and infrastructure that are the result of collective deci-
sions and societal effort, rather than luck as such. Yet, even so, it is still a matter of
luck that any particular person is born into a country with these advantages. The
wealth that a person inherits may well be due to the efforts of her ancestors, but it is
still sheer luck that she is in a position to inherit.
If justice requires that the allocation of economic goods or opportunities among
persons ought not to track their good or bad luck but only their effort and choice,
then there ought to be some global distributive principle to mitigate contingencies
like a person’s place of birth. Thus, quite independently of the facts of international
relations, there is a moral obligation for better-off nations to undertake certain dis-
tributive obligations to disadvantaged ones.
In his groundbreaking Political Theory and International Relations, Charles Beitz offers
a partial extension of the luck egalitarian ideal to the international arena (though
the descriptive label “luck egalitarianism” postdates Beitz’s work). In response to the
problem of the uneven natural distribution of the Earth’s resources, Beitz refers to
John Rawls’s proposal that factors which are “arbitrary from a moral point of view”
(Rawls 1971, p. 71) ought not to “improperly influence” persons’ distributive shares.
One example of a morally arbitrary fact for Rawls is the distribution of individuals’
natural talents. That is, it is contingent that one person has a special talent for scien-
tific research that others don’t share; or that a person has a special talent for basketball
that is uncommon. According to one interpretation of Rawls, then, one impetus for
distributive justice is to compensate for this unequal distribution of talents among
persons. Accordingly, Beitz argues that the same consideration applies to the allo-
cation of the Earth’s natural resources. Given the arbitrariness of the spread of the
Earth’s natural resources, it is unfair if some individuals do better while others floun-
der just because they live in countries that happen to be naturally better endowed.
Thus Beitz concludes that even if we assume that there isn’t an international order,
that states are more or less self-sufficient and don’t interact with each other much,
the arbitrariness principle (he associates with Rawls) sufficiently warrants a principle
of redistributing the benefits associated with having natural resources. That is, coun-
tries that are, by luck, better endowed in terms of resources have the duty of justice
to redistribute some of the benefits accruing from their resource holdings to those
who are unluckily less well endowed.
While Beitz’s implicit invocation of luck egalitarianism is limited to controlling the
effects of the maldistribution of natural resources, others more recently, such as
Simon Caney, appeal explicitly to luck egalitarianism to argue for a more encompass-
ing global egalitarian ideal. According to Caney, given that personal opportunities in
the world are so deeply influenced by the lottery of one’s citizenship, luck egali-
tarianism taken to its logical end will require some kind of global principle of equal
opportunity. That is, the world should be arranged such that no individual has fewer
comparative opportunities than others simply because of the contingency of their
place of birth.
The luck egalitarian ideal has intuitive appeal to many. It does, after all, appear
unfair if someone has to make do with less merely because of bad luck. This point
is especially poignant if we think of the bad luck of having some serious congenital
illness or disability. Turning our gaze to the world, it seems patently unfair also
that some people will have to make do with less simply because of the accidental
fact of where they are born. But why should the random event of being born south
as opposed to north of the Rio Grande make such a big difference to persons’ life
opportunities? If we believe, from the moral point of view, that luck should not have
such a decisive role in shaping the course of persons’ lives, then justice entails some
distributive principles to control for the vagaries of such arbitrariness.
It is important to note that the attribution of luck egalitarianism to Rawls is contro-
versial, and the dominant reading of Rawls currently is that he is not a luck egalitarian.
Indeed, Rawls himself is quite explicit in his later writings that the reason why egali-
tarianism matters has nothing to do with the need to mitigate the effects of luck but
for reasons of democratic reciprocity. We will turn to this matter in the next chapter.
In any case, regardless of the proper (Rawlsian) pedigree of luck egalitarianism, what
is relevant is that luck egalitarianism is, in its own right, a forceful account of why
egalitarianism matters, and that it provides a powerful basis for global egalitarianism.
Luck egalitarianism is not the only moral conception of egalitarianism. A different
moral argument for egalitarianism might say that respect for the moral equality
of persons implies that each person should have a say in the design of institutions
that affect her, and a global institutional order that ignores economic inequalities
among persons would be one that some could reasonably reject. But the distin-
guishing feature of the moral conception is that global egalitarianism is something
owed to persons as such, independently of shared membership in a social group or
associational ties.
• ASSOCIATIVE ARGUMENTS FOR GLOBAL

EGALITARIANISM
The associative approach denies that egalitarian obligations take hold between
persons qua moral beings as such. Egalitarian obligations, on the contrary, are extra-
moral obligations in the sense that they apply only among persons who share some
form of social associational relationship with each other. So the associativist will reject
luck egalitarianism as a plausible basis of distributive egalitarianism since luck egali-
tarianism treats egalitarianism as immediately relevant among moral persons as such.
The associativist does not deny that we can have basic moral duties to make sure
that persons are not deprived of basic needs, duties that we can have independently
of any common association. But egalitarian obligations belong to a different category
of duty according to the associativist view. Egalitarian commitments go beyond the
provision of basic needs, and require that inequality in persons’ shares of economic
goods or their life prospects be addressed. According to associativists, this additional

requirement of distributive equality kicks in only when persons stand in a certain
social relation to each other.
The relevant form of association that is commonly appealed to by global egalitarians
is the idea of fair social cooperation. It is an indication of the richness of John Rawls’s
theory that other egalitarians, contra luck egalitarians, take his theory of justice to
be representative of an associative approach to egalitarianism. On this associativ-
ist reading of Rawls, it is the ideal that society is a fair system of social cooperation
among free and equal parties that sparks the move towards egalitarianism. Following
Rawls in this respect, some global egalitarians attempt to show that the global order
can indeed be properly described or appropriately conceived as a system of social
cooperation among states which, in turn, represent individuals. They point to trade
practices and agreements, international trade laws, and more generally the presence
of international law, as evidence that there is in fact a global cooperative scheme.
Thus Rawls’s method and reasoning extend straightforwardly to the global domain.
We are to imagine a global “original position”, complete with a global “veil of igno-
rance”, in which the parties to the social contract are to decide on the principles
of justice for the global basic structure. The main modification when we globalize
Rawls’s method is that among the arbitrary facts the parties are presumed to be igno-
rant of (behind the global veil of ignorance) is the fact of the wealth of the country
they represent or, more to the point, the country they belong to. Thus situated, it
will be rational for the parties to insist on and endorse some kind of global egalitarian
principle since any one of them can find herself a member of a less well-off country
(when the veil is lifted) after the deliberation.3 If Rawls’s arguments are extended in
this way, according to some global egalitarians, the outcome is global principles of
justice identical to Rawls’s two principles.
Indeed, while Beitz makes the case for a limited redistributive principle to coun-
teract the arbitrariness of the distribution of natural resources (as noted above),
he relies on the associative reading of Rawls to make the case for a more system-
atic global egalitarian commitment. He points to different features of our world
order – such as trade relations and rules that regulate this relationship, interna-
tional law, and the like – which suggest that the ideal of social cooperation underlies
international relations. Beitz argues, therefore, that Rawls’s method and reasoning
globalizes straightforwardly, and his resulting two principles of justice therefore
have global scope. In particular, Rawls’s “difference principle”, which states that
economic and social institutions are to be arranged to the best benefit of the worst
off, applies globally.
Global egalitarians need not, however, be necessarily committed to the view that
global egalitarian principles are just domestic egalitarian principles writ large. As noted
at the beginning of this chapter, what makes a position egalitarian is the presump-
tion of an egalitarian default and the commitment to control deviations from this
default. Thus, a global egalitarian does not forfeit her egalitarian stripes if she holds
that domestic egalitarian principles and global principles can differ in their content
(e.g., Moellendorf). Thus, a difference can be noted between the pattern of distribu-
tion (i.e., whether a distribution should be egalitarian or not) and the content of the
principle of distribution (e.g., the form of the egalitarian principle itself). A global
egalitarian, therefore, can easily allow that global principles have different content
from domestic egalitarian principles since the practices and institutions that global
principles are meant to regulate are quite different from domestic ones. Some have
argued, for example, that the economic practices and institutions that global distribu-
tive principles are meant to guide are limited to trade laws, practices and agreements,
unlike in the domestic case where economic institutions are more encompassing and
determine ownership rights at a more fundamental level (James 2012).
• EQUALITY OF WHAT? RESOURCES VERSUS

CAPABILITY
What is it that egalitarians should aim to distribute more equally? That is, what is the
unit or metric of distribution? In the egalitarian debate, this is known as the question
of the equalisandum – Latin for “that to be equalized”.
The preceding discussion largely assumes that the equalisandum is resources, broadly
construed. We included what Rawls calls the “primary goods” of income and wealth,
and other goods such as natural resources, education, and good health, that all per-
sons would need for pursuing whatever ends in life they might have. Egalitarians
who take the equalisandum to be resources are called “resource egalitarians”.
But is “resource” the most appropriate metric of distribution? Is there another unit
of distribution that might make more sense? In the global justice debate, the main
alternative to resource egalitarianism is the capability approach (Sen 1979).
Before describing the capability approach, it will help to take note of a third metric
that both proponents of the capability approach and resource egalitarians reject. This
is the view that an equal distribution of individual well-being or welfare is the aim of
distributive justice. This position is commonly called “welfare egalitarianism”.
But there are two serious problems with welfare egalitarianism. The first is that it
succumbs to the expensive tastes of individuals. What if some people require more
resources in order to be as satisfied as others? More problematically, what if their
expensive tastes are preferences that they have deliberately cultivated and not due to
some unavoidable condition they have? Welfare egalitarianism would require, per-
versely, that more resources be allocated to them. Second, welfare egalitarianism is
subject to the problem of “entrenched deprivation”. An individual adapted to a life of
deprivation or disadvantage might need fewer resources to be as satisfied as another
who is used to a luxurious life. Equalizing welfare will have the counterintuitive
requirement that the person with the adjusted preferences, in light of her deprived
circumstance, gets less than the person with higher life expectations.
Resource egalitarianism avoids these pitfalls. The aim of an egalitarian distribution is

to provide individuals with their fair share of goods with which they can then go on
to pursue their ends and satisfy whatever needs they might have. The fact that some
have acquired more expensive tastes is their responsibility, and the fact that some have
lowered expectations is not held against them. Since certain economic goods are things
that everyone needs, whatever their personal preferences might be, egalitarian distribu-
tive justice cares only to assign these goods as fairly as possible. What goes on in the
minds of persons – their actual satisfaction or happiness – is outside the purview of
egalitarian justice. The appeal of resource egalitarianism then is that it is “neutral” with
respect to individuals’ preferences and goals in life.
While proponents of the capability approach, such as Martha Nussbaum (2001) and
Amartya Sen (1979), also reject welfare egalitarianism, they think that the resource
egalitarian goes too far in dislocating egalitarianism from what goes on inside the
person. If the aim of distributive justice is to ensure that individuals are able to freely
and equally pursue their ends (whatever these might be), as resource egalitarians
accept, then the fact that different individuals can utilize their resources to varying
degrees is crucial. The different conversion powers of individuals with respect to the
resources at their disposal means that an equal amount of resources can have differ-
ent value or worth for different individuals.
For instance, a person with a serious disability will be at a disadvantaged with respect
to a given bundle of resources in comparison to an able-bodied person with an identi-
cal bundle. The disabled person will have to expend some of her allocated resources
to service special needs (say mobility needs or special health-care needs) that the
able-bodied person need not. Thus, her effective resource share is, for this reason,
in fact reduced. What is fundamental then, according to capability theorists, is not
one’s share of resources, but one’s capability to turn a given set of resources into
meaningful use. Since the disabled person needs more resources to achieve the basic
capability (say for mobility) than able-bodied persons, a concern for people’s free
and equal capacity to lead lives of their choosing will require that we direct more
resources to the disabled.
The moral impetus for capability comes from the concept of human flourishing and
achievement, or human “functioning”. While Sen eschews proposing a universal and
objective set of human functioning, Martha Nussbaum believes that there are various
human functionings that are not subject to cultural variation, such as living a normal
life span; having adequate nutrition, good health, and shelter; enjoying relationships
and associations with others; forming and pursing a conception of the good life, and
so on.4 But both believe that it is the capability to achieve these human functionings
that is basic for distributive justice, not the realization of human functioning itself.
This is because, in the name of freedom, it has to be up to individuals whether or not
to achieve a certain functioning once they have the capability to do so. For exam-
ple, a person with the capability to acquire adequate nutrition may wish, instead,
to go on a religious fast even though she has access to food. The difference between
this person and another who is malnourished because he lacked access to food is in
that the former has the requisite capability but not the latter. Distributive justice
demands only the proper allocation of capability, not the actual realization of func-
tioning since this is left up to individuals to achieve.
The capability versus resources debate has important implications for the debate
on global egalitarianism. The capability approach prompts a different comparative
measure of how countries perform from that which focuses solely on economic
goods, such as national wealth and income. A country which scores higher in terms
of national income per capita than another country can also be one in which her citi-
zens face lower life expectancy, a more degraded natural environment, polluted air,
greater economic and gender inequality and fewer educational opportunities. Is the
average individual in the higher income country necessarily better off than people
in the lower income country? Many of us would think not. The capability approach
tells us that to have a fuller picture of how people in different countries are doing
comparatively, we need to look at more than just a country’s per capita income, and
be attuned to other features of individual flourishing.
Indeed, inspired by Sen’s capability approach, the United Nations Development
Programme uses a composite index in its development ranking of countries. The
Human Development Index reflects a multidimensional view of human develop-
ment, taking into account, in addition to gross national income per capita, the life
expectancy of its citizens, their average number of years of schooling, economic ine-
quality, gender and political inequality, and other non-income aspects of poverty.5
This approach gives us a very different view of how countries fare than if we were to
rely solely on gross national income per capita. For instance, Qatar, with the highest
gross national income per capita of all countries at $123, 124 is ranked 32nd on the
Human Development Index when other factors of life quality are included, such as
gender equality (for which it ranks 116th). Thus, it makes a real difference to how
we understand and address global inequality, depending on whether we use a narrow
resource metric of human development or a multidimensional one.
The other implication of a capability approach, interestingly, is that it can tilt away
from global egalitarianism (again here understood as the view that equal distribu-
tion is the default, departures from which must be justified) to the position called
global sufficiency. Many capabilities theorists believe that what distributive justice
demands is that each person acquires an adequate or sufficient level of capability, not
that each should have an equal amount of capability. To be able to realize human
functioning requires only that individuals attain some threshold capacity, such as
a sufficient level of health and nutrition, a certain level of educational achieve-
ment, and the like. There is no compunction to require that each individual has an
equal level of capability (such as an equal level of health or educational attainment)
beyond the sufficiency threshold. Thus, Gillian Brock has argued against global
egalitarianism in favor of the idea of global sufficiency because of her capability
starting point (Brock 2009).
Indeed, in political philosophy in general, most capability theorists subscribe to the

position known as sufficientarianism. This is the view that the just distributive form
or pattern is that which ensures that individuals have a sufficient or adequate amount
of whatever the currency of distribution is, as opposed to an equal amount. That
is, if we answer “capability” in response to the question “Distribution with respect
to what?”, we are likely also to answer “sufficientarian” in response to the question
“What is the sought for pattern of distribution?”
Resource egalitarians have responded that the capability approach reduces to
resource egalitarianism once we begin to operationalize capability. How else do we
distribute capability but by distributing resources and related opportunities? Also,
resources can cover the things that capability is concerned with – such as differences
in personal capacities to achieve ends – if we adopt a broader view of resources to
include personal resources like one’s talents, abilities and the like. Moreover, other
resource egalitarians like Rawls, believe that variation in personal capability can be
taken into account when principles of resource distribution are implemented as pol-
icy. For example, when we implement distributive policies, the disabled person’s
special needs can be taken into consideration. These are matters of ongoing discus-
sion in contemporary political philosophy, and we will unfortunately have to leave
it at that here.
For the present, what is important is that even if we grant that resource egalitarian-
ism identifies the right metric of global distributive equality, what the capability
challenge has alerted us to is the fact that a proper understanding of global equality
will require a more holistic understanding of the resources that matter, besides a
country’s income and material wealth.
• SUMMARY
The basic strategy of the global egalitarian is to extend general arguments for egali-
tarianism (or more precisely arguments constructed for the domestic context) to the
global context. The global egalitarian holds that there is no relevant normative differ-
ence between the global arena and the domestic arenas and so consistency requires
the application of domestic egalitarian arguments to the global context. Thus, if the
reason why egalitarianism matters among citizens in a society stems from the obli-
gations that persons owe to each other qua equal moral agents, then egalitarianism
matters globally among persons as well. Or if the case for domestic egalitarianism
turns on some associative facts about shared citizenship, some global egalitarians
have attempted to show that these facts also obtain in the global setting.
A significant difference, however, between the domestic and global domains is
that in the latter it is states that interact with each other rather than individuals
directly. Still, it is important not to overstate the difference here. After all, individ-
ual relations within a state, and their interactions qua citizens, are also mediated by
institutions. In the global plane, in contrast, individuals mostly engage and relate to
other citizens through their respective states. The presence of states may pose some
complications for the extension of egalitarian reasoning to the global plane but
many global egalitarians do not ignore the presence of independent states and the
fact that states are among the primary actors in global affairs. They can acknowl-
edge, for reasons of feasibility and efficiency, that global distributive equality in its
implementation must focus on equality between states in the first instance. But,
for the global egalitarians, what ultimately matters is egalitarianism among persons.
Egalitarian distribution among states will be seen as instrumental to, or an approxi-
mation of, equality among individuals.
However, this understanding of the moral relevance of states for egalitarian justice
is contentious. Some egalitarians have argued that it is only within the context of a
state that egalitarianism commitments gain moral salience. The state, in other words,
is not merely a vehicle for affecting egalitarianism but is in fact constitutive or forma-
tive of this obligation. Accordingly, since there is no global state or the equivalent
thereof, global egalitarian arguments don’t even get off the ground. We will consider
some of these objections in the next chapter.
• STUDY QUESTIONS
1 Is global economic inequality itself a potential problem of justice? If so, on what
grounds?
2 Must egalitarian distributive justice presuppose an existing system of social coop-
eration? Is there such a scheme of cooperation at the international level?
3 What would it take for a global distributive principle to be implemented? Does
this presume a world governing body?
4 Is natural resource inequality a cause of international economic inequality? And,
if so, is this natural fact itself a problem of justice?
5 What is it that egalitarians should seek to distribute fairly? Is it individual well-
being? Individual access to resources and opportunities? Or their capability to
convert resources and opportunities into effective freedoms?
• NOTES
1 These figures are from the United Nations Development Programme’s Human
Development Report 2015 (accessed June 2016): http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/
files/2015_human_development_report_1.pdf
2 The contrast is not that the other approach is amoral. The label is meant to reflect
the idea that egalitarianism is an obligation that derives directly from the equal
status of moral agents.
3 The last step might appear indistinguishable from luck egalitarianism. But there
is a key difference. The argument is motivated by the ideal of social cooperation,
whereas luck egalitarianism has life independently of such facts.
4 See also “Women’s Capabilities and Social Justice”. Available at: http://philosophy.
uchicago.edu/faculty/files/nussbaum/Women’s%20Capabilities%20and%20Social%20
Justice.pdf [7 Sept. 2016].
5 See pp. 2–3 of the UNDP Human Development Report 2015. Available at http://hdr.
undp.org/sites/default/files/2015_human_development_report.pdf [7 Sept. 2016].
• REFERENCES
Rawls
John Rawls (excerpts), A Theory of Justice (1971).
Global egalitarianism
Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, Part III (1979).
Simon Caney, “Distributive Justice” in Justice Beyond Borders (2005a).
Darrel Moellendorf, “The Borders of Justice” in Cosmopolitan Justice (2002).
Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls, Part III (1989).
Equality of what?
Gillian Brock, “A Cosmopolitan Model of Global Justice”, in Global Justice:

A Cosmopolitan Account (2009).
Martha Nussbaum, “The Central Capabilities”, in Creating Capabilities (2011).
Amartya Sen, “Equality of What?” (1979).
• FURTHER READING
See Samuel Freeman’s Rawls for an authoritative and comprehensive introduction
to John Rawls (Freeman 2007b). Pablo Gilabert defends a non-associative approach
to global egalitarianism, which he calls “humanistic cosmopolitanism” (Gilabert
2012). For a sustained discussion of justice and trade, see Aaron James’s Fairness in
Practice (James 2012). See also Mathias Risse, “Justice and Trade” (in Risse 2012);
and the critical summary by Helena de Bres “Justice and International Trade”. Laura
Valentini (2011) defends global egalitarianism that does not simply apply domestic
egalitarian principles to the world, but that is circumscribed by the special institu-
tions and practices of the global order. See Chris Armstrong, Global Distributive
Justice (2012) for a comprehensive introduction to the topic. For a novel thesis
that equality of human flourishing is that which matters (and not capability for
flourishing), see Sypnowich (2016).
4
•
against global
egalitarianism
In the previous chapter, we discussed some arguments in favor of global egalitarianism.
But global egalitarianism has its share of detractors and, in this chapter, we will consider
some of the main arguments against globalizing egalitarian obligations.
One could be against global egalitarianism by opposing egalitarianism, tout court.
For instance, a libertarian will naturally dismiss global egalitarianism since she rejects
egalitarianism altogether. While the libertarian position is, of course, important and
deserves attention, to engage it here takes us too far afield from our special topic
of global justice. In order to focus on the unique egalitarianism debate within the
special subject of global justice, we will attend to arguments that specifically target
global egalitarianism without necessarily denying egalitarianism in general. Indeed,
the positions we will look at are those that affirm egalitarianism within the just state,
but deny its relevance at the global level. This asymmetry is what makes the anti-
global egalitarian position especially interesting and philosophically intriguing. As
we will see, some of these arguments compel us to engage with the basic question of
why we should be egalitarians at all.
The anti-global egalitarians we will consider do not say that foreigners have less than
equal moral standing relative to compatriots. If this were so, their arguments would
be easier to refute. The more challenging anti-egalitarian positions do not deny that
persons have equal moral standing regardless of nationality or citizenship. They
accept that, in virtue of the moral equality of persons, we have the duty of global
justice to assist those persons who are unable to meet some defined standard of basic
needs (as discussed in Chapter 2). What the anti-global egalitarians deny is that there
is a duty to regulate economic inequality above this threshold of sufficiency. Their
basic claim is that moral equality alone does not entail egalitarianism.
• AGAINST EGALITARIANISM AS A MORAL IDEAL

Opponents of global egalitarianism reject the idea that egalitarianism is a moral
obligation that takes hold straightaway among moral equals (unless they wish to
36 • against global egalitarianism
implausibly deny that foreigners are our moral equals). Why should the fact that
one is worse off but not impoverished create obligations on others (the better off)
to address the difference, they will ask? In the absence of some further explana-
tion, such as some associative ties or past history, egalitarianism seems unmotivated.
Moreover, to insist on it, they argue, will result in certain absurdities.
First, the moral case for egalitarianism seems unmotivated because it is not obvious
that we owe each other egalitarian duties simply by virtue of our equal moral stand-
ing. It is relatively less controversial that the ideal of moral equality is disrespected if
we ignore human suffering due to a lack of basic needs. So, the anti-global egalitar-
ian can acknowledge that moral equality requires some attention to the subsistence
needs of all persons. But why should equal moral respect entail the further require-
ment that we owe each other egalitarian obligations? How is the fact of economic
inequality per se a violation of moral equality? Egalitarianism might well follow from
equal moral respect, but this is not a logical entailment.
Second, the moral conception of egalitarianism, if granted, can result in absurdity.
Imagine that we come across a new group of moral beings. (To make the case as
compelling as possible for the egalitarian side, let us imagine them to be like human
beings as far as possible.) The moral beings are not impoverished but are doing fine
by some objective standard of well-being. They are, however, less well off than us.
Should we now take on distributive commitments to them? Not only would this
seem unmotivated, but it is seemingly absurd, some would argue, since it implies
that there is no principled limit to our distributive egalitarian duties. Anytime some
person or group less well off than us appears on the scene, we immediately incur
some debt to that person or group.
Let’s recall the luck egalitarian idea, as discussed in the last chapter, to illustrate the
above two points. Unsurprisingly, many opponents of global egalitarians are explic-
itly skeptical of luck egalitarianism. What is the basis for the luck egalitarian ideal
that equal life prospect is the moral default unless an agent’s own choices dictate
otherwise? Why should equal respect for persons require sensitivity to the luck/
choice distinction? Indeed, the luck/choice distinction seems metaphysically fraught.
How can we determine how much a person’s success in life is due to sheer luck and
how much is due to her effort and commitment? To the extent then that the luck
egalitarian project hinges on this distinction, it rests on shaky metaphysical grounds.
Moreover, luck egalitarianism has absurd outcomes if we follow through on its funda-
mentals. For instance, it would say that persons who are severely deprived because of
their bad choices are not entitled to our assistance. But this seems counter-intuitive.
Typically, we do not believe that we can neglect to assist a person just because her
desperate situation is the result of her bad choice rather than luck. Also, along the
lines noted above, luck egalitarianism will require egalitarians to work overtime since
luck factors across different areas of a person’s life. Should a person who is unlucky
in love be the beneficiary of some social compensation, if we even know what this
could consist of? The idea of mitigating the effects of luck seems a non-starter.
against global egalitarianism • 37
These objections against luck egalitarianism have ignited a lively ongoing discussion
in the literature. If it turns out that luck egalitarianism cannot be defended against
these objections, then it cannot serve as a reliable basis for global egalitarianism.
• AGAINST GLOBALIZING ASSOCIATIVE ARGUMENTS

Many anti-global egalitarians take egalitarianism to be an associative obligation. For
them, egalitarianism does not take hold among moral persons as such, but between
persons who stand in some associative relationship with each other. But, unlike asso-
ciative global egalitarians, they deny that the relevant associative relations are present
in the global context to jump-start egalitarian considerations there. Underlying their
position that egalitarianism applies domestically but not globally is the belief that
there is something special or unique about the state as an association.
We will look at two kinds of arguments in turn. The first says that egalitarianism is
a means of legitimizing the necessary coercive authority of the state. Since there is
no coercive authority of this kind that needs legitimization in the global domain,
egalitarian arguments don’t even get off the ground. The second says that it is social
cooperation of a specific sort that generates egalitarian commitments. Since the
global arena lacks this form of social cooperation, there is no basis for adopting
egalitarian commitments.
The coercion argument

To locate the distinctiveness of the state, some commentators have stressed that an
important difference between the state and the global arena is that the former is an
ongoing and legal coercive order. That is, the state is an entity that is able to lawfully
exercise force over its citizens and has the authority to determine their legal rights,
entitlements and obligations. It is this fact of lawful coercion that generates egalitar-
ian commitments among members of a nation-state; and because there isn’t a lawful
global coercive authority, there is no similar reason for caring about global equality
(Blake 2001; R. Miller 1998).
One important line of argument draws on the idea of autonomy, in that since law-
ful coercion is, in the first instance, autonomy restricting, it must be justifiable to
those being coerced if the lawful coercion is to be legitimate (Blake 2001). Such an
arrangement would be justifiable, on this account, if significant special consideration
is given to fellow members. One such special consideration is that of not allowing for
arbitrary inequalities among members. That is, a coercive order is acceptable in spite
of its restrictions on autonomy if it is tempered by some institutionalized distribu-
tive egalitarian commitments among all persons living under the arrangement. For
example, the civil laws that society enforces, laws that determine contractual rights,
ownerships, taxation and so on, are prima facie restrictions on persons’ autonomy,
and this system of coercion is legitimate only if can be acceptable to all, in particular
to those who are most significantly relatively disadvantaged (ibid.). This presents a
consideration in favor of mitigating the situation of the worst off under this arrange-
ment via some egalitarian distributive arrangement.
Thomas Nagel has developed a version of the coercion argument which incorpo-
rates another associative element that explains why coercion of members presents
a special problem of justification in the domestic case. (This move is important to
those who might be tempted to think that domestically enacted laws can be coer-
cive of outsiders as well, and hence the coercion argument for egalitarianism would
also apply to outsiders.) This additional element is the notion of “joint-authorship”
of the laws of one’s society, or the implication of one’s will in a political system in
which one participates. Unlike the coerced outsiders wanting to get inside, insid-
ers aren’t simply coerced. Rather, they are coerced by a system of which they are
also joint-authors. That is, they are living under a shared coercive system whose
establishment and maintenance “engages” their will, and whose legitimacy con-
sequently must turn on their acceptance of this arrangement. That is, this is an
arrangement under which those subject to it are supposedly also its authors, and
thus whose arrangement must reflect their will. It is only among joint-authors of a
coercive arrangement, Nagel argues, that the demands for legitimacy can be made.
On Nagel’s reasoning, as in the coercion argument, one necessary condition for
mutual acceptability is that no arbitrary inequalities be admissible, thus triggering
the basis for distributive equality.1
But, for Nagel, since there is no global coercive order that is also regarded as the
joint project of all persons, there is no basis for global distributive demands. A sys-
tem may indeed be coercive of some persons, but if the system does not also engage
or implicate their will, they have no moral standing to ask for any justification of
that arrangement. Objections to global inequalities simply do not gain any traction
because the concern for legitimacy in the global plane does not arise in the same way
as in the domestic case.
The coercion argument is thus a two-step argument: it first makes a normative claim
that egalitarian justice commitments are triggered under the condition of state coer-
cion; and it makes a second, empirical, claim that the global order is not a coercive
order in the relevant sense. Thus, in evaluating this argument, we can ask separately:
is the normative premise defensible? And is the empirical claim verifiable? We will
return to this matter in the section on Assessing the arguments below.
The social cooperation argument

The second class of arguments against global egalitarianism emphasizes the ideal of
reciprocity or social cooperation in the state over the fact of coercion. As we saw
earlier, some global egalitarians also accept that social cooperation is the starting
point for egalitarianism, and they see their task to be that of showing how the global
institutional order is in fact ideally conceived as a cooperative one. But some critics
have pointed out that this is a misdirected application of the cooperation argument.
The state is a cooperative entity in ways that the global arena is not, even if ideally
conceived, and it is this difference that explains why egalitarian obligations take
hold domestically but not globally. The state is a cooperative system that governs
the economic life of participants in ways that the global domain does not do. The
state dictates the terms of ownership, of transfers, of contracts; makes laws regulat-
ing wages and income and work hours, and so on (Freeman 2007a). It also provides
the basic economic infrastructure for economic activities and transactions to take
place, such as law and order, roads, postal and communication services, methods
of adjudicating disputes and enforcing contracts, the educating of a workforce, etc.
Under the cooperative system of the state, individuals are more deeply entangled
economically and thus more mutually obliged than they are in the global context
(Sangiovanni 2007). In fact, the success of anyone within an economic system cannot
be understood without attribution to the social and economic background conditions
that the state creates and sustains, and which members of society contribute to and
participate under. Participants in a shared economic system, so understood, thus
stand in a special kind of cooperative or reciprocal relationship.
It is the ideal of reciprocity under the context of economic cooperation that motivates
the case for egalitarianism – that is, it requires that the gap between the advantaged
and the disadvantaged under the arrangement be regulated in certain ways. The steps
from reciprocity or cooperation to egalitarianism have to be filled in. Basically, it
will have to be shown, for example following Rawls, how the requirements of social
cooperation and its implications will take us eventually to conclusions about our
egalitarian obligations. But, for our purpose, the important point is that, according
to the cooperation argument, there is no similar motivation for global egalitarianism.
The global arena is not a cooperative system of this kind, and so does not compel the
same requirement of reciprocity.
The social cooperation argument, like the coercion argument, is a two-step argu-
ment. It first makes the normative claim that social cooperation is what activates
egalitarian obligations among persons; then it argues that while the state constitutes a
cooperative arrangement of the sort that gives rise to egalitarianism, the global arena
does not. Persons don’t stand in the same kind of reciprocal or cooperative relation-
ship with each other internationally. Similarly, an assessment of the soundness of
this argument can tackle the two premises in turn: Is the normative claim a plausible
one? And is the empirical view of the world correct?
• ASSESSING THE ARGUMENTS

