A Just Global Economy: In Defense of Rawls

Transcription

1 By: David A. Reidy, J.D., Ph.D. Asst. Prof., Philosophy 801 McClung Tower University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN (office) (fax) A Just Global Economy: In Defense of Rawls Abstract: In The Law of Peoples (hereafter LP), John Rawls does not discuss justice and the global economy at great length or in great detail. What he does say has not been well-received. The prevailing view seems to be that what Rawls says in LP regarding global economic justice is both inconsistent with and a betrayal of his own liberal egalitarian commitments, an unexpected and unacceptable defense of the status quo. This view is, I think, mistaken. Rawls s position on global or international economic justice is richer, more nuanced, and generally more compelling than his critics have been willing to acknowledge. My aim in this essay is to sympathetically set out and then defend against two common families of objection Rawls s position on global or international economic justice. Objections of the first sort reject Rawls s position as inadequately attentive to the material and economic interests of individual persons worldwide. Objections of the second sort reject it as inadequately attentive to the material and economic interests of well-ordered peoples. Throughout the paper I develop several arguments implicit in LP but not well-developed there as well as offer some additional arguments of my own consistent with the spirit of LP and Rawls s work more generally. I conclude with some brief remarks expressing two worries I have about Rawls s position one concerning global public goods, the other concerning the formation of a morally adequate and effective political will within the international context under contemporary conditions. Key Words: Rawls, Liberalism, International, Global, Economic, Justice, Trade, Egalitarianism, Cosmopolitanism. About the Author: David A. Reidy, J.D., Ph.D., is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Tennessee. He has published in Political Theory, Res Publica, Public Affairs Quarterly, Journal of Social Philosophy, Southern Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Value Inquiry, Polis, Kantian Review, Economics and Philosophy, Philosophical Studies and other journals as well as various anthologies. He is the co-editor of two volumes: Universal Human Rights: Moral Order in a Divided World, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005, and A Realistic Utopia: Essays on Rawls s The Law of Peoples, Blackwell Publishers, forthcoming. He is presently at work on a monograph on the philosophy of law for Wadsworth Publishing.

2 A Just Global Economy: In Defense of Rawls. * I. Introduction. In The Law of Peoples (hereafter LP), John Rawls does not discuss justice and the global economy at great length or in great detail. 1 And what he does say has not been well-received. 2 Indeed, the prevailing view seems to be that what Rawls says in LP regarding global economic justice is both inconsistent with and a betrayal of his own liberal egalitarian commitments, an unexpected and unacceptable defense of the status quo. This view is, I think, mistaken. Rawls s position on global or international economic justice is richer, more nuanced, and generally more compelling than his critics have been willing to acknowledge. That doesn t * I wish to thank Alyssa Bernstein, Allen Buchanan, Samuel Freeman, John Hardwig, John Mandle, Rex Martin, Jim Nickel, Walter Riker, Kok-Chor Tan, and Leif Wenar for helpful comments or instructive conversation regarding earlier drafts of this paper. 1 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). This is an extended and revised version of Rawls s Oxford Amnesty Lecture titled The Law of Peoples and published in Critical Theory, 20 (1993), pgs , and then reprinted in S. Shute and S. Hurley, eds., On Human Rights (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pgs For a sense of this literature (the following is of course an incomplete list; the full list would be far too long for a footnote), see, Charles Beitz, Rawls s Law of Peoples, Ethics, 110 (2000), pgs , and Human Rights as Common Concerns, American Political Science Review, 95 (2001), pgs ; Allen Buchanan, Rawls s Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanishing Westphalian World, Ethics, 110 (2000), pgs ; Simon Caney, Cosmopolitanism and the Law of Peoples, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 10 (2002), pgs ; Andrew Kuper, Rawlsian Global Justice: Beyond the Law of Peoples to a Cosmopolitan Law of Persons, Political Theory, 28 (2000), pgs ; Darrel Moellendorf, Constructing the Law of Peoples, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 77 (1996), pgs ; Kai Nielsen, Is Global Justice Impossible, Res Publica, 4 (1998), pgs ; Thomas Pogge, An Egalitarian Law of Peoples, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 23 (1994), pgs , and The International Significance of Human Rights, Journal of Ethics, 4 (2000), pgs ; Kok-Chor Tan, Toleration, Diversity and Global Justice, (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000), esp. ch. 4, and Critical Notice: Rawls s The Law of Peoples, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 31 (2001), pgs ; and Leif Wenar, The Legitimacy of Peoples, in P. de Greiff and C. Cronin, eds., Global Justice and Transnational Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pgs

