Global justice: A democratic perspective

Abstract

Global justice refers to world politics and worldwide actions, relations, practices and institutions. Are they just? This question presupposes that we know the meaning of justice. Although the abstract concept of justice is universal, its substance and direction are not. Like almost all ethical concepts, the notion of justice is constructed metaphorically. The core meaning of justice is that similar cases should be treated in the same way, and given what they truly deserve. However, there are a large number of basic models of justice. Various theories and ideologies of justice articulate a carefully organized story of justice comprising a selected set of (largely) mutually consistent models. A particular conception of justice already constitutes many transnational practices, including practices of international law and global governance. In this dominant conception, free markets are best for justice. If markets are sufficiently competitive, justice will prevail in the sense of a scalar distribution model—the more you contribute, the more you get. I conclude by making two substantial points. First, there seem to be good reasons to stress the (generally greater) plausibility of alternative conceptions of global justice. Second, and perhaps even more importantly, is the recognition of the relativist nature of struggles between models and sentiments of justice, giving rise to a quest to democratize systems of global governance. Given how prone justice has been to absolutist and also violent interpretations, it seems that the real ethical and practical-political problem is how to effect necessary and desirable institutional changes by means of peaceful change.

Notes

1. It is commonplace to make the distinction between retributive and distributive justice, and then distinguish both from the theory of just war (or humanitarian intervention). It is also possible to talk about civil and political justice. The main focus of this study is on global distributive justice, and, to a much lesser extent, a related theory of just war.

2. The original thesis on conceptual metaphor was expressed in a book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson entitled, Metaphors We Live By, in 1980. Twenty years of further research has led to a number of ground-breaking works on the underpinnings of this theory, and its critical relation to Western philosophy, to further elaborate a position of ‘embodied realism’ (see in particular Lakoff and Johnson, 1999), as well as its applications to poetry (Lakoff and Turner, 1989), mathematics (Lakoff and Núñez, 2000), morality (Johnson, 1993) and politics (Lakoff, 2002). However, as it has emerged in linguistics, the main evidence of the theory remains largely linguistic rather than geo-historical, anthropological or social scientific. This kind of cognitive science tends to lack systematic accounts of agency, social structures and history. Thus, complementary and, in some regards, corrective theories are also needed (cf. Nellhaus, 2004).

3. My main source is the Finnish translation (Platon, 1981, passage on p. 24). I have taken the English translation from Perseus, an evolving digital library for the humanities that engineers various interactions through time, space, and language. In Perseus, one can also find the original Greek text of Plato's Republic among many other ancient classics (see http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cache/perscoll_Greco-Roman.html).

4. The main difference is that while Thrasymachus maintained that it is better to be on the side of the strong and successful, Marx and Engels wanted to cultivate ‘ideas that revolutionize society’.

5. My main source is the Finnish translation (Marx and Engels, 1978, passage on p. 355). I have taken the English translation from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm (trans. by S. Moore in cooperation with F. Engels, 1888).

6. Caney, 2005, p. 4, provides a brief summary. For a systematic account of various Greco-Roman and modern European theories, see Linklater, 1982. For a post-structuralist analysis and critique, see Walker 1993. For a transcultural corrective of the inherent Western bias of these discussions, see Dallmayr, 1999.

7. This is a part of what Marx meant by his term ‘species-being’ in his Economic Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; however, the idea is in no way confined to Marxist theories. For a similar—and much more fully specified—non-Marxist account of human powers and liabilities, see Harré & Secord (1972).

8. The first wave of European imperialism in the sixteenth century was legitimized in terms of assumptions about God, Christianity and hierarchy of higher and lower beings, grounded on the metaphor of Great Chain of Being. The basic concept of hierarchical order of cultures and human-like beings lived through centuries in various forms, for instance, in the ideas of ‘civilizing mission’, and ‘white man's burden’. Lockean universalism has been just one aspect of complex geo-historical realities.