The thrust of the main arguments against global egalitarianism is that egalitarianism
is animated by certain normative conditions that are found in the setting of the state
but not globally. Egalitarian obligations don’t arise between persons as such without
these triggering conditions, contra views such as luck egalitarianism. As mentioned,

the arguments turns on a normative premise regarding the circumstances of egalitari-
anism, and an empirical premise regarding the state of the world.
Now one might accept the normative premise of the anti-global egalitarian, but
challenge its empirical premise that the circumstances of egalitarianism don’t obtain
globally. For instance, some commentators have argued in response to the coercion
argument that the global order is a suitably coercive one for the purpose of generating
egalitarian obligations. Trade conventions, international norms and laws restrict indi-
vidual and state conduct globally, and such restrictions are often backed by sanctions
of varying kinds, such as trade retaliation, withdrawal of cooperation, imposition
of embargos, and even military intervention in cases of extreme transgressions. It
is often pointed out as well that what appears as an instance of domestic law mak-
ing, such as immigration policies, has coercive implications for individuals at large.
Borders keep people out and are protected by armed guards. Even Nagel’s version of
the coercion argument, which invokes the idea that only citizens have the standing
to demand of each other some justification for their shared coercive arrangements,
can be challenged as an empirical matter. Is it the case that there are no globally
coercive institutions that are properly thought of as the joint creation of individuals
in the world? It is true that individuals need not directly support and design global
institutions. More typically it is states (and other collectives like NGOs) that are
directly engaged in the formation of global institutions. Still, to the extent that states
are supposed to represent and speak for their own citizens, individuals can be seen as
joint-authors of global institutions even if their choices are expressed through their
state institutions. Can this point not put some pressure on Nagel’s empirical claim
about the uniqueness of the state?
The same goes for the argument from cooperation. The cooperation argument points
to economic institutional facts and laws, such as property rights, contract laws, laws
regulating transfers and transactions and the like, to show why egalitarianism applies
within the state. Are there not similar economic institutions within the global arena?
Could one argue that international laws and norms regulating territorial rights, own-
ership of natural resources, and the international intellectual property rights regime
are examples of global institutions and laws that establish and define ownership? Is
the economic success of one country really so detached from and independent of a
background international economic structure?
Even if the empirical premise of the anti-global egalitarian position is sustained, its
conclusion does not follow if there is a suitable alternative to its normative premise.
The form of the normative premise common to the arguments we have considered is
that there must be certain political institutional features that are necessary for acti-
vating egalitarian commitments. That is, egalitarianism is a political ideal – an ideal
applying to persons who share certain forms of political life – rather than a moral
ideal, an ideal that applies to persons qua moral agents as such.
But is it the case that egalitarianism is triggered only where there is state coercion
that has to be justified? Is it the case that this coercion needs to be justified only to
those who are regarded as joint-authors of the state’s institutions? Or, tackling the
argument for cooperation, is it the case that social cooperation is a necessary cir-
cumstance of egalitarianism? In general, are there additional motivating reasons for
egalitarianism other than the fact of coercion or the ideal of cooperation (even if we
grant that coercion or cooperation sufficiently motivates egalitarian commitments)?
Does the fact that institutions can affect or impact persons, as global institutions do,
sufficiently motivate egalitarian principles to regulate these institutions?
One place where this inquiry can take us is back to the moral conception for egali-
tarianism. Is it really the case that moral relations alone cannot ground egalitarian
obligations? Consider the opposition to luck egalitarianism. It is true that the force
of certain objections have put the ball back in the luck egalitarian’s court. But this
cannot be the last play, and some egalitarians are attempting to revise the luck egali-
tarian ideal. If there is a plausible interpretation of luck egalitarianism that can fend
off these criticisms, then a moral grounding for global egalitarianism can be restored.
In short, the main anti-global egalitarian arguments rest on two necessary prem-
ises, one that specifies the necessary condition for egalitarianism, and another that
describes the state of international relations to show that this condition is not real-
ized globally. The ongoing debate is whether these two premises can be sustained.
• INDIRECT ARGUMENTS FOR EGALITARIANISM:

RAWLS’S LAW OF PEOPLES
As mentioned, some global egalitarians take themselves to be extending Rawls’s the-
ory of justice to its logical end, whereas some anti-global egalitarians take these to be
a misapplication of Rawls’s method and arguments.
In The Law of Peoples, Rawls explicitly opposes the global extension of his egalitarian
principles. He holds that a global duty of assistance, a duty to ensure that all socie-
ties are able meet the basic needs of their citizens and have the means to support
well-ordered institutions of their own, is all that is needed by way of international
economic justice. That Rawls rejects global egalitarianism is not itself a decisive blow
to Rawlsian global egalitarians for it is reasonable and not without precedent for phi-
losophers to argue that a complex theory has applications and implications beyond
or even in opposition to what the author of the theory himself or herself holds. Thus,
to close, it will be useful to consider Rawls’s own rejection of global egalitarianism.
One argument that Rawls makes against global egalitarianism can be described as an
argument from national self-determination. He tells us to imagine two societies start-
ing off equally well off, with an equal amount of resources, comparable population
size, human capital, and the like. But one society invests in its economy in such a
way that, over time, it becomes twice as well off as the other. A global egalitarian
principle will require some redistribution of resources from the better-off society to
the less well-off one, but Rawls says that this would be “unacceptable”. Presumably
the reason why it would be unacceptable is that we would be requiring a society to
subsidize another which is less well off because of its choices. Indeed, this amounts
to our penalizing the better-off society for its superior decisions and hard choices. In
another case, Rawls imagines a similar starting scenario but with the difference this
time that one society engages in population control and the other does not. Holding
all other growth rates constant, one society will over time be richer than the other per
capita. Yet global egalitarian would require redistribution between the two and again
this seems “unacceptable”.
But it seems that Rawls’s self-determination argument works only if we already
presume that there is no prior global egalitarian obligation. After all, if there is an
antecedent obligation of egalitarian justice, then it is not the case that complying
with it undermines self-determination. For example, we can’t say that even though
paying our domestic taxes is an obligation of justice, this obligation violates indi-
vidual self-determination. This is because, as seems most plausible, the admissible
space for self-determination is defined in terms of what we owe to others, not the
other way around.
In fact, Rawls has another, more basic, argument against global egalitarianism that
frames the self-determination argument. The argument is that the reasons for egali-
tarianism are indirect in the sense that egalitarianism serves or is tied to other moral
objectives that we have. These indirect reasons obtain domestically but not globally,
Rawls argues. In fact, reading Rawls’s own theory of justice in light of his remarks on
international justice provides a renewed understanding of Rawls’s basic project and
method. It has become even clearer, for instance, that Rawls is not a luck egalitarian
since egalitarianism is not something that exists between moral persons as such, but
is motivated by considerations relevant to common citizenship.
The first, indirect, reason why we care about economic inequality in the domestic
context, Rawls identifies, is that we want to prevent persons from falling into pov-
erty. Since there is a global duty of assistance within Rawls’s law of peoples (that
goes beyond helping persons to meet their basic needs to enable them also to support
decent functioning institutions), the problem of poverty within the global arena is
addressed without the need for economic equality.
As mentioned at the start of Chapter 3, it is worth considering whether egalitar-
ianism matters for justice independently of the problem of poverty. But Rawls’s
argument is that even if we focus on poverty, there is no reason why global economic
justice requires egalitarianism in the way that domestic egalitarianism is tied to pov-
erty. The presumption here seems to be that in a more closely entwined market,
unmitigated inequality can result in the impoverishment of some. This is, of course,
a very plausible point – in a given market where people compete for the same goods,
the more another has, the easier it is for her to outbid me in the competition for
goods, and I can become impoverished when necessities become out of my reach in
this way. But is it the case that the global market-place is not one where inequal-
ity can matter in this way? Do people not complete for similar goods or resources?
Global demands for cash crops like coffee, compete for and claim scarce arable land
that could otherwise be used to cultivate food crops. Thus, differences in global pur-
chasing power can contribute to the actual impoverishment of some communities.
Another indirect reason Rawls discusses is that unregulated inequalities between
persons within a state can result in the social stigmatization of the less well off and,
consequently, the corrosion of their basis of self-respect. Yet, Rawls believes, eco-
nomic inequality between persons across state boundaries need not have such effects.
When all societies are regarded as equal and free members of a well-ordered inter-
national arena, and in the presence of a duty of assistance to ensure that all societies
are able to maintain functioning institutions, no society or persons will be socially
stigmatized or feel less worthy just because some countries are richer than theirs.
The presumption here seems also to be that more tightly economically entangled
social orders constitute significant comparison or reference groups for individuals
that would make economic inequality a salient factor. Americans may care about how
they fare in relation to other Americans; and Mexicans to other Mexicans. But, for
Rawls as it seems, Mexicans do not compare themselves in this way with Americans.
The question that needs to be pursued further is whether it is the case that the global
economic order does not constitute a comparison group in which inequality matters;
within which, that is, it matters to persons or societies how they fare in relation to
other persons or societies in the global arena. One might suggest, contra Rawls, that
telecommunication, the internet, the global reach of the arts and culture (such as
films and television shows), etc. make it more likely that inter-state or cross-border
comparisons will matter more and more to persons. We will need more empirical
research to be able to settle this argument.
Rawls’s other reason why economic inequality matters within the state is that it can
undermine the fairness of political processes. It is a commonplace among observers
that economic inequality within a society threatens democracy. Candidates for pub-
lic offices with greater financial power are better able to win attention and garner
votes, and affluent lobbyists and other interest groups can influence the political
agenda. Thus, to help maintain political fairness in domestic society, Rawls believes
we have an obligation to limit inequality among persons. But there are no analo-
gous political processes in the global domain that would be corrupted by economic
inequality, the argument implies. Again, as Rawls puts it, all societies, so long as they
are well-ordered – economic inequality notwithstanding – can participate as free and
equal participating members in the law of peoples.
Again, the interesting question this argument raises is highly complex and will
require more empirical research into how international organizations work in prac-
tice. For example, consider the fact that the number of votes a country has within
the International Monetary Fund depends on its financial contribution to the organi-
zation, which in turn, of course, depends on its wealth.2 Is this or is it not an instance
of unfairness in political processes in the international arena? Or consider the more
blatant case of how inter-governmental aid and economic assistance can exert pres-
sure on less well-off countries during international deliberation and decision-making.
Again, is this a case of the ways in which economic inequality can compromise politi-
cal fairness on the global plane?
In addition to the indirect reasons for egalitarianism having to do with the problems
of poverty, stigmatization and political fairness, Rawls also hinted at another, namely
the ideal of reciprocity, under his discussion of the mitigation of poverty as a reason
for controlling inequality. He says that the gap between the rich and poor in domes-
tic society cannot be “wider than the criterion of reciprocity allows” (Rawls 1999,
p. 114). But this invites the question: Why does domestic reciprocity, in particular
reciprocity between democratic citizens, require the limiting of economic inequality
among individuals, but international or global reciprocity does not? Rawls does not
say much about this in The Law of Peoples, although his other writings suggest that
reciprocity between citizens has a special quality because of the cooperative and
democratic nature of their relationship. Indeed, the argument from cooperation we
canvassed above is an attempt at explicating and working out this special require-
ment of reciprocity among democratic citizens. Depending on how we unpack the
ideal of democratic reciprocity, we can be led back to the question of why that ideal
applies only domestically and not globally.
• SUMMARY
Critics of global egalitarianism typically deny that egalitarian obligations obtain
between equal moral agents as such. What activates these obligations are additional
claims or facts about associative relations among persons. These associative claims or
facts are, however, peculiar to the circumstance of the state and are not present in
the global arena. Some argue, for example, that the coercive character of the state
is the distinguishing feature that triggers egalitarian commitments among citizens;
others prefer to highlight the cooperative character of the state, in particular in its
economic institutions. These can also be seen as ways of explaining why there is a
special requirement of reciprocity among citizens that could place limits on eco-
nomic inequality among them but no similar requirement among persons at the
global level.
These criticisms raise different issues for global egalitarians and identify different
courses of response. For example, global egalitarians can examine further whether it
is really the case that egalitarianism is an associative obligation and not an obligation
that could take hold between persons (in the world as a whole) as such. Or, if they
grant the associative approach to egalitarianism, they can try to show that the relevant
egalitarian triggering features obtain at the global level as well.
The problem of global egalitarianism has perhaps received more attention in the
current literature on global justice than other questions, since it engages one of the
staple issues of political philosophy, that of distributive justice and economic equal-
ity. While there is as yet no resolution to this dispute – if anything the anti-global
egalitarian side seems to be gaining momentum – it has in fact inspired investiga-
tions into the conditions under which egalitarianism matters. The result is, so we
will hope, a more complete and sophisticated understanding of the circumstances of
egalitarian justice. So, even if the dispute at the global level remains at an impasse,
this enhanced philosophical clarity counts as advancement. The subject of global
egalitarianism is a good illustration of how political philosophy makes progress when
it confronts new problems or questions, even when it is not yet able to offer solutions
or answers.
• STUDY QUESTIONS
1 Must egalitarianism presuppose some associative ideals or facts among the
relevant agents?
2 Is luck egalitarianism an implausible conception of egalitarian justice?
3 Is state coercion a necessary condition for egalitarianism?
4 Is the ideal of social cooperation a necessary condition for egalitarianism?
5 Is the global order a coercive order in the relevant sense required for triggering
egalitarian duties?
6 Can the global order be conceived as a fair system of social cooperation?
7 Are the common indirect reasons for why egalitarianism matters domestically
inapplicable at the global level?
• NOTES
1 Because cooperation (as expressed by the idea of joint-authorship of laws) seems
to play an important role in Nagel’s argument, some commentators have classified
his argument as an argument based on cooperation rather than coercion. But it
seems to me that Nagel’s position is better seen, fundamentally, as an argument
from coercion since it is on account of coercion that egalitarian obligations are
generated, albeit coercion in the context of cooperation. Nagel’s arguments for
example, do not apply to a cooperative but non-coercive context.
2 See the voting power chart at: https://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/memdir/
members.aspx (last accessed 11 March 2016).
• REFERENCES
Michael Blake, “Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy” (2001).
Samuel Freeman, “Distributive Justice and the Law of Peoples”, in Justice and the
Social Contract (2007a).
David Miller, “Global Egalitarianism”, in Nationality and Global Responsibility
(2007).
Thomas Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice” (2005).
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples, Part III (1999).
Andrea Sangiovanni, “Global Justice, Reciprocity and the State” (2007).
• FURTHER READING
See Carl Knight and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen for recent defenses of luck egalitari-
anism. Laura Valentini and Nicole Hassoun argue in different ways that the global
order is coercive in a morally significant sense. Blake replies to his critics in his Justice
and Foreign Policy (2013b). Mathias Risse, On Global Justice, provides further argu-
ments for the special status of the state with respect to egalitarian justice (Risse 2012).
David Reidy, “Rawls on International Justice” (2004) defends Rawls’s rejection of
global egalitarianism.
5
•
nationalism and
patriotic sentiments
PRINCE FEISAL: You are an Englishman. Are you not loyal to England?
T.E. LAWRENCE: To England, and to other things.1
The last two chapters canvassed arguments for and against global egalitarianism. But
there is another powerful consideration against global egalitarianism that we have
left out, and this is the argument from nationalism and patriotic concern. (Or, to be
precise, this was an argument we looked at only obliquely, and briefly, in our remarks
on the self-determination argument we attributed to Rawls.) The challenge is that
global egalitarianism lies in tension with the value of national self-determination and
the ideal of patriotic sentiment. A self-determining nation has to determine its own
collective projects and goals and take responsibility for them. Global egalitarianism
seems to contradict national responsibility if nations are also to take responsibility
for how some nations are faring relative to others. Moreover, global egalitarianism
seems to be at odds with the patriotic sentiment that individuals are entitled, if not
even obliged, to show special concern for their conationals or fellow citizens. That is,
the moral impartiality underlying the ideal of global egalitarianism appears contra-
dictory to the permissible (if not obligatory) moral partiality implied in nationalism
and patriotism.
Yet, surely not all instances of national partiality are permissible. “My country right
or wrong” forms of nationalism put paid to any decent notion of global justice and are
difficult to defend. So the claim of the nationalists and patriots is not that global egal-
itarianism leaves no room for xenophobic versions of nationalism. Their claim, more
moderately, is that it seems that there must be some scope for justifiable expressions
and exercise of national self-determination and patriotic concern, and that it is not
clear how a firm commitment to global egalitarianism can accommodate these. For
instance, it does not appear immediately unjust that the Canadian government sup-
ports a public health-care system that can provide quality care but only for Canadians
(and long-term legal residents of Canada). On the contrary, this partiality seems per-
missible, if not in fact required, as a matter of domestic justice. If so, how is partiality
48 • nationalism and patriotic sentiments
of this sort compatible with the demands of global egalitarianism? And how can we
distinguish permissible forms of national self-determination and patriotic partiality
from unjust ones?
The problem of nationalism and patriotism generalizes beyond the specialized prob-
lem of global egalitarianism. At its root is the philosophical tension between the
moral universalism of global justice on the one hand, and the moral particularism of
nationalism on the other hand. Indeed, the problem of global justice and nationalism
is an iteration of a deep question in moral philosophy: how should the universal-
istic and particularistic features of morality be reconciled? Is morality ultimately
universalistic and ought particularistic commitments to be reduced to and justified
by universal principles or moral objectives? Or is there, ultimately, a fundamental
tension within morality itself, between its universalistic and particularistic strains?
Examining the debate between nationalism and global justice can provide one entry
point into this moral philosophical question.
In this chapter, we focus on the idea of liberal nationalism. Is it an oxymoron? Or can
some forms of nationalism be liberal in character, and, if so, what are the conditions
for a liberal nationalism? Then we examine whether nationalism is a value. We will
finally look at the challenge of patriotism for global egalitarianism, and close with
some remarks on nationalism and cosmopolitanism.
• THE PROBLEM OF NATIONALISM: A LIBERAL

NATIONALISM?
What room is there within a conception of global justice for nationalism? We need
not belabor the point that historically, and even presently, nationalism has been a
source of various domestic and international injustices, including the subjugation of
minorities and even genocide within states, and wars of conquests and annexation.
Not surprisingly, for some liberals, nationalism is anathema to the moral core of
liberalism. Nationalism’s focus on individuals’ national identity and the collective
good of the nation is at odds with the liberal ideal that the individual is the basic
subject of moral concern and entitled to equal respect regardless of her background
characteristics, such as national membership. Moreover, nationalist sentiments seem
irrational and morally arbitrary, and hence no more philosophically defensible than
racist expressions and sentiments.
Without denying that nationalism has been the source of great (past and prevailing)
injustices and that nationalist demands are often framed in ways that contradict basic
liberal values, some liberals, have nevertheless argued that there is nothing inher-
ently illiberal about nationalism. For them, nationalism can be liberal or illiberal in
character and it is too hasty, according to these liberal nationalists (as we can call
them), to condemn nationalism tout court.
nationalism and patriotic sentiments • 49
One of the liberal nationalists’ rationales for identifying a permissible form of

nationalism (which liberal nationalism is supposed to be) is that they believe state
nationalism to be an inescapable feature of a political life. The basic institutions of
the state cannot help but reflect a certain political cultural identity, centered on
a sense of shared history, public traditions and practices. A citizenry is not just a
gathering of individuals pursuing their private ends, but an association of individu-
als who see themselves as members of a distinctive society that is committed to
certain shared goals. To this end, the state must be in the business of inculcating
in its citizens some sense of mutual identification through education, institutional
practices and, as Rogers Smith puts it, the creation and telling of “stories of people-
hood” (Smith 2003). If nationalism is an integral part of statehood, then the issue is
not whether to allow or condemn nationalism per se, but to identify the bounds of
its permissibility. Differentiating liberal forms of nationalism from illiberal ones is
one way of doing this.
Some liberal nationalists make the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism
(Ignatieff 1993). Ethnic nationalism is a nationalism based on descent and heredity.
It is therefore an exclusionary form of nationalism, since individual membership in a
nation is ascribed rather than voluntary under this model. It is relatively clear how a
form of nationalism that equates “belonging” with “blood” is fundamentally at odds
with liberalism, especially if membership status or the lack thereof determines one’s
basic political rights and social entitlements. In contrast, civic nationalism is a nation-
alism based on shared commitments to the principles of liberal political morality and
is thus inclusive, in that it is inclusive of anyone prepared to embrace a liberal politi-
cal constitution or culture. The patriotic ties that bind members of a civic national
together are not based on ties of descent but on a joint commitment to the political
culture and constitution of that nation. Some commentators refer to this as “consti-
tutional patriotism” (Habermas 1992).
Yet other liberal nationalists believe that civic nationalism has erred too far in the
opposite spectrum of ethnic nationalism. These liberal nationalists (e.g., Tamir 1995,
D. Miller 1995 and Kymlicka 2001) acknowledge that a nationality that is hereditary
and ascribed cannot be liberal in character. But they also believe that civic national-
ists, by stripping away the notion of ethno-culture entirely from their conception of
nationalism, rescue nationalism for liberals at the cost of rendering nationalism ster-
ile, if not unrecognizable. Nationalism involves more than just a shared commitment
to principle or values or a common constitution, they argue. Nationalism proper
entails individuals sharing a conception of a collective identity centered on a public
culture and language, a common history and a collective conception of themselves
as a distinctive people. For these liberal nationalists, the notion of civic nationalism
is a rather bloodless, and therefore mistaken, concept of nationalism. It misses the
essential element of nationalism, namely that sense, among persons of a nation, of
shared historical and cultural belonging and distinctiveness.
Moreover, as critics point out, the concept of civic nationalism trades on a mere
myth that there can be a culturally neutral conception and practice of national-
ism. As Will Kymlicka points out, meaningful forms of nationalism must involve
the promotion of certain national cultural characteristics, such as a public language,
public institutions, conventions and practices, and shared founding stories and cul-
tural histories. Significantly, it also means that members of a national community
consider themselves to constitute a distinctive people or historic community. On
this understanding, the United States, for example, which is commonly cited as a
real world example of a civic nation, is not ethno-culturally neutral. Although there
is no official language, English is the lingua franca, required for official positions and
civil service; its public institutions and practices reflect an Anglo and Judeo-Christian
cultural tradition. The civic versus ethnic nationalism divide, thus, cannot capture
the real distinction between liberal and illiberal nationalisms. What makes national-
ism a liberal nationalism is not its aspiration to ethno-cultural neutrality, but how it
conceives of its shared ethno-culture and how it goes about promoting it.
In short, a nationalism based on notions of racial descent cannot be liberal and, to
the extent that ethnicity is sometimes seen to be coterminous with race, we have
reasons to be suspicious of ethnic nationalism. But an ethno culture need not be
racially defined. It can be defined in terms of language, social practices, rituals, cus-
toms, and an understanding of common history that can be adopted by individuals
rather than properties which are thrust upon them. If all forms of nationalism must
have some ethno-cultural content, then what makes a nationalism liberal or illiberal
in practice is not whether it is ethno-culturally neutral or not, but the way it under-
stands its ethno-cultural identity, the content of this identity and the way it goes
about promoting that identity. One condition for a liberal nationalism, according to
Kymlicka, is that state nationalism must avoid imposing unreasonable demands on
minority cultures. One way any potential unreasonableness is alleviated is by grant-
ing minority groups certain kinds of minority cultural rights to counteract the effects
and implications of state nation building.
• IS NATIONALISM A VALUE?
Is nationalism merely a potential but unavoidable vice that we should try to make as
palatable as possible? Or are there reasons to commend nationalism as well? Liberal
nationalists argue that nationalism is not merely compatible with liberalism. They
make the stronger claim that nationalism is actually valuable or a virtue from the
liberal standpoint.
For instance, they argue, that nationalism makes possible the realization of the liberal
ideals of personal autonomy, distributive justice and democracy. First, membership
of a cultural community provides individuals with the “context of choice” within
which to form, pursue and revise their ideas of the meaning and the good in life; that
is, within which to exercise their personal autonomy (Kymlicka 1995). It is within
a cultural framework that individuals see value in their ends and projects. To the
extent that nationalism protects this cultural structure of personal autonomy, it is
valuable. As Alasdair MacIntyre writes in his defense of the virtue of patriotism, out-
side my cultural community, “I am unlikely to flourish as a moral agent …. Without
community, there are no standards of judgment. Patriotism gives those standards”
(MacIntyre 1984, p. 10).
Second, shared national affinity provides the impetus and rationale for citizens of a
society to accept and take on distributive obligations among themselves. Why should
persons be convinced and be motivated to share in the fate of their compatriots
unless they also see themselves as fellow members in a community of fate? In modern
political societies we can’t count on the intimate ties of kinship or tribal affiliations
to motivate the commitments of social justice. Instead, nationality provides the ties
that bind and motivate. It encourages individuals to see each other as members of
an “imagined community” (to borrow Benedict Anderson’s (1993) apt phrase), as
a moral community in which persons take themselves to be mutually indebted and
obligated to one another.
Third, national affinity and the common language it supports make possible delib-
erative democracy. Deliberative democracy requires a certain reasonableness on the
part of citizens, in how they make demands on each other, in their willingness to
concede to better arguments, to compromise for the sake of tolerance and so on. It
requires that citizens be willing to forward proposals that are respectful and be will-
ing to meet other deliberators halfway out of a sense of mutual respect and of the
common project they are all engaged in. Shared nationality provides the fuel for this.
Moreover, deliberative politics, in Kymlicka’s words is “politics in the vernacular”.
What Kymlicka means is that democratic deliberation requires a common language
in which individuals can engage with each other.
Some critics of nationalism take national affinity to be irrational, as a form of identi-
fication based on passion and sentiment rather than reason. But defenders of liberal
nationalism would remind these critics that merely because a pursuit or project cannot
be fully rationally defended to everyone does not imply that it is valueless or unworthy
of consideration. Religious commitments and ideals of the good life aren’t the sort of
things that can be rationally defended universally. Yet we don’t immediately condemn
religious expressions and practices as meaningless or invaluable or a vice.
But can something that is not rationally defensible be morally justifiable? Again,
taking religion as an analogy, the fact that religious commitments cannot be ration-
ally defended does not make it unjust to pursue those commitments. What makes
religious practices just or unjust is not their rational basis but whether they conform
to background standards of justice. That is, what makes a pursuit just or unjust is
not whether it can be rationally defended to every philosopher’s satisfaction, but
whether it is pursued and realized in compliance with the requirements of justice.
Liberal nationalism is just such an attempt to show that there can be forms of nation-
alism that are consistent with the requirements of liberal justice.
The reasonable concern of skeptics of liberal nationalism is that, as mentioned,

nationalism has been the source of much vice in human history. In this regard, the
non-rational basis of nationalism carries a special burden of proof or justification
(unlike that of the non-rationality of personal pursuits). Moreover, one element of
nationalism is the idea that conationals are entitled to special consideration and are
beneficiaries of special obligations that other individuals in general are not. (We will
turn to this particular problem next.) Thus, while liberal nationalism has its stalwart
advocates, it should by no means be regarded as an uncontroversial position.
• PATRIOTISM AND PARTIALITY

There is a feature often associated with nationalism that presents a particular dif-
ficulty for global egalitarianism. This is the idea that individuals are entitled, if
not obliged, to care more for their compatriots. This idea of patriotic concern, as
we can call it, need not be tied to nationalism. Some commentators would argue
that patriotic sentiment can exist among members of a state quite independently
of any underlying nationalist identification among them. But what is relevant for
our discussion is that patriotic concern – whether it is nationalistically grounded or
not – seems to contradict the global egalitarian ideal that all persons are entitled to
equal consideration.
Global egalitarianism is a particularly strong view of what global justice demands.
As we saw, global egalitarianism not only holds that all individuals are entitled to
equal respect, but claims that, on account of equal respect, all individuals are enti-
tled to some form of global economic equality. The challenge of patriotic concern is
thus most pronounced when directed against global egalitarianism, and in investigat-
ing how global egalitarians could address this challenge, we should also be able to
account for the less difficult cases.
An immediate retort available to the global egalitarian is: “So much the worse for
patriotic concern then!”. That is, the global egalitarian could stand firm by her com-
mitments and if there is a prima facie tension between these commitments and other
values, the latter are to be rejected. There is nothing special about patriotic ties and
concerns. To the contrary, they are forms of prejudice and shortsightedness that we
should try to overcome. This form of response is analogous to William Godwin’s
argument (1793), in his discussion of utilitarianism, that if you ought to rescue the
archbishop of Cambray over his chambermaid because that will produce the best
outcome, then you ought to do the same even if the chambermaid happened to be
your sister or spouse. There is nothing morally significant in the pronoun “my”.
If global egalitarianism requires the wholesale rejection of patriotic concern, we
might be inclined to fault global egalitarianism as a mistaken view of global justice.
After all, any conception of justice that condemns special or personal concern of
other kinds – like friendship and kinship – could be accused of being out of touch
with humanity and human values, and consequently unfit for human beings. This
will be the problem many commentators, including utilitarians, find with Godwin’s
bald-faced rejection of relationship and special concern. Patriotic ties are, of course,
unlike ties of friendship and kinship in that the latter are intimate and personal ties.
But rejecting patriotic ties as unjust merely because they involve partiality is prema-
ture. Indeed, what the case of friendship and kinship suggests is that we look at how
conceptions of justice deal with these more familiar forms of partiality, and see if a
parallel can be drawn for the case of patriotic concern.
Thus, many global egalitarians would argue “back”, in same the way that, for exam-
ple, utilitarians could try to argue back to account for and accommodate friendship
and kinship within the utilitarian framework. For example, utilitarians could hold
that although utilitarian morality is fundamentally impartial and impersonal, special
concern for friends and family is defensible because special concern of this kind will
in fact in the long term produce more utility for society as a whole. Indeed, they
can make the even stronger argument that more good will result if individuals in
fact fully internalize these special commitments, and take them to be valuable in
themselves, even though objectively (from the utilitarian perspective) these are only
useful instrumentally. But even if individual actors do internalize these special com-
mitments, these special commitments are objectively only instrumentally valuable.
They are justifiable only because they provide a division of labor that allows for the
most efficient production of good for all involved.
Accordingly, following a similarly structured argument, some global egalitarians
could attempt to argue that special concern for compatriots can be seen as a division
of labor in this sense. By permitting individuals and their state institutions to care
specially for compatriots, if not further inculcating individuals to in fact endorse
these commitments as valuable in themselves, the end of global egalitarianism will
be better served or realized. Thus, if we allow Americans to attend specially to the
egalitarian needs of other Americans, Canadians to those of other Canadians, and the
British to other British, then we have a division of labor that will more effectively
realize our goals of global justice, rather than if we were to require all individuals
to attend to the needs of everyone at large. The reasons why this division of labor is
more efficient can be easily inferred. Through a combination of proximity, shared
history, participation under common institutions and laws, compatriots know each
other’s needs better than outsiders do. They also have clearer information on the
specific problems that their compatriots face, and proximity and shared institutions
allow for their efficient solution (e.g., Goodin 1988).
One problem with this argument is that it does not follow that patriotic concern will
always result in the desired outcome. In the case of America, Canada and Britain, it
does seem plausible that leaving each to focus on the needs of their own could pro-
vide an effective division of moral labor since each country is relatively capable of
providing justice its their own members, each is relatively well resourced and so on.
But dividing our moral obligations along patriotic lines surely cannot be efficient if
we throw into the mix countries that are less well off. Would we be able to say that
global justice will be best realized if Americans look after their own, and Somalis try
to do the same even though their country faces serious economic challenges? The
division of labor argument seems to fail as a general justification for patriotic concern
in our world.
However, this could be turned into an advantage for the division of labor argument.
Its proponents have made a case for why patriotic concern is valuable and what its
limits are: it is valuable because it can be an efficient mechanism for discharging or
fulfilling general global obligations; and it is impermissible at the point where patriotic
concern does not, in fact, service global goals.
A more serious problem for the division of labor argument is that treating patriotic
ties as (objectively) only instrumentally valuable, provides a mistaken account of the
value of these commitments. Some philosophers hold that, as social beings, we not
only find meaning and value in certain forms of social life, but that our actual flour-
ishing ordinarily entails some participation in social relationships like friendship and
kinship. The division of labor is incorrectly “reductive” in that it explains the value of
special relations and special obligations wholly in terms of some general moral good.
This way of accounting for special obligations strips special relations and concern of
any intrinsic value they might have for human beings. Nationalist theorists extend
these observations about special relationships to patriotic ties, and hence argue that
attempts to accommodate and limit patriotic concern by reference to some greater
global value mischaracterize and under-appreciate the value of patriotism. For these
theorists, just as it is implausible (pace some utilitarians) that the special concern
parents have for their own children is justifiable wholly because encouraging this
special care is how the welfare of all children in society is best maximized, so too
they argue that it seems implausible that patriotic ties are of value only because a
general global good is best realized by encouraging this form of partial concern.
The claim that patriotic relations are of intrinsic value will have to show that there
are certain relationships that are indeed valuable in this way, and that patriotic ties
are one of them. One might be prepared to accept that some special relations, like
friendship and kinship, are valuable in themselves, but deny that patriotic relations,
being impersonal and large scale, are valuable in the same way. But if there are special
relations and concerns that are valuable in themselves, then it is possible that patri-
otic relations count among these. So, granting the moral significance of patriotism,
what follows for global egalitarianism?
Not all defenders of patriotism go on to say that compatriots take priority always in
all cases. What they will say is that the ideals of global justice are shown to be more
complex than global egalitarians would have us believe. We cannot simply assume,
with regard to egalitarian justice, that the world is a single social scheme in which all
persons are entitled to equal economic entitlements or rights. Patriotic ties should
be taken into consideration and this can muddy the reasoning considerably. What
most commentators hold in the end is that while we do have duties of global justice
to help ensure that persons, regardless of nationality or citizenship, have the means
of subsistence, there is no duty of economic equality to all persons (D. Miller 2007).
The division of labor argument rescues global egalitarianism but by deflating the
significance of patriotism; the moral significance argument restores significance to
patriotism but undercuts global egalitarianism. Is it possible to have it both ways?
Here, it is helpful to examine how egalitarian justice addresses and accommodates
more familiar forms of special concern in the domestic case. For instance, few if
any domestic egalitarians deny that friendship and kinship are permissible relations
and forms of expression. Moreover, not many will be reductive about these ties
by arguing these are permissible or encouraged only because they serve egalitarian
goals. For instance, John Rawls does not say that individual conceptions of the good
(in which familial and other relational ties surely do play a part) are justifiable only
if they promote or help to realize social justice. Instead, the only restriction from
the perspective of social justice is that our conceptions of the good do not violate
or undermine the requirements of justice. That is, the principles of justice set the
parameters that define and limit the space for admissible pursuits (Brock 2009; Tan
2004). But, beyond this, no further justification is required. It is up to individuals
to attach whatever moral significance they want to their ideas of the good life. Of
course, as rational agents, we would hope that our overall forms of life would be
coherent and consistent. But there is no requirement that we justify and see the
value of their conceptions of the good in any particular way. That is, there is no
requirement that we must see our ends in life as being in the service of the greater
goal of social justice.
In other words, we can maintain the primacy of global egalitarian justice with-
out necessarily stripping patriotism of its moral significance. What the primacy of
egalitarian justice insists is only that, however these patriotic ties are grounded and
conceived, they be expressed and exercised within the parameters defined by global
egalitarianism. Just as a show of friendship in domestic society should not violate the
terms of egalitarian justice – I cannot withhold paying my taxes in order to benefit a
friend – so too patriotic commitments ought not to violate the terms of global egali-
tarian justice. But, just as this primacy of domestic justice does not mean that the
value of friendship is reducible to the ideal of egalitarianism, so limiting patriotism
against global egalitarianism in this way does not mean that we must treat patriotism
reductively.
Of course, the debate will continue in this way: unlike friendship, patriotism is a spe-
cial kind of relationship that in some political societies includes taking on obligations
of distributive justice towards each other. Thus, unlike friendship, patriotism gives
rise to a domain of egalitarian justice that will compete with the domain of global
egalitarian justice. But in reply, why should the fact that patriotic relations create
justice demands of their own negate justice demands in other context? For instance,
we could create a new private association that grants that members have justice
obligations to each other, and then use this as a reason to insist that the domestic
justice claims of the larger society no longer apply to us because we now occupy a
distinct and competing domain of justice. Rather, most of us would say that this
private association is a subset of the larger domain of justice and so it remains bound
by the demands of justice applicable in that domain. Whatever obligations we would
like to see ourselves as having towards fellow members of our private associations,
these obligations are constrained by the requirements of justice in force in society as
a whole. Likewise, whatever patriotism requires of persons, these requirements are
circumscribed by the requirements of global justice. Thus, if there is an independent
case for global justice, patriotic commitments and their moral significance do not, on
their own, block off these demands.
The form of the argument above is the following: if there is a case for global egalitari-
anism, the claim that patriotism is itself morally significant cannot undermine it. It
might well be that patriotism makes it impossible to argue for global egalitarianism.
For example, one might say, specifically against globalizing Rawls’s method, that
specific patriotic ties are not the sorts of things that one could assume ignorance of at
the (global) original position. But we will need to know why that is, why patriotic ties
are unique from other kinds of special relationships. Alternatively, one could argue
that patriotism provides the ties and mutual identification that make egalitarianism
a commitment in the first place, and hence there is no such thing as global egalitari-
anism, given the obvious absence of global patriotism. But this argument takes us
back to the considerations raised in the previous chapter about the circumstances of
egalitarian justice. In this respect, the case might well be made that, absent patriotic
relations, there can be no egalitarian justice. What is clear, however, is that this is
a different challenge from the one originally raised, which is that patriotic commit-
ments present a limitation to global egalitarianism. If there are independent reasons
for embracing global egalitarianism, patriotic ties do not limit its commitments.
• COSMOPOLITANISM AND NATIONALISM