3 mean that it is not without difficulty. It just means that whatever its difficulties, they are likely as yet unarticulated and unappreciated. My aim in this essay is to set out and defend against common objections Rawls s position on global or international economic justice in the hope that so doing might serve the larger cause of generating an adequate assessment of Rawls s contribution in LP. After setting out Rawls s position and considering its implications, I turn to two general classes of objections. The central claim of members of the first class is that Rawls s position fails to attend adequately and fairly to the material and economic interests of all individual human persons worldwide, either because it fails to establish an adequate global economic minimum for individual persons or permits excessive economic inequalities between individual persons or classes of persons. The central claim of members of the second class is that Rawls s position fails to attend adequately and fairly to the material and economic interests of all wellordered peoples or bodies politic, again either because it fails to establish and adequate global economic minimum for well-ordered peoples or permits excessive economic inequalities between them. Critics who press for a global difference principle governing the economic inequalities between transnational classes of individual persons worldwide typically press objections of the first sort. Critics who press for a global difference principle governing the international economic inequalities between well-ordered peoples typically press objections of the second sort. I argue that correctly understood Rawls s position is not particularly vulnerable to either sort of objection and that it accordingly merits a far more sympathetic, yet still critical, engagement than it has heretofore received. I conclude with a few speculative thoughts about two aspects of Rawls s position that seem to me to invite critique, namely its failure to wrestle seriously with the problem of securing certain global public or collective goods, such as a clean environment, and its somewhat naive utopianism regarding the prospects for effective 2

4 international political agency in the interests of anything other than capital. 3 II. Rawls s Position Articulated. Rawls affirms two general demands on global or international economic relations. The first is that well-ordered peoples are obligated as a matter of justice to take affirmative steps to aid those burdened societies unable (through no fault of their own) to constitute and sustain themselves as well-ordered peoples. 4 The second is that trade and other economic relations between well-ordered peoples are to be free and fair and therefore mutually advantageous for all well-ordered peoples over the long term. 5 These are the two basic requirements the international or global economy must meet as a matter of justice. 6 Note that while the first requirement, the duty of assistance, affirms something like a global social/economic minimum for all peoples, it sets the target or cut-off point for that minimum at that which is necessary to a well-ordered polity, whether liberal and democratic or nonliberal and nondemocratic but nevertheless decent. Note also that while the second requirement, the principle of free and fair trade, entails a commitment to transactional justice and the background conditions necessary to it, it sets no limits per se on global or international economic inequalities. The only such limits Rawls recognizes are those rooted in his commitments to free and fair trade between well-ordered 3 A third worry I take up in an essay forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence is that Rawls s treatment of non-ideal theory lacks, and requires, a theory or principles of corrective justice and reparations given the history of substantial international injustice. With respect to non-ideal theory, Rawls discusses only the duties of assistance and the principles of just war. 4 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pgs. 37, Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pgs. 38, Of course, Rawls regards principles requiring nonaggression and that treaties be kept also as fundamental principles of international justice. And these surely have an economic aspect to them. I set them to the side in this essay, however, and focus on the principles more clearly concerned with and controversial as principles of global economic justice. 3

