GLOBAL DISTRIBUTIVE

JUSTICE:WHAT AND WHY?

“Americans spend $8 billion a year on cosmetics—$2 billion more than the estimated annual total needed to provide basic education for everyone in the world. Europeans spend $11 billion a year on ice cream—$2 billion more than the estimated annual total needed to provide clean water and safe sewers for the world’s population. Americans and Europeans spend $17 billion a year on pet food—$4 billion more than the estimated annual additional total needed to provide basic health and nutrition for everyone in the world. It is estimated that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all and clean water and safe sewers for all is roughly $40 billion a year—or less than 4 percent of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world.

IDEA OF GLOBAL DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

Distribution of benefits and burdens of our lives that we share between us. Some talks about individual society and other’s for the entire world.

Not limited to economic issues only. Because it might exclude some ‘goods’ which are important to us but which are not considered to be part of economic life (e.g. education or health care.)

Two faces of distributive justice:1. Account of entitlement or rights.2. Account of our duties.

GDS is defined as any theory which suggests that there are some entitlements of justice which have global scope and which also suggests that there are some duties of justice which have global scope.

IDEA OF GLOBAL DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

An account of GDJ need not tell us that all valid principles of justice are global in scope. But it will tell us that at least some valid principles have global scope. It will seek to regulate the distribution of at least some benefits or burdens at a global level.

Global justice will tell us that individuals will have some entitlements- say, to clean drinking water or basic education- as a matter of justice. It will also tell us that people the world over have duties of GDJ.

There are certain things we are obliged to do, or not to do, and these duties are sufficiently weighty that it makes sense to say that we are behaving unjustly if we do not measure up.

DUTIES OF JUSTICE &DUTIES OF HUMANITARINISM.

1. Who has the duty?2. What type of duty?

Who has the duty?

Example: Obligation to tackle global poverty.• Two Answers:

1. Individual answer: it is separate people- individuals- who have a duty to address global poverty, perhaps by giving money to organizations, helping people in developing countries or by refusing to buy goods from authoritarian regimes which keep their citizens in poverty, or else by lobbying governments to improve their policy on the alleviation of global poverty,

2. Collective answer: collectives of people, organizations, have duties in question. We might believe that only nation states have the resources and the capacity to address global poverty, that it is indeed the job of nation states. We can also specify that MNCs have a duty to contribute towards achieving the goals of global justice.

What type of duty?Two alternatives:

1. Humanitarian principle.2. Duty of distributive justice.

Difference: 1. Duties of humanitarianism are somehow superficial , whereas

duties of justice are more fundamental and tackle the ‘root’ of global problems.

Kok-Chor Tan says that humanitarian approach tell us that we should re-distribute resources to tackle poverty abroad but fail to adequately address the ‘root of the problem’.Thomos Pogge argued that characterising our duties to the world’s poor as duties of humanitarian ‘assistance’ diverts our attention from the various ways in which we actually contribute to their poverty

What type of duty?• Duty of distributive justice are more stringent than

humanitarian ones. And they are enforceable..• A stringent duty is one which is firm and difficult to avoid. The

stringency of a duty corresponds to the importance of fulfilling. So to say that a duty is stringent is not the same thing as saying that it is demanding or expensive to perform. E.g. To contribute $5 per week to the cause of eradicating poverty and lending $20 to a friend.

• Stringent duties of global distributive justice important and weighty, and that they ought not to be ignored simply because there are other things on which we would rather spend our money.

• Unlike humanitarian duties, duties of justice are morally enforceable i.e. a duty that would potentially be justified for someone to compel you to perform. E.g. Charity v. Tax.

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE DUTIS OF JUSTICE• Positive duty is a duty to do something for another, whereas

negative duty requires us not to do something that that is bad (John Rawls)

• Positive duty involves an obligation to deliver some material good for someone else- to providing food for the starving or to give money to others in the form of international development aid.

• Negative duty is a duty not to do something to someone. E.g. duty not to infringe the autonomy of other communities, to harm their basic interests by polluting them or to exploit or oppress them.

• Thomos Pogge’s says that we have a negative duty of justice not to impose an unjust institutional order on other people.

• Negative duties are sometimes taken to be more stringent that positive duties.

WHY GLOBAL DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE?

• GDJ may impose some quiet stringent and enforceable duties on us, wherever we happen to live, as well as granting us certain important entitlements.

• Theories of global justice will seek to persuade us by pointing either to facts about the world or to facts about our nature as human beings.

• Theories which points to facts about the world- to the effect that we share certain institutions or are bound together in some significant way – can be called Relational Approaches.

• Theories which point to facts about human beings and are motivated by what we share simply by virtue of human can be called- Non-Relational Approaches.

RELATIONAL APPROACHES.

• It says that distributive justice becomes relevant between people when they exist in a certain kind of relationship with each other. That relationship could take variety of forms.

• Some people oppose GDJ for broadly relational reasons- they believe that there is something very special about the relationship of sharing citizenship with someone, or being governed by the same state as them. They also believe that specialness of that relationship makes justice relevant within that relationship but not outside it.

• These relationist might then want to limit DJ to the level of the state, and to reject the idea of GDJ altogether.

• But, the kind of relationist which we are talking about is the kind who believes that there is some relationship that all, or more or less all, people share wich makes justice relevant between them.

3 IMPORTANT VIEWS:

1. Justice applies between people who share a single world. It suggests that GDJ has always been applicable between all peoples, and continues to be.

2. Distributive justice becomes relevant between peoples who can potentially affect each other’s lives. Onora Neill says, “when we factor in other peoples actions when making our own decisions, we are already in the kind of relationship with them that triggers concerns of DJ”.• If we were to focus purely on economics, we might then say

that DJ applies to global economy, which is a large scale system where every individual actions potentially have a small but nevertheless real impact on everybody else.

• People not part of global economy-indigenous community• For moving away from the economy, consider Global climate.

CONT…

3. Global justice is relevant because we each, potentially or actually, impact on each others lives. Most relational accounts emphasise institutional relationships, and principally those institutions of the global economy or the organizations which regulate it.• Institutionalist accounts of justice argue that the existence of

common institutions make an enormous difference from a normative point of view.

• Principles of justice apply to institutions , and , as such, the scope of institutions determines the scope of justice. If there were no significant global institutions, global justice would not be necessary.

• Globalisation may have fundamentally transformed the normative terrain, creating duties of GDJ when none existed before

NON-RELATIONAL APPROACHES.

• They suggest that humans have entitlements simply as humans and not because we happen to share certain institutions. E.g. they suggest that our humanity, or dignity ought to be respected and that so has distributive implications.

• Contemporary human rights discourse tends to make just this kinds of claim that humans have certain entitlements. Other says these right exist whether or not there is a global institutional order.

• They do not require any further facts about human interaction for the standards of justice to become relevant.

• For non- rationalist reference to humanity or need for the protection of human dignity is enough to trigger concerns of distributive justice.

NON-RELATIONAL APPROACHES.

Non rationalist accounts tend to emphasise continuity in two senses:

1. They tend to see no really important differences between domestic and global realms.

2. Non-relationist do not place great store by the transformations which have characterised the contemporary world- transformations which are often grouped together under the term ‘globalisation’.