It is often thought that cosmopolitanism is at odds with nationalism. Cosmopolitanism,
after all, affirms the ideal that all persons are entitled to equal respect, so must dis-
miss, some believe, nationalism as an obstruction to that ideal. To the extent then
that global justice is also cosmopolitan justice, global justice must be skeptical of
nationalism. It will be appropriate then to close this chapter with some reflections
on cosmopolitanism versus nationalism.
The term “cosmopolitanism” has different meanings in the global justice literature, and
while some conceptions of cosmopolitanism might well be in tension with nationalism,
others need not. So, to assess better the claim that cosmopolitanism and nationalism
are at odds, one needs to further specify “cosmopolitanism with respect to what?”.
If cosmopolitanism is meant as a conception of individual moral identity, that is, that
persons should basically identify themselves as members of humanity rather than of
any sub-group, then it would be in a state of conflict with nationalism, which allows
that nationality can be a primary source of identification. Or, if cosmopolitanism is
understood as an affirmation of a world government or world state, this might tell
against nationalism to some degree.
But if cosmopolitanism is a claim about the scope of egalitarian justice, then there is
no necessary tension between that and nationalist demands. In this case, it is possible
that, on the one side, we take egalitarianism to be a global ideal while holding, on the
other side, that national identity and partiality are important and valuable pursuits.
Just as a conception of domestic egalitarianism need not renounce familial partiality or
partiality among friends, but only require that these partial pursuits be confined by the
demands of egalitarian justice, so too cosmopolitan justice, so understood, can allow
and even acknowledge the value of nationalism consistent with the commitment to
global egalitarianism.
In short, whether cosmopolitanism and nationalism can be reconciled is hard to
answer in the abstract because the term “cosmopolitanism” is not sufficiently fixed
as yet in the literature. It has been used to refer to a host of distinct ideals about
global justice. Indeed, the general ideal that all persons are entitled to equal respect
seems so basic that it might be thought “we are all cosmopolitans now”. For cosmo-
politanism to be meaningful, therefore, it has to be further defined. And whether
cosmopolitanism and nationalism can go together will depend on what it is that
we are supposed to be cosmopolitan about. The above discussion suggests that it is
possible to be a cosmopolitan about egalitarian justice while accepting the value of
nationalism.
We will have a more comprehensive examination of cosmopolitanism when we discuss
cosmopolitan democracy in Chapter 11.
• SUMMARY
If nationalism is not inherently illiberal, then there is no reason why a defensi-
ble account of global justice cannot make room for liberal forms of nationalism.
Moreover, if there are good reasons for valuing nationalism, then a defensible
account of global justice must provide sufficient room for nationalist expression and
self-determination.
In this chapter, we explore the notion of liberal nationalism, and why some of its
proponents hold that liberal nationalism must be more than just a form of national-
ism around a shared constitution. We also looked at arguments that nationalism is
of value because of how it contributes to the objectives of liberal political morality.
A feature of nationalism is the ideal of patriotic partiality. How can this partiality
be justified? More importantly, does patriotic partiality undermine global egalitarian
arguments and commitments? We looked at arguments suggesting that partiality per
se need not be problematic for egalitarian justice, especially if egalitarian justice is
meant to regulate the background conditions under which persons and associations
engage in different pursuits, including personally or associationally partial ones.
Finally, we remarked briefly on the relationship between cosmopolitanism and
nationalism. While some conceptions of cosmopolitanism stand in conflict with
nationalism, cosmopolitanism as an account of the scope of distributive egalitarianism
need not be.
• STUDY QUESTIONS
1 Why do some liberal nationalists believe that liberal nationalism cannot be merely
“civic nationalism”?
2 What are some of the ways in which nationalism contributes to liberal political
objectives, according to liberal nationalists?
3 Is patriotism a virtue or is it a vice to be curbed?
4 Is patriotic partiality in tension with global egalitarianism?
5 What is the most relevant sense of cosmopolitanism for the purpose of global
justice? Is this conception of cosmopolitanism compatible with nationalism and
patriotism?
• NOTE
1 Lawrence of Arabia, directed by David Lean, screenplay by Robert Bolt. As
transcribed by Kenneth Mooney: http://www.aellea.com/script/lawrence_of_
arabia.txt [8 Sept. 2016].
• REFERENCES
Liberal nationalism
Jurgen Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity” (1992).

Will Kymlicka, “Misunderstanding Nationalism”, in Politics in the Vernacular (2001).
Alasdair MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” (1984).
Conational partiality
Gillian Brock, “What Do We Owe Conationals and Non-nationals?”, in Global

Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (2009).
Robert Goodin, “What’s So Special About Our Fellow Countrymen?” (1988).
David Miller, “The Ethical Significance of Nationality” (1988).
• FURTHER READING
Yael Tamir’s Liberal Nationalism (1995) is one of the first books in defense of nation-
alism in the contemporary debate. See also David Miller’s On Nationality (1995)
and Margaret Moore’s The Ethics of Nationalism (2001). For a critique of patriotism
and nationalism, see Simon Keller, “Patriotism as Bad Faith” (2005). David Miller’s
National Responsibility and Global Justice (2007) argues for national responsibility
as a limitation to global egalitarianism. Lea Ypi’s Global Justice and Avant-Garde
Political Agency (2012) argues that state-level political associations can be a force for
global justice and global egalitarianism.
6
•
the universality of
human rights
• UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS
Human rights belong to all individuals regardless of their citizenship, nationality, culture
and other forms of associative membership. Article 2 of The Universal Declaration of
Human Rights reiterates this universality and individuality of human rights as follows:
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration,
without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion,
political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other
status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political,
jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a per-
son belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any
other limitation of sovereignty.
Human rights are, therefore, by definition universal in that they are regarded as rights
of all individuals qua human beings regardless of their race, religion, political beliefs,
nationality, and so on. As a universal ideal, it follows that the protection and secur-
ing of the human rights of individuals is not solely the purview of their respective
states. States may well be the primary moral agent tasked with securing and protect-
ing the human rights of their own citizens, but human rights are ultimately a matter
of international concern. When a state fails to live up to its human rights duties, the
international community is entitled, and in fact obliged, to respond appropriately.1
The universality of human rights, therefore, has important practical implications.
Crucially, it sets a limit to state sovereignty, that is, the right of a state to independ-
ence, and its autonomy to make laws within its territory. It also means that respect for
or toleration of cultural diversity has to be balanced against human rights concerns.
What accounts for or justifies this universal reach of human rights? What grounds
these rights? And how does the universalistic aspiration of human rights influence
the content of human rights? For example, should human rights be limited to the
more basic and uncontroversial rights, such as the right to security, and perhaps
the universality of human rights • 61
the right to subsistence, but ought not to include rights that are more specific to
liberal political morality, such the right of free expression, association and the right
to democratic participation? How are these rights subject to cultural variation, and
claims of political self-determination?
These are poignant questions as leaders of some countries, such as Mahathir Mohamad
(former Prime Minister of Malaysia) and Lee Kuan Yew (former Prime Minister of
Singapore), have rejected the supposed universalistic basis of the current standard of
human rights. They claim that human rights, as presently conceived, reflect Western
cultural and moral values rather than truly universal ones. In particular, they object to
the moral individualism they perceive in present human rights doctrines. This cultural
parochialism of human rights, they argue, shows that human rights lack universal
moral authority. In light of this absence of true universality of human rights, they
hold that greater concessions must be given to cultural diversity and state sovereignty.
We will discuss the challenge of state sovereignty and cultural diversity for human
rights in the next chapter. First, let us examine how human rights can be conceived
as universally binding in a way that escapes the charge of cultural parochialism, and
how a non-parochial universalism ought to frame the content of human rights.
• THE GROUNDS OF THE UNIVERSALITY OF HUMAN

RIGHTS
On what philosophical grounds are human rights universal? How can the universal
requirements of human rights be justified? We can consider three approaches to
human rights universalism. One approach says that human rights derive from moral
features or facts about individuals. Since these moral facts or features are common
to all individuals, they provide the foundational justification for universal human
rights. The second approach takes human rights to be just that set of rights or related
values that the main cultures and traditions in the world affirm or can endorse. Thus,
human rights are universal because they constitute the core of the values lying in the
intersection of the major value systems of the world. Finally, a third approach holds
that human rights are universal because the idea of human rights is now a given and
entrenched feature of international relations. That is, our global political culture has
come to affirm the ideal of human rights as a universally binding standard, as a result
of certain shared historical experiences.
Let us examine the moral approach, the common core approach and the historicist
approach (as I will label these general positions) in turn.2
The moral approach

The moral approach to human rights holds that human rights ultimately reflect or
derive from the moral entitlements that individuals have qua moral agents.3 One
62 • the universality of human rights
obvious moral approach traces human rights to the natural moral rights of persons.
The idea of natural rights has a rich philosophical tradition, going back to Hugo
Grotius and John Locke. A moral right is a legitimate entitlement of the claimant
that puts others under some corresponding obligation to respect that right. Since
natural rights apply to all persons, they are entitlements of everyone universally
regardless of national, cultural or political membership. Human rights, although a
comparatively more recent idea than the idea of natural rights, are seen as a subset
(or specification) of natural moral rights.
Why are persons entitled to natural rights? Locke would say that it is because of the
fundamental moral equality of persons. This basic moral equality means that each
person has a set of natural rights, ensuring that she is free from domination by others.
Kantians would argue that it is the status of persons as rational autonomous beings,
capable of forming and pursuing valued ends, that makes them creatures worthy of
respect and regard as ends in themselves, and thus bearers of moral rights.
Although the idea of natural rights is the most direct way of basing human rights on
morality, there are other moral approaches that need not appeal to the idea of natural
rights. Some have argued that human rights are a means of protecting and ensuring
that each individual can attain the requisite human capabilities that are essential for
living a flourishing human life. Since these human capabilities are common and basic
to all persons, the human rights that are meant to protect these capabilities will have
universal scope. Martha Nussbaum (2001) has advanced a capability-based argu-
ment for human rights along these lines. Thus, if having adequate nutrition and the
ability to associate and form relations with others are features of human flourishing,
then there must be a human right to subsistence and a human right to freedom of
association and expression to guarantee the capabilities to realize these goals.
Other philosophers, like James Griffin (2008), have argued that human rights are
necessary protections for securing the “normative agency” of persons. Individuals, as
normative agents, have an interest in protecting their capacity to form, pursue and
revise their ends in life. Human rights serve to protect these basic interests of indi-
viduals and the necessary social preconditions for the realization of these interests.
Whatever the moral entitlements are that human rights are thought to reflect or
protect – natural rights, capabilities, normative agency – what is distinctive in the
moral approach in general is the view that human rights are founded on some univer-
sally held moral entitlements or interests of persons qua moral agents. The obvious
advantage of the moral approach is that it easily explains and justifies the univer-
sality of human rights. If human rights derive from or reflect our natural rights or
moral interests of persons qua human beings that put others under a corresponding
obligation to respect and protect, then human rights straightforwardly apply to all
individuals universally. Since they are founded on some supposed moral nature of
persons, human rights are straightforwardly rights of persons as such, independently
of their national and cultural origin.
The disadvantage of this approach is that substantive claims about humans’ moral
natures are subject to philosophical disagreements. Jeremy Bentham, for instance,
famously disparages natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts”. The Kantian notion of
autonomy can likewise be disputed, since it turns on a conception of the autonomous
self that some might consider metaphysically contentious. And the capability argu-
ment, some would retort, presumes that there is an ideal of human flourishing or
excellence, and yet this moral perfectionism – that there is an ideal of the good life
for human beings which they are capable of attaining given their nature – relies on
some conception of human nature or essence that is contestable.
Indeed, some might object that the moral theories appealed to for the purpose of
grounding universal human rights are themselves hardly universal but reflections of
cultural biases. For instance, the ideal of normative agency – that persons are norma-
tive agents who have an interest in forming, pursuing and revising their ideas of the
good life – relies on a western liberal conception of the individual, one that is not nec-
essarily shared by other political and cultural traditions. The supposed western moral
bias is the root of Mahathir Mohamad and Lee Kuan Yew’s objection (as noted above),
and the moral approach, rather than assuaging their objection, in fact gives it force.
The common core approach

The common core approach takes human rights to be the rights or related values
that lie in the overlap or intersection of the major value systems in the world.
That is, human rights are universal because they reflect the shared moral core of
human values. But this means that only values that are truly common to all qualify
as universal (Taylor 1999). One can expect the right not to be tortured, the right
to bodily integrity, and perhaps the right to basic subsistence to be among the
moral rights or values that are universally shared, and so can count as human rights
proper. But other moral ideals, like gender equality, freedom of association, the
right of political participation and so on, may fall outside the intersection of all sets
of values. If so, they don’t qualify as human rights.
The idea that human rights are the common denominator of the diversity of global
values is appealing. For one thing, it preserves the universality of human rights while
avoiding the worry of ethnocentricism. If human rights engage the rights or values
that are affirmed by the (at least major) moral systems of the world, then they can
non-ethnocentrically serve as the universally binding critical standard by which to
evaluate state conduct. When a state fails to respect human rights on this approach,
it fails by its own standard rather than by some standard that is alien to it.
But the price of success on this front is a significantly reduced or minimalized set of
human rights. If rights like the right to gender equality or the right to democracy do
not belong to the common core of values, then they cannot be regarded as human
rights. But does this not potentially render the list of human rights too thin? Is there
not the danger under this approach that we are simply reaffirming the status quo?
Does this not undermine the basic function of human rights, which is that of provid-
ing us with a critical standard for assessing state and international conduct?
Some proponents of the common core approach to human rights will point out that
since societal values develop and evolve, we must not presume that some rights or
values which are not presently in the common core could not eventually gain univer-
sal endorsement, and thereby come to gain the status of human rights. For instance,
it is possible that, in time, societal values in different traditions can evolve to affirm
gender equality (just as that value has come into being, relatively recent in the course
of human history, within the western cultural tradition). The ideal of human rights is
therefore a progressive one, and more rights can be added to the list of human rights
as human moralities progress.
The problem with this progressive account, however, is that until that happens, until
a right or value falls within the shared consensus, it does not qualify as a universal
human right. Thus, until gender equality becomes universally endorsed, it cannot
count as a human right. If one finds this problematic, then this counts against the
common core approach.
In short, one might worry that the common core approach gets us universality with
consensus, but at the cost of diluting the content of human rights. The consensus
is achieved by treating human rights as the lowest common denominator, and this,
some might worry, is too deflationary of human rights.
The historicist approach

The historicist approach avoids grounding the universality of human rights on a par-
ticular moral conception (the moral approach) or some actual or ideally achievable
value consensus (common core approach). What it takes to be salient is that the idea
of universal human rights is already part of the language of international relations in
practice and theory. That is, this approach claims that it is already an accepted idea
that there are universal human rights that bind all states and international actors.
Indeed, as evidence of this international recognition of human rights, adherents of
this approach will note that even tyrants do not deny the universality of human
rights when they are called out. Instead, they deny that what they are doing consti-
tutes violations of human rights. This denial is a tribute that vice pays to the virtue
of human rights, some commentators have noted.
On a common rendition of this approach, the contemporary idea of human rights
is a conscious international response to the atrocities of the Second World War. As
the preamble of The Universal Declaration (adopted in 1949) declares, the “disregard
and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged
the conscience of Mankind”. One lesson of the War is that the sovereignty of states
has to be limited by an established international standard – “a common standard of

achievement” – so that state sovereignty can no longer operate as a legal and moral
shield when states abuse their own citizens.
The historicist approach thus does not try to found human rights on some philo-
sophical ideal of human morality. The idea of human rights is seen as freestanding
in a sense. That is, the idea of human rights is not presented as something that is
grounded on any particular moral conception. This does not mean that we must disa-
vow any attempts to connect human rights to some moral beliefs. What it will insist
on, however, is that human rights are to be seen as ecumenical in the sense that there
are different possible moral foundations for these rights. Within some traditions, one
might find a natural rights grounding very persuasive. Within another tradition, it
might be some ideal of human excellence or perfection that appeals. And within yet
others, one might prefer a religious support for human rights. It is also possible that
some societies opt to arrive at human rights through a more communitarian moral-
ity (e.g., Confucianism). So long as the value and universality of human rights is
acknowledged, it is not relevant, as a matter of human rights practice, how different
societies and moral systems support human rights within their own moral doctrines
and traditions.
The historicist approach is also distinct from the common core approach since it does
not reduce human rights proper to just those values that lie in the common core of
the world’s values. Contra the common core approach, it can say, for instance, that
the set of human rights includes more than just those values that belong to the low-
est common denominator of the world’s values. Human rights will include all those
rights that are necessary for the purpose that we expect human rights to serve.
On this approach to human rights, the philosophical task is not so much that of
identifying and defending a moral foundation for human rights. In one version of
this approach the challenge is to clarify the practical purpose of human rights.
Accordingly the content of human rights is to be articulated and refined by refer-
ence to this practical function of human rights. For instance, Charles Beitz (2009)
writes that human rights limit state sovereignty by identifying the most urgent and
important individual interests that states can be held accountable for and that are
appropriate subjects of international concern. Thus, whether, say, gender equality is
a human right will depend in part on whether it is a suitable subject of international
concern. On one common interpretation, John Rawls’s approach to human rights is
another example of the functional view. Rawls, on this reading, regards human rights
to be those basic individual rights whose violations by a state disqualifies that state as
a member in good standing in a lawful international order.
Adherents of the historicist approach do not deny, implausibly, that the philosophi-
cal work for human rights is completed just because we regard human rights to be
an integral feature of the global political culture. But the questions of the foundation
and normative force of rights (which the moral and common core approaches tackle
head on) are just two philosophical issues concerning rights. The historicist approach
bypasses these questions, confronting instead the task of clarifying the practice or
function of human rights and the content of these rights. Its philosophical task is
thus that of interpreting the practice of human rights rather than that of morally con-
structing human rights from the ground up, as in the moral approach. For example, if
human rights are meant to set limits on state sovereignty and to identify rights whose
violations are proper subjects of international response, does gender equality qualify
as a human right? What about the right to democracy?
The key point of the historicist approach, however, is that the universality of human
rights is already presumed and is not part of the discussion. And unlike the common
core approach, this universality is not based on a consensus around existing values,
but on a shared value-commitment that is historically informed.
A difficulty with the historicist approach, in particular with the functional view, is
that there is the danger that it risks deflating the normative force of human rights.
What if someone denies the ideal of human rights from the outset and claims that the
advent of contemporary human rights discourse is a historical mistake? For example,
what can we say to the tyrant who rejects the language of human rights altogether?
Moreover, disagreement can arise as to what the exact function of human rights
is. And what if, even among those who affirm the ideal of human rights, there is
disagreement regarding what its function is? Is it to limit sovereignty narrowly with
respect to military intervention? Or does it limit sovereignty more broadly, to permit
international criticism and condemnation? Indeed, while Beitz takes his functional
approach to be inspired by Rawls, he arrives at a different content of human rights
from Rawls because he rejects Rawls’s particular understanding of the function of
human rights. (We will turn to Rawls and human rights below.) Beitz might well be
right to reject Rawls’s conception of human rights’ function; but the point is that
such disagreements within the historicist approach are possible, and will result in
different conclusions about specific human rights.
Finally, what are the urgent individual interests that are appropriate subjects of inter-
national concern? Can the emergent practice of human rights settle this question
without some discussion of what counts as true urgent individual interests? That is,
can the practice of human rights on its own determine the content of human rights
without recourse to some moral theory of what matters for individuals?
Reflections
The moral approach to human rights makes the case for the universal moral force of
human rights by grounding human rights on moral rights or interests of persons qua
human beings. If successful, it can present a strong case for the universality of human
rights without diluting its content. The difficulty with this approach is that claims
about human moral natures are philosophically contestable. The common core
approach avoids philosophical controversy of this sort by treating human rights as

the core set of values lying in the intersection of the major value systems of human-
ity. But the difficulty with this approach, for some commentators, is that this renders
the content of human rights too thin. Finally, the historicist approach eschews moral
foundational arguments for human rights, and avoids treating human rights as the
common core of global values. Rather, human rights are values that the global com-
munity has already affirmed and signed up to. The task is then one of clarifying this
global moral standard and refining its content. The difficulty with this approach, for
its critics, is that it makes human rights too historically contingent, and is at risk of
deflating the normative force of human rights in the case where some disagree with
the practice, or even that it should be part of the global political landscape.
• SHOULD HUMAN RIGHTS INCLUDE LIBERAL

RIGHTS?
The discussion above suggests that, for some commentators, the universalism of
human rights requires that the content of human rights be as non-parochial as pos-
sible. That is, human rights should exclude rights that are specific to certain political
and cultural traditions and include only those basic rights that are truly common to all
of humanity. On this view, some of the rights affirmed in the Universal Declaration
are in danger of overreach. For example, the right to democratic participation and
the right to free association, among others, some would argue, are liberal rights. That
is, these are rights that are unique to the liberal tradition. Since the liberal tradition
is just one among others, human rights proper ought not to include liberal rights.
If it is agreed that sovereignty is never absolute but limited by the ideal of human
rights, then the practical limits of sovereignty can turn on how different sides to
the debate understand the content of human rights. Should human rights proper
be limited to the most basic of individual rights, such as the right to security and
perhaps the right to subsistence? Or should human rights include some of the rights
commonly affirmed in liberal democratic societies, such as the right of democracy,
the right to political participation, the right to freedom of expression and association,
and the right of gender equality? Interestingly, the Universal Declaration includes
these “liberal” rights among its list of human rights. Has the Declaration overreached
in its aspiration?
Rawls: human rights and toleration

In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls provides a powerful case for not including liberal
rights as human rights in this way. Since human rights are to serve as the evalua-
tive benchmark for a state’s moral standing, including liberal rights among human
rights would provide an unreasonable criterion for a state’s moral legitimacy. Such
an international standard of state legitimacy would not be adequately respectful of
nonliberal forms of political life and organization that could very well exist as equal
partners with other societies in a lawful international order. In other words, given the
critical function of human rights, adding liberal rights to its content will violate the
limits of international toleration for Rawls.
Rawls believes that his conception of international toleration follows from his
account of political liberalism. For Rawls, the liberal state ought to tolerate com-
prehensive doctrines (such as a person’s conception of the good life) even if they
aren’t liberal so long as they are in conformity with the public political principles of
liberalism. Since comprehensive doctrines are subject to reasonable disagreement,
the liberal state steps out of bounds if it does not tolerate nonliberal comprehensive
doctrines. So long as adherents of nonliberal doctrines can affirm the public political
requirements of liberal justice, there is no cause to politically criticize, much less
challenge, these nonliberal doctrines. Analogously then, if a state is able to affirm the
principles of the society of peoples, there is no grounds for objecting to its internal
political organization.
Thus, for Rawls, “human rights proper”, as he calls them, are limited to the most
basic of rights, such as the rights of persons, rights of religious freedom, rights
to formal legal equality and a right to basic subsistence. States that violate these
basic rights will be classed as tyrannical states, and will be subject to appropri-
ate international criticisms, sanctions and even intervention in extreme cases. But
states that respect basic human rights and are peaceful and law-abiding members
of the society of peoples in other ways are states in good moral standing, even if
they aren’t liberal in their domestic constitution. That is, states qualify as decent
even if they don’t endorse liberal rights, like the right of political participation,
equal religious freedom, right of individual dissent and so on. These nonliberal
but rights-respecting and law-abiding states, what he calls “decent peoples”, are
to be recognized as members in good standing in the society of peoples. As such,
they should not be pressured by liberal states or the international order to become
liberal internally. Since decent peoples don’t stand in violation of human rights
(by definition since human rights do not cover liberal rights), these societies are
entitled to their sovereignty and non-interference.
Rawls’s position on international toleration has launched a substantial body of
literature. Some critics argue that, even if Rawls is right that expecting all indi-
viduals to adopt liberal comprehensive ideals in the whole of life is intolerant of
nonliberal conceptions of the good, it does not follow that international toleration
is violated if principles of liberal political justice were to be required of all states.
The space for reasonableness in the domestic case concerns nonpolitical compre-
hensive matters, such as one’s conception of the good life; in the international
case, it is disanalogously extended to include political ideals and conceptions on
how to organize the public arena.
Rawls’s response is that since he is developing a two-tiered account of justice – that
is, a standard of justice for liberal domestic society, and a different standard of
justice for international society – the scope of reasonableness may be appropriately

adjusted when moving from the domestic to the global contexts. Thus, what would
count as reasonable in the domestic case, namely requiring that all persons accept
the political liberal conception of justice for the public domain of the liberal state,
would not be so considered in the global domain. In the liberal domestic case, cer-
tain liberal values are already explicitly or implicitly affirmed. That is, there is an
existing liberal political culture that underpins the reasonableness of this require-
ment. However, in the global context, there is no shared global liberal political
culture to support this expectation. There is the culture of human rights in the
global domain, but one that does not include the more parochial liberal rights. So
while it is reasonable to require that all societies, in order to be in good standing,
affirm human rights, it is unreasonable to require them to also endorse liberal rights.
This exclusion of liberal rights will depend on how we envisage the global political
culture. Is this culture a liberal one at its core? And if not, would it be reasonable
for liberals to want it to become more liberal? That is, if the formation of a global
liberal political culture is not itself an unreasonable quest, then requiring all states to
become characteristically liberal if they are to be in good standing in the society of
peoples need not be a violation of international toleration.
One might be tempted to think that one of Rawls’s reasons for not including liberal
rights as part of human rights is that human rights violations are triggers for military
intervention. If human rights violations do present a just cause for military interven-
tion, then it does seem sensible not to have too exacting a standard of human rights
since there are very good reasons for limiting the moral occasion for going to war. But
this conflation of non-tolerance with military intervention overextends Rawls’s func-
tional account of human rights. It is correct that respecting and protecting human
rights is one necessary criterion for a state to be in good international moral standing.
He is clear that any state that does not respect human rights proper will be deemed
unreasonable and will not meet the limits for international toleration. But it is not
the case that states which violate human rights are therefore subject to military
intervention. Even though tyrannical societies that violate human rights are not to be
tolerated, it does not follow that they are legitimate targets of intervention. Whether
it can be permissible to intervene in a rights-violating tyrannical society is a further
question, and Rawls’s own response is that “in extreme cases” intervention could be
warranted. Thus, to conflate non-tolerance with intervention confuses an evaluative
standard with a method of enforcing that standard.
Thus, if human rights violations are not sufficient reasons for military interven-
tion (an enforcement issue) but serve only as standards of legitimacy (an evaluative
issue), then it is less troublesome if human rights include liberal rights. Illiberal
states will not be tolerated, but there is no danger that this risks setting the world on
some slippery slope towards habitual military intervention. Indeed, if a just war has
to satisfy, among other things, some proportionality criterion, it is hard to imagine
how violations of liberal rights themselves could present a just cause for a military
intervention. (We will return to this subject in the next chapter.)
Disengaging non-tolerance from military intervention does not mean all talk and no
action. There are many ways for the international society to respond to human rights
failures, from mild diplomatic pressures for less severe violations to providing incen-
tives and, in more important cases, disincentives and other forms of sanctions short
of military engagement.
But there might be another reason why imposing liberal rights (as human rights) on
all states as a criterion for moral legitimacy might be seen as an intolerant response.
It does not properly respect the tradition, customs and values of historically distinct
cultural or national communities. This is one of the questions we will explore in the
next chapter.
• SUMMARY
In this chapter, we discussed the basis for the universal scope of human rights. One
approach takes human rights to be part of human morality and so, in as far as moral-
ity is universal, so are human rights. The difficulty with this approach is that theories
of morality are subject to philosophical disputes. Another approach takes human
rights to be the lowest common denominator values that are common to all (the
main) moral systems in the world. The difficulty with this approach is that there
is the possibility that the content of human rights will be rendered rather minimal.
Finally, we looked at a historicist approach that takes the universality of human
rights to be an accepted feature of international relations. On this approach what is
open to debate is not the universality of human rights per se but the fleshing out of
its content in light of the role which the idea of human rights is meant to play in the
world. This seems to be a promising approach. One question it invites, however, is
whether this way of conceptualizing human rights renders it too contingent on the
values already affirmed in the global political culture.
Finally, we looked at whether human rights should include some of the common
liberal rights, such as the right of democratic participation, right to freedom of asso-
ciation and expression, and the like. Some liberals believe that including liberal
rights as human rights risks rendering human rights too parochial and ethnocentric.
Others think that, to stay consistent with their liberal commitments, liberals ought
to expand human rights to include certain liberal rights. The universality of these
rights need not imply a lack of toleration for nonliberal societies, since the scope of
toleration is to be determined within the bounds of rightness.
• STUDY QUESTIONS
1 Should the idea of human rights be founded on a moral theory?
2 Does a consensus approach to human rights achieve universality at the cost of the
moral content of human rights?
3 Is there an emerging practice of human rights? Can we agree on what the function
of this practice is?
4 Is the practical approach to human rights too morally disengaged to have the critical
moral authority and force we would want in the idea of human rights?
5 Should human rights include liberal rights, or would this exceed the limits of
international toleration?
• NOTES
1 To say that the international community has the right, if not the obligation, to
respond to human rights violations is not the same as saying that it has the right
or duty to engage in military intervention. Military intervention is a particular form
of response to human rights violations and presents a special case with additional
moral concerns. I will turn to this topic in Chapter 8.
2 The reader should note that while these are not necessarily original labels, they are
not standard either. However, the categories substantively reflect distinctions in
recent discussion. See in particular Beitz 2009.
3 By calling this the “moral” approach, the implication is not that the other
approaches are amoral or lacking in normative standing. Rather, it is to signify
that, on this approach, human rights are the entitlements, straightaway, of moral
persons. I thank a reader for urging clarification of this label.
• REFERENCES
Charles Beitz (excerpts), The Idea of Human Rights (2009).
Gillian Brock, “Rawls’s Law of Peoples,” in Global Justice (2009).
James Griffin (excerpts), On Human Rights (2008).
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples, Part II (1999).
Charles Taylor, “Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights” (1999).
• FURTHER READING
For some advanced discussions on the foundation of human rights, see the essays in
The Philosophical Foundation of Human Rights, edited by Rowan Cruft et al. (2015).
Rex Martin and David Reidy’s edited collection, Rawls’s Law of Peoples (Martin and
Reidy 2005), has chapters on Rawls and human rights and international toleration.
7
•
human rights: state
sovereignty, culture
and gender
In the previous chapter, we examined possible arguments for the universality of
human rights. We will continue with this investigation, this time by examining two
specific obstacles to human rights universalism.
One is the principle of state sovereignty. The principle of sovereignty holds that states
are independent and autonomous with respect to other states and have the right to
determine their own laws and political institutions within their territorial jurisdiction.
We noted, however, that human rights can serve to limit state sovereignty. Yet, the
principle of state sovereignty is considered to be one of the fundamental principles of
international relations, and leaders of some countries are quick to invoke the principle
of state sovereignty to fend off outside criticisms of their human rights practices.
For example, the Chinese government typically plays the sovereignty card against
external or international criticism of its domestic human rights practices. This
response by Chinese officials to criticisms by the State Department of the United
States of the detention of activists is representative: “China is a country ruled by
law. Relevant departments will handle the relevant case according to law. We hope
that public figures in other countries can respect China’s judicial sovereignty and
independence.”1
How should we assess this tension between human rights and sovereignty? State
sovereignty undoubtedly has value; but the idea that sovereignty trumps any inter-
national human rights concern is dubious. What is the proper relationship between
sovereignty and human rights? What is the value of state sovereignty from a human
rights perspective?
The other challenge is that of cultural diversity. Human rights include the right of
individuals to a shared or common way of life. But how do we reconcile the respect
state sovereignty, culture and gender • 73
for individual human rights with the right of individuals to a cultural community and
tradition when these come into conflict? For example, Asian leaders like Lee Kuan
Yew, have made the concept of “Asian Values” a household name. They believe that
there are distinctive culturally derived Asian moral values that have withstood the
test of time and that are at odds with human rights as presently understood. Thus,
imposing human rights on all countries without regard for their different cultural
traditions amounts to a form of Western moral imperialism.
We will look at these two related challenges to human rights in this chapter. We
will end this chapter by looking at the specific problem that gender justice poses for
human rights.
• HUMAN RIGHTS VERSUS SOVEREIGNTY