5 peoples and to a global social/economic minimum sufficient to insure that no society is less than well-ordered through no fault of its own. 7 These two requirements of a just global or international economy are requirements of justice delivered through philosophical analysis and argument. They belong to the first principles of global or international justice, binding on all peoples regardless of their consent or voluntary undertaking. Rawls allows, of course, that peoples may voluntarily take on, through treaty-making or customary practice, many additional commitments binding on the global or international community. But the content of these latter commitments cannot be delivered save through the actual unfolding of international politics, a contingent historical process. Philosophy has a role to play here too, of course. But it cannot by itself, apart from real politics, finally determine the content of these latter commitments. Of course these latter commitments, given determinate content through international politics, may function within the international order as binding and enforceable. But their binding force, their enforceability, is dependent on their being voluntarily undertaken or consented to by the peoples subject to them. This is not true of the two requirements Rawls identifies as made on the global or international economy by the first principles of global or international justice. These need not be voluntarily undertaken or consented to in order to bind. Both their content and their normative force, then, is something philosophy can set out on its own, apart from politics. II.a. The duty of assistance. These commitments bear further comment. Take the duty of assistance. This is a duty owed by well-ordered peoples to those burdened societies not well-ordered through no fault of 7 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pgs Rawls makes it clear that he recognizes no other limits on global economic inequalities. In a world of well-ordered peoples, he says, there is no justifiable reason for any society s asking for more than is necessary to sustain [its] just institutions, or for further reduction of material inequalities among societies. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pg

6 their own. Well-ordered peoples are to assist burdened societies become well-ordered peoples. Well-ordered peoples are independent bodies politic, corporate moral agents, morally entitled to recognition, respect, self-determination and non-intervention within the international order. To be well-ordered a people need not be liberal and democratic. But it must be at least decent and thus able to generate genuine, if prima facie, moral obligations of obedience among its members. To be decent a people must be organized as a genuine scheme of social cooperation between its members as persons or moral agents. But it need not be organized as a scheme of social cooperation between its members taken as free and equal individual persons apart from and prior to any other group-based identifications or memberships. Instead, it may be organized as a scheme of cooperation between members who are taken as moral agents situated within and identified with antecedently given groups. A well-ordered people, then, is a corporate moral agent (in possession of territory, administering a political and legal system, etc.) within which membership carries moral significance, underwrites legal and political obligations of prima facie moral force, for all members. A people may be relatively poor and still be well-ordered (and presumably some today are and in the past have been). But it can not be too poor. Well-orderedness requires a degree of material wealth well beyond that minimally necessary to the physical survival of individual members. It requires material wealth sufficient to sustain the rule of law, a stable government, and so on. Thus, contrary to some claims by critics, Rawls s duty of assistance does not set the global social/economic minimum at bare subsistence. It sets it higher than that, at that level of wealth and resources necessary to sustain well-orderedness. Of course, Rawls emphasizes, rightly, that wealth does not guarantee well-orderedness. There are presumably today wealthy societies that are not well-ordered. Rawls regards the duty of assistance as operative primarily under the conditions covered by nonideal theory. But it is also operative, even if only passively so, under ideal conditions, in 5

7 a world populated by only non-aggressive and well-ordered peoples. Natural and other sorts of unforeseen and perhaps unforeseeable disasters will always present well-ordered peoples, even those that plan and save effectively, with some risk of losing through no fault of their own the material or other conditions necessary to their own well-orderedness. Thus, well-ordered peoples will recognize a standing duty to assist one another should any such contingency arise. Such a duty can be generated easily enough from an international original position argument of the sort Rawls develops. Under the conditions of ideal theory, this duty would best be met through an international mutual insurance scheme through which well-ordered peoples pooled risks and resources to insure all against such unforeseen or unforeseeable disasters. Under the nonideal conditions of the real world today, it makes sense to extend this duty of assistance, or to extend coverage under this mutual insurance scheme, to all burdened societies. Because of our lack of historical knowledge and the great difficulties of sorting out historical causation, we have good reason to suppose that the burdens carried by today s burdened societies are not the result of only self-inflicted wounds for which they ought to be held politically responsible. Extending the duty of assistance to the conditions of nonideal theory in this way can even be vindicated from the point of view of agents representing wellordered peoples in an international original position. It would be rational for such agents to agree to a mutual insurance policy guaranteeing coverage to any burdened society so long as there is no clear and compelling historical evidence of its political responsibility for self-inflicted wounds. 8 If this is right, then Rawls s duty of assistance is not an ad hoc addition to his other 8 Of course, there may still be reasons to aid burdened societies burdened only because of self-inflicted wounds for which they re politically responsible. There will be humanitarian reasons to prevent individual human suffering. And there may be practical international reasons tied to the great goods of international stability and so on. The point is just that where a society is burdened solely through self-inflicted wounds for which it alone is responsible, the reasons to aid, whatever they may be, will not be reasons of international distributive or economic justice. 6

