Statism and Cosmopolitanism on Global Justice

The object of this paper involves terms, among the others, (global) justice and rights, which are debated in several fields of study and whose conceptualization has been at the core of long-standing disputes which are widening more and more. That is the reason why it is essential to frame the discussion explaining how these notions are meant in this paper and how the analysis is developed. Thus, before delving into the main theories of global justice it is worth to make both terminological and methodological clarifications about the object of this paper. Even though it would be practically impossible to sketch out a universal shared conception of global justice and universal fundamental rights and duties, a wide agreement has been reached in the way they are outlined below.

In a first attempt to explain what justice is, it is possible to say that «Justice, at its core, concerns itself with who deserves what and why» [1] and it can be seen as the commitment to fighting against morally arbitrary inequalities [2]. Being slightly more precise, however losing neutrality getting a bit closer firstly to cosmopolitan conception and secondly to Rawlsian and statist conception of justice, justice can be defined as the fair distribution of fundamental benefits (e.g. claims, liberties, powers, and immunities) and burdens (e.g. duties and liabilities) to all [3] and can be retained «the first virtue of social institutions» [4]. It goes without saying that global justice regards the fairness of the above-mentioned distribution at the global level. To provide a first sketch on the standing of statism and cosmopolitanism on this topic, statism argues for the fact that the current global distribution is fair, or at least is not related to justice, and relieving the burdens of the worse off is a matter of humanitarian aid while cosmopolitanism states that principles of justice apply also at the global level considering the current global distribution unjust.

As already mentioned above, rights can be defined as fundamental benefits while duties as fundamental burdens. Looking at the core meaning of rights, to have a right means to have a valid claim [5] which entails (justifiable) duties to others. As also the author of one of the most sophisticated analysis of rights, Hohfeld, admits, «“in the strictest sense” all rights are claims» [6]. In a nutshell, duty is «that which one ought or ought not to do» [7]. Duties are obligations, or justified burdens, which persons or peoples ought to bear. Obviously, there are different categories of rights and duties, such as moral and legal ones, which we will touch upon further on. For the main purpose of this paper, however, the focal point to bear in mind is that each right has one or multiple corresponding duties, and each duty can be seen as a justifiable restriction of another right. Indeed, quoting again Hohfeld, «`Duty' and `right' are correlative terms. When a right is invaded, a duty is violated» [7] and, for this, they can be seen as two sides of the same coin, i.e. justice.

The paper makes use of a critical methodology comparing the main points of the two leading theories on the above-mentioned topics and trying to go beyond them proposing another (balanced) approach to solve their drawbacks. Some fundamental remarks must be outlined on what the paper focuses and what has been left out in order to avoid losing the main aim of the work. Thus, the paper restricts the analysis of statism and cosmopolitanism concentrating on their conception of the scope of justice, i.e. the assessment of the extent to which the global context can be considered a context of justice and the rights and duties which persons and peoples ought to enjoy and ought to bear at the global level according to their paradigms. The paper does not deal with the universal foundation of both civil and political rights and, social and economic rights, so on defined as socio-economic rights, focusing on their dialectic relations and global justification, as well as on the justification of the corresponding duties they entail.

Statism and the `absolutization' of associative duties

Before delving into the main points of statism it is necessary to underline that almost all the statist scholars do not deny the gruesome facts of inequality in world economy related to lack of democracy and unequal enjoyment of fundamental socioeconomic opportunities and basic liberties. This is a situation which is a «disaster from a more broadly humanitarian point of view» and, for this, «there is some minimal concern we owe to fellow human beings» [8]. Quoting the cosmopolitan scholar Thomas Pogge, the statist scholar Nagel underlines that «roughly 20 per cent of the world's population live on less than a dollar a day, and more than 45 per cent live on less than two dollars a day, whereas the 15 per cent who live in the high- income economies have an average per capita income of seventy-five dollars a day» and even though the situation seems to be improving in absolute terms, global relative deprivation, strictly linked to the absolute deprivation, remains a serious global burden which can put in doubt the improvements in the fight against global inequalities defended by many Statists [8-10].

However, the main question we should focus on is if those global burdensome inequalities in socio-economic opportunities and fundamental liberties make rise any justifiable demand for justice. In other words, what is necessary to understand is the potential and practical applicability of standards of justice at the global level. According to statism - and this paper refers mainly to the most relevant exponents of this theory, i.e. Thomas Nagel and David Miller - egalitarian distributive norms can apply only among citizens of a common state according to the «associative duties» that citizens owe one another in virtue of their membership to the same national community. Accordingly, concerns of justice apply only within national borders since, for statists, the primary context of justice is the national one and the political communities (peoples) organized into states are the primary focus of global justice [11]. Global justice can be understood only in terms of principles of justice which regulate the relations among states but not the relations among persons belonging to different states since «the moral units of the order are peoples, not individuals, and the values have to do with the relations among these collective units rather than relations of individuals across the world» [8].