Human rights and the principle of state sovereignty are two of the key normative pil-
lars of international relations. Yet they are in tension when the protection of human
rights requires some kind of international interference with a state. This conflict
between sovereignty and rights is one of the problems of global justice: to what
extent should sovereignty be respected when human rights are at stake? It is there-
fore important to clarify the relationship between human rights and sovereignty
since it affects our understanding of the universal reach of human rights.
The ideal of sovereignty is a complex one and can be given different meanings depend-
ing on the discussion. For instance, one might understand sovereignty narrowly as
immunity from military intervention in the discussions of just war. The concept can,
however, also be understood more broadly to mean a right of self-determination,
that is the right of a state to conduct its internal affairs without outside interference,
including here not just military action but diplomatic, economic, etc. This will be
our understanding of the right to sovereignty: it is a right to construct and pursue a
shared way of life as a political society without interference from outside.
Why is sovereignty a value? In particular how is it a value? Why should we think
that states have a right to sovereignty, if we also believe in human rights? One posi-
tion will be that sovereignty ought to be respected because it provides a means for
protecting and securing human rights. This is an instrumental defense of sovereignty.
On this view, human rights exist independently of the state. The role of the state is
to protect and secure these independently existing human rights.
Another position accords sovereignty intrinsic value. On this second view, sover-
eignty is to be respected because the right to sovereignty is itself a human right,
and/or it is a right that brings human rights into existence. Accordingly, sovereignty
is not merely a means for securing human rights (as in the instrumental account),
but is what makes human rights possible. We will consider these defenses of state
sovereignty in turn.
74 • state sovereignty, culture and gender
An instrumental right
On the instrumental defense of sovereignty, state sovereignty matters merely because
respecting a state’s right to determine its own internal affairs without outside inter-
ference is a means for achieving human rights. That is, human rights are more liable
to be promoted and realized when a state, the primary arena within which human
rights are protected and enforced, is able to freely determine its own domestic life,
including working out the institutional mechanism by which human rights are to be
exercised. The argument might even posit that states know the interests of their own
citizens best, and thus are in the best position to serve their human rights. So the
right to sovereignty is an instrumental right in that respecting this right of states is
the best means of protecting the human rights of individuals.
But this instrumental defense of sovereignty prioritizes human rights over sover-
eignty. If sovereignty is instrumentally valued with regard to human rights, then
in cases where a state is violating, or even when it is clearly unable to protect, the
human rights of its own citizens, it forfeits its claim to sovereignty. On this instru-
mentalist view of sovereignty, respect for a state’s sovereignty is conditional on the
state’s protection of and respect for the human rights of its own citizens.
One might push back against this quick surrender of sovereignty by insisting that,
just as an individual knows best what her own interests are, so does the state. And
just as when outsiders interfere paternalistically against an individual they tend to
get it wrong, so when outsiders interfere with a state on human rights issues, they
tend to get it wrong. Outsiders lack the cultural and historical knowledge and hence
may believe a rights violation is involved when the issue in question might just be an
accepted practice.
It is, however, important not to exaggerate the epistemic point. For one thing, when
there is a belief that human rights are being violated, it is often because those whose
rights are being violated are crying out for help. These victims are as much insiders as
their abusers and outsiders are getting involved on their behalf. At the very least, the
idea that outsiders cannot know whether conditions within a foreign state are suited
for human rights or not cannot be taken at face value.
Thus, the instrumental defense of sovereignty is one that human rights defenders can
readily accept. They will say in fact then that we should respect a state’s sovereignty
when it is discharging its human rights duties to its own citizenry. But when a state
fails in this regard, the reason for respecting its sovereignty disappears.
An intrinsic right
The intrinsic argument for sovereignty poses a more difficult challenge for human
rights. One form of this argument says that the right to sovereignty is itself a human
right and so the tension between human rights and sovereignty is really a tension
within the ideal of human rights itself and so giving priority to rights does not mean
relegating sovereignty to a secondary status. Another says that although sovereignty
is not itself a human right, it is constitutive of human rights in that it establishes and
secures the setting that gives rise to human rights.
Among the human rights that persons have, the argument can go, is the right to col-
lectively determine the course of their joint political life. As Michael Walzer puts it,
state sovereignty “derives its moral and political force from the rights of contempo-
rary men and women to live as members of a historic community and to express their
inherited cultures through political forms worked out among themselves” (Walzer
1980, p. 211).2
Thus, the conflict between state sovereignty and human rights is not really a conflict
between two different ideals, but a conflict within the ideal of human rights itself.
The instrumentalist view, which is favored by human rights proponents, oversimpli-
fies the relationship between rights and sovereignty and resolves the conflict in a
mistakenly simplistic way. On the contrary, respect for human rights can sometimes
prioritize the claim of a state to sovereignty. On this view, only under the more severe
instances of human rights violation, when it becomes cynical to say that there is some
community acting in self-determination, can the right to sovereignty be forfeited.
Another argument for the intrinsic moral standing of states is that many of the central
human rights that persons typically claim aren’t rights that they have in some stateless
situation or a state of nature. Rather, the important human rights – the basic rights
to personal security, personal property, protection of the law, etc., are rights that
are identified, specified and enforced within a state structure. That is, these human
rights make sense only in the context of a state. Without a state, these rights have
no home. Again, Walzer’s remarks on this point are representative: “The distinction
of state rights and individual rights is simplistic and wrong-headed … without the
first of these, the second is meaningless: as individuals need a home, so rights need
a location.” (Walzer 1980, p. 228). The political society is where important human
rights are specified and protected. Disregarding the autonomy of a political society
therefore threatens the social setting that makes human rights possible.
Unlike the instrumentalist view of sovereignty, this constitutive view of sovereignty
takes it that the role of the state is not just that of an enforcer and protector of some
pre-existing human rights which persons have in nature. Rather, the state creates
and makes possible the existence of these rights. Thus the instrumentalist view, that
the protection of human rights can warrant the forfeiture of sovereignty, is at risk of
incoherence as it seeks to undermine the very conditions of human rights.
These two arguments for the intrinsic moral standing of states can reinforce each
other. Since states are necessary for the realization and protection of certain impor-
tant human rights (the second argument), and since individuals have the right to a
“rightful condition” of this sort, individuals have a human right to form a state of
their own (the first argument).
A state, therefore, does not forfeit its moral legitimacy in the eyes of the international
community merely because it has restricted certain human rights – like the right to
gender equality, the right to free speech and association, the right to political dissent,
and so on. On the intrinsic conception of sovereignty, so long as a state continues to
secure the public and political arena within which the rights of individuals can be
worked out, it maintains its right of self-determination and sovereignty. Indeed, this
international respect is required even if some members of the state find that it has
lost its moral legitimacy. A state that is not morally legitimate in the eyes of (some
of ) its citizens can nonetheless retain international legitimacy.
The main difference between what we can call the cosmopolitan and communitar-
ian conceptions of sovereignty and human rights can be summed up as follows. The
cosmopolitan view denies that there is a human right to sovereignty as such, and
holds that the state has only the instrumental role of protecting and enforcing human
rights. The communitarian view holds that sovereignty is itself a human right, and
that the state has a constitutive function, and not just an instrumental one, with
respect to human rights.
Thus the real world problem of the limit of sovereignty and human rights turns on
some deeper philosophical questions. A fuller resolution of this matter will require
further analysis of the purpose of the state in relation to the rights of individuals.
It will also require philosophical analysis of the relationship between the rights of
individuals and the rights of a collective. For example, under what conditions can a
collective correctly express the rights of its individual members?
Even if we grant the constitutive view of the state, it matters how we define the
function of the state in relation to rights: is the state’s purpose to provide an insti-
tutional order in which certain human rights are exercisable and protected, or is the
state’s role only that of securing a stable forum in which these matters can be dis-
puted, debated and worked out in whatever way? If we believe that the constitutive
function of states is to realize human rights and not merely that of providing a stable
arena for their contestation, then any state that fails to achieve this end surrenders its
very purpose and loses its moral standing.
That is, even if the state is that which provides the setting for the existence of human
rights, it does not follow that any state arrangement would do. The rightful condi-
tions, the conditions of rights that the state makes possible, presumably require that
the state take certain institutional forms.
• CULTURE AND HUMAN RIGHTS

It is sometimes claimed that the demands of human rights go against certain cultural
traditions and values. Thus, human rights cannot really be universal since not all
cultural practices can endorse them. Or, at the very least, what can be considered
universal human rights will be rather minimal if human rights are to enjoy global
endorsement, given the fact of cultural diversity. For shorthand, let’s call this the
“culturalist” challenge to human rights. To give this challenge some content, I will
focus on the Asian Values objection to human rights.
The Asian Values objection is more properly an East Asian Values objection. The
objection is that the ideal of human rights commonly proposed as universal is in fact
at odds with the Confucian tradition and values of certain East Asian countries, such
as China and Singapore. Confucian values, the adherents of this argument say, empha-
size community over the individual, responsibility over rights, and these principles
are in tension with the individualist and rights-based focus of human rights doctrines.
The Asian Values challenge is thus not a straightforward case of ethical relativism –
that is, the claim that there can be no universal moral standards on account of cultural
diversity. It does not deny that there are certain universal standards, including standards
which have to do with the good of a community and responsibility. Indeed, proponents
of the Asian Values position imply that there is a universal human right to a tradition or
a cultural way of life. Moreover, few proponents of Asian Values will deny that there
are human rights to basic security and subsistence. What they really are opposing is the
perceived liberal morality in human rights universalism, the claim that human rights
must include democratic participation, freedom of speech and expression, freedom of
association and freedom of political dissent.
Consider the charge of excessive normative individualism that proponents of Asian
Values level against the idea of human rights. They put the case that groups can be
holders of rights as well, and that the right of the group to preserve and maintain its
shared values and tradition can trump the rights of individuals. This group right goes
beyond the right of individuals to a secure and stable social environment in which
they can live and interact with each other. It includes the right of the group to a
particular cultural and social context and way of life. These cultural values include
respect for authority, filial piety (respect for one’s parents and elders), respecting
the proper modes of expressing dissent, willingness to put the interest of the group
before one’s own, and so on. These cultural practices and traditions are valued not
just because they promote stability and social harmony but they are valued also as
forms of cultural expressions.
Related to the problem of individualism is the perceived rights focus of human rights
discourse. Naturally, the ideal of human rights has to be concerned with rights. The
Asian Values objection says, however, that this preoccupation with rights is one-
sided. With individual rights must come individual responsibility, and yet human
rights discourse does not say much about individual responsibility. Again, this has
been diagnosed as liberalism’s undue influence on human rights, since liberalism
is traditionally concerned with granting individuals rights as protections against
the excesses of the state. This stands in contrast to the Confucian moral code, so
claim proponents of the Asian Values argument, which stresses the individual’s
responsibility to society and the social order over the rights of individuals against
society. If there is to be a universal ideal of human rights, there has also to be a
universal declaration of responsibility.
The Asian Values argument is perhaps the most well-known of the culturalist chal-
lenges because of the prominence of some of its proponents, such as Lee Kuan Yew
of Singapore and the various premiers of China since the 1980s.3 What can the
human rights defender say in reply to the East Asian challenge, and the culturalist
objection in general?
First, with regard to the fundamental claim that there is a basic tension between
Asian Values or Islamic Values on the one hand and human rights on the other, it
can be queried whose interpretation of Asian Values or whose interpretation of Islam
are we presuming. A rich cultural tradition is not monolithic, and certainly not static
but is rather multidimensional and dynamic. There isn’t just one interpretation of
Asian Values. What Asian Values are is contestable by members of Asian societies,
just as Western values are subject to interpretation and argument. Thus, against the
anti-liberal interpretation of Confucian morality, there is a more liberal reading of
Confucianism.
It is precisely because a cultural tradition is subject to debate and interpretation, and
not a matter carved in stone for all to see, that the right of free expression and politi-
cal participation, including democracy, is taken to be a central human right if we are
to take cultural claims seriously. If culture is of value to groups of individuals, then
each individual must have the right to deliberate with fellow members the content
and traditions and direction of their culture. If Asian Values are important and to
be respected, then the rights of individuals to determine the content of these values
must be respected.
The human rights defender therefore need not deny that groups can have a right to
a cultural way of life, a right that in a sense may trump the preferences of some par-
ticular individuals. But for a right to be properly a group right, they will say, certain
internal moral conditions must hold. Only when all are free to voice their opinions
and engage in free exchange with each other can we be reasonably confident that the
cultural viewpoint expressed can be described as a viewpoint of the whole. A person
whose preferences have been outvoted can be expected to stand by the group’s deci-
sion so long as the voting process is one that is fair. Moreover, prioritizing the group’s
decision over her preference is not morally objectionable if her basic interests remain
protected. So liberals can take seriously certain cultural claims so long as individual
rights set the moral constraints on exercises of group preference.
With respect to individual responsibility, the East Asian objection seems to be on the
correct path if what they are saying is that rights must be accompanied by and sup-
plemented by individual responsibility. After all, to take rights seriously will require
taking the responsibilities that these rights impose on each of us seriously. But if the
East Asian position is claiming that rights must be supplanted by responsibility as
the more basic ideal, then this seems to be an overreach. Rather than seeing respon-
sibilities and rights as competing alternatives, they can be seen as two sides of the
same coin. For this reason, human rights advocates should concede that the other
side has a point here, that rights talk should be supplemented with some account of
individual responsibility.4 Ignoring the significance of responsibility, as the flip side
of rights, will only fuel skepticism about the supposed universality of rights.
It is worth noting that the culturalist challenge to human rights replicates a debate
within liberalism itself concerning the relationship between multiculturalism and lib-
eralism. There can be some lessons to be drawn from this internal debate amongst
liberals. For one thing, it affirms the value of culture and its significance for liberal-
ism, thus narrowing the apparent gap between the culturalist and the human rights
advocate. Liberal multiculturalists have argued that cultural identity is an important
individual good in that it provides the context within which persons make choices
that are meaningful and valuable to them. That is, we don’t choose our pursuits in a
cultural vacuum but from a range of options that are culturally valued and defined.
Thus, in the case of a multicultural society where the cultural membership of indi-
viduals in minority cultures is less secure, the liberal state can provide some means
of support through the provision of special cultural rights. These are group rights in
the sense that they are rights that are group-differentiated and that serve to protect a
group’s way of life rather than any particular individual preference. But while liberal
multiculturalists go some way towards recognizing the value of and protecting culture,
many are also insistent that a culture’s worth turns on whether it in fact respects the
basic liberal rights of individuals, including its own members and internal minorities.
If liberal multiculturalism is a plausible position, then the East Asian Values Challenge
can be absorbed rather than acceded to. The human rights defender can affirm the
value of culture and the right of a group of persons to support and maintain a shared
way of life and common values; but this cultural group right is to be exercised within
certain parameters as defined by individual rights.
• GENDER AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Women’s rights
Are women’s rights human rights? As stated, this question seems odd, since if women
are humans, then surely their human rights are human rights. But the question is not
whether women are entitled to human rights, but whether there ought to be special
human rights for women.
One response to this question notes that all women and men are human beings
with common needs and interest and identical moral status. As such, there are only
universal human rights that apply equally to men and women. There is no need for
any special human rights for women. The problem, on this view, is not that women
need a special class of human rights, but that historically and at present their human
rights are not being properly or equally protected or respected. These problems of
enforcement and protection are not trivial problems to be dismissed. In fact, they will
require significant domestic reforms in many cases and more concerted international
concern. But, ultimately, the issue is that of equal and gender-neutral protection and
enforcement of human rights, not the lack of special human rights for women.
Traditionally, the problem of women’s rights does seem to be that of unequal protec-
tion and respect. For example, in many countries today (and in most until recently),
women do not have the same citizenship rights as men. They don’t have the right
to vote, to equal education, of mobility and occupation, and the like. Women (and
girls) are also traditionally subject to outright physical violations or forced to par-
ticipate in rituals and social practices that violate their basic human rights, such as
female genital mutilation. Women are also subject to domestic violence and abuse
that many states seem unable to protect them from. These are cases of women not
enjoying human rights that men take for granted, and although as mentioned these
are serious issues, the way to secure their resolution, on this account, is to ensure that
women are able to enjoy the same human rights as men.
So, although there are clearly violations of the human rights of women, the posi-
tion sketched out above sees the solution as lying in better enforcement and equal
protection of human rights as such, not the creation of a new and special category of
women’s rights.
But other commentators have argued that women have special needs and interests
that require a special set of human rights for women. Women have child-bearing and
nurturing responsibilities and needs; they have the larger share of the caring duties
for family members in traditional households; and they are more vulnerable to physi-
cal and sexual violence. No doubt some of these discrepancies of needs and interest
have social and institutional sources, but they are present all the same. Given these
real differences in needs and vulnerabilities, there has to be a class of human rights
specifically for women to supplement the existing set of human rights. The problem,
according to this view, is not that of discrimination with respect to how we enforce
human rights for men and women. The problem is a deeper one, having to do with
the inherent male biases in human rights, as currently conceived.
Susan Moller Okin, for example, points out that there are specifically “gender-related
forms” of rights violations against women that are not normally considered human
rights abuses.
Frequently these abuses are perpetrated by more powerful family members

against less powerful ones. For example, slavery is generally recognized as a
fundamental violation of human rights. But parents’ giving their daughter in
marriage in exchange for money or even selling her to a pimp has not typically
been seen as an instance of slavery.
(Okin 1998, p. 35)
This feminist criticism of human rights parallels one line of feminist critique of
domestic justice. It basically levels the charge that the standard ideal of human
rights is presented as if it were gender-neutral and universally applicable to men
and women, when in fact it has been constructed from the male perspective and
with the interests of men in mind. The rights and abuses that are of concern in
standard human rights doctrines are male-centered, and abuses that are specifically
and uniquely targeted at women are left off the agenda. So, just as some domestic
feminist theorists have argued that there must be special protection and rights for
women in domestic society beyond the right of non-discrimination and equal pro-
tection, so too some global feminists argue that there have to be special rights for
women beyond non-discrimination and equal application of human rights as they are
currently understood.
Readers will agree that the human rights of women are especially vulnerable and
frequently abused. The interesting question is whether this calls for a more equita-
ble enforcement of the ideal of human rights and better non-discrimination against
women, or whether it requires some reconceptualization of the idea of human rights
and the creation of a special class of human rights for women. Is the current stand-
ard of human rights irreparably male-centric or are its commitments open to more
gender-neutral interpretations, even if in practice this has not been done? This ques-
tion connects with some live issues in feminist political philosophy.
Gender equality as a human right?

Is gender equality a human right? Should the liberal ideal that men and women are
free and equal citizens be regarded as a universal ideal, such that violations of this
ideal will count as a violation of human rights?
On the common core approach to human rights that we discussed in the previous
chapter, if gender equality is not a universally shared value among societies in the
world, then, pro tem, it cannot be a human right. Charles Taylor (1999) has proposed
an argument along these lines in his defense of the common core or overlapping con-
sensus approach to human rights. Taylor is not claiming that gender equality could
never be a human right. He is only claiming that while it is not among the shared
values of the world, it cannot yet be enforced as a human right. He urges Western lib-
erals to appreciate that gender equality was a hard-fought, recent victory in Western
societies, with much work still to be done. Sensitivity to history and tradition should
prompt us to recognize the challenging path to moral progress; that it has its own
internal cultural impetus but is also realizable. But until there is convergence on this
matter, insistence that gender is a human right is not only disrespectful of diversity
but also counterproductive by reinforcing conservative opposition to progress.
John Rawls has made a similar kind of argument out of international tolerance. He
allows for a decent theocracy; one in which, of course, by virtue of its decency, the
basic rights of women are protected and their interests properly represented. But
there is no requirement for gender equality in a decent theocracy since this equality
is a liberal ideal and it would be a case of intolerance to impose that ideal as a human
right on all societies.
Those who believe that gender equality is not merely a right in liberal societies but a
human right will insist that it is not intolerant to promote gender equality as a human
right. They will argue (as we saw in the previous chapter) that some quintessentially
liberal rights can be properly conceived as human rights, gender equality being one
of these. As for the concern that this entails international intolerance of cultural dif-
ferences, their response is that intolerance is not a freestanding notion, but rather a
standard that answers to some background conception of political justice. That is,
some prior standard of rightness and wrongness defines for us the limits of toleration,
not the other way around.
Moreover, as also noted earlier, to say that gender equality is a human right does not
mean that we may, let alone ought to, go around imposing that ideal. The claim that
gender equality is a human right is a claim about standards and our commitments.
How we are to go about enforcing our commitments is a different story, and there
are right ways and wrong ways of enforcing moral standards and commitments.
Culture and gender

How much normative space is left for cultural diversity if we are committed to gen-
der equality? Susan Moller Okin believes not much. She argues that cultural rights,
as in the case of minority rights for immigrant groups in societies, are detrimental
to gender equality and women’s rights more basically (Okin 1998; 1999). Cultural
rights protect traditional and informal cultural practices in the private sphere, such
as in the home. These informal cultural practices for Okin are the main source of
violations of the rights of women. Since the traditional cultures that liberal multicul-
turalists seek to protect tend to be patriarchal (as most traditional communities are,
she believes), supporting the survival of minority cultural communities through state
multiculturalism is bad for women. Thus, a true feminist cannot also be a multicul-
turalist, she concludes.
Okin rightly draws our attention to an interesting and significant conflict between
the rights of a cultural group and the rights of individual women. But, as some
of her critics point out, her claim that minority cultures are inherently patriar-
chal overgeneralizes. There are cultural practices and cultural values, and the fact
that some cultures have sexist practices does not mean that sexism is part of the
culture’s values. The aim of the feminist is not to eliminate distinctive cultural
ways of life altogether, but to identify and reform specific sexist and harmful
practices. Moreover, the liberal multiculturalist Will Kymlicka, whose defense of
liberal multiculturalism is what sparks Okin’s condemnation, stresses that liberal
multiculturalism does not, and ought not to, tolerate cultural practices that are
restrictive of individual freedom and equality (Kymlicka 1995). There is thus
no compunction under liberal multiculturalism for the state to allow, much less
promote, cultural practices in the private sphere that are detrimental for gender
equality. The liberal state, for example, does not permit households to prevent
their girls from receiving an education. A universal requirement that all children
attend school that is not subject to cultural disagreement is one way in which such
a cultural practice is explicitly disallowed.
These questions of whether women constitute a special class entitled to special rights,
whether gender equality is a universal value (or merely a liberal ideal), and the rela-
tionship between respect for cultural diversity versus protection of women’s rights
are some of the staple issues in feminist political and moral philosophy. A fuller
resolution of the problems we touched on above will require engaging with some of
the core debates in feminism. But examining the special case of women and human
rights will, in turn, give us an additional angle for exploring the core questions.
• SUMMARY
This chapter examined the challenge of global diversity for human rights. One major
expression of global diversity is the principle of state sovereignty. How can state
sovereignty be reconciled with the universal requirements of human rights? If state
sovereignty is seen as a means for furthering and protecting human rights, then we
have a way of reconciling sovereignty and rights that morally prioritizes human rights
over state sovereignty. On the other hand, one might argue that sovereignty is more
intrinsic to human rights than this. For instance, state sovereignty is itself a human
right, or it is what provides the preconditions for the fruition and realization of
human rights. Still, even on this conception of sovereignty, we can still ask if there
are no moral constraints that states must satisfy if the collective self-determination of
a people (that sovereignty is meant to protect) is to have the status of a human right.
And if states provide the necessary preconditions of human rights, this suggests too
that there are certain moral conditions that states are to satisfy in order for them to
properly give birth to human rights.
The other challenge of diversity we looked at is the challenge from Asian Values.
This is the claim that certain cultural traditions are at odds with human rights, and
so human rights (or at least a range of human rights) do not apply to them. These
culturalist arguments, however, presume that cultural traditions are monolithic and
set in stone rather than pluralistic and continuously reinterpreted (as living traditions
are). If cultural traditions are themselves subjects of interpretation and debate, then
any claim of a cultural consensus has validity only if the conditions for individual free
expression and free exchange are antecedently present.
Finally, we looked at the problem of gender and human rights. Is there a need for a
special class of human rights for women? Or is the problem that of equal enforce-
ment of existing human rights? Is gender equality a human right, or should there be
admissible cultural variation on this matter? And is there a tension between cultural
rights and women’s rights, or is cultural diversity compatible with women’s rights?
These are difficult questions, and our aim, as always, is to identify the key competing
views and the further questions they raise, rather than to provide decisive answers
to them.
• STUDY QUESTIONS
1 Should human rights have moral priority over state sovereignty?
2 What is the value of state sovereignty?
3 In what way does the state produce the necessary preconditions for certain human
rights? What are some of these human rights?
4 What is the moral significance of cultural diversity? Should moral requirements be
limited by cultural traditions and values?
5 Are there cultural practices and tradition that ought not be limited by the require-
ments of human rights?
6 Do we need a special class of human rights for women?
7 Can cultural reasons be a justification for gender inequality?
8 Some countries have banned the wearing of religious scarves and headdresses
(by women) in public spaces, such as schools. How would one argue that these
restrictions are consistent with liberalism? Do you agree that they are?
• NOTES
1 “China peeved as Hillary Clinton denounces women’s detention”, available at: http://
www.reuters.com/article/us-china-usa-rights-idUSKBN0MY0KD20150407
[9 Sept. 2016].
2 Although Walzer’s classic paper is motivated by the problem of military interven-
tion, the arguments he presents in defense of a general principle of non-intervention
claim more for states than just the right to non-intervention. His arguments imply
in addition that outsiders act wrongly when they judge societies against standards
of individual rights that are alien to their tradition.
3 The Islamic challenge is another culturalist challenge to human rights, one that
raises more explicit religious objections to the perceived liberal agenda in human
rights as well as introducing the problem of gender equality.
4 Some countries have thus proposed a “Universal Declaration of Human
Responsibilities” to supplement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Available
at http://interactioncouncil.org/universal-declaration-human-responsibilities
[9 Sept. 2016].
• REFERENCES
Sovereignty and human rights
David Luban, “The Romance of the Nation-State” (1980b).

Michael Walzer, “The Moral Standing of States” (1980).
Culture and human rights
Daniel A. Bell, “An Asian Voice on Human Rights?” in East Meets West (2000).
Amartya Sen, “Culture and Human Rights” (1999).
Gender rights
Allison Jagger, “‘Saving Amina’: Global Justice for Women and Intercultural Dialogue”
(2005).
Martha Nussbaum, “Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings” (1995).
Susan Moller Okin, “Feminism, Women’s Human Rights, and Cultural Differences”
(1998).
• FURTHER READING
For one critique of sovereignty, see Charles Beitz, “Sovereignty and Morality in
International Relations” (1991). Jack Donnelly, “Sovereignty and International
Human Rights” (2014), surveys the modern evolution of state sovereignty in light
of the development of human rights. For discussion on culture and justice, see Will
Kymlicka Multicultural Citizenship (1995). See the chapter “Toleration and its Limits”
for a position on the limits of cultural pluralism. See Joanne Bauer and Daniel A.
Bell (eds), The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights (1999) for essays on cultural
and human rights, including discussions of Asian Values. See Susan Moller Okin,
“Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” and the commentaries included for further
discussion on multiculturalism and feminism (Okin 1999).
8
•
just wars and
humanitarian
intervention
Just war theories identify the conditions under which a war and its execution are
justifiable. More recently, some theories also specify the conditions for a justified
cessation of and exit from war. The aim of just war theories, of course, is not to
grease the path for warfare, but to establish and identify moral constraints in order to
limit its rightful occurrence and execution. This chapter will introduce some of the
main concepts in just war theories, including the distinction between the justness of
a war and the just conduct of a war, before turning to a particular problem that this
distinction creates regarding the scope of a soldier’s responsibility. The second half of
this chapter introduces the special problem of military intervention.
• CONDITIONS FOR JUST WAR