9. This list, from Lakoff and Johnson (1999, p. 297), is not entirely unique. In some regards similar even if shorter and perhaps less systematic lists have been developed for instance by C. Perelman (1963) and Nicholas Rescher (1966). In addition to the equality of distribution model, Perelman (1963, pp. 6–11) lists two alternative versions of the scalar distribution model (contribution defined either in terms of merits or works), as well as rights-based fairness, need-based fairness and the principle ‘to each according to his rank’. Rescher (1966, pp. 73–81) further distinguishes, for example, between efforts or sacrifice, and actual productive contribution, and he also adds the common good of humankind as a possible contribution. For a discussion and assessment, see (Heller, 1987, pp. 24–34).

10. The point of Kenneth Arrow and Frank H. Hahn's General Competitive Analysis (1971) seems to be to show, with mathematical certainty and precision, that the basic conclusion of Walras and other neo-classicists is valid: (i) competitive markets can yield an efficient Pareto-optimal equilibrium and (ii) prices of factors can equal marginal productivity. This is more a theory of justice than of economic efficiency in any meaningful, realistic or empirical sense. It is interesting to note how Arrow and Hahn justify their analysis. For instance, ‘at the moment the main justification for the chapter is that there are results to report on the tâtonnement [tentative proceedings] while there are no results to report on what most economists would agree to be more realistic constructions’ (ibid., p. 322). By a ‘result’ they mean a mathematical possibility that a market system can solve a system of equilibrium prices. As they explain in the preface, ‘there is by now a long and fairly imposing line of economists from Adam Smith to the present who have sought to show that a decentralized economy motivated by self-interest and guided by price signals would be compatible with a coherent disposition of economic resources that could be regarded, in a well-defined sense, as superior to a large class of possible alternative dispositions’ (ibid., pp. vi–vii). Hence, the aim is to do ethico-political theory with mathematical certainty. However, this forces neoclassical economists to confine their analysis to imagined, abstract ‘economies’ that may, at best, be (or merely appear to be) isomorphic, in a few limited regards, with the real, geo-historical capitalist market economies or, perhaps more accurately, the world economy.

11. Of course, the majority of late twentieth century economists have maintained that economics is a ‘positive science’ (Friedman, 1953). It does not have anything to do with values such as justice. Values are entirely subjective. Economics is claimed to be a science of technical means–ends efficiency only, with concepts such as equilibrium and Pareto-optimality providing neutral tools for scientific analysis. I discuss, and also deconstruct, this line of defence in Patomäki (forthcoming). I try to show in detail that neo-classical economics constitutes a theory of justice, independently of whether its proponents acknowledge this in their theoretical writings or not (as far as praxis is concerned, the normative role of the theory is obvious).

12. My main source is the Finnish translation (Marx, 1979 [1875], this passage from p. 539). I have taken the English translation from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm.

13. Popular articulations of this belief include Ohmae (1990). A similar necessitarian picture of the new world of ‘network society’ has been canvassed, although in a much more sociological and nuanced fashion, by Manuel Castells; see Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998.

14. By ‘surrounding texts’ I mean relevant ethico-political texts produced by those actors that are positioned in such a way as to be able to set the agenda and shape decisions of the systems of global governance. Empirical study of these texts is beyond the scope of this study. No systematic analysis of UN or NATO documents is possible here; a few remarks will have to suffice (however, if you can read Finnish, see Patomäki, 2003a).

15. As in the nineteenth century, this vision degenerates easily into a Darwinist doctrine, according to which the good of the world as a whole was still identical with the good of its individual members, ‘but only those individuals who [are] effective competitors in the struggle for life’ (ibid., p. 48). This is what the late twentieth and early twenty-first century redefinition of states as ‘competitive states’ amounts to.

16. We can also imagine a world in which the basic metaphor would change, or the notion of justice would become meaningless. Just as justice emerged in human geo-history, it may also become absent one day.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heikki Patomäki

Heikki Patomäki is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Helsinki and also the Research Director of NIGD, the Network Institute for Global Democratisation. His most recent books in English are Democratising Globalisation: The Leverage of the Tobin Tax (2001); After International Relations: Critical Realism and the (Re)Construction of World Politics (2002); and, with Teivo Teivainen, A Possible World: Democratic Transformation of Global Institutions (2004). Currently he is working on book for Routledge entitled World Economic Decay: Future Crises and Changes of Global Governance.