As one of the preeminent representatives of the realist school and the Hobbesian (political) understanding of justice, Nagel argues for the fact that no standards of social justice can hold at the global level and that only states are relevant agents of justice in the global arena. According to Nagel, «even if justice is taken to include not only collective self-interest but also the elimination of morally arbitrary inequalities, or protection of rights to liberty, the existence of a just order still depends on consistent patterns of conduct and persisting institutions that have a pervasive effect on the shape of people's lives» [8]. Even though Nagel recognizes the fundamental commitment of justice to fighting against morally arbitrary inequalities, he does not accept the possibility to understand the global context as a context of justice: the reason is that for how morally motivated can be the individual demands for global justice they cannot have practical expression. Besides, he compares two conceptions of justice, the cosmopolitan, or moral conception, which we take apart for a while delving into it further on, and a second conception which Nagel defines `political conception' of justice according to which «justice should be understood as a specifically political value, rather than being derived from a comprehensive moral system, so that it is essentially a virtue - the first virtue - of social institutions» [8]. Not only does this conception empty justice of its inner moral dimension, but Nagel states that he opts for the political conception of justice, rather than the cosmopolitan one, because «the political conception is accepted by most people in the privileged nations of the world, so that, true or false, it will have a significant role in determining what happens» without, however, justifying the reasons for this choice. This weakens his defence of the political conception of justice insofar as he justifies this decision by the fact that it is preferred by the majority of people taking as given that the most shared option is the fairest one. In any case, even if Nagel categorically excludes that global morally arbitrary inequalities can entail demands of justice, he states that they are a matter of humanitarian assistance since «the most basic rights and duties are universal, and not contingent on specific institutional relations between people» [8]. Moreover, he makes a distinction between negative rights, such as bodily inviolability, freedom of expression and freedom of religion, and positive rights, such as right to democracy, equal citizenship, non-discrimination, equality of opportunity and the amelioration through public policy of unfairness in the distribution of social and economic goods [8] arguing for a priority of the first category over the latter one, insofar as negative rights «set universal and prepolitical limits to the legitimate use of power, independent of special forms of association». Indeed, «it is wrong for any individual or group to deny such rights to any other individual or group» while socio-economic justice is fully associative since «it depends on positive rights that we do not have against all other persons or groups, right that arise only because we are joined together with certain others in a political society under strong centralized control» [8]. Therefore, according to Nagel and more broadly to many statists, the scope of negative rights, in which the category of civil and political rights, is wider than the scope of positive rights can be included, in which the category of socio-economic rights can be included. This can be explained by the common supposition that negative rights imply less burdensome duties, i.e. duty not to do, than positive rights which implies more demanding duties, i.e. duty to do. Even though one of the aims of the paper is to overcome this supposition, this task will be addressed in the final part of the work. For now, it is just relevant to understand this focal difference and the statist position on this matter.

As another leading scholar of statism, Miller frames the discussion on the justification of the distribution of rights and duties debating the difference between ethical particularism and ethical universalism [12] defending the first insofar as the special relationships citizens have one another motivate them to pursue justice. Without going excessively deep into his argumentation, and maintaining the focus on the main topic of the paper, the most interesting point of Miller's theory of global justice is his defence of the ethics of nationality and the global minimum of human right to be set at the global level. Miller maintains that we have special obligations to compatriots which we do not owe to other human beings and global justice ought to be understood not in terms of equality, but in terms of basic human rights that belong to human beings everywhere and which can entail remedial responsibility on outsiders [13]. Thus, Millers admits that we owe some responsibilities toward the world's poor but of a kind that protection of universal socio-economic rights can only be a matter of sufficiency and not equality, and, more important, a matter of humanitarianism rather than justice, strictly speaking.

Besides lacking to recognize the proper relevance of the moral dimension of the concept of justice, statist theory seems to be excessively stuck in the status quo without being able to adapt to the fast changes in persons' and peoples' global relations. Indeed, its ideas fail to take into account the global level as an increasingly relevant context of justice, that is according to the thickening of global interconnection and interdependence. Moreover, statists, on the one hand, gives much relevance to the rights to liberty among collective agents, as states, without however properly taking into consideration the rights of individuals at the global level and, on the other hand, absolutizes the `associative duties' as the only category of duty which can rise demands of justice and which, thus, justifies their restricted scope at the global level.

Cosmopolitanism and the chimera of a full-fledged global justice

Cosmopolitans (or globalists) position themselves in a standing diametrically opposite to statists. As statists, cosmopolitans denounce the grave burdensome of global inequalities in socio-economic opportunities and fundamental liberties arguing for the fact that a plan to end severe poverty for over 2.5 billion human beings - whose aggregate shortfall amounts to barely $300 billion annually which are well under the 1 per cent of the aggregate annual gross national incomes of the high- income economies - could be carried out through reforms which would entail a negligible reduction in the standard of living for the 1 billion people living in the high-income countries [3]. However, not only do cosmopolitans argue for the negligible sacrifice that the relief of the worse-off would entail but, more importantly, they underline that this fact is a matter of justice insofar as global unfair inequalities are replicated by the global order which ought, for this, to be retained unjust.