Was the 2003 United States led war against Iraq justified? Many observers and
ordinary citizens believe that to be an unjustified war, particularly when it came
to light that there was little evidence that Iraq was in a serious position to build
nuclear weapons. But many of these critics will have a more positive opinion of the
1990–1991 war, also waged against Iraq, which was carried out in response to Iraq’s
unlawful invasion of Kuwait. And virtually all readers will agree that the war fought
by the Allied Forces against Nazi Germany was a just war. What are the principles by
which we can assess the justness or the unjustness of a given war? The identification
of such principles is what a just war theory aims to do.
There is no single just war theory. Some just war theories draw on the natural law
tradition found in Augustine or Aquinas. But there are alternative theories. Michael
Walzer’s modern day classic, Just and Unjust Wars (1977), advances what Walzer
calls a legalist approach to just war. On this account, to oversimplify, the standards
just wars and humanitarian intervention • 87
of just wars are provided by international legal norms and conventions, particularly
those sanctioning the communal integrity of states. An unjust war is a war that vio-
lates without cause this integrity of states, and a just war is a war fought in response
to this aggression. John Rawls in The Law of Peoples (1999) briefly outlines a contrac-
tarian account of just war. On this approach, the standards of just wars derive from
principles of international conduct for states that are identified and affirmed through
an international social contract procedure. We will not go into the detailed differ-
ences between these positions. Instead we will look at some of the shared substantive
commitments of the various approaches.
To start, most just war theories draw a distinction between two dimensions to a just
war. The first concerns the justness of a war, that is, the justification for going to
war. The term for this moral dimension of just war is the Latin phrase, jus ad bellum
(meaning the justice of war). The second concerns the just execution or conduct of
the war, that is, how the war is being fought. This is known as the condition of jus
in bello (justice in a war).
Most just war theories see these to be morally distinct categories, since a war that
is justified can be unjustly fought. For example, we agree that the war against the
Nazis was a war that was justified. But we could also imagine this war being fought
unjustly; if, for example, Allied soldiers committed war crimes in what would oth-
erwise be a just fight. Likewise, soldiers forced to undertake an unjust war could
conduct themselves justly in the execution of the war. A just war thus ought to meet
the conditions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. We will later see how far this distinc-
tion holds. For instance, some might say that an unjust war cannot really be justly
fought.
Recently, some just war theorists have introduced (or rather reintroduced) a third
category of just war called jus post bellum. This has to do with justice after the war,
a moral dimension that some theories think should be included in an overall assess-
ment of how just a particular war is. We will look at the conditions under each of
these categories in turn.
Jus ad bellum
Most just war theories identify some of the following conditions for an engagement
of war to be just:
x just cause
x right authority or authorization
x right intention
x proportionality
x last resort
x reasonable chance of success.
88 • just wars and humanitarian intervention
Some theories may require a subset of the above conditions, but the conditions once
identified are normally regarded as conjunctively necessary conditions. Some just
war theorists may disagree about one or two of these conditions, for example, the
requirements of right authorization. But most accept the necessity of just cause, last
resort, proportionality and right intent as a necessary set of conditions. Below we will
clarify some of these commonly noted conditions of justified war.
Just cause
Just cause is perhaps the most obvious of the necessary conditions for a justified
war. A country that invades another country for the purpose of enlarging its political
domain goes to war without just cause. Just cause, of course, includes the exercise
of self-defense by a country against an unjustified attack. The right of self-defense
also derivatively justifies a third state or the international community coming to the
aid of a country that is unjustly attacked.1 In general, a war is just if it is a necessary
response to an unjust war. But another possible just cause that is not necessarily
based on the right of self-defense is that of defending the basic human rights of indi-
viduals against systematic violations carried out by their own state.
A natural law approach to justified war will consider the defense of some moral law
to be a just cause. On Walzer’s legalist paradigm, countering an unjust war is a just
cause, and a war is unjust if it aggresses, without cause, against the political integrity
of a state as reflected in international law and convention. So, there can be disagree-
ments among theorists as to what counts as a just cause, but the general requirement
that there must be a just cause is basic to a justified war and easy to appreciate.
Right authority
More controversial is the requirement of right authority. The requirement is that a

justified war must not only have a just cause, but it must (among other things) be
rightly authorized. Leaving aside what right authorization entails, why should there
be this general requirement? The significance of this requirement is appreciated if
we consider the difference between the state enforcing its laws through the police
and enforcement of laws carried out by private vigilantes. The vigilantes may in fact
be acting for the same cause and even with the same efficiency, but we would still
think that something is morally amiss here. One central reason is that we believe the
use of force to be generally impermissible unless its use is authorized. We have del-
egated this power to the state (and its agents like the police) because it is necessary
that the state has this power. Vigilantes, however, act, even if their cause is other-
wise just, without this authorization. Indeed, Aquinas holds that it is this authority
of the state that distinguishes it from a band of brigands when it uses force to enforce
its laws. There is a difference, then, between a state declaring war against another for
a just cause and a group of private citizens declaring violence against the same state
for the same cause. The last lacks the legitimate authority that the first enjoys. If the
objective of a just war theory is to limit the space for permissible violence, then the
right authorization requirement makes sense.
One difficulty is that, in contemporary international society, right authorization for
war requires more than a state’s unilateral authorization. There is a requirement that
a war be authorized by the international community at large. According to interna-
tional legal practice, this translates to authorization by the United Nations Security
Council (UNSC). Again, if the aim of just war theory is to limit the grounds for going
to war, requiring that a justified war be one that has international backing seems
reasonable. Given the complexity of international politics and entwined national
interests, international authorization is one way of helping to ensure that there is
indeed a just cause for engaging in a given war. Individual states may too quickly
judge that there is a just cause for war if their own interests are also at stake. The
requirement of international authorization therefore provides an important safe-
guard against this possible confusion of just cause with state interest. We might then
understand the requirement of proper international authorization as a kind of moral
check against state biases, something that is especially important given the gravity of
waging war.
The difficulty with the requirement of international authorization is that interna-
tional decision-making could become politicized. It is a common complaint that the
United Nations Security Council consists of permanent Member States which have
powers of veto over the Council’s decisions, and therefore whose conflicting national
interests can block the necessary authorization even in cases where the cause for war
seems overwhelmingly just and necessary. When this happens, some commentators
would insist that there could nonetheless be proper authorization so long as there is
sufficient coalition of countries in support of the war, and so this would be a morally
justified war even though illegal (since there is no United Nations authorization).
One could perhaps see the appeal of this, as in the intervention against Serbian
aggression in Kosovo in 1999, often cited by commentators as a paradigm example
of a purely humanitarian intervention. This was an intervention led by NATO but
carried out without the authorization of the United Nations. On the other hand,
however, it is less obvious that the coalition war against Iraq, again carried out with-
out formal United Nations authorization, was a justified war. In this case, requiring
proper international authorization would seem to be an important moral safeguard.2
Right intention
The right intention requirement is perhaps even more puzzling than the right author-
ization requirement. Why should intention matter if the cause is just and there is
right authorization of a war? If justice is served, and moreover served by the right
authority, why should it matter what the real intentions of the agent are?
Again, this requirement can be easier to appreciate if we keep in mind the bloodiness
of war and that the aim of just war theory is to limit and minimize the inevitable
moral costs of warfare. Requiring that agents go to war with the right intention is one
way to lessen the evil of war. If a state wages a war with just cause and with the right
intention, then we can be more confident that this state will not act in excess and go
beyond the cause for which the war is being fought.
In contrast, a state that is waging war solely for self-interested reasons, even if war
would be otherwise justified, cannot be fully relied upon to limit its goals to the just
cause. Imagine a state engaged in a seemingly justified fight in defense of another
state. If that state’s real intentions are to annex the aggressor state, then there is the
danger that it would exceed its permitted moral objective. Moreover, it is reasonable
to think that a state with ulterior motives can be less entrusted with carrying out that
war justly. The right intention requirement then can also be seen as a way of helping
to ensure that the conditions of jus in bello are not transgressed.
An obvious difficulty with this requirement is that intentions are hard to measure.
How are we to know what the real intentions behind a state’s act of war are? And
how do we, moreover, make sense of mixed intentions?
Proportionality
This is the requirement that the act of war is proportionate to the cause that the
war is to serve. The criterion of proportionality, of course, also factors among the
conditions of jus in bello, in that it will limit particular strategies within a war. But as
a condition for an act of war, proportionality requires that there is a proper balance
between the moral cost of the war and the outcome that the war hopes to achieve
or avoid. For instance, the loss of lives and regional or even international instability
that a particular war might cause could be disproportionate in relation to its cause.
As an illustration, one could argue that even if there is just cause to invade Iraq (in
the name of protecting human rights), the cost of a war in Iraq drastically outweighs
the expected benefit of the war. The basic idea is that, given that war has high moral
costs, the cause for which a war is being fought must be sufficiently morally weighty
to justify the act of war. Assessing the cost of war will no doubt involve military judg-
ments about the type of war that has to be fought, the strategies that will be used, the
scale and duration of the war. So this might present a moral hazard. The more power-
ful an unjust aggressor is, the more costly a war is likely to be, and therefore the more
difficult it is to satisfy the proportionality requirement. Hence, the more difficult it is
to wage a just war against a powerful attacker. But, in wars of self-defense, it will be
up to members of the state under attack to assess and evaluate the costs of war, when
the risks of going to war and not going to war are predominantly borne by them.
Although this is sometimes introduced as a distinctive requirement of a justified war,
the idea of reasonable success can be incorporated into the proportionality criterion.
If there is no hope whatsoever that a war will realize a just cause, then it seems that
this war stands to violate the proportionality condition. In contrast, a war with a
reasonable chance of success can satisfy this condition even if we keep the costs of
the war constant.
Last resort
A war would not be justified, even if the above conditions are met (that is, there is
a just cause, the war would proportionate to the cause, there is right authorization,
and so on), if alternative non-violent solutions are available. So, if negotiations and
political engagement are realistic responses to curtail a country’s development of
nuclear warheads, then going to war to cut down its nuclear capacity will violate
the last resort requirement. But, as Walzer points out, the idea of last resort must
not be understood literally. There is always something more that can be attempted,
one final diplomatic effort, one last attempt to broker a ceasefire etc. (Walzer 1977,
pp. 212–13). What the condition demands, more plausibly, is that feasible non-
military options have been put to the test and have failed to produce results, and
the urgency of the situation does not allow further attempts. The condition of last
resort is thus adjusted according to the situation at hand. Intervening to put an end to
human rights restrictions in a country could fail this requirement if there are realistic
alternatives, such as economic pressures and diplomacy. On the other hand, if an act
of mass slaughter is imminent, the urgency of the situation means that an interven-
tion qualifies as the last resort, since anything else would be too late.
Jus in bello
A justified war, a war that meets the above conditions, could still be an unjust war on
the whole if it is unjustly fought. For example, if the justified war against the Nazis
had been won through a general strategy of targeting German noncombatants, that
would have tainted the justness of that war, if not rendered it on the whole unjust.
A just war therefore has to satisfy certain conditions for its rightful execution – the
rules that regulate the conduct of the war. Some of the main conditions of justice in
war, or jus in bello are:
x proportionality;
x prohibitions on certain weapons;
x proper treatment of prisoners of war;
x noncombatant immunity: so while active combatants are fair targets, noncombatants
are off limits.
The proportionality requirement limits the strategy that may be morally adopted
within a war, even if that war is itself justified. So, even if a war against terrorism is
a justified war, bombing a country “back to the Stone Age” for that just cause is, of
course, a violation of the proportionality condition. Just conduct in war also rules
out the use of certain prohibited weapons, like biological and chemical weapons.
The war against the Nazis would have been unjustly fought if the Allied forces had
used chemical weapons in that war. Norms governing treatment of prisoners of war
dictate that they cannot be killed or otherwise mistreated. Prisoners of war are no
longer active combatants and so are no longer a threat to the opposing side.
But perhaps most central to jus in bello is the combatant/noncombatant distinction
and the idea of noncombatant immunity. If the above conditions dictate how war can
be carried out, and how and when killing is permitted, the condition of noncombat-
ant immunity limits where war can be carried out and who can and cannot be killed.
The condition of noncombatant immunity, perhaps the most important requirement
of jus in bello, is for many commentators one of the key distinctions between an act of
war and an act of terrorism. We will focus on this condition in our discussion.
The noncombatant immunity clause implies that while (active) combatants are legit-
imate targets of war (that is, they can be justly killed), noncombatants are off limits.
To gain some purchase on this clause then, it will help to clarify why most just war
theories take it that combatants are fair targets.
The basic justification for the right of one soldier to kill an enemy soldier is an argu-
ment from self-defense. The enemy combatant poses a threat to the life of a soldier.
Even when the enemy is not actively engaging in a firefight, while she remains active
(e.g., is not a prisoner of war or on military leave), she remains a threat. A soldier
occupies a social role whose function it is to kill combatants on the opposing side; so
long as she remains in that role (i.e., is not taken prisoner), she constitutes a threat.
The rules of war thus justify the killing of combatants by other combatants because
of the publicly acknowledged threat that they pose to each other by virtue of their
roles as combatants. A combatant who has been taken prisoner is no longer a threat,
and so there are no self-defense grounds to kill her.
The self-defense argument that explains why combatants are legitimate targets also
explains noncombatant immunity. By definition, noncombatants do not pose a pre-
sent danger to the lives of opposing soldiers. The self-defense argument just does not
apply in their case. Noncombatants may have a moral responsibility for initiating an
unjust war, but since they present no threat to the soldiers on the other side, they
enjoy immunity.
The basic moral distinction then between combatants and noncombatants is not
moral innocence or fault, but the actual threat that they pose. It is important to note,
then, that in just war theories, the term “innocent” when it is used, as in “innocent
civilians”, is a term of art. It does not denote the absence of moral fault or blame-
worthiness for the war, though that might be the case. What makes a noncombatant
“innocent”, and therefore not a fair target for attack, is that they do not pose a pre-
sent threat that can justify preemptory self-defense, not because they are blameless.
A just war is not meant as retribution, as in a form of punishment. War, rather,
is more akin to an enforcement of law or moral right. The reason why soldiers on
the unjust side may be killed is not because they are guilty of causing the war. On
the contrary, they are not guilty of this charge in many cases. Moreover, a soldier
could be fighting for the just side and still be considered a legitimate target of attack
from the opposing side on the jus in bello convention. So, guilt has no role in the
justification of combatant non-immunity. Rather, the justification for combatant
non-immunity is based on the right of self-defense. Soldiers may be killed because
they present a threat to the life of opposing soldiers. Assigning moral responsibility
and guilt for a war and punishing wrongdoers is not part of a war effort but a matter
for the law to determine. So noncombatants can be found guilty of causing an unjust
war and may be punished accordingly. And combatants on the unjust side can indeed
be morally faultless for fighting in that war. But this is distinct from the fact of threat
that underlies the distinction between combatants and noncombatants during war.
If punishing wrongdoers is to be considered part of a full account of just war, then it
falls under the category of jus post bellum, that is, justice after the war.
The violation of this basic distinction is that which distinguishes acts of terrorism
from acts of war. Even if the cause that prompts an act of terrorism is just, the fact
that the strategy involves the deliberate targeting of noncombatants renders the fight
unjust in its performance. Moreover, terrorism is often carried out by belligerents
who are not clearly designated as combatants, thereby undermining the combatant
vs. noncombatant distinction altogether. This puts pressure on the other side’s abil-
ity to fight a war justly. This is because, when it is not clear who on the enemy side
really poses a clear and present threat, then it is difficult to honor the moral distinc-
tion between combatants and noncombatants in the fight against terrorism. But a
war against terrorism can be just only if that distinction is maintained. This is a moral
responsibility and challenge for any war against terrorism.
Jus post bellum

This is a relatively new focus in contemporary just war theories (Orend 2002). Jus
post bellum, or justice after war, is concerned with justice in the aftermath of a war,
including, importantly, the conditions for a just surrender, peace and resolution. Jus
post bellum also specifies terms of just punishment for the side responsible for the
unjust war (who have violated jus ad bellum). Here the subject will be the decision
makers and leaders of society and not the soldiers per se. However, jus post bellum will
also address the issue of justified punishment for soldiers who are guilty of war crimes
(that is who are in violation of jus in bello conditions). Other moral concerns of jus post
bellum include the matter of just compensation and reparations for victims of the war.
Jus in bello requirements carry over into the dimension of jus post bellum since con-
duct in a war can influence the prospects for justice after the war. For example,
concerns of jus post bellum will provide further reasons against immoral conduct in
war, such as mass killings of civilians, as they can make a post-war just peace and
settlement difficult to achieve.
The category of jus post bellum reinforces the non-guilt based reading of the
combatant/noncombatant distinction under jus in bello. As mentioned, the reason
for combatant non-immunity and noncombatant immunity is not guilt or fault for
an unjust war. This bracketing of guilt and responsibility for purposes of jus in bello
need not be seen as a moral oversight if the question of guilt, responsibility and pun-
ishment and accountability for an unjust war is taken up by jus post bellum. That is,
just war theory as a whole will eventually address the problem of moral responsibility
and fault for an unjust war (under the auspices of jus post bello), thus relieving jus in
bello of this task.
Closely related to but distinct from jus post bellum, which is concerned generally with
justice in the aftermath of war, is the category of jus ex bello, which is concerned spe-
cifically with the conditions for a just exit from a war (Moellendorf 2008; also Rodin
(2008)). One can see why a war that is started must be followed through in some spe-
cial cases, and not ended willy-nilly, if leaving the fight part-way will leave a country
in a state of extreme anarchy and its inhabitants at the mercy of warlords. Even if a
war is optional (that is, justified but not required), a country that starts it may become
so morally entangled that it is not entitled to exit unilaterally and unconditionally.
For instance, a permissible intervention once entered into may not be terminated
unilaterally by the intervener simply because it feels the costs of intervention. An
intervention that left is half-done can render the victims which the intervention is
meant to protect particularly vulnerable to the retaliation of the aggrieved side. Thus,
a complete just war theory has not only to identify the conditions for starting a war
justly, it has to also identify the conditions for ending a war justly.
Jus ad bello highlights an interesting complexity in the morality of war. It does not
follow that the right thing to do with respect to an unjust war is to end it uncondi-
tionally. On the contrary, it can be unjust for a country to end an unjust war that it
had started without first ensuring that the exit conditions are right. As an example,
some commentators take the United States’ 2003 war against Iraq to be doubly
unjust. It was an unjust war to start with, but it was also unjust that the United States
too prematurely declared “mission accomplished”, and effectively quit Iraq, leaving it
in a condition of lawlessness and civil strife.
• THE MORAL EQUALITY OF COMBATANTS

The standard distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello and the idea of the
moral equality of combatants noted above has been the subject of some philosophi-
cal controversy in recent years. Let us outline and review this debate.
The moral equality of combatants (henceforth “moral equality clause” for short)
holds that soldiers on either side of the conflict have the equal moral right to kill the
other, regardless of whether they are fighting on the just side or not (that is, whether
the war that they are fighting is a justified war or not). The Nazi infantry solider,
for example, has the same moral right as the Allied soldier to kill the other. On the
standard argument noted above, since both, now that the war is under way, pose
a dangerous threat to the other in their capacity as soldiers, each has the right of
preemptive self-defense to kill the other. It does not matter that one party is fighting
for a clearly unjust side, and the other for the just side.
The moral equality clause thus relies on the distinction between jus ad bellum and
jus in bello. Ordinary soldiers are not culpable for the justice of the war that they are
fighting in. The requirements of justified war, or jus ad bellum, are the responsibil-
ity of political leaders and high-level military officials, typically. One might even be
willing to extend this responsibility somewhat to a citizenry at large if citizens had
some say (as in a democracy) in the decision to go to war, or if they supported the
war effort in other ways. But soldiers, qua soldiers, on this account cannot be held
responsible for the war. They are responsible only for their conduct in war as dic-
tated by the conditions for jus in bello. That they might be fighting on the unjust side
does not compromise their standing as soldiers, and does not give them a lesser right
to kill the opposing soldier.
Others, most influentially Jeff McMahan (2009), have argued that this supposed
moral equality of combatants seems counterintuitive. The general form of their
argument goes as follows. In ordinary morality, we do not say when two parties pre-
sent an equal life-ending threat to each other that each has the same right based on
self-defense to kill the other. Rather, our assessment of the situation will take into
account which party, if applicable, is responsible for putting the two sides in this
compromising situation in the first place. If, for example, my wrongful invasion of
your home puts both of us now in a situation of kill or be killed, it would be morally
counterintuitive to say that we are morally on a par, that we have the same moral
right to kill each other in the name of self-defense. So, how can it be, the argument
goes, that the Nazi and the Allied soldiers stand in a relation of equality as defined
by the moral equality clause?
The moral equality clause therefore presumes the distinction between jus ad bellum
and jus in bello. That is, it takes it as a given that soldiers are not to be held respon-
sible for the war that is being waged and only for how they conduct themselves in
that war. The distinction shields soldiers from having a responsibility for the condi-
tions of jus ad bellum. So, if the soldiers on both sides are not to be held morally
responsible for the war, even though one side is waging an unjustified war, none are
morally culpable for the war. Qua soldiers, they stand on equal moral terms and on
grounds of self-defense, following the arguments above, either side is equally entitled
to attack the other.
Standard just war theories will thus reject the home invasion analogy presented
above. The analogy fails because it extends principles of ordinary interpersonal
morality to the morality of war. But war, according to the standard theories, is not
individual morality writ large. Unlike the home invasion case, the invading soldiers
on the unjust side qua soldiers do not have a say in whether to invade or not. That
decision is made for them by the state. Their job as soldiers is to go where they are
sent, and not to make the decision whether or not to go to war. As Walzer puts it, to
give soldiers this responsibility and the right to decide whether or not to go to war
undermines the whole purpose of a country having a standing army. It is this collec-
tive dimension of war, which the home invasion analogy misses, that accounts for the
jus in bello and jus ad bellum distinction.
The debate hence depends on the degree to which soldiers can be held accountable
for the collective (state) decision to wage an unjust war. One might allow that even
if, as is in fact the case, soldiers in a democracy have a greater degree of influence,
albeit indirect, on the state’s decision to wage an unjust war than in an autocracy, this
is not sufficiently meaningful to undermine the moral equality clause. Individuals
in a democracy vote for officials to make laws in their name, who then decide on
their behalf whether or not to go to war. But even if there were a referendum on
whether a war should be waged, it cannot be presumed that all soldiers sent to fight
actually voted in favor of it. One might retort that soldiers who oppose a war as
unjust ought to conscientiously object to the war. But to allow soldiers the right to
pick and choose which wars they will fight in would undermine the institution of a
standing army. Indeed, we would reduce that institution to a band of mercenaries.
Finally, there is the problem of information and knowledge. How much should we
expect a soldier to know? What counts as a being reasonably informed of the facts?
Do soldiers have more responsibility in this regard than civilians?
To frame this debate, it is important to reiterate the very special case that the moral
equality clause serves: it accounts for the equal right of soldiers to kill each other,
independent of whether they are fighting for the just or unjust side. To say that there
is no moral equality means that soldiers on one side have a reduced right not to be
killed, and the other side has a greater right to kill them. But why should having a
very limited and indirect say over whether your side should go to war or not so dras-
tically alter your moral situation? Again, war is not about punishing people, much
less about holding people morally accountable. A just war is a response to an act of
aggression that needs to be stopped and to restore the status quo. Only after this
special and urgent task is discharged, do the issues of punishment and accountabil-
ity arise. It seems very plausible that citizens of a democracy can be held to greater
account and be subject to certain punishments for an unjust war than subjects of a
true autocracy. But it is a different thing to say that therefore they have forfeited
their right to life to a greater extent than others.
• MILITARY INTERVENTION
The paradigmatic just cause for war is that of self-defense. But another increasingly
cited just cause, especially in modern history, is that of protecting persons from atroci-
ties committed by their own state. In fact there was a moment in current world affairs,
in the years following the end of the Cold War, in which wars to protect civilians from
intra-state conflict became the more typical type of warfare. Are outside military
interventions carried out to protect civilians from intra-state violence, or humanitar-

ian interventions, morally justifiable? Does humanitarian protection provide a just
cause for war? And assuming that there are conditions under which humanitarian
interventions are justifiable, can there be a duty to intervene?
Consider some examples. Most commentators now agree that the United States’
intervention in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s was an unjust intervention. Yet
many also regard the NATO-led intervention in Kosovo in 1999 to protect the eth-
nic Albanians from the majority Serbian aggression as a recent paradigm case of just
intervention. What is the salient moral difference between these cases? And how
ought the international community to respond, say, to the armed conflict in Syria
between the government and various civilian groups, where more than 250,000
Syrians have lost their lives (as of 2016)? Is a military intervention to topple the
regime of Bashar al-Assad morally permissible? An account of justified or permissible
intervention aims to shed some light on these questions. Finally, could any interven-
tion be obligatory? Was there a duty to intervene to prevent the Rwandan genocide
in 1994, a duty that the international community neglected?
Permissible intervention
I think that few people will insist that humanitarian intervention is never justifiable.
It might well be the case that, historically, interventions are rarely justified. But
we can imagine conditions under which an intervention is, in principle, justified.
Moreover, there are historical cases where an intervention was justifiable or would
have been if one had been carried out. For example, a military intervention per-
formed singularly to end the Nazi Holocaust would have been justified; intervention
in Rwanda to put a stop to the Tutsi–Hutu genocide in 1995 would have been justi-
fied. Commentators also point to the intervention in Uganda in response to atrocities
committed by Idi Amin and to the intervention by Vietnam against Cambodia during
the Killing Fields years as examples of just interventions. The NATO intervention in
Kosovo in Serbia, as mentioned earlier, is another commonly cited example of a just
humanitarian intervention.
The interesting moral question, rather, concerns the conditions under which inter-
vention serves a just cause. While there are other possible grounds of military
intervention, such as an intervention that is aimed at repelling an unjust intervention
that has already occurred (counter-intervention), let us focus on humanitarian inter-
ventions, that is interventions motivated by the violation of human rights of subjects
by their own state. How extreme must the violation of rights be for an intervention
to be permissible? What form must the violations take? How do we balance the right,
if not the duty, to protect individuals against the right of states to non-intervention?
Some authors argue that a state enjoys a significant moral standing, including the
right to non-intervention. Accordingly, intervention against a state is only justified in
cases where human rights violations are severe and systematic, of the sort that “shocks
the conscience” of humanity. The Nazi Holocaust obviously qualifies, as does the
genocide in Rwanda. But not other cases like Iraq under Saddam Hussain in 2003.
While human rights were being violated in Iraq in 2003, they did not constitute major
violations of the sort that warranted intervention, according to this position.
Under Walzer’s legalist paradigm, as we saw above, a just war is a response to an unjust
war, and a war is unjust when it violates the political and communal integrity of a state.
That is, a just war is necessarily a war in defense of “a historic community” against
aggression. On this account of just war, interventions are harder to justify, since it is
not clear how an intervention to protect the human rights of individuals against abuses
by their own state is a response to an unjust war. But Walzer makes room within his
theory for interventions in the following cases: intervention as a response to an unjust
intervention (counter-intervention); an intervention to liberate a distinct historic com-
munity from an oppressive state (in defense of a just secession); and intervention to
stop violations of human rights of such extreme character as to debunk the notion
that there is a common historic community deserving of international respect and
protection (humanitarian intervention). So Walzer’s legalist paradigm allows room for
military intervention consistent with his theory’s focus on the communal integrity of
states. But the communal integrity starting point limits humanitarian intervention to
the most extreme sort, as noted above.
An alternative position takes it that violations of basic human rights to security and
subsistence count as a just cause for war (Luban 1980a, 1980b). This is the case even
if the violations are not of the sort that constitute genocide or mass killings. Thus,
some commentators argued that the 2003 war in Iraq was a justified intervention
since it served to protect the human rights of Iraqis against Saddam Hussain.
An appeal of this account is that it does seem correct that Iraq under Hussain lacks
standing; it would be what Rawls would call a tyrannical state. On the other hand, to
jump to the conclusion that therefore an intervention against such a state is justifi-
able seems to lower the bar for justifying war. On this point, limiting the just cause
for intervention to the most extreme forms of rights violations does seem sensible.
A way, perhaps, of gaining the advantages of the two positions without the disadvan-
tages, is to distinguish the question of a state’s moral standing from that of whether
intervention against it is permissible. The two questions are, of course, not separate
in that how we respond to the former can affect our response to the latter. But they
are nonetheless distinct questions. Keeping the question of state moral standing dis-
tinct from the question of intervention, we can hold that a state (like Saddam’s Iraq)
lacked moral standing because it violated human rights while maintaining that an
intervention against it is impermissible because the violations are not of the extreme
sort to present a just cause. To put this in the context of the authors above, we can
say that while Walzer (1980) is right about intervention he is wrong about the con-
ditions of state moral standing (too permissive), and while Luban (1980b) is right
about state moral standing, he is wrong about intervention (too permissive).
Thus, it is perfectly coherent to affirm that respect for basic human rights is a necessary
condition for a state to be in good standing, but only extreme and widespread violations
of human rights present a just cause for intervention. Moreover, even if the just cause
condition has been met, recall that a just war has to satisfy a set of necessary conditions
beyond that of just cause. Specifically, will intervention meet the test of proportionality,
even if the rights violation considered by itself presents a just cause? Second, is inter-
vention a reasonable last resort? Third, perhaps more controversially, is there proper
authorization? This requirement might seem out of place where human rights are at
stake. On the other hand, given the tendency of state actors to privilege their own
power and security interests, the requirement that a just intervention cannot be uni-
laterally decided on and executed can serve as a check against cognitive biases or even
overt rationalization of a situation to one’s best political advantage. In any case, whether
or not we include the requirement of right authorization as one of the necessary condi-
tions for just intervention, some other conditions beyond just cause will be necessary.
It does seem, at the very least, that the additional conditions of proportionality and last
resort are significant.
It might well be the case where certain atrocities, like genocide, are already being
committed, that the last resort criterion is straightaway met. There is no time in this
context for further talk and negotiation. And one might also think that the graveness
of genocide means that it is rarely going to be disproportionate to go to war to end
it (unless that would provoke some unusual catastrophic and large-scale retaliation).
But this means that these conditions of just cause, proportionality and last resort are
satisfied all at once, not that some of the conditions have become unnecessary.
The above reasoning also shows that even if we regard low-level violations of human
rights as presenting a just cause for intervention, it is easy to see how, if the rights
violations are not of the sort that involve mass killings, that the last resort and pro-
portionality requirements are harder to satisfy. The fact that political dissenters are
imprisoned, that there is no freedom of expression and association, etc., that dem-
onstrators are routinely beaten by state agents may be sufficient to nullify a state’s
moral standing. Even if we go further and say that such rights violations serve as a
just cause for intervention, it seems that it will be hard to show how a war could be
justified since it would fail the proportionality and last resort requirements.
So, detaching moral standing from intervention, and keeping in mind that war is a
form of enforcement that has inherently great costs, it does seem sensible that just
humanitarian interventions be limited to the more extreme cases of human rights
violations (for example, genocide, mass killings, and the like).
The responsibility to protect

Assuming that a humanitarian intervention is justified, would it also be an obligation?
Consider the example of Rwanda. No intervention took place to block the genocide,
but an intervention would have been permissible. The moral failure was that no
intervention took place when it ought to have. That is, there was a presumptive duty
to intervene that the international community failed to live up to.
Indeed, the moral failure in Rwanda as well as in the Balkans prompted an interna-
tional resolution on the “Responsibility to Protect” or “R2P”. The resolution, as its
name reveals, turns the focus on the shared responsibility to protect individuals ver-
sus the permissibility of intervention.3 R2P shifts the paradigm in the international
discourse on intervention by turning away from the right of states to non-intervention
to states’ responsibility to protect their own citizens, and away from the permission
of the international community to intervene to its responsibility to protect individu-
als against their own states.
R2P, and the events, like Rwanda, that have prompted it, have instigated a lively
debate in the philosophical literature on when and how a humanitarian intervention
could be a moral duty. Where human rights violations are severe enough to permit
military intervention, are they also severe enough to trigger a duty to intervene? If
we maintain a very restrictive standard of permissible intervention, limiting justi-
fied interventions to only the most extreme forms of atrocities a state could commit
against its own people, then it seems more plausible that conditions for permissibility
also generate a duty. There is no gap then between an intervention that is permis-
sible and an intervention that is obligatory. Thus, although ordinarily permission to
do something does not necessarily create an obligation to do that thing, in the case
of intervention, it is conceivable that a permissible intervention is immediately also
an obligatory intervention.
In any case, even if we allow that not all permissible interventions are obligatory
(perhaps by lowering the requirements for permission to intervene), the interna-
tional community acknowledges a responsibility to act in certain kinds of extreme
situations. The prevention of genocide is one such example.
Philosophical challenges remain, however, even if we grant it that the international
community has a responsibility to intervene to protect. One challenge is that, while
there could be a duty to intervene, this is an all-things-considered duty. If an inter-
vention is too costly for the intervening state, then it does not have a duty to protect.
Given the inherent moral risks and costs of going to war, it is up to individual states
to determine the risks and costs that they are prepared to assume in taking up arms,
and a state could not be faulted for arriving at a more conservative assessment of how
it should act. Thus, effectively, the duty to intervene remains a duty in name only.
This is a duty that is easily defeated by other considerations, in particular the moral
risks and costs to the intervening state. Going to war is a dangerous business for
the state as a whole and most poignantly for the individuals who are sent to do the
fighting. Just as ordinary morality does not compel agents to act in ways that are self-
sacrificing, so then there cannot be a duty to intervene if the cost of intervention is
unreasonably high for the intervening state.
But is intervention morally costly in a way that can in general annul the duty to pro-
tect? States do not face an existential hazard when they intervene, say, the way an
individual does in risking her own life to rescue another. States are not natural agents
with a biological life or limbs to lose when they engage in military intervention. It
is true that a weaker country can face annihilation should it attempt to intervene
against a much more powerful one. But in most typical cases of interventions, con-
sidering the Rwanda example again, prospective intervening states, like the United
States or countries from European Union, need not fear significant military retalia-
tion from the Hutu extremists perpetrating the genocide against the Tutsis. It is true
that a genocidal regime could enjoy the backing of a powerful patron state, in which
case, intervention would indeed be costly for the intervening state. But, again, it is
important not to assume that all cases of intervention face this problem.
The other challenge is that the responsibility to protect is a collective responsibility of
the international community as a whole. This presents a problem because until some
specific actor (i.e., state) is assigned this task, it remains the case that no particular
state has a duty to protect. Philosophers sometimes refer to a duty of this sort as an
imperfect duty: it is a duty that is not attached to any particular agent and hence not
claimable by anyone in particular. The international community let Rwanda down,
but no one state is morally at fault since none specifically had this duty.4 The basic
challenge then is that while there is a duty to protect, from the perspective of the
agents that matter (the states who are to carry the duty), it is only an imperfect duty,
morally non-claimable and non-demandable.
The significance of this challenge and possible solutions to it are matters of some
discussion in the philosophical debate. In general, commentators hold that if there
is a principled way of assigning that duty to some specific state, then the problem of
imperfect duty is resolved. Thus some commentators, like James Pattison, suggest
that given the urgency of the problem that an intervention is meant to prevent or
put an end to, the duty should be assigned to the most effective or capable agent.
The problem with this mode of assignment is that it seems to unfairly burden the
most capable agent. We often hear the United States respond to calls that it should
intervene (in places where it has no other motivation for intervening) that it is “not
the world’s police”. If this is not already unfair, it is even more so if the most capable
became most capable because of certain hard choices and sacrifices that it had made
in the past.
Others might suggest cultural or historical ties to the people whose rights are to
be protected. For instance, Belgium in the case of Rwanda, given their historical
colonial ties; or, say, Albania in the case of Kosovo. But, as these examples suggest,
countries with the cultural or historical relations may not be capable of responding,
let alone be the most effective.
Another solution that avoids the drawbacks of the two approaches detailed above
and that has the added advantage of formalizing the duty, thereby making it in a
sense also legally binding, is to institute a standing global humanitarian defense force.
One could imagine this force operating under the authority of the UNSC, consist-
ing of rotating troops from Member States of the UN. Since such a force would be
specifically assigned, trained and equipped for humanitarian defense, and since it
would intervene with the full weight of the international community and its support
behind it, it would be an effective agent of intervention. And the actual composition
of the intervening soldiers could be selected when it is helpful to reflect cultural and
historical ties between interveners and victims.
The institutionalization of an imperfect duty thus effectively renders it a perfect
duty by assigning that duty to an institutional actor. There have been some calls in
the international forum for the establishment of exactly such a global defense force.
If this is a necessary means through which the global responsibility to protect can be
effectively acted on and realized, then the international community has the duty to
create such a standing army. As Kant notes, an imperfect duty is still a duty. While
there is room for agential discretion with respect to the performance of an imperfect
duty, it is a violation of duty if one makes it a matter of principle not to conform
with the imperfect duty. So, if we know that the creation of a humanitarian defense
force is necessary for the performance of our shared responsibility to protect and we
don’t go on to create such a force, then it is not a stretch to say that we have made it
a matter of principle not to comply with that duty.
Yet, some readers may worry about the feasibility of creating such a force. And
details may present worries: what would the command structure look like? Who will
take responsibility for its military strategies, have the final say on tactical trade-offs
and so on?
The above discussion introduces several philosophical puzzles, the resolution of
which is required to answer the question of whether there can be a duty to intervene.
Thus, is it true that states are not asked to go beyond the call of duty, to take unrea-
sonable risks, when they are called on to intervene? Are soldiers being asked to exceed
their role obligations when they are asked to face danger for the sake of the human
rights of non-compatriots? Does the fact that there is no one assigned to take on the
mission of intervening mean that the duty to intervene cannot be pinned on to any
particular actor and so it is not a duty that can be demanded of any particular agent?
And is the institutionalization of this duty a necessary solution to this problem, and
is it a feasible solution?
• SUMMARY
In this chapter, we examined the conditions for a justified war, and the conditions for
rightful conduct in war. Different just war theories offer different understandings of
some of these conditions. One feature of standard just war theories is that the condi-
tions for a justified war and for rightful conduct in war are regarded as distinct features
of just war. Soldiers are held responsible for just conduct in war but not normally for
waging a war. An important implication of this is that opposing soldiers stand in a kind
of moral equality vis-à-vis each other, regardless of the fact that the soldiers on one
side could be fighting an unjust war. In the recent discussion on the ethics of war, one
central debate focuses on this issue of moral equality of combatants.
Just war theories also establish the conditions for a just military intervention. Since
purely humanitarian interventions are not justifiable on grounds of self-defense, the
basis of justification will be different from that of standard war. The general form
of justification is that intervention is permissible when it is necessary for protecting
the human rights of persons against their own state. The point which generates the
fiercest debate is the extent and nature of human rights violation that is necessary
for a justified intervention. Some commentators require there to be large-scale and
systemic violations, as in a genocide. Others object that this makes the conditions for
justified intervention overly restrictive. Finally, we discussed whether intervention,
in cases where it is clearly permissible, could also be obligatory. Going to war, even
for just cause, seems to go beyond the call of moral duty. On the other end, seen
as a collective response, carried out by individuals who occupy particular social and
moral roles in which the acceptance of risks is assumed, the act of intervening need
not exceed that which we might expect of moral actors.
• STUDY QUESTIONS
1 What conditions of justified war should be included in a theory of just war?
2 How important is just authorization as a condition for a justified war?
3 Are the dimensions of justice of war and just conduct in war distinct, such that
an unjust war could still be justly fought?
4 What accounts for the moral difference between combatants and non-combatants?
5 Do soldiers fighting for the unjust side have the same moral standing as soldiers
fighting for the just side?
6 Fighting with drones reduces personal risks to combatants. Should this affect the
idea of the moral equality of combatants?
7 Should soldiers be held responsible for the wars they fight, or only for how they
fight?
8 Is intervention to protect human rights per se permissible?
9 What are some of the current events that raise question of whether to intervene
or not to intervene? Would an intervention in these countries be justified or not?
10 Can there be a duty to intervene? And, if there is such a duty, whose duty is it?
• NOTES
1 See, for instance, Chapter VII, Article 42 of The United Nations Charter: the Security
Council “may take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to
maintain or restore international peace and security.”
2 The US-led coalition claimed, however, that it was acting on a previous UN

resolution on Iraq that was still in force. This was the UN Security Council reso-
lution 1441 that dictated the terms of ceasefire for the first Gulf War in 1991, a
ceasefire to a war authorized by the UN in response to Iraq’s invasion Kuwait in
the fall of 1990.
3 See http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/about/bgresponsibility.shtml
[11 Sept. 2016].
4 Although the sense of imperfect duty here is a bit different from Kant’s own, the
distinction is most commonly Kant-inspired. See Kant (1953[1785]).
• REFERENCES
Just war
David Luban, “Just War and Human Rights” (1980a).