8 principles constituting the law of peoples. It has a sound justification within ideal theory and is naturally extended to the conditions of nonideal theory with just the implications Rawls suggests: well-ordered peoples today owe aid and assistance to most, if not all, presently burdened societies. 9 The duty of assistance is a duty of justice. As such it takes priority for all well-ordered peoples over the vast majority of other ends to which they might commit themselves, including the liberalization or democratization of other states. 10 It ranks behind only the duty to secure their own domestic well-orderedness and justice. Thus, wealthy states are obligated to discharge their duties of assistance prior to committing themselves to national projects such as space exploration or artistic achievement or continued growth in per capita GDP for the sake of increased material comfort or consumer luxury. This is still a position weaker than that defended 9 Rawls frames the duty of assistance as he does (by directing it to burdened societies burdened through no fault of their own) so as not to undercut the responsibility of each body politic for its own domestic condition. All bodies politic have an obligation to help themselves become well-ordered. Well-ordered peoples have no obligation to force well-orderedness on a population that consistently refuses it, though they do have a humanitarian obligation to secure for all human persons the most basic human rights (to subsistence, physical security and so on). Rawls s treatment of the peaceful benevolent absolutism is illuminating here. A peaceful benevolent absolutism is not well-ordered, since its subjects have no political participation rights whatsoever, but it otherwise secures basic human rights to subsistence, physical security, some measure of liberty of conscience, and so on. Because it is not well-ordered, well-ordered peoples have an obligation to extend aid (which will likely be in the form of cultural and institutional aid aimed at securing an institutionalized culture of political participation, and thus reciprocity between rulers and the ruled). But if that aid is consistently refused or delivers no positive results over the long haul, no further aid is required and certainly no intervention is justified. A population must be prepared to do its share to secure its own well-orderedness. Well-ordered peoples have no obligations other than benign neglect toward non-aggressive societies that honor the most basic human rights (so that there is no humanitarian justification for intervention) but are otherwise not well-ordered (as with the benevolent absolutism with its absence of any political participation rights). If the members of those societies are not themselves prepared, in sufficient numbers, to play an active role in securing their own well-orderedness, well-ordered peoples need not aid them further. 10 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pgs