Cosmopolitanism is founded on the idea that all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, are (or can and should be) citizens in a single community basing on universal moral norms [14]. According to cosmopolitanism, principles of justice regulating the fair distribution of rights and duties hold also at the global level and global justice should be conceived in terms of an institutional cosmopolitanism based on universal human rights [3] which leads to assess the global order as unjust insofar as it is unable to globally ensure the overall protection of fundamental rights. Cosmopolitanism develops in the framework of the broad philosophical argument of moral universalism According to Pogge, «a moral conception, such as a conception of social justice, can be said to be universalistic if and only if A) it subjects all persons to the same system of fundamental moral prin-ciples; B) these principles assign the same fundamental moral benefits (e.g. claims, liberties, powers, and immunities) and burdens (e.g. duties and liabilities) to all; and C) these fundamental moral ben-efits and burdens are formulated in general terms as not to privilege or disadvantage certain persons or groups arbitrarily» [3, p. 98]. which maintains that some ideas have universal power, i.e. there are universal principles which apply to the whole humanity.

According to one of the leading exponents of cosmopolitanism, Thomas Pogge, there are three specific features which are shared by almost all the diverging strands of cosmopolitanism: Individualism: the ultimate units of concern are individual human beings or persons rather than other categories of agents, like collective ones which can be units of concern only indirectly, in virtue of the participation of their members; universality: the status of ultimate unit of concern attaches to every living human being equally; and generality: this special status has global force, which is to say that persons are ultimate units of concern for everyone [3]. Therefore, cosmopolitanism maintains that persons are the primary focus of justice and the global context ought to be considered as the primary context of justice since persons are, first and foremost, members of a single universal community. States can only be secondary or indirect units of concern since they are subordinated to the most relevant units of concern, i.e. persons.

Since there are many different categories of cosmopolitanism, such as moral, political, legal, institutional, economic, the debate will be restricted on the work of an author, Thomas Pogge, which seeks to bridge these different conceptions of cosmopolitanism remaining however closer to the moral one, which can be considered the most characteristic of this theory of global justice. As a matter of fact, he argues for the combination of two compatible conceptions of moral cosmopolitanism: interactional moral cosmopolitanism and institutional moral cosmopolitanism. According to this distinction, the first one formulates fundamental principles of ethics that assign responsibilities for the implementation of universal basic rights directly to persons and groups, whereas the second one postulates fundamental principles of social justice that assign these responsibilities to the institutional scheme [3]. However, developing a variant of institutional cosmopolitanism - precisely one which makes persons and peoples bearing responsibility for the support to a global unjust order which authorizes and enforces unfair inequalities in violation of a general negative duty - Pogge maintains that only the institutional conception of cosmopolitanism can be retained a matter of social justice while the interactional conception, still not irrelevant to reduce global unfair inequalities, remains a question of individual ethics.

Placing the question of how universal rights ought to be conceived, Pogge argues for a validity of moral human rights which is independent of any social order - which however plays a crucial role for their realization - an idea which has been widely and progressively acknowledged since the aftermath of the World War II [3]. Moreover, Pogge considers moral and legal rights not in contrast to each other but rather claims that the first category pre-exists the second (whose instrumental role for the realization and adjudication of moral rights is, in any case, a matter of fact). Indeed, the relation between moral and legal rights is conceived in such a way that avoids any conceptual connection between these two terms. Moral rights are moral claims which are valid In Pogge, the validity of these moral claims is explained in the light of the consensus which their enunciation in the UDHR as human rights has obtained. Accordingly, Pogge seems to leave pending the foundational question of universal rights and the concept of rights itself. Differently, Forst seeks to explain the validity of moral rights according to their moral and political construction on the very basic moral right (and duty) to reciprocal and universal justification. regardless of their actual legal recognition and judicial adjudication and, thus, their juridification ought not to be understood as demanding. Pogge does not underestimate the relevance of legal rights for the implementation of (moral) human rights but he argues that such legal rights need not to have the same content of moral human rights and highlights that secure access to the object of moral rights - that is what really matters - may be maintained also in other ways [3]. It follows that legal rights are effective, and probably the strongest, means to realize moral rights however other tools, as nonlegal practices and commitment by the citizenry, can be considered in their own way important to pursue this aim. Pogge argues for the inclusion of the corresponding legal right of a moral right in the law or constitution when its juridification is required to ensure the secure access to its object - as it is, for example, for the right to vote [3]. In his work, he also poses the main focus on a specific category of rights, i.e. socio-economic rights, underlying how they are «currently, and by far, the most frequently unfulfilled human rights» [3] arguing for the fact that this underfulfillment also plays a major role in explaining global deficits in the protection of civil and political human rights. However, his major focus on socio-economic rights, and issues as world poverty, unequal distribution of wealth, inequalities in the standard of living seems to underestimate the relevance of civil and political rights.

One of the main criticisms to cosmopolitan ideas is that cosmopolitanism almost completely discharges justice from its not irrelevant political weight. In the wake of this observation, other limitations of this theory are the deficiency of cosmopolitanism to not take into account the relevance of special duties linked to particular relations among persons, such as those related to the shared national identity, as well the weak practical feasibility of the reforms cosmopolitans propose in order to realize the utopian world they conceive.

Universal fundamental rights as a fair mean