Jeff McMahan, “The Morality of Participation in an Unjust War”, in Killing in War
(2009).
Michael Walzer (excerpts), Just and Unjust Wars (1977).
Just intervention
Terry Nardin, “The Moral Basis of Humanitarian Intervention” (2002).

Michael Walzer, “The Moral Standing of States” (1980).
James Pattison, “Whose Responsibility to Protect? The Duties of Humanitarian
Intervention” (2008).
• FURTHER READING
For an introduction to just war theory, see Brian Orend, The Morality of War (2006).
For an alternative view to Walzer’s legalist paradigm, see David Luban, “Just War
and Human Rights” (1980a) which argues for an human rights based notion of just
war instead of Walzer’s state-centric account. For more discussion on the moral
status of combatants, see Just and Unjust Warriors, edited by David Rodin and Henry
Shue (2006). For more discussions on intervention, see the edited volume by Terry
Nardin and Melissa Williams, Humanitarian Intervention (2005). See Brian Orend,
“Justice After War” (2002) for jus post bellum and Darrel Moellendorf “Jus ex Bello”
(2008) for conditions of just exit from a war. See also David Rodin, “Two Emerging
Issues of Jus Post Bellum: War Termination and the Liability of Soldiers for Crimes
of Aggression” (2008).
9
•
borders: immigration,
secession and
territory
In the absence of a world government, any conception of global justice has to take as
a given in our world the fact of bounded states. But what moral significance should
we accord to state borders? The debate is not whether there should be bounded
states or not in a just world. The issue rather is what considerations and problems
of justice the fact of borders presents, and how these should be addressed. In this
chapter we will draw out some of these philosophical issues concerning boundaries
by looking at three related topics.
The first has to do with the ethics of immigration. Do states have the right to keep indi-
viduals who are non-members out, through restrictive immigration rules? The second
problem concerns the right of secession. Do states have the right to preserve their present
boundaries against members who wish to secede, or can citizens have the right, under
certain conditions, to break up a state? Finally, the third issue has to do with territorial
rights and jurisdiction. What accounts for a state’s right to its bounded territory that other
states and nonmembers have to respect? We will survey these problems in turn.
• THE ETHICS OF IMMIGRATION

Are states justified in restricting immigration into their country? Does immigration
regulation wrongly constrain the freedom of individuals who wish to become mem-
bers of another state? Or are sovereign states justified in imposing barriers to entry,
even perhaps closing off their borders entirely?
The case for open borders

Some philosophers argue that global justice would require the right of free movement
of individuals and therefore a world of open borders. These arguments can appeal to
106 • borders: immigration, secession, territory
principles of political justice and economic justice. The political justice argument holds
that immigration restriction offends against the right of movement of individuals; the
economic justice argument says that immigration restrictions violate the principle of
equal opportunity. Indeed, so they argue, given that individual liberty and equality of
economic opportunities are widely considered to be basic liberal values, it is especially
egregious for a liberal state to control entry through strict immigration laws. Joseph
Carens, whose writing on this subject has done much to frame the contemporary
debate on the ethics of immigration, has made arguments along these lines (1987).
Consider the equal opportunity argument for open borders. Depending on how one
spells out the requirements of equal opportunity, and the economic egalitarianism
underlying it more generally, the case for open borders hits its limiting point later
rather than sooner. If equal opportunity means equal opportunity to strive for equiv-
alent life prospects, then the economic argument carries the case for open borders
further than if equal opportunity means equivalent opportunity to meet basic needs.
Nonetheless, in the world as it is, even the more modest reading of the equal oppor-
tunity argument is significant. It will decry as illegitimate the common forms of
restrictions on movements we see in place in virtually all liberal democracies.
The argument from political justice attends to the basic individual liberties, specifi-
cally the individual freedom of mobility. Immigration restrictions get in the way of
the exercise of this basic individual liberty, and are restrictions that liberal states
ought to find particularly troublesome. After all, liberal states, as some commenta-
tors have pointed out, do not impose restrictions on personal movement within their
borders. So how can they, consistent with their commitments, endorse immigration
restrictions at the global level?
This argument from freedom of movement remains in play even if the economic
argument is played out. This basic individual right remains a right even if economic
equality of opportunity, by whatever definition, has been achieved. That is, even in
an egalitarian global order (whatever one’s definition of global equality might be),
the case for open borders remains if the alternative presents a restriction on the right
of mobility. If there is a moral right of free movement, then border control amounts
to an unjustified coercion of individuals who “want in”. It is coercive of individuals
because it prevents them from exercising an option that they have a moral right to.
The case for immigration restrictions

In contrast to open borders, other philosophers emphasize the right of states to
restrict entry, and to set their own terms of admission, into their political society.
One argument for this right to impose immigration control invokes the right of a
sovereign and legitimate state to self-determination. Self-determination implies that
citizens of a state have the prerogative to regulate their economy as they see fit, to
protect their natural environment, to maintain their distinctive cultural or historic
borders: immigration, secession, territory • 107
identity, to maintain the racial balance of the country’s population (in the case of a
multiracial society in which racial balance is a matter of state interest), and so on.
On this reading of self-determination, states have much leeway in terms of justifying
their immigration restrictions. Michael Walzer has made such an argument based on
this wide reading of the right of self-determination (1983). Indeed, for Walzer, there
is nothing per se morally objectionable if a state implements a racial immigration
policy. The difficulty with this kind of immigration restriction, for Walzer, will not
be that it is morally repugnant per se, but that the case for it will be difficult to justify
in most countries, given that few states at present are racially homogenous.
But the state prerogative that is most commonly appealed to is that of its right to
sustain its political culture and the political institutions that the culture sustains. The
argument from political culture takes it that a state’s political and social institutions
are both reflective of and supported by an underlying societal or public political cul-
ture. For instance, democratic political institutions require individuals to respect the
views of others, with whom they may vehemently disagree; to tolerate lifestyles from
which they may personally recoil; to respect freedom of expression and association,
even when the speech is personally offensive. Some commentators will include also
a culture of mutuality that can sustain economic redistributive institutions in society.
Generally, there is a need for a culture of respect, reasonableness and reciprocity.
One might even go further to add a linguistic component to political culture, saying
that for true democratic deliberation to take place, there must be some common
languages among members of a society (Kymlicka 2001; D. Miller 1995).
An appeal of the argument from political culture is that it is does not justify racial
immigration laws since, presumably, compatibility with or affirmation of a political
culture is race-independent. Still, it justifies admissions restrictions on the reasona-
ble ground that free movement of individuals globally will dilute or even undermine
the political culture on which a state’s political and social, including distributive,
institutions rest.
Given this important and legitimate interest that states have in maintaining their
political culture, the open borders argument is thus put on the defensive. Moreover,
regarding the claim that free movement is a basic right, opponents of open bor-
ders remind us that there is no such thing as an absolute individual right of free
movement. Even within a liberal state, individuals aren’t absolutely free to move
wherever they want. There can be legitimate reasons for restricting the right of
movement, including that of protecting private property and national parks, security
and coordination reasons, and the like. Thus, if states have a legitimate reason to
control immigration, this could be just another instance of a defensible limitation on
individual mobility (D. Miller 1995).
The economic argument, as mentioned, carries as much force as is found in the con-
ception of global egalitarianism that drives it. But in light of the possible legitimate
interest that states have in controlling their membership, opponents of open borders
argue that, even if we define the egalitarian argument robustly to mean that there
must be equal opportunity for comparable life prospects, it does not follow that
global justice necessitates open borders. This is because there are other distributive
mechanisms, other than through migration, for realizing global egalitarianism. Given
the importance then of protecting its political culture, a state should have the option
of discharging its global distributive duties in other ways besides opening up its bor-
ders. At best then, the open borders argument becomes a conditional argument. It
will say something like: if you don’t take on your global economic obligations, then
you cannot impose immigration restrictions.
Moreover, opponents of free movement have pointed out that if global justice is the
main concern, then open borders in fact, rather than being a solution, exacerbate
the problem. This is because of the phenomenon of “brain drain”, whereby it is the
more economically advantaged and informed members of poor countries who will
have the means to actually exercise their mobility right. But these are also the same
individuals who can contribute most to their own societies and so whose departure
will worsen the condition of their home country.
Reflections
The debate on the ethics of immigration draws out certain philosophical issues over
borders and justice. Do enforced state boundaries present a restriction on individual
right of mobility? Do states have a sufficiently weighty and legitimate interest to
maintain their respective political culture, and is immigration regulation a neces-
sary means of protecting it? One might think that even if there is something to the
claim that states have a morally legitimate interest and right to support their political
culture, it is questionable whether strict immigration controls, that are common in
most countries, are necessary to this end. The argument from political culture may
work to support some immigration control, but not the kinds of restrictions that are
currently enforced. Thus, coupled with the mobility argument and the equal oppor-
tunity argument, one might argue that there is a case for moderately open borders.
Finally, the economic argument for less restriction can stress that the conditional
argument is still an argument: in a economically unjust global order, unless a well-off
state is committed to moving some of its resources to people, it has no right to keep
people from moving to its resources. This argument will have immigration implica-
tions for the majority of rich liberal democracies.
While the above argument for immigration restriction focuses on the collec-
tive right of a political community to control entry contra liberal arguments that
emphasize the right of the individual, other philosophers have offered arguments
from liberal individualism for immigration restriction. One of these stresses the idea
of individual freedom of association (Wellman 2005). Individuals, in concert with
others, have the right to not associate with persons they don’t wish to associate
with, and immigration restriction can be justified on this right of non-association.

Another argues that individuals have the right not to take on additional obliga-
tions that they don’t in general owe to persons at large. Since members of a state
will have to necessarily take on special responsibilities for migrants, they have the
right to refuse them membership based on their prior right to avoid taking on addi-
tional (special) obligations (Blake 2013a). The force of the freedom of association
arguments will depend on the extent to which we can regard the state as a free
association writ large, such that the norms of individual right of association (and
dissociation) apply at the state level. The force of the avoidance of obligation argu-
ment depends on how successfully it can be maintained that members of a state
can refuse new members because of the additional burdens this might impose on
them. After all, we don’t say that citizens have the right to deny fellow citizens the
right to have children because of the additional burden they will impose on them
collectively. Now one might say that this will be because of the right of fellow
citizens who wish to have children. But if this reply works, then it works just as well
for relatively open borders since most migrants will find some citizens who wish to
exercise their right to associate with them through, say, employment relations.
Finally, it has to be noted that few defenders of states’ right to control immigration
deny that refugees have certain urgent claims that outweigh the right of political self-
determination. At the least, states will have an obligation to accept refugees up to the
point where it can be reasonably demonstrated that further admission will corrode the
state’s political culture and institutions. On this reading, most developed countries can
take in a lot more refugees than they currently say they can. Of course, the definition
of a true refugee is a matter of contention. Does this class refer only to those fleeing
political persecution (and even so, what counts as that?) or can it include migrants
escaping economic hardships? Even if we do not claim that the search for economic
betterment per se qualifies one as a refugee, it is another thing to not acknowledge
that one who is seeking an alternative to subsistence deprivation is a refugee.
The open borders position is motivated by two important values – the liberty of
persons (to some degree of freedom of movement) and the economic rights of per-
sons. In light of these and some of the more compelling considerations for some
regulation of state borders, the more reasonable position is one that lies in between
the extremes of open borders and state discretion. The present immigration laws of
many well-to-do countries can be criticized as being too restrictive, but the option is
not open borders but less restrictive borders.
• SECESSION
Secession is the withdrawal of a group from political union within an existing state.
The seceding state can then opt to become its own independent state, or it may secede
from one political order to join another (not annexation). Secession is, however, not
just an exodus or mass emigration of individuals from a state to form or join another.
Rather, and very crucially, secession has a territorial component. It involves the par-
tition of the original state and the reconfiguration of its political boundaries in that
some portion of its territory will be given over to the seceding side.
Secession is consensual when it is mutually consented to by both the seceding faction
and the state. The secession of Finland from Norway, and the splitting of Czechoslovakia
into the Czech Republic and Slovakia are examples of mutually assented to secessions.
When both host and seceding states agree to the separation, the secession is easier to
justify. The problem of unilateral secession, in contrast, is less straightforward. Can
some portion of a state have a unilateral right to secede from the larger political society
without its consent? Under what conditions can a group of individuals come to have a
moral right against a state to secede? Since unilateral secession is the more challenging
case, and moreover the more common form of secessionist demands, I will focus on
this type of secession in this section unless otherwise qualified.1
There is something to be said for ensuring the stability of states’ borders and thus to
treat secession as an exception to a rule rather than a norm. Fragmenting a state can
result in massive disruptions to the lives of individuals, precipitate mass migration,
and cause regional or global instability. But many philosophers hold that, under cer-
tain conditions, secession can be justified. Moreover, given the potential moral costs
of secession, to the host state as well as to certain individuals in the seceding associa-
tion, the permissibility conditions for secession will normally include conditions on
how the secession is to be executed.
The two main positions of just secession are the “primary right” theories and the “reme-
dial right only” theories.2 There are different variants of each of these approaches to
secession, hence the plural “theories”. For our purpose, we will attend to the general
features of each of these approaches to secession.
Primary right approach

The primary right approach, as its label suggests, takes secession to be a right in
itself. Just as an individual may, in the name of self-determination, leave an associa-
tion, so can a group of individuals in the name of collective self-determination opt to
withdraw from a political association. The collective character of this exercise of self-
determination is key. Most advocates of the primary right approach will require that
the collective decision be made democratically, through a plebiscite or referendum.
If the collective decision to exit satisfies the requirements of democratic decision-
making, the collective has the right to secede. Different primary rights theories will
thus propose different accounts of an appropriate democratic decision for secession.
Would it be a simple majority? A super-majority? Who gets to vote? But whichever
theory of democracy is adopted, the approach basically holds that if members of an
association democratically elect to secede, they have the right to do so. This approach
is thus also sometimes referred to as the democratic right model of secession.
One immediate problem with this account of secession is that it seems overly per-
missive. In principle, this approach can allow, say, California to secede from the rest
of the United States if this is the collective decision of California; or Vancouver from
the rest of Canada. Given the potential costs of secession, this permissiveness would
give many philosophers some pause.
One version of the primary right approach thus qualifies the collective that may
democratically decide to secede. This right to a referendum is not one that any asso-
ciation or collective has, on this version, but it is a right that only distinctive national
communities have. On the nationally qualified versions of the primary rights theo-
ries, Puerto Rico, Quebec or Scotland will have a primary right to secede from the
US, Canada and the UK respectively, but not the state of New York, Alberta or
London.
Thus some commentators, like Allen Buchanan, stake a further sub-division within
the primary right approach, between “plebiscitary theories”, which take a democratic
decision by any association to be sufficient, and “ascriptivist theories”, which limit
the primary right only to groups with certain ascribed features, like a distinctive
nationality.
As mentioned, secession can be potentially disruptive and can have unjust outcomes,
and some might worry that even the ascriptivist approach remains too permissive.
A complete theory of just secession, therefore, in addition to identifying the right to
secede, must also identify conditions for the just execution of the secession. Thus,
in addition to a primary right of secession, even when the exercise of this right is
limited to specific types of groups, primary right theorists will note other important
conditions for a just secession.3 For instance, a collective decision on the part of a
national community to secede may not mean that the community will be permitted
to withdraw from membership if its actual act of secession will result in injustice.
For example, if there are internal minorities within the new state whose rights the
withdrawing state is unprepared to offer protection for, then the secession itself may
not be permissible. There is also the possibility of injustice to the original state itself
in secession, as when the secession will necessarily leave the original state landlocked
and impoverished as a result. If there is no reasonable settlement of matters of this
sort, secession will not be permitted even if the national and democratic conditions
are met. Finally, secession, like any separation, will require that past accounts be set-
tled. So a just secession can require some agreement on the proper settlement of any
debt that the exiting state might owe to the host state.
But even when qualified by ascribed characteristics, like nationality, and the con-
ditions for the just exercise of secession are identified, critics of the primary right
approach complain that it is still too permissive. Many states in the world today are
multinational or multicultural states, and several are in fact facing secessionist claims
from their national minorities. Besides more well-known cases of national move-
ments for secession, such as Scotland from the UK, and Quebec from Canada, Spain
is facing demands from Catalonia; Belgium from Flanders, France from Corsica, and
China from Tibet and Xinjiang, to name just a few examples. The primary right
approach, even in the nationality-qualified ascriptivist form, too eagerly greases the
path of secession. While adherents of the primary rights approach will take this to be
a feature of their theory of just secession, its critics consider it to be a flaw.
Remedial right only approach

In contrast, to the primary right approach, the remedial right only approach offers a
more restrictive account of just secession. It grants the right to secede only in cases
when secession is a reasonable last resort response to an injustice. The standard kind
of injustices for which secession could count as an admissible means of remedy are
limited to more significant forms of injustice, such as extreme violations of human
rights such as genocide, and unlawful annexations – whose injustice is still felt rather
than simply being a mere historical fact – that had forced the seceding group into the
political union in the first place.
To the extent that extensive violations of human rights, as in the case of genocide, nor-
mally target ethnic, national or religious minorities, the remedial right only approach
will typically have national or distinctive minorities as its subject. It might well be the
case, then, that just secessions on the remedial right only approach will apply mostly
to national minorities. But this convergence is coincidental on the remedial rights
view. On this approach, it is the fact of injustice and not the fact of nationality that
is providing the justification. For example, when Bosnia and Herzegovina seceded
from Serbia in 1992 this was a justified secession, on this account, not because of
a primary national right to secede but because secession was a fitting response to
the Serbian unjust treatment of Bosnians. Thus shared nationality is not a necessary
condition, and more importantly not a sufficient condition, for a just secession. The
presence of injustice of certain kinds is the necessary condition.
If the primary right approach is too permissive in the eyes of some its critics, oppo-
nents of the remedial right only approach will say that it is too restrictive. Why
should an injustice be a necessary condition for a rightful secession? This skepticism
is compounded when secession has to be seen also, as in most remedial right only
theories, as a reasonable last resort. Does this requirement not raise the bar of just
secession too high? After all, what counts as last resort for the seceding side can be
seen by the other party to be an overly hasty response. So, isn’t it sufficient that a
community sees itself as a distinctive historic community and therefore entitled to
its own political society?
In response, a proponent of the remedial right only approach will say that, given that
a minority national community is already a member of a functioning state, that should
be the default position and deviation from that will require strong justification, of the
sort that ending an injustice provides. This may seem like a status quo bias, one that is
in favor of existing state arrangements where there is no justice, but adherents of the
remedy right approach take this to be a virtue of their view. Given the great disruption
that secession presents, as recounted above, even if the conditions for a just execution
of a secession can be identified that will minimize its moral costs, there is something
to be said for favoring the status quo. In short, the restrictiveness of its approach is
embraced as a virtue rather than regarded as a problem.
Moreover, the cases of nationalist secessionist demands that garner international
attention tend to be cases in which there is also demonstrable injustice committed
against the national minority. Thus, for the range of secessionist demands that fea-
ture highly in the international consciousness, the remedy right only approach is not
necessarily too restrictive.
Some defenders of the remedy right approach go further to include a lack of equal
recognition for national minorities as constituting another kind of injustice that can
rightly motivate secession. But, while this move eases the restrictiveness of the reme-
dial right only approach, it comes agonizingly close to the primary right approach, if
it does not collapse altogether into it. Quebec’s, Catalonia’s and Scotland’s secession-
ist demands, for example, are put forward on the grounds that equal recognition is
practically lacking and unrealizable while they remain in the larger political society.
Secessionist moves are demands for equal recognition of a distinct national commu-
nity through political independence and political self-determination. That is, if the
argument is that the mere fact of national or cultural distinctiveness means that there
can be no equal recognition unless there is also political independence, the argument
from equal recognition becomes indistinguishable from the primary right position.
• TERRITORIAL RIGHTS
States have jurisdiction over a bounded space. The problem of territorial rights is in
part the problem of explaining and justifying this right that states have over a geo-
graphical space. But there are two aspects to the problem of territorial rights. One
concerns the right of states to make and enforce laws which are binding on persons
(most fully on its own subjects but also less extensively on anyone who happens to be
within its borders) within a geographical area. That is, what gives the state this right
to make and impose laws? And if this right of the state to make and enforce its laws
comes with a corresponding obligation on the part of its subjects to obey the law,
what accounts for this duty to obey? The other aspect introduces an international
element. Why should outsiders respect this jurisdictional right of any state to control
a bounded piece of territory? States claim possession over land, sea and even air-
space, but what makes this possession a claim-right that other states have to respect?
The local and international aspects of the territorial right are, of course, related but
they are distinct. A response that might be considered satisfactory as an answer to
the local question does not necessarily address the international one. For instance,
one might say, in response to the local question, that the state has a right to pass
and enforce laws that are binding on persons within a given space because it is
the function of the state to realize justice for its members, and having the right to
make and enforce laws is a necessary condition for realizing justice. But accepting
this justification of state authority over its subjects does not explain why outsid-
ers and other states have to respect that state’s territorial claim. For example, it
is not implausible that the state of Australia could continue to deliver justice for
Australians quite effectively if the territory of Australia were reduced by a third.
That the Australian state realizes justice for Australians might explain why it has
political and jurisdictional authority over them, but it does not explain why the
territorial claim of Australia has to be respected by other states and outsiders if a
mini Australia can realize justice for its people just as well.
My focus in this section will be on the international aspect of territorial right. What
gives the state its right-based possession over a bounded space, making it a possession
that others have to respect?
A state’s claim over a territory is not the same as the claim over personal property.
Rather, the terms of personal property rights and ownership are worked out within a
bounded jurisdiction. That is, a territorial right is the precondition of property rights.
Still, since territorial right is not mere possession and de facto control over a portion
of the Earth, but a possession and jurisdictional authority based on right, that is a
possession and authority that other states have the duty to respect, it seems reason-
able to see how the main theories of property rights can be appropriately extended
to defend a state’s territorial right.
One influential theory of property right is that of John Locke, which holds that
ownership right can be pre-contractual, that persons can come to have a right over
property in nature. According to Locke, what gives social value to a resource lying in
nature is the work humans put into it. If natural resources belong to all persons in the
world in the sense that no one has any prior claim to any of the Earth’s land, sea and
the items one finds there, as they remain in their natural state, as Locke holds, then
anyone who adds her labor to an unclaimed space or an item in nature, thus giving it
value, has come to rightly acquire it and is the rightful owner of the thing. This right
of acquisition is subject to two conditions, however. Locke says that the acquisition
must leave enough and as good for others, and that one may not acquire more than
one can use, such as to result in spoilage and wastage.
One might be tempted to extend this Lockean theory of rightful acquisition to the
matter of territorial right in a straightforward way, by arguing that the state’s terri-
tory is the sum of the rightful acquisitions of land by individuals of that state. But
it will be obvious why this cannot serve as a basis for territorial right. In most large
states, there will remain land and resources that are uncultivated and unextracted
by any individual. A straightforward application of Locke’s theory of acquisition to
territorial rights will leave a state with a rather speckled territory.
The Lockean theory, if it is to be applied meaningfully to the problem of territorial
right will have to take a collective turn: it will have to treat the state, or Locke’s com-
monwealth, the people, as the agent that is doing the acquisition. But, even so, the
state as an agent does not add its labor to all the land within its boundaries. There
remain wildernesses, conservation areas, unclaimed land (for stakeholders) to which
the state cannot be said to have meaningfully added its collective labor and thereby
have a rightful claim over them. At most, what the state has done is to put a “fence”
around its claim, but this, of course, does not qualify as appropriation in Locke’s sense.
More fundamentally, extending Locke’s theory to territory accentuates a problem
commonly associated with Locke’s account of property right. This is that there is
the problem of reasonable disagreement over whether something has been rightly
acquired and whether the limiting conditions of rightful acquisition have been
breached. This is distinct from the problem of right enforcement that Locke is aware
of and which, of course, motivated, under his social contract theory, the formation
of the state. The problem is not just that of enforcement of a right that is clearly
established, but the difficulty of even establishing that there is a right.
Since the problem of reasonable disagreement is more pronounced in the territorial
case, consider the following. Has the collective actor, i.e., the state, really added its
labor to a certain tract of land within its proclaimed territory? And even if it has, is
this leaving enough and as good of the same thing for others? And is any of this land
going to waste through underuse or lack of care?
Indeed, the problem of reasonable disagreement about ownership in the state of
nature is what prompts Kant’s own approach to property rights, and this seems more
promising as a basis for territorial rights. Given the problem of disagreement over
who rightly owns what, Kant says that a claim of possession can, at most, be a pro-
visional right while we remain in a pre-institutional or lawless state, i.e. the state of
nature. An item that I have acquired from nature and am holding in my hand physi-
cally might be universally consented to be rightfully mine. This is already assuming
away potential disagreement over what counts as proper acquisition. But, be that
as it may, what happens if I were to leave it unattended for a moment? Or be at
some physical distance from the same item? For Kant, unless there are some publicly
known rules governing who can own what under which conditions, property rights
can remain only provisional, subject to reasonable interpretation and dissent. So, the
solution is the formation of a state that makes and enforces property laws that are
knowable and accessible to all. In a sense, a certain established and accepted conven-
tion is that which makes mere possession into rightful ownership.
The idea that there has to be a certain background public system or rules or conven-
tion before possession turns into a right claim that others must respect is perhaps
more promising as an account of territorial rights. What grounds the right of a state
to its current territory is the fact of an international legal convention to which all
states are parties. Even if we invoke some quasi-Lockean theory of acquisition to
explain the territorial right of states (perhaps this argument can go some way but
not all the way for the reasons noted above), at best any possession over territory
remains provisional and not based on right. Indeed, until recently in the span of
human history, wars of conquest and territorial annexation were standard practices,
as “the continuation of politics by other means”, in Carl von Clausewitz’s celebrated

phrase. What grounds territorial rights, what turns any provisional right a state might
ever come to have over its land into a universally respected right, is the fact of an
international legal convention that sanctions this right. A global institutional order
is surely not a centralized state with the same powers and functions as the domestic
state. But the important feature is not whether there is a state present globally or
not, but that there is a recognized public system of rules that underpins the territo-
rial rights of states. Saddam Hussain quickly learned the truth of this when he led
Iraq into an outright and undisguised invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Some important implications follow if territorial rights are grounded fundamentally
on international convention. But before exploring some of these, let us look at two
other dominant accounts of territorial rights. In a sense, these two approaches paral-
lel the primary right approach and the remedial right only approach that we looked
at in the above discussion on secession.
Paralleling the ascriptive version of the primary right approach to secession, one
account of territorial right says that a collective that constitutes a historic commu-
nity, a national community or a people with a distinctive political culture, has a
rightful claim over a territory. The argument, very briefly, is that since these cultural
collectives are entitled to political self-determination, and self-determination entails
a jurisdictional right over a territory, and this last requires a bounded and respected
territorial space, it follows that national groups or a people have a right of territory.
While this goes some way to explaining how a group can come to have a provisional
right, it seems to leave too much room for reasonable disagreement: does this group
qualify as a distinctive people or nation? What is its historical and cultural connec-
tion to this particular space, and why this much space? Like the Lockean argument,
even if it succeeds, the right it issues remains provisional and needs to be backed by
an international convention or public system of rules.
Paralleling the remedial right only approach, although taking this in the reverse
direction, another approach to territory holds that the reason why states have a right
over a territory is that this is necessary for the state to deliver justice for its citizens
or subjects. So, unlike the nation- or people-based arguments above, this approach
turns the lens back to the individual.
One account focuses on the right of individual members of the state to a loca-
tion which is a good in itself and instrumental for the realization of other goods.
Violation of a state’s territory then, including taking away and annexing a portion
of it, is a wrong therefore not against the state as such but against the individuals
whose locational interests have been violated.
But this focus on the individual cannot explain the Australia thought-experiment
above: why would carving away a portion of a huge and under populated country
offend against any individual Australian’s locational interests? The best individual
good argument that can be made will have to be in terms of the interest of Aborigines,
but this is not what defenders of political territory will say. That is, they will not
want to claim that the pro tanto wrongness of carving up present-day Australia is
wholly contingent on its impact on existing Aboriginal Australians.
One might argue that removing a portion of Australia will offend against Australians’
locational interest even if there is no present impact on their individual interests.
This is because individual Australians have by now formed expectations regarding
their homeland, and the resources available to them in the future. But this raises
the question of why they are entitled to form such expectations in the first place?
Why should these expectations be considered legitimate from the point of view of
outsiders? Again, one might argue that it is conventions, ultimately, that ground the
right to a given territory.
One implication of the thesis that international territorial right is a convention-
based right is that it means that the basic operating norm of modern international
relations – that of independent and sovereign territorial states interacting with each
other – presumes an international institutional order. The international domain of
states is not a global state of nature or in a condition of global anarchy. It is funda-
mentally an order based on a shared and acknowledged convention that underpins
states’ rights. What this means, among other things, is that there is a global conven-
tional order that all individuals live under, and it is not unreasonable to conclude
from this fact that this order must be one that is justifiable to them.
To take stock: one could try to defend a state’s territorial right as a natural right by
appealing to Locke’s theory of ownership. As individual ownership is possible in a
state of nature independent of institutions, for Locke, so too, on this argument, can
there be a natural territorial right of states. The difficulty with this Lockean approach
is not only that Locke’s theory of ownership is subject to reasonable philosophical
disagreement, but that it is hard to apply Locke’s argument to a collective claim over
a territory. Another approach focuses on the cultural and historical claims of states
to a particular territory. This historicist approach avoids the presumption that ter-
ritorial right is a kind of natural ownership right, but as a foundation for territorial
rights it seems flimsy since historical and cultural claims over territories are fraught
with indeterminacy and prone to competing interpretations. Finally, we might think
that territorial right is a conventional international right, a right that is presumptive
in virtue of a background global institutional order. This approach introduces the
fact of an international institutional order of sorts, and this can, in turn, pave the way
for other normative considerations, such as the justificatory standing of this order.
• SUMMARY
The case of immigration regulation pits interests of outsiders against the interests of
insiders. We looked at arguments for open borders based on the right of individuals
to free movement as well as implications of global egalitarianism. Against the open
borders position is the view that states have a legitimate entitlement to control who
becomes citizens. One argument of this kind is that states have an interest in main-
taining the political culture of their society, and immigration restriction is a necessary
means toward this end.
While secessions can be destabilizing, not all secessions are unjust. We looked at two
approaches to just secession. One says that it is a basic right of a self-determining
collective to form its own independent state. A more commonly qualified version of
this primary right to secede view is that only groups that are political communities,
or nations, have this right. In contrast with the primary right approach, the remedial
right only approach says that secession is permissible only in cases where it is the only
response to an injustice, as when, say, a minority community is being oppressed by
the majority group.
Finally, we looked at territorial rights of states. How do states come to have a claim
against other states based not on might but on a right to a possession of, and author-
ity over, that territory? Some of the options include treating territorial rights as a
kind of natural right that states have, akin to property rights; treating it as a cultural
and historically based right; and regarding it as a right because this is how justice is
realized for individuals. I propose, however, that none of these options on their own
succeed in accounting for states’ territorial rights. In the end, it seems to me that
territorial rights are rights based on international convention and institutions, akin to
Kantian property rights.
• STUDY QUESTIONS
1 Does liberalism, given its commitments to individual liberty and economic justice,
require free mobility of persons globally?
2 What legitimate interests do states have that border control can protect?
3 Even if states are permitted some level of control over their own immigration
policies, are present restrictions too strict? What standards can we reference when
judging the justness or unjustness of a country’s immigration laws?
4 Consider current events. Are there cases where mass migration and border con-
trols come into conflict? What can the positions we have discussed in this chapter
say about these cases? Where do you stand?
5 Can there be restrictions on emigration?
6 Must a social group be a distinctive national group before it can secede to form its
own state, or is it enough that a group is being treated unjustly and that secession
is a necessary response to the injustice?
7 Which of the two approaches to just secession, the primary right approach or the
remedial right only approach, has the right balance of permissiveness and restric-
tions on the conditions for a just secession?
8 What is the basis of a state’s claim to a bounded space? How is this a right-based
claim that imposes obligations on other states to respect its territory?
9 Is a state’s territorial claim in relation to other states a moral claim, or is it a claim
that has normative force only in the context of international laws and norms?
• NOTES
1 In identifying the right of unilateral secession, the idea will be that the host state
will acknowledge this right and thereby also consent to the secession. So, ideally,
consent would follow from the right. But unlike mutually consensual secession,
the right is independent of the consent.
2 See Allen Buchanan (1991), Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce, from Fort
Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec.
3 This is analogous to the distinction between justified war and justice in war.
• REFERENCES
Immigration
Joseph Carens, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders” (1987).
Michael Walzer, “Membership” in Spheres of Justice (1983).
Secession
Allen Buchanan, “Theories of Secession” (1997).

Christopher Wellman (excerpts), A Theory of Secession (2005).
Territory
Margaret Moore (excerpts), A Political Theory of Territory (2015).

A. John Simmons, “Territorial Rights: Justificatory Strategies” (2015).
Anna Stilz, “Nations, States and Territory” (2011).
FURTHER READING
See Joseph Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (2013) for Caren’s most recent defense
of open borders. Christopher Wellman argues from immigration restriction based on
the freedom not to associate in “Immigration and Freedom of Association” (2008).
Gillian Brock and Michael Blake debate the relatively less explored converse ques-
tion of the right to emigrate in Debating Brain Drain (Brock and Blake 2015). See
Cara Nine, Global Justice and Territory (2012) and Avery Kolers, Land, Conflict, and
Justice: A Political Theory of Territory (2009) for books on territorial rights.
10
•
climate change
justice: sharing
the burden
Global average temperature has increased by 0.8 degrees Celsius since modern
record-keeping began in 1880. The Earth’s surface temperatures in 2015 broke the
record-high set just previously in 2014.1 The main source of this global warming is
the emission of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases due to human
activities, such as fossil fuel consumption and the logging and strip mining of land. It
is no exaggeration that anthropogenic climate change is one of the gravest challenges
facing humanity. Climate change is an especially profound problem of global justice
as it puts the very capacity of our planet to sustain human life at risk.
Climate science tells us that any further increase in global temperature must be lim-
ited to 2 degrees Celsius. Past this point, global warming becomes irreversible. To
stay within the 2 degrees limit, the world must collectively reduce global CO2 emis-
sions by 50–80 percent of 2000 levels by 2050. Encouragingly, there is a growing
global consensus on this. The United Nations Convention on Climate Change, drafted
in 1992 at the United Nations Conference on Development and Environment (Rio
Summit), and signed by 197 parties to date, acknowledges the global responsibility
to address anthropogenic climate change. The 2015 Paris Agreement further affirms
the commitment to the 2 degrees target.
However, one stumbling block to global action, indeed a major point of contention
in international climate talks, is the matter of how to distribute the global responsi-
bility to cap total global CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions among individual
countries. Emissions reductions are necessary; yet they come with the opportunity
costs of economic development and growth. How can this collective cost or burden
be fairly allocated to the different countries of the world?
The duty to control climate change is ultimately something we in the present owe to
future persons. But it is a duty that will incur costs in the present, and the question
climate change justice: sharing the burden • 121
is whether there is a fairest way of sharing that cost among present actors. As Darrel
Moellendorf asks, “How should this generational responsibility be divided intragen-
erationally within the framework of an international climate change agreement?”
(Moellendorf 2014, p. 163).
The distribution of emissions rights is one of the main agenda items in international
climate change discussions and will be the focus of our discussion in this chapter.
Should the cost of climate justice be imposed equally on all countries, presumably
adjusted for population? Or should the allocation of this burden depend on a coun-
try’s past and ongoing emissions of greenhouse gases? Or should this be determined
by the specific economic capacity and needs of countries?
• CLIMATE JUSTICE AND THE RIGHT TO

SUBSISTENCE
At the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, the Chinese President Xi Jinping acknowl-
edged the common global responsibility to combat climate change. But he also
insisted that “[a]ddressing climate change should not deny the legitimate needs of
developing countries to reduce poverty and improve their people’s living standards”.2
Similarly, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, argued that poor countries
should have the right to continue to increase their rate of fossil fuel consumption for
the purpose of economic development, the global responsibility to counter climate
change notwithstanding.3
The above official statements reiterate a long-standing contention in international cli-
mate negotiations. Underlying these remarks is the principle known as the “Principle
of Common but Differentiated Responsibility”. This principle, proclaimed in the
Rio Declaration, holds that while addressing the problem of climate change is the
responsibility of all countries (hence a common responsibility), this collective respon-
sibility should nonetheless be asymmetrically allocated to countries depending on
their background circumstances, such as their varying economic needs. The Principle
of Common but Differentiated Responsibility stands in contrast to the view that the
burden of climate justice ought to be shared equally by all societies regardless of
background conditions.
These considerations bring to the fore a central question in climate justice debates.
How should the right of poorer countries to economic development be balanced
against their duty of climate justice to reduce fossil fuel consumption and extraction?
Henry Shue, who defends the basic right to subsistence (see Chapter 2), makes
the important distinction between subsistence emissions and luxury emissions (Shue
1993). Subsistence emissions are emissions that are necessary to maintain or to
achieve economic subsistence in a society. Luxury emissions are emissions for the
purpose not of subsistence but luxury items. Thus, releasing CO2 in order to provide
122 • climate change justice: sharing the burden
for the basic energy needs of a society is a subsistence emission, whereas releasing
pollutants by, say, driving large SUVs is a case of luxury emissions. The general idea
here is that countries have a presumptive right to engage in subsistence emissions
in the name of the right of subsistence. But luxury emissions are a different matter.
This is a privilege subject to override by other moral considerations. Thus, given the
fact of climate change, richer countries have a more demanding duty to reduce their
emissions.
This basic distinction between subsistence emissions and luxury emissions reflects
the spirit of Common But Differentiated Responsibility. But the difference between
subsistence and luxury may not suffice to systematically ground an asymmetrical
assignment of climate justice duties. One person’s luxury is another’s subsistence. Is
the second household car a luxury or a matter of subsistence? Some might insist that
in suburban America, it is a matter of subsistence for a working family. Also, if we
define subsistence too modestly, it is possible that countries like China and India will
have to very soon cease emitting pollutants, when they have achieved some defined
standard of living for their citizens, even though they will lag far behind the United
States and other developed countries in terms of economic development.
The basic idea behind luxury emissions versus subsistence emissions is that some
emissions are unnecessary and others are permissible. What we need then is a princi-
ple of emissions distribution that will shed light on what counts as impermissible and
admissible emissions. Is there a more fundamental distributive principle by which to
systematically ground and justify an asymmetrical allocation of the burden of climate
justice among countries?
• EQUAL PER CAPITA EMISSIONS

One way of allowing developing countries like India, China and Brazil to emit more
greenhouse gases than developed countries like the US, Canada and Britain is to
require of every country an equal amount of emissions reduction adjusted for its
population. Or, to put this standard in the converse, each country is to have an
equal per capita emissions quota. Thus adjusted, more populous countries like China
or India as a whole will be permitted to emit more greenhouse gases than the US,
Canada or Australia. Indeed, when we consider that the per capita emissions of CO2
of Australia and the US are 16.5 (metric tons) and 17.0 respectively for 2011–2015,
compared with 6.7 and 1.7 for China and India respectively, the equal per capita
emissions approach (EPC) can require a significant total emissions reduction in the
US and Australia while permitting China and India to continue in their economic
development goals, business as usual.4
The moral ideal behind EPC is presumably something like the equal rights of indi-
viduals to emit greenhouse gases (or, in the converse, the equal responsibility to
reduce their emissions). The egalitarian character of the equal per capita emissions
approach no doubt has appeal. It will distribute the burden of climate justice to each
individual equally, in a sense, and this seems eminently fair from an individualistic
moral perspective. EPC can be seen as a principle of allocation that, on the one hand,
allows developing countries to emit more, while maintaining, on the other hand, the
idea of equality.
But the fairness of EPC comes under pressure on further analysis, according to its
critics. EPC might be an appropriate end-state that the world community should
aim for. But to deploy this standard at a time when some countries are still struggling
with the problem of extreme poverty and playing catch-up with more developed
economies is to ignore the right of economic development. It would be somewhat
akin to saying that each individual has to pay an equal amount in taxes to society
regardless of her income and wealth and basic needs.
The basic problems of fairness with the EPC can be diagnosed as follows. First, it
is indifferent to parties’ past contribution or fault with respect to the problem of
climate change. That is, it seems to take a time-slice approach to the problem: how-
ever the situation in need of remedying has come about, everyone must now accept
an equal share of the burden to fix the problem. We might decide on further analy-
sis that past contribution to a problem is normatively irrelevant, but we must at
least be attuned to this question. (We will in fact turn to this question below.) The
second problem with EPC is that it is indifferent to the fact of background inequal-
ity and the varying abilities of countries to bear the costs of emissions reductions.
It holds that weak and strong alike are to be equally charged with addressing the
problem. That some countries have more economic needs than others is not given
consideration under EPC (Moellendorf 2015).
Moreover, EPC seems to “fetishize” emissions as Simon Caney puts it (Caney 2012).
EPC gives the impression that all global justice is concerned with is the distribu-
tion of emissions entitlements as an end in itself, when in fact emissions are merely
means to other ends that people value. For example, whether we adopt a primary
goods (or resource-based) approach to distributive justice, a capability approach or
a well-being approach, one’s share of emission entitlement is just one ingredient
of the good that we are seeking to distribute fairly (see Chapter 2). For example,
suppose we take primary goods to be our equalisandum (the thing that we want to
distribute fairly). How we ought to assign to a society its emissions quota, then, must
be informed by its current holdings of the primary goods as a whole. All things being
equal, a country with lower resource holding can be granted a higher emissions quota
than a country with a higher resource holding since this might be how we equalize
each country’s share of primary goods in total.
It is, in principle, possible that the equilibrium point – the point at which each
country’s per capita share of emissions cap is equal – is also adequate for meeting the
2 degrees Celsius target. For instance, at the extreme, we could imagine an equal per
capita cap that is close to zero. But if we take both climatic sustainability and economic
development into consideration, it is more likely that, in the short-term at least, poor
countries will need a higher per capita cap than rich, developed countries. That is,
they will need to increase rather than reduce their emissions, and this increase has to
be offset by significant reduction by rich countries.5
In sum, the core worry is that EPC is too ahistorical and insensitive to present con-
tingencies. It ignores past actions by imposing equal responsibility on all persons.
More poignantly, it brackets the differing development needs of countries and their
corresponding capacities to shoulder the cost of climate justice. Opponents of EPC
believe that differential responsibility of climate justice means that poorer countries
may emit more greenhouse gases per capita than wealthy countries so long as global
poverty remains a problem of global justice. On their view, what is required in the
name of both climate justice and economic right in the interim is that poorer coun-
tries be permitted to continue to increase their per capita fossil fuel consumption,
and that this increase ought to be off-set by a corresponding decrease in the per
capita consumption in developed countries.
• THE POLLUTER PAYS PRINCIPLE

An alternative principle to EPC is explicitly historical. We saw earlier the Indian
Prime Minister’s call for differential responsibility based on the right of economic
development. But Modi also appealed to a separate historical argument at the Paris
talks. He said, “Climate change is not of our making”. Rather, he continued, “It is the
result of global warming that came from the prosperity and progress of an industrial
age powered by fossil fuel.”6 For this reason, he concluded that rich industrialized
countries which have polluted the most should accept special responsibility to coun-
ter climate change.
The ideal behind Modi’s position can be summed up by the retail slogan, “You break
it, you buy it”. In climate justice speak, this is known as “the polluter pays princi-
ple”. The polluter pays principle (PPP) can be understood as a fault-based principle
of responsibility assignment. It assigns the duty to remedy a problem to the actors
whose wrongful actions or moral neglect has created the problem.
The temporal span that is presumed under this principle obviously determines the
set of agents that the principle can target. If we adopt a narrow time horizon, and
focus on current or recent emissions activities (say, over the past two to three dec-
ades), the principle may very well implicate rapidly growing economies like China,
Brazil and India (given their enormous greenhouse gas contributions in recent times),
while possibly letting some highly developed economies off the hook as they become
better positioned to develop green technology and reduce their current fossil fuel
consumption.
But this assignment of responsibility is contrary to the intent of proponents of PPP.
The spirit behind PPP is that advanced, developed countries, such as Britain, Germany
or the US, should bear greater responsibility for climate change since they have
enjoyed the benefits of industrialization longer than countries like China and India
have, and therefore have historically emitted more greenhouse gases. PPP is meant,
therefore, to have a longer time frame so as to take account of cumulative historical
emissions since the Industrial Revolution.
Yet the further back in time PPP reaches, the knottier the philosophical problems it
confronts. Suppose we accept, reasonably, that Britain began contributing to climate
change from the time of the Industrial Revolution, around the late 1800s. Also, sup-
pose (and here more controversially as we will see) that these polluting activities are
morally objectionable because they contributed to global warming. One might con-
clude from these premises that some compensation is owed by Britain to those who
are suffering the consequences of its past moral failure or neglect, and this responsi-
bility will take the form of accepting a higher emissions reduction cut. But this would
be too quick, as most readers will see. Even if we grant the argument’s premises, the
conclusion does not follow. “Why should present Britons bear the duty of reparative
justice to make amends for the sins of their predecessors?”
PPP thus introduces the philosophically interesting topic of reparations for past
wrongs. Reparative justice obligations are relatively easy to account for when the
wrongdoer is still available to take on reparative duties. But reparative justice
gets complicated when it has an intergenerational dimension, that is, when it is
addressed to an injustice committed by a previous generation. Can the sins of a
previous generation be visited upon the present?
The question of reparative justice for past international injustice is an important
topic in global justice as it engages with other normative problems in international
relations. Besides climate justice, it makes an appearance in discussions on com-
pensation for European colonialism, and also discussions of land reclamation for
indigenous peoples. (In the domestic case, as in the United States, there is the ques-
tion of reparations for African-American slavery.) In these cases, as with PPP, the
central philosophical issue is this: how can the wrongs committed by individuals in
the past fall on persons in the present to atone for? In some other cases of past inter-
national injustices, the problem is compounded by the absence of the recipient side.
In the case of colonialism, for example, not only are the individual perpetrators of
the (alleged) injustice no longer present, but it is also not obvious who the individual
benefactors of reparative justice ought to be since the victims of the past injustice are
no longer present. We note these other interesting cases of reparative justice, only to
return to the topic of PPP.7
To be sure, the effects of global warming are present and ongoing, so if contribut-
ing to climate change is an injustice, it is an injustice for which there are victims
to be compensated. The problem, however, is the first one noted: how can we
hold the perpetrators to account when they are no longer alive? Isn’t it unfair to
make some present individuals pay for their misdeeds simply because of national
or generational association?
One possible solution to this problem of intergenerational unfairness is to adopt a

collectivist approach to moral responsibility and obligation, as opposed to the strin-
gently individualistic one (that the problem of intergenerational unfairness seems to
take for granted). On this collectivist approach, it is (say) Britain as a collective moral
agent, as a national community, who is responsible for the past emissions. Thus, it is
Britain now as that collective agent who has to repair the damage. Accordingly, there
is no unfair passing of the buck from the guilty to the innocent. The culpable actor is
the society as a whole, and it is the society as a whole now that has the duty to make
amends (see D. Miller 2007; Butt 2009).
A counter-argument against this collectivist turn is that, at the end of the day, the
collective responsibility of repair must trickle down to individuals (who are the ones
to actually bear the costs, after all). Granted that it is the national community as
a collective agent that has the responsibility of repair, but a nation is made up of
individuals, and it is still going to be living individuals (who had nothing to do with
the injustice) who will ultimately have to foot the bill. Doesn’t the original problem
of intergenerational unfairness reappear, since innocent individuals are expected to
answer for the sins of their forebears?
But this counter-argument, absent further elaboration, too hastily assumes that any
common social obligation a society has can be passed on only to those individuals
who bear some fault for the problems to be addressed. But this is, of course, hardly
the way we normally think of individual societal obligations in general. Instead, we
normally accept that individual members of a society can be required to take on their
fair share of social obligations to address societal issues independently of their past
contribution to or neglect of these issues.
For instance, we all share responsibilities of justice as individuals to address common
societal problems of education inequality, lack of adequate public health care, social
inequality, and so on. That is, as individuals, we each have a range of civic duties
and responsibilities, many of which are aimed at problems that have historical root
causes but which we personally played no role in bringing about. If our society has a
duty of justice to confront certain problems of justice, then each of us as individuals
has some share of that responsibility, not because we were somehow at fault, but
because of our membership in that society.
The collectivist turn is a promising solution to the problem of reparations for past
international injustice. But its full defense will require some deeper understanding
of what makes for a collective moral agent and how a collective responsibility can
be distributed among individuals of the collective. What are some of the necessary
conditions for collective moral agency? Must the collective show some structured
deliberative capacity? Must it be a collective whose individuals share national ties or
other bonds of solidarity? Or must the individuals of the collective be enjoined via
certain common interests? And if there is indeed a collective responsibility, what is
the right way of parceling this responsibility out among individuals?
There is also another problem for PPP conceived as a fault-based principle. In order
to hold someone morally at fault, it is not always sufficient to show that she was a
significant part of the causal chain of events that led to the bad outcome. In addi-
tion, we would normally need to show that she had acted wrongly or was at least
morally negligent. The problem with PPP is that, since knowledge of the damage of
greenhouse gas emissions became part of mainstream science and general knowledge
only relatively recently (some might say only as recently as the 1980s but certainly
not before the 1950s), early polluters cannot really be reasonably held to account.
We can’t hold them morally culpable since they genuinely lacked the information.
Genuine and reasonable ignorance can exculpate an agent. For example, we hesitate
to hold the ancient Greek slave-owner morally blameworthy for his choices and
actions. It is, of course, not impossible for an ancient Greek to imagine that slavery
was unjust, but such a person would be a moral genius or visionary so to speak.
And there is no moral requirement that one is capable of being a moral genius (see
Guerrero 2007). The Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius may have had the foresight
and imagination to be the first to see the connection between CO2 accumulation and
changes in the Earth’s temperature back in 1895.8 But we can’t hold the ordinary
industrialists and the British society in general to the same improbably high standard.
Thus, if the problem of intergenerational unfairness is that it seems unfair to make
present generations pay for injustice of past generations, the unfairness in this case is
that it is unfair to even pin any wrongdoing on previous generations.
In response to this challenge, perhaps PPP need not be seen as a strictly fault-based
principle. A duty of reparative justice need not be based necessarily on culpable
wrongdoing. In many instances, we don’t find it counter-intuitive to make people
pay for damages even when they are truly accidentally brought about through gen-
uine ignorance. My prior lack of knowledge that the fish I had released into our
natural pond was an invasive species does not mean that I don’t have to accept the
special trouble of fixing the problem. The fact that one engaged in an activity once
thought to be harmless but is now known to have harmful side effects does not make
it inappropriate for one to bear the cost, or at least a lion’s share of the cost, of repair-
ing the damage. It is not implausible, in some cases, that we hold a person liable for
damages even if she was not culpable because of her lack of knowledge.
The above are some of the main considerations for and against PPP, and an indication
of some of the difficult questions that PPP raises. Now, it might appear to some readers
that if PPP is attractive, it is because those responsible for polluting are also benefitting
or have benefitted from the polluting activities. This observation suggests that another,
more basic, distributive principle is at play. We turn to this principle next.
• THE BENEFICIARY PAYS PRINCIPLE

Another principle that has been proposed in the literature is the beneficiary pays
principle (BPP). This is the principle that the larger the benefit one gains from global
warming activities, the larger one’s share of responsibility to mitigate the problem.
Thus, one’s burden of climate justice is proportionate to one’s gain from the causes
of climate change.
On one application of this principle, the parties that have historically benefitted most
cumulatively from emissions have the greatest responsibility to mitigate climate
change. But as a historical principle in this respect, BPP faces parallel problems with
PPP. Who are the historical beneficiaries? Should present actors pay if it was only
their ancestors who benefitted most? And what is the right measure of benefits? Is it
a country’s GDP? Is it that combined with other factors of human development like
a clean environment?
But BPP can also be conceived non-historically and in this way escape the above
historical questions. That is, whatever happened in the past, there are parties who
are continuing to benefit from the emissions activities of the past and it is the fact of
their status as current beneficiaries that they are asked to pay for. For example, one
might say that the past polluting activities in Britain gave its economy a significant
head start that continues to advantage present-day Britons. It is this fact of current
benefit (and not some reference to total historical benefits) that puts the weight
of responsibility on their society. So, unlike PPP, there is no issue here of unfairly
passing the burden of repair from the guilty party to the innocent; and there is no
issue here of unfairly pinning moral wrongdoing on an actor who simply lacked the
knowledge.
But, even so, the issue of measuring benefits remains. BPP will have to clarify what
it means for a country to benefit from emissions activities, and this question is less
straightforward than it might seem. For instance, is a country benefitting from such
activities if it gains economically but loses out in terms of breathable air and clean
environment for its citizens? Moreover, how direct must the benefits from emission
production be in order to count as a relevant benefit? Has a country like Switzerland
benefitted from emissions activities for the purpose of BPP if, let’s say for the sake of
discussion, its economic advantages are the result of managing the finances of people
who have polluted? And finally, what difference does it make, if any, if the benefits
acquired were not sought out or voluntarily accepted, but simply thrust upon an
agent? If the present generation benefits from the actions of their predecessors with-
out asking for them – indeed they can’t avoid the benefits – can it be fairly held to
account? These are ongoing debates that a successful defense of BPP must resolve.
There is also the question of what gives BPP its appeal. For some commentators,
the appeal of BPP is not the core idea that one who benefits must pay, but that one
who benefits from an injustice must pay. That it is the benefitting from an injustice
or some harmful arrangement that is normatively crucial. After all, we don’t ordinar-
ily begrudge people benefits fairly and squarely gained. What excites our sense of
injustice is when someone gains from an arrangement that is at the expense of others.
Thus unpacked, BPP is really a principle of what we owe to others as a matter of

justice. Justice can require that we don’t gain at the expense of others’ entitlements.
But justice can also require that we take steps to correct background injustices quite
independently of whether we are in fact benefitting from the arrangement or not.
We turn next to the principle that climate justice requires those who are most able
to pick up the lion’s share of the burden of emissions reduction.
• THE ABILITY TO PAY PRINCIPLE

Ultimately, both PPP and BPP are attempts to assign greater emissions burdens to
rich countries and a impose laxer restriction on developing economies for the sake of
economic development. These principles can try to do this because richer industrial-
ized countries have historically emitted more greenhouse gases (PPP), or they have
historically benefitted more (BPP). We have seen arguments for and against these
approaches above, and some of the philosophical questions that must be addressed
to resolve the issue (see Moellendorf 2014, pp. 163–173).
A third alternative assigns emissions burdens based on countries’ ability to take on
the economic opportunity costs of reducing emissions. This principle, known as the
ability to pay principle (ATP), directly targets richer countries without invoking past
fault or present benefits. The fact that richer countries have historically emitted
more CO2 and/or benefitted more from the emitting activities is, normatively speak-
ing, only coincidental. What matters from the point of view of fair distribution of the
burden of justice is the fact of an actor’s capacity or ability.
What underlying moral principle can justify placing greater responsibility on the
more able? One moral theory that could do this is utilitarianism (see Chapter 2). If
the ultimate moral objective is to maximize overall global utility or well-being, then
it is probable that this would require richer countries to reduce emissions substan-
tially while permitting poorer countries to emit more in order to take themselves out
of poverty.9
Another approach, that is non-consequentialist, takes it that justice requires pri-
oritizing the situation of the worst off. Recall John Rawls’s idea that a cooperative
social order ought to be arranged such that resulting economic and social inequalities
are to the best advantage of the worst-off class (see Chapter 3). On this approach,
then, better-positioned actors ought to take on the greater share of the responsibility
of global justice. The worst off are prioritized not because this is how overall good is
to be best achieved, but because this is something that can be mutually agreed on as
reasonable from behind a veil of ignorance.
As we saw, there is considerable debate whether the global order is a cooperative
order of the relevant kind that could ground this Rawlsian idea of prioritizing the
worst off. But if we take it that climate change requires international cooperation
(as expressed by the international framework), then this creates the cooperative
scheme under which the development and subsistence needs of poorer countries
will be given consideration.
Some commentators and world leaders supplement ATP with principles like PPP.
This is because the countries that are most able to contribute to climate change miti-
gation tend also to be those who have polluted the most historically, and so backing
up ATP with PPP provides additional impetus for assigning greater responsibility to
the most able actors. This is one possible way of interpreting the position illustrated
by the Indian Minister’s remarks in the Paris Conference. Rich countries have the
duty of justice to do more in response to climate change because they are better
positioned to; moreover, it is also rich countries that have, to a large extent, brought
on the problem in the first place. But, even so, the basic justifying principle for the
asymmetrical allocation of climatic responsibilities is the fact of the varying abilities
of countries to respond.
ATP is more broadly egalitarian than the equal per capita approach (EPC) in spite of
its asymmetrical character. This is because it differentiates countries’ responsibilities
of climate justice against their economic standing and capacity. Unlike EPC, it does
not narrowly focus on emissions reduction as if that were the end of justice per se.
In contrast, it adopts a wider view of what human development consists in, taking
into consideration environmental as well as economic factors. Accordingly, distribu-
tive justice has a broader currency (or equalisandum) and emissions rights are just
one part of it. Thus, equality might mean that a country at a lower level of economic
development should be entitled to a higher emissions cap.
In fact, even with respect to climate change justice alone, emissions reduction is
just one side of the responsibility of climate change. In addition to the burdens of
emissions reduction, which is part of the strategy of mitigation, there is also the
strategy of adaptation and its associated costs. Adaptation costs include the expense
of building sea walls and levees in low-lying island states as a result of rising sea levels
due to global warming, the costs of revising agricultural practices, and the costs of
confronting more pervasive tropical diseases. These costs of adaptation have to be
taken into consideration when we are working out the totality of a country’s climatic
responsibilities. Adaptation costs are among the burdens of climate change that are
common to all and that have to be shared fairly by all countries. For instance, a coun-
try that has to bear the brunt of climate change will incur immediate adaptive costs
that should be added to the opportunity costs of its climatic justice duties. Thus, all
things considered, a country’s emissions entitlements should be adjusted against the
price it is already paying in response to climate change.
ATP need not tussle with the difficult questions of historical injustice and how to
make actors pay for it, nor does it need to derive the asymmetrical allocation of bur-
dens from some story about how certain agents have benefitted more than others. It
cuts to the chase, so to speak, and directly targets the richer countries of the world.
But as noted above, it faces its own philosophical challenge of explaining why being
better off entails greater responsibility. It requires a substantive theory of justice or

morality that can explain and justify why the better off have stronger obligations
of justice than the less advantaged. The success of ATP in the end will turn on the
success of some of the arguments for global distributive justice discussed in earlier
chapters.
• OTHER CHALLENGES OF CLIMATE CHANGE JUSTICE

To end this chapter, it should be noted that climate change justice raises other
knotty philosophical problems of global justice besides that of the fair distribution
of emissions quotas. To mention just one, it also calls into play the problem of inter-
generational justice. Curbing global warming is ultimately a responsibility we owe
to future generations. But what exactly can people in the present owe to people in
future generations? How do we evaluate competing interests across generations? In
particular, how do we weigh the interests or needs of future people (say the need
for a sustainable environment) with the interests or needs of present individual
(say an interest in economic progress)? Economists have introduced the concept
of a “social discount rate” in an attempt to allow for some comparison of present
and future interests. The social discount rate is the rate at which future interests
or needs are discounted against present interests and needs. There is the question
then of the rate at which, if any, we should discount the interest of future agents.
The above discussion takes it for granted, reasonably, that whatever discount rate
we might settle on, the interests of future persons are not to be discounted entirely
(Moellendorf 2014, Chap. 4).
There is also another problem with respect to intergeneration justice, one which
connects with a much discussed problem in moral philosophy. The renowned moral
philosopher, Derek Parfit, has argued that if we had made different choices in the
past, then persons existing today would not have existed. Thus our polluting activi-
ties in the past do not wrong any actual persons today for if we hadn’t polluted, they
would not have come into existence. Accordingly, there is nothing we can do now –
continuing to emit greenhouse gases for example – that can count as a wrong against
some particular future person. If we make different choices and curb our emissions,
then individuals who would have otherwise come into existence will not exist. This
is the famous “non-identity” problem. Parfit’s point is not to disprove that we have
responsibility with respect to the future. His concern, rather, is the philosophical
question of how we should understand morality. Impersonal approaches to moral-
ity that hold that the right act is that which promotes a certain impersonal state of
affairs, such as maximizing happiness in the world, will not be touched by the non-
identity problem. But moral theories that understand the rightness or wrongness
of an action or a policy in terms of how it affects persons – what Parfit (1984) calls
the “person-affecting view of value” – will run into the non-identity problem. Thus,
those who defend rights-based approaches to global justice and climate change will
have to address this well-known problem in moral philosophy.
• SUMMARY
Climate change justice brings to center stage the tension between what we owe to
each other at present and what we in the present owe to future generations. It pits
the right of economic development against the duty to reduce emissions to miti-
gate climate change. The principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibility
reflects the view that the burdens of responding to climate change, while a common
responsibility of all countries, should be asymmetrically distributed among countries
given their different histories and background economic conditions. We examined
four principles by which to assign the duties of climatic justice. The first is equal
per capita emissions. But this principle seems insufficiently attentive to historical
facts and the needs of developing countries. The second principle is the polluter
pays principle. While this principle is clearly historical, it encounters certain philo-
sophical issues by transferring responsibility for past actions to the present. The
beneficiary pays principle faces similar problems. But even if seen as a principle con-
cerned only with the present (with present benefits), it seems to be using “benefits”
as a proxy for advantage or ability. We turned finally to the ability to pay principle
which pins the greater responsibility on countries that are most able to withstand
the costs of emissions reduction. While able countries may also be countries that
have polluted most historically and/or countries which have benefitted historically
and presently from polluting productive activities, this association is merely coinci-
dental. The relevant normative fact is that of ability. But the ability to pay principle
must in turn rest on some substantive theory of justice to explain why the allocation
of the duties of justice must prioritize the needs of the worst-off party. The aim of
this chapter, as with the others, is not that of resolving a very complicated debate.
Rather, its goal is to identify and clarify the main principles of emissions allocation
in the literature, and to note the additional questions and philosophical challenges
that each introduces.
• STUDY QUESTIONS
1 The principle of equal per capita emissions seems at first glance to be thoroughly
egalitarian. But some commentators believe that it unfairly disadvantages poor
countries. Do you agree?
2 Is the emission of CO2 and greenhouse gases during the Industrial Revolution
morally blameworthy? Is this relevant for how we are to assign climate justice
duties?
3 Can individuals living today be asked to make amends for the wrongdoings of the
previous generation?
4 How might early emissions of greenhouse gases continue to benefit some people?
5 Can one be asked to pay for benefits that one did not ask for?
6 Is it unfair to expect an agent to do more to bring about justice just because she is
more able?
• NOTES
1 See http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-noaa-analyses-reveal-record-shattering-
global-warm-temperatures-in-2015 [12 Sept. 2016].
2 See http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/climate/2015-paris-climate-
talks [12 Sept. 2016].
3 See http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/01/world/europe/obama-climate-conference-
cop21.html?_r=0 [12 Sept. 2016].
4 See http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC [12 Sept. 2016].
5 Given that China’s total output of CO2 emissions far outpaces that of the United States
(in second place), any climatically sustainable level of equal per capita emissions will
most likely hamper economic growth in countries like China and India.
6 See http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/01/world/europe/obama-climate-conference-
cop21.html [12 Sept. 2016].
7 For a collection of essays on the problem of reparations across a range of cases, see
Miller and Kumar (2007).
8 Arrhenius presented his paper “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air
upon the Temperature of the Ground” that year. See http://earthobservatory.
nasa.gov/Features/Arrhenius/ [12 Sept. 2016].
9 That this would be so depends in part on how the utilitarian measures the well-
being or interest of future persons. How much poor countries may emit in the
name of development will depend on the rate at which we discount the well-being
of future persons. I bracket this issue for the moment, but will return to it later.
• REFERENCES
Simon Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice, Responsibility and Global Climate Change”
(2005b).
Darrel Moellendorf, “Responsibility and Climate Change Policy” in The Moral
Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change (2014).
Darrel Moellendorf, “Climate Change Justice” (2015).
Henry Shue, “Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions” (1993).
• FURTHER READING
For a recent collection of advanced papers on climate change, see Jeremy Moss
(2015). The “Introduction” by Moss is an excellent critical survey of the debate sur-
rounding climate justice duties. A useful anthology of seminal papers can be seen
in Stephen Gardiner and Caney et al. (2010). For more on reparations for interna-
tional injustices, see Daniel Butt (2009) and Göran Collste (2015). For discussion on
the social discount rate for the future and climate change justice, see Simon Caney
(2009). For a commentary on the non-identity problem see Roberts (2015).
11
•
global democracy:
cosmopolitan versus
international
It is commonly observed that increasing globalization is accompanied by a global
democratic deficit, that is, “a lack of input and participation, and a correlate lack
of accountability, concerning decisions by intergovernmental and other transna-
tional organizations that increasingly affect people’s lives” (Gould 2004, p. 201).
In a response to this democratic deficit, some theorists have argued that we need to
disconnect democracy from its traditional state-centered locus, and to reconceive it
as a trans-state and cosmopolitan ideal. Others believe that democracy is inherently
a bounded ideal. Specifically, it is an ideal intrinsically confined to the state. In their
view, the response to the democratic deficit is not to dislocate democracy from its
traditional locus, as the cosmopolitan democrats would have it, but to strengthen the
existing state-centric sites and practices of democracy. In this chapter, we outline the
main contours of cosmopolitan democracy and one line of objection against it.
The debate between cosmopolitan democracy and its alternative reiterates a funda-
mental controversy within democratic theory. Democracy is rule by the people. But
what constitutes the people, or the demos? Which group of individuals is entitled to
democratically participate in decision-making? The debate on global democracy is, at
bottom, a debate about the plausibility and reality of a global demos.
• THE DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT AND COSMOPOLITAN

DEMOCRACY
Cosmopolitan democracy is proposed as a response to the problem of global demo-
cratic deficit. The state-centric account of democracy, cosmopolitan democrats point
out, is increasingly outmoded in an era of increasing globalization in which state
borders and membership are becoming less and less central with respect to where
decisions are made, on the one side, and, on the other, how and where they impact
global democracy • 135
people. Many domestic economic and social decisions and policies have global reach
and effect. For example, environmental regulations, or the lack thereof, affect not
just the country where these regulations are enacted or not enacted, but also affect
neighboring countries, if not the rest of the world. Even when decisions with pro-
found impact on persons are made by international institutions, such as the World
Bank or the International Monetary Fund, there is an absence of democratic input by
those individuals who will be most affected. As a major proponent of cosmopolitan
democracy, David Held, puts it, “the idea of a democratic order can no longer be
simply defended as an idea suitable to a particular closed political community or
state” (Held 2000, p. 19; also Held 2010).
Thus, Held and others like Daniele Archibugi et al. (2000) propose, as an alterna-
tive to the traditional state-centric view of democracy, the ideal of cosmopolitan
democracy. As transnational and governmental decisions and policies with global
consequences become more pervasive, the bounds of individual democratic engage-
ment cannot remain confined to their respective states. The idea that democracy is
essentially a state-based practice and concept has to be replaced by an unbounded
conception of democracy in order to face the new realities and challenges of a
globalized world order. Held thus recommends that
[a]gainst this background [of globalization], democracy must be thought of as

a “double-sided process” … [meaning] not just the deepening of democracy
within a national community, but also the extension of democratic processes
across territorial borders. Democracy for the new millennium must involve cos-
mopolitan citizens able to gain access to, and mediate between, and render
accountable, the social, economic and political processes and flows which cut
across and transform their traditional community boundaries.
2000, p. 30
Instead of continuing to regard democracy as primarily an ideal that must be anchored

in the idea of a nation, cosmopolitan democrats propose that democracy be seen as
primarily a transnational ideal that is directly applicable to individuals of the world
taken as a single social scheme.
Thus, basic to the idea of cosmopolitan democracy is that there ought to be overlap-
ping transnational institutions and associations in which individuals ought to have
a participatory or deliberative democratic role. People are not just democratic citi-
zens of their state, but they are also democratic members of the global community
through their membership and participation in various different associations and
activities within and without their own countries. Some cosmopolitans propose the
formation of a world parliament of a sort, in the form of democratically elected
People’s Assembly, a world assembly of individuals elected directly by individuals
independently of their nationalities, to complement the United Nations General
Assembly in which countries rather than individuals as such are represented
(Archibugi et al. 1998).
136 • global democracy
Although cosmopolitan democrats need not go all the way and seek to replace nation
states with a world state, they advocate the creation of overlapping transnational and
regional institutions that cut across national boundaries and in which individuals can
have a direct participatory democratic role. Individuals are not merely democratic
agents within their own countries, but are democratic agents in the world at large.
They are to be empowered to have a voice in global decision-making through their
participation in various transnational associations and institutions. In other words,
individuals will assume certain democratic citizenship functions at the global level that
are traditionally state-confined, such as electing representatives to world-governing
bodies. Held thus writes that “Democracy for the new millennium must involve cos-
mopolitan citizens able to gain access to, and mediate between, and render accountable,
the social, economic and political processes and flows which cut across and transform
their traditional community boundaries” (Held 2000, p. 30; my stress).
Undergirding the ideal of cosmopolitan democracy is the principle of democratic
membership called the “all affected principle”. This principle, in its basic form, says
that the relevant set of individuals who should have the right of democratic partici-
pation in the collective decision-making is anyone who would be affected by these
decisions. The advent of new technologies, increased mobility of goods and people,
the increasing influence of international institutions and the increasing impact of
international practices on persons’ lives, make it the case that individuals are increas-
ingly being affected by decisions made outside their own state. In the face of this
new global reality, the all affected principle thus entails the extension of individuals’
democratic rights beyond the confines of the state.
• COSMOPOLITAN CITIZENSHIP
The concept of cosmopolitan citizenship introduced by cosmopolitan democrats
needs some clarification. It could give the impression that what cosmopolitan demo-
crats are yearning for is a world democratic state in which persons are cosmopolitan
citizens in the legal-political sense, as subjects of a literal global government.
But, in fact, few cosmopolitan democrats call for an actual world state and an
accompanying literal world citizenship. Indeed, they are normally appreciative of
the standard concerns with regard to world government. For instance, Immanuel
Kant, his cosmopolitan credentials notwithstanding, is skeptical of a world state.1 He
argues in his essay “Perpetual Peace” that a literal world state will be hard to achieve
and, even if achievable, hard to maintain given the vast expanse of the globe and
the challenges of human diversity (Kant). Moreover, Kant notes that if, contrary to
expectations, such a state is realized, it is realizable and sustainable only through
some kind of global tyranny. In short, world statism is hard to realize and, even if
realizable, morally objectionable.
World statism has some gallant defenders.2 But this is an outlier position among cos-
mopolitan democrats. Few cosmopolitans actually defend a literal world state and a
world citizenship conceived as citizenship in the ordinary legal and political sense
and defined in terms of a common political relationship. Most of them, like Held,
refrain from affirming an actual world state. On the contrary, they quite explicitly
state that their understanding of cosmopolitan democracy does not entail a world
state as we ordinarily understand “state”. For Held, what cosmopolitan democracy
requires primarily are trans-national institutions and organizations that transcend and
cut across the boundaries of states. To put it simply, Held’s cosmopolitan democracy
is a call for more democratic world governance, not world government. Its attendant
notion of cosmopolitan citizenship, then, is not citizenship in the standard legal-
political sense, connoting membership in a political association and lawful subjection
to its coercive powers.
In general, when cosmopolitans, like Martha Nussbaum, make the case for world
citizenship, they are not arguing for the extension of our ordinary conception of
citizenship to a world polity as such. In Nussbaum’s case, she is urging that we strive
to “make all human beings part of our community of dialogue and concern, base our
political deliberations on interlocking commonality, and give the circle that defines
our humanity special attention and respect” (Nussbaum 1996, p. 9). Nussbaum’s
cosmopolitan citizenship is a moral aspiration rather than a legal-political one. The
“world citizenship” that cosmopolitans aspire to is a moral rather than a legal ideal.
Cosmopolitans are not bent on creating a world state as such, but want the creation
of a common moral world and the recognition of the membership of all humans in
this moral world. Cosmopolitans, in short, intend their call for world citizens to be
understood metaphorically, rather than literally.
• DEMOCRACY AS A STATE-CENTRIC IDEAL

Although the cosmopolitan democrat need not be advocating for world statism and
cosmopolitan citizenship in the legal-political sense, she nonetheless imagines the
possibility of democratic engagement among individuals outside the context of the
state. Some critics object to this unmooring of democracy and individual demo-
cratic responsibility from the locale of the state. According to this line of objection,
democracy is a necessarily state-bounded concept. Democratic engagement and
accountability are possible and realizable only among individuals of the same state.
Perhaps the most vivid version of this objection is what I will call, for conveni-
ence, the nationalist objection. This is the argument that democratic deliberation is
achievable only among members of a common political culture. Unlike the cosmo-
politan ideal, which defines the demos in terms of affectedness, the nationalist view
of democracy understands the demos in terms of political membership.
Will Kymlicka writes that “democratic politics is politics in the vernacular” (2001,
p. 213). Meaningful democratic deliberation is possible only among individuals who
share a common language, he argues. One reason for this is that ordinary people feel
“comfortable debating political issues in their own tongue”, and that, as a general rule,
only elites can acquire fluency in more than one language. So to require people to
deliberate in a language that is foreign to them is to defend a form of elitism at best,
and at worst their exclusion from deliberative politics – a violation of the democratic
ideal either way. As well, “political communication has a large ritualistic compo-
nent” that a mere technical competence in a language may not be sensitive to (ibid.,
p. 213). For example, Yael Tamir notes how the Israeli parliament, the Knesset,
follows after the “Great Knesset”, which was a central religious and political institu-
tion during the period of the Second Temple (Tamir 1995, p. 148). The Knesset’s
proceedings and procedures thus reflect a particular culture and background history
that a merely technical understanding of Hebrew may not suffice to render compre-
hensible and familiar. Thus, Kymlicka concludes that “the more political debate is
conducted in the vernacular, the more participatory it will be” (2001, p. 214).
In addition to the common language that shared nationality provides, another cru-
cial role nationality plays in servicing democratic politics is that it provides a sense
of solidarity and unity that is necessary for generating the requisite level of mutual
respect and trust among individuals. Democracy requires individuals to respect the
reasonable views of their fellow citizens, even if they are in deep disagreement with
each other, and conversely that they are to forward arguments and views that each
can reasonably expect others to endorse. It also requires a certain degree of trust so
that the losers in a given democratic process can be motivated to honor the result,
because they are confident that, should results be in their favor next time, their
opponents would likewise honor these results (Kymlicka 2001, p. 226; also D. Miller
1999, p. 90).
Fellow nationals are, of course, in general not as intimate with each other as, say,
friends or kin are. But fellow feelings, nationalists argue, need not be restricted only
to people who are closely related to one another. Conationals see themselves to be
part of a collective and common past and with a shared future, and even if they are
not actually acquainted with each other, “in the minds of each lives the image of
their communion” (Anderson 1993, p. 6). It is for this reason that Benedict Anderson
famously refers to the nation as “an imagined community,” meaning by this not that
the nation is a fictitious association that is unworthy of people’s allegiances, but
that it is a significant allegiance-generating association that is premised on a people’s
image or collective consciousness of its historic and communal distinctness.
Thus David Miller writes that democratic politics “are likely to function most effec-
tively when they embrace just a single national community” (1999, p. 90). This is
because the virtues of mutual trust and respect, moderation and self-restraint are
crucial for a functioning democratic political community; and common nationality
provides the “cement” for engendering and nurturing these virtues.
In sum, nationalist theorists point out that nationhood provides the solidarity and
common language necessary for democratic politics. Yet, they retort, “the cosmo-
politan governance proposed by Held is for the most part silent on” this crucial
point (Kymlicka 2001, p. 239). What would serve as the basis of solidarity and
common understanding at the global level among people of diverse nationalities?
If individuals are to be directly represented in global decision-making irrespective
of nationality, it is not clear if the linguistic diversity can be overcome, and if
the diversity in worldviews and affinities can properly support a democratic delib-
erative order that is based on mutual trust and respect across national lines. If we
actually do establish, say, a directly elected world parliament, how likely would it
be for, say, a Canadian to seriously consider voting for, and to do so in an informed
manner, an Indonesian candidate given the linguistic and cultural barriers between
them? Indeed, as some commentators point out, the European experience has
shown this to be quite unlikely. In spite of the success of the European Union
(EU) in bringing together democratic nations under a single formal/legal organiza-
tion, the creation of a unified European demos remains elusive (p. 211). Indeed,
the diversity of national identification remains in spite of economic and monetary
integration at the level of Europe.
There is also the problem of fostering and securing a global civil society that can
underpin a functioning democracy of individuals in the global arena. Democrats
take as one important precondition for a flourishing democracy the presence of
a flourishing civil society. Yet it is not clear how a global civil society could be
engendered, according to the nationalist democrats. Richard Falk holds out hope,
cautiously, that a global civil society may emerge as a result of globalization, in
that “as the global village becomes more an experienced, daily reality” (Falk 2000,
p. 176), individuals can come to see themselves as members of a shared commu-
nity of fate. This optimism presupposes that the sense of solidarity and common
sympathies and fellow-feelings that are the preconditions of civil society can be
engendered globally because of people’s common experiences and realities as a
result of increased globalization. Yet shared experience and reality alone may not be
sufficient. A prior sense of identity may be necessary before individuals can come to
appreciate and perceive certain experiences and realities as shared. Why, for exam-
ple, would Americans attempt to understand the effects of globalization and to
share in their worldview? The felt impact of free trade and economic liberalization
for Americans and the Chinese workers are quite different; unless there is first a
prior sense of affinity and mutual feeling between the two peoples, experiences
need not be seen as shared and held in common.
One might propose that shared values and causes could provide the glue to bind
individuals from different nations together, thus creating the global civil society
needed to ground cosmopolitan democracy. Held points to the “new voices” moti-
vated by shared principles in events such as the Rio Conference and the Beijing
Conference on Women’s Rights as hopeful signs of strengthening global ties and
the founding of a global civil society. While Held acknowledges that these attempts
to create “new forms of public life and new ways of debating regional and global
issues” are still very nascent, and so it is too early to say whether these attempts to
foster a global civil society will eventually succeed, he nonetheless thinks that “they
point in the direction” of such possibilities (2000, p. 29).
On the other hand, nationalists hesitate to take transnational activism motivated by
shared goals and interests as evidence of emerging transnational democratic delib-
eration. The former kind of coalition is unraveled once goals and interests diverge;
democratic associations, on the other hand, ought to be able to withstand such value
disagreements. Indeed, democratic associations presuppose divergent goals among
their members, and hence the need for democratic deliberation to fairly and rea-
sonably adjudicate divergent claims. The ties that bind a democratic order together
cannot be secured by shared interests or principles for these are not robust and per-
manent enough to generate the kinds of shared sympathies, and mutual respect and
trust, necessary for actual deliberative democracy (Kymlicka 2001, p. 325).
The nationalists do not deny that there is a global democratic deficit that needs fix-
ing. They do not oppose the idea of greater global democracy as such. What they
are skeptical of is that global democracy can be achieved through the direct demo-
cratic participation of individuals dislocated from local and national communities.
Instead of supplanting and diluting national and local democratic relations, nation-
alists would call for the strengthening of the traditional sites of democracy at the
local and national levels, and better international democratic institutions wherein
representatives of democracies can engage in democratic decision-making with other
national representatives. In short, global democracy is to be achieved by improving
democratic relations between individuals at the national level and improving demo-
cratic relations between national communities at the global level. Global democracy
will take the form then literally of an international democracy instead of a cosmo-
politan democracy.
Indeed, the nationalist democrats would argue that it is better to address the global
democratic deficit not by weakening or transplanting local (state-centered) demo-
cratic ties but by in fact strengthening and improving these local democratic relations.
As Amy Gutmann writes, “Democratic citizens have institutional means at their dis-
posal that solitary individuals, or citizens of the world only, do not” (1996, p. 71).
They are in a real position to pressure their representative to address the defects in
global policy making and to represent their interests in this way without the need for
their actual participation in global forums.
This last point highlights the strategic role of nationalizing democracy for the end
of global democracy. Unlike the cosmopolitan democratic approach, which will call
for the creation of new forms of governance, the nationalist approach calls on demo-
crats to improve on existing global institutions and structures and, importantly, to
strengthen democratic national governments.
Defenders of cosmopolitan democracy have, of course, challenged the claims of the
nationalists. They argue that, contra the nationalist thesis, deliberative democratic
associations larger than the nation, and that cut across national and other boundaries,
can be formed, fostered and sustained, the lack of shared nationality and language
notwithstanding (e.g., Weinstock 2001). Indeed, they may point out that nationalists
are guilty of a certain double standard by holding cosmopolitans to a higher standard
of deliberative ideal than is expected of deliberative democrats in the national con-
text. After all, the ideal of deliberation within multicultural countries faces the same
issues of linguistic and cultural diversity that nationalists say cosmopolitans must
surmount; also deliberative democracy in modern nation states, which are certainly
not intimate associations, does not require direct individual involvement in all mat-
ters, but that individuals may be represented indirectly at different levels through
different constituencies and other sub-national associations. So cosmopolitans are
not alone in being guilty of assuming a higher degree of direct individual involvement
than is realistically possible, they would note.
Perhaps the most challenging of the nationalist objections against the cosmopolitan
concerns the basis of solidarity and affinity for democratic politics. Yet, as some cos-
mopolitans have countered, it is important not to underestimate the malleability of
people’s sense of solidarity and fellow-feeling with others. Indeed, if nationalism is
properly seen as a morally expansionist project, that is, a project that seeks to compel
people to overcome their parochial ties of kinship and tribalism in order to include
strangers (i.e., their conationals) within their arc of moral concern, rather than as a
morally limiting project, then there is no immediate reason to think that this expan-
sion of human moral motivation cannot be developed beyond the bounds of the
nation. Carol Gould (2014) has argued for the formation of global solidarity that is
necessary for interactive global democracy.
• SUMMARY
Both sides to the debate agree that there is a global democratic deficit. The cosmo-
politan democrat’s solution is to reconceive democracy and disengage it from its
traditional locus, which is the state. By liberating democracy from the state, we can
then democratically empower citizens globally. The nationalist holds that democracy
is inherently state-bound. In particular, if what we care about is meaningful delib-
erative democracy, it is not possible to realize democratic ends without situating the
practice of democracy among individuals connected by some nationalist solidarity.
The response to the global deficit is to improve democratic politics at home in the
state and to provide better deliberative democratic forums for representatives of
democratic states to negotiate with one another. Here the solution to global demo-
cratic deficit is not cosmopolitan democracy but improved international democracy.
The problem of global democracy highlights a basic problem in democratic theory.
Democracy is self-rule among a set of individuals. But what is this relevant set?
How do we determine the demos? One principle is the principle of all affected.
On this principle, anyone who would be affected by the decisions of the collective
is a member of the demos. As we saw, this commitment typifies the cosmopolitan
democratic ideal. An alternative principle takes the demos to be defined by some
criteria of social membership. On the nationalist view, membership in a demos is
not determined by the all affected principle but by the fact of shared nationality.
The dispute between cosmopolitan democracy and its main critics will engage and
further unpack this more basic dispute.
• STUDY QUESTIONS
1 Why do some commentators think that there is a global democratic deficit? What
are some examples of this deficit?
2 Does the idea of cosmopolitan citizenship require a fundamental reconceptualiza-
tion of what citizenship means?
3 What is the difference between democratic global government and global
governance?
4 Is democratic deliberation necessarily a state-centric ideal, such that there can be
no meaningful democratic deliberation among individuals across borders outside
the confines of the state?
5 Why do some nationalists believe that shared nationality provides the social ties
that are necessary for democratic relations? Have they exaggerated the signifi-
cance of shared nationality?
6 What are the prospects for the world as a whole to constitute a single demos?
7 If there is no possibility of a global demos as such, how can we address the global
democratic deficit?
• NOTES
1 See Pauline Kleingeld (2016) for a critical overview of Kant’s cosmopolitanism.
2 See, e.g., Goodin (1988) who argues that the rudiments of world government are
already present, and thus the fear and skepticism of world government as a wholly
novel idea is unwarranted.
• REFERENCES
Carol Gould, “The Global Democratic Deficit and Economic Human Rights” in
Gould (2004).
David Held, “From City-States to a Cosmopolitan Order” (1992).
Kymlicka “Citizenship in an Era of Globalization: Commentary on Held” in Kymlicka
(2001).
David Miller, “Bounded Citizenship” (1999).
• FURTHER READING
For an overview of the philosophical problems of democracy, see Robert Talisse,
“Democracy” in his Engaging Political Philosophy (2015). For a collection of essays on
global democracy, including discussions on its different forms, see Barry Holden’s
edited volume (2000). See Carol Gould’s Interactive Democracy (2014) for a discussion
on the prospect of global solidarity and global democracy.
12
•
conclusion
Karl Marx famously grumbled that “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the
world in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx 1888). But to change the world,
and Marx will not disagree, we must first interpret it correctly, that is, we must come
to have a right understanding of the problems we want to solve. This is what global
justice as a problems-based inquiry seeks to do.
We gain a greater understanding of a problem of justice when we are able to identify
the form of a solution to that problem. But clarification of a problem does not mean
that we must see an answer or solution to it. We also acquire insight when we come
to have a better understanding of the nature of a problem, and the values and issues
at stake and the trade-offs involved in responding in one way as opposed to another.
We achieve clarity when we realize that a problem is more complicated than at first
meets the eye. The aim of a philosophical inquiry is more often that of illuminating
and identifying the right questions and less that of providing the answer to a question.
Although we adopted a problem-by-problem approach in this book, it should not
be concluded that we are renouncing aspirations to a theory of global justice. In
my view, the aim of a problems-based approach to global justice is still ultimately
the construction or identification of a theory of global justice with which to better
understand and change the world.
One might wonder what purpose a theory of global justice would serve if we can
address the problems of global justice one by one, as we have done in this book.
There are at least three reasons why a theory of global justice should matter to us.
First, a theory of global justice can coherently and systematically organize our judg-
ments on a range of different issues of global justice. Are our substantive positions
on, say, world poverty, human rights and military intervention consistent with each
other? When our various moral judgments can be subsumed coherently within one
theory, we gain greater confidence in our positions. Just as we construct or identity
scientific theories in order to better understand, organize and explain our different
observations, so a theory of justice allows us to organize and justify our various
judgments about matters of justice coherently and systematically.
Second, with a theory of justice in hand, we acquire principles for guiding us in dif-
ficult cases, cases where our intuitions or initial judgments are unclear or pull us
conclusion • 145
in different directions. We know that racism is wrong. But what about race-based
affirmative action? This is a harder question whose proper understanding will require
some background theory of justice. Or, to consider an example from global justice,
how should we fairly distribute the burden of climate change mitigation? The world’s
opinion on this is a mixed one. As we saw, a background theory of global justice can
give us some purchase on this and similar hard questions.
The third reason concerns specifically the notion of an ideal justice that some theo-
ries aspire to. A theory of ideal global justice offers a vision of what an ideally just
world would look like. This picture of an ideal world is not without use. It can pro-
vide us with a target to aim at, and it provides a measure of how well or badly we are
doing with respect to achieving justice. Moreover, a theory of ideal justice can alert
us to potential moral blind spots. To invoke another parallel from science, just as a
scientific theory derived or constructed from a series of observations can then have
predictive powers with respect to future observations, so an ideal theory of justice
constructed or derived from a series of moral judgments can go on to direct us to
new cases of justice.
So global justice, as a philosophical subject, can strive for a theory of global justice.
But the ultimate proof of any theory of justice is in its elucidation of the real world
problems we confront and its ability to point the way to new problems. A problems-
based approach to theory construction will begin with, and keep firmly in sight, the
problems of the real world. Thus, although this is just the first step in the quest for
something more systematic, I hope our study is able to affirm why global justice
matters and how it can provide us with the method and tools for dealing with the
problems of humanity.
•
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•
index
Archibugi, D. 135 equality 21–2; versus egalitarianism 22; see also
Asian Values see human rights egalitarianism; equality of what
equality of what 22, 29ff
Beitz, C. 26, 28, 34, 65–6, 71
Bell, D.A. 85 Falk, R. 139
Bentham, J. 8, 20 n, 63 famine 8–9; see also world poverty
Blake, M. 37–8, 109, 119 Feinberg, J. 17
Brock, G. 31, 34, 55, 58, 71, 119 Freeman, S. 34, 39
Buchanan, A. 111, 119
Butt, D. 126, 133 gender: and culture 82–3; equality 81–2; and
women’s rights 79–81; see also human rights
Caney, S. 26, 34, 123, 133 global egalitarianism 21ff; associative
capabilities 29ff arguments for 27ff; coercion argument
Carens, J. 106, 119 against 37ff, 39–40; cooperation argument
climate change: anthropogenic 120; basic facts against 38–39, 40–1; versus humanitarian
120–21; and future generations 131; see also assistance 21, 35; indirect arguments for
climate change justice 42–4; moral arguments for 25ff; national
climate change justice: ability to pay principle partiality 52 ff; self-determination 41–2; see
129–31; beneficiary pays principle 127–9; also egalitarianism
and economic development 120, 121–2, global democracy 134ff; and cosmopolitanism
123; equal emission rights 122–4; past 134–6; and democratic deficit 134–5; as
wrongs, problem of 125–7; polluter pays international democracy 140; and the nation-
principle 124–7; social discount rate 131; state 137–41; versus world state 136–7
subsistence versus luxury emissions 121–2 global justice: as a distinct subject 3–4; as a
consequentialism 7, 8; see also utilitarianism normative inquiry 2–3; problems of 1, 4, 5;
cosmopolitanism 56–7, 76; and citizenship theory of, purpose of 144–5; why it matters
136–6; see also global democracy 4–5
culture 61, 72–3, 106–07, 111, 112, Godwin, W. 52–3
113, 116; see also human rights; liberal Goodin, R. 53, 58, 142 n
multiculturalism Gould, C. 134, 141, 142
Griffin, J. 62, 71
democracy 134, 137–41; see also global Grotius, H. 62
democracy Guerrero, A. 127
deontology 8, 11; see also kantian ethics Gutmann, A. 140
Dewey, J. 1
duty: negative versus positive 12, 13, 14–17; Habermas, J. 49, 58
see also imperfect and perfect duties Held, D. 135, 136, 137, 138, 139–40, 142
Hobbes, T. 16, 18–19
egalitarianism 21–2, 34–6; as an associative human rights 60ff, 72ff; and Asian Values
duty 23, 27–8; as a moral duty 23, 25–6; 72–3, 77–8; consensus approach 63–4; and
and political fairness 43; and poverty 21, culture 61, 63–4, 72–3, 76–9; historicist
42–3; and reciprocity 44; and stigmatization approach 64–6; and intervention 69–70;
43; see also luck egalitarianism and liberal rights 67–70; moral rights
154 • index
approach 61–3; and state sovereignty 73–6; Parfit, D. 131

universality of 60–1; women’s rights 79–83 Pattison, J. 101, 104
Pogge, T. 14ff, 20, 34
Ignatieff, M. 49 poverty: and economic equality 21, 42–3; see
immigration 105–9; and open borders 105–6; also world poverty
and restrictions 106–8
imperfect and perfect duties 17, 102 Rawls, J. 23–5, 26, 27, 28, 34, 41–4, 55, 65,
intervention 69–70, 96–102; duty of 99–102; 67–70, 71, 81–2, 87, 129
permissibility of 97–9; Responsibility to Reidy, D. 46, 71
Protect doctrine 100 reparations, problems of 124–6
Risse, M. 46
Jagger, A. 20 n, 85 rights 11–14; basic rights 13–14; manifesto
just war 86ff; justice after war (jus post bellum) right 17; positive versus negative
93–4; justice in war (jus in bello) 91–3; 12, 13; to subsistence 13–14; see also
justice of war (jus ad bellum) 87–91; human rights
moral equality of combatants 94–6; Rodin, D. 94
non-combatant immunity 91, 92–3; Rousseau, J.J. 18–19
terrorism 92, 93; see also intervention
justice and ethics 5 Sangiovanni, A. 39, 46
secession 109–13; as a primary right 110–12;
Kant I. 20 n, 102, 104 n, 115, 136 as a remedial right 112–13
kantian ethics 12, 17, 62, 63 Sen, A. 29, 30–31, 34, 85
Kleingeld, P. 142 n Shue, H. 13ff, 20, 121–2, 133
Kymlicka, W. 49–50, 51, 58, 81–2, 107, Simmons, A.J. 119
137–8, 139, 140, 142 Singer, P. 8–11, 20
Smith, R. 49
liberal multiculturalism 79, 82–3 social contract 15–16, 18–19
libertarianism 12, 14, 16 state of nature 16, 18–19
Luban, D. 85, 98, 104 state sovereignty 72–3; instrumental reasons
luck egalitarianism 25–7, 36–7 for 74; non-instrumental reasons for 74–6;
Locke, J. 18–19, 62, 114–15 see also human rights
Stilz, A. 119
MacIntyre, A. 51, 58 sufficientarianism 31
McMahan, J. 95, 104 Sypnowich, C. 34
Marx, K. 144
Mill, J.S. 8, 20 n Tamir, Y. 49, 138
Miller, D. 49, 54–5, 58, 107, 126, 138, 142 Taylor, C. 71, 81
Miller, R. 37 territorial right 113–17; as a conventional right
Moellendorf, D. 28, 34, 94, 120–21, 123, 115–16; as a functional right 116–17; as a
129, 133 cultural and historical right 116; as a natural
Moore, M. 119 right 114–15
Nagel, T. 38, 40 utilitarianism 8–11, 52–3

Nardin, T. 104
nationalism 47ff; civic versus ethnic Walzer, M. 75, 85, 86, 88, 96, 98, 104,
49–50; and cosmopolitanism 56–7; and 107, 119
global egalitarianism 41–2, 52–6; liberal Weinstock, D. 141
nationalism 48–50; national partiality 52–6; Wellman, C. 108, 119
and patriotism 47, 52–5; value of 50–2 world poverty 1, 4–5, 7ff; deontological
normative versus empirical claims 2–3 approach 11ff; duty-based approach 17–18;
Nussbaum, M. 30–1, 34, 62, 85, 137 and global egalitarianism 21, 42–3; and
negative duty 14–17; rights-based approach
O’Neill, O. 17–18, 20 11–12, 13–14; utilitarian approach 8–11; see
Okin, S.M. 80, 82, 85 also poverty

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Kok-Chor Tan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He

What Is This Thing Called Knowledge? third edition

What Is This Thing Called Philosophy of Language?

What Is This Thing called Metaphysics? second edition

What Is This Thing Called Ethics?

ISBN13: 978-1-138-83196-4 (hbk)

Typeset in Berling LT Standard

3 Global economic equality 21

4 Against global egalitarianism 35

5 Nationalism and patriotic sentiments 47

6 The universality of human rights 60

7 Human rights: state sovereignty, culture and gender 72

8 Just wars and humanitarian intervention 86

9 Borders: immigration, secession and territory 105

10 Climate change justice: sharing the burden 120

11 Global democracy: cosmopolitan versus international 134

I am grateful to the students in my undergraduate global justice seminars for their

• WHAT IS GLOBAL JUSTICE AND WHY IT MATTERS

Global justice as a normative inquiry

The distinctiveness of global justice

Why global justice matters

Justice and ethics

Approach and organization

appreciate how philosophical theories can make a difference to how we understand

Singer’s utilitarian approach

• RIGHTS-BASED DEONTOLOGICAL APPROACHES

Shue and subsistence as a basic right

Duty to alleviate poverty as compensation for harms

No sooner was the proposal [that would be favorable to poor countries]

• HOW TO ARGUE FOR GLOBAL EGALITARIANISM

illustrate, imagine that we have before us a range of different feasible socio-economic

• MORAL ARGUMENTS FOR GLOBAL EGALITARIANISM

• ASSOCIATIVE ARGUMENTS FOR GLOBAL

goods or their life prospects be addressed. According to associativists, this additional

• EQUALITY OF WHAT? RESOURCES VERSUS

Resource egalitarianism avoids these pitfalls. The aim of an egalitarian distribution is

Indeed, in political philosophy in general, most capability theorists subscribe to the

John Rawls (excerpts), A Theory of Justice (1971).

Gillian Brock, “A Cosmopolitan Model of Global Justice”, in Global Justice:

• AGAINST EGALITARIANISM AS A MORAL IDEAL

• AGAINST GLOBALIZING ASSOCIATIVE ARGUMENTS

The coercion argument

The social cooperation argument

• ASSESSING THE ARGUMENTS

these triggering conditions, contra views such as luck egalitarianism. As mentioned,

• INDIRECT ARGUMENTS FOR EGALITARIANISM:

• THE PROBLEM OF NATIONALISM: A LIBERAL

One of the liberal nationalists’ rationales for identifying a permissible form of

The reasonable concern of skeptics of liberal nationalism is that, as mentioned,

• PATRIOTISM AND PARTIALITY

• COSMOPOLITANISM AND NATIONALISM

Jurgen Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity” (1992).

Gillian Brock, “What Do We Owe Conationals and Non-nationals?”, in Global

• THE GROUNDS OF THE UNIVERSALITY OF HUMAN

The moral approach

The common core approach

The historicist approach

has to be limited by an established international standard – “a common standard of

approach avoids philosophical controversy of this sort by treating human rights as

• SHOULD HUMAN RIGHTS INCLUDE LIBERAL

Rawls: human rights and toleration

justice for international society – the scope of reasonableness may be appropriately