9 by Peter Singer in his famous essay on famine, affluence and morality. 11 But it is not significantly weaker than that defended by Henry Shue. 12 The primary difference would seem to be that Shue holds that a well-ordered people must meet its obligations of aid, where the basic rights of others are at stake, even if at some cost to the nonbasic rights, say, democratic or liberal welfare rights, of its own members, while Rawls s view on this trade-off is unclear. It is not clear whether Rawls thinks a liberal democracy must be willing to sacrifice any of the liberal democratic rights of its own members, even rights that are nonbasic in Shue s or Rawls s sense of the term (e.g., the right to universal franchise), if necessary in order to secure basic rights (e.g., subsistence and security) in a burdened society and thus meet its obligations of aid. 13 In any case, as Shue notes, there is little reason to think this potential tradeoff will likely ever or often confront us in the real world. And that means that the difference between Shue s and Rawls s view here, if there is one, is probably of little practical significance. As a duty of justice, the duty of assistance entails several pretty obvious corollaries, though Rawls says too little in this regard. First, if well-ordered peoples may more effectively and efficiently meet their obligations of aid by acting in concert and through common 11 See Peter Singer, Famine, Affluence and Morality, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1 (1972), pgs Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and US Foreign Policy, 2 nd Ed., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pgs Knowing where Rawls comes down on this question would seem highly relevant to determining where exactly on the liberal nationalist - cosmopolitan liberal spectrum he falls. Rawls s position would be decidedly closer to the liberal nationalist end of the spectrum if his view was that a liberal democracy may properly give priority to securing any and all liberal democratic rights (but not, say, increasing aggregate GDP or pursuing space exploration) within its own domestic order over securing basic rights elsewhere. It would be decidedly closer to the cosmopolitan liberal position if his view was that a liberal democracy must give priority to the basic rights of other human persons over any and all claims made by members of its own domestic order, except those tied to their own basic rights. While Rawls does not explicitly address this matter, I suspect that his position falls at the liberal nationalist end of the spectrum. 8

10 institutions, then they ought to do so. Second, the obligations of any particular well-ordered people with respect to providing aid for burdened societies will be a function of its ability to provide the required aid and the opportunity and other costs of so doing. (Here it must be emphasized, however, that relatively less wealthy peoples may be well-ordered, and that the relevant aid will often have significant non-material or non-financial components.) Third, wellordered peoples are obligated to provide aid aimed at enabling burdened societies to constitute themselves as politically autonomous well-ordered peoples. Accordingly, well-ordered donor peoples are to avoid conditioning their aid on the adoption by donee peoples of domestic policies or practices unnecessary or unrelated to this end. 14 Rawls s duty of assistance is a substantial duty of justice, more demanding than is generally acknowledged. Well-ordered peoples that do not satisfy it are in violation of a first principle of international justice. Rawls does not explicitly address the moral consequences of such a violation. But certainly a people that fails to satisfy its duties of assistance ought to be subject to substantial moral criticism, perhaps even other forms of non-military pressure, within international political discourse and institutions. That, after all, is presumably how nonaggressive, well-ordered peoples that routinely fail to keep their treaties (and thus violate another first principle of international morality) are properly treated. II.b. Free and fair trade. Just as Rawls s duty of assistance is a richer and more demanding requirement of a just 14 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pgs Rawls mentions IMF conditionality practices, where liberalization or democratization conditions are attached to loans, as objectionable. However, Rawls also recognizes that as an empirical generalization certain aspects of liberalization and democratization are strongly correlated with enduring well-orderedness. Democratic institutions and women s rights, for example, are strongly correlated with enduring well-orderedness. And this raises the question of whether a well-ordered people may condition its aid to a burdened society on that society adopting certain forms of liberalization and democratization because as an empirical matter such reforms substantially improve the likelihood that the aid given will secure the desired result, namely enduring well-orderedness. 9

11 global economy than it at first appears, so too is his principle of free and fair trade between wellordered peoples. Rawls clearly states that well-ordered peoples are to refrain from monopolizing markets, forming cartels, acting as oligopolies or otherwise frustrating free and fair international or global trade and economic relations. Indeed, he claims that they are obligated to preserve the general background conditions necessary to free and fair trade and economic relations. These conditions are first that trade be between well-ordered peoples, and second that it be mutually advantageous. Trade between well-ordered peoples and burdened societies, or between burdened societies only, is morally problematic. Burdened societies are not able to sustain a well-ordered domestic legal and political order on their own. Property rights and the rule of law are thus unlikely to be secure in burdened societies, rendering problematic informational transparency and thus the genuine voluntariness of trade and the presumption of mutual advantage in trade with or between them. Further, trade with or between burdened societies will likely often involve duress on one or both sides as well as radically unequal bargaining positions, since so many burdened societies are desperately poor. Well-ordered peoples are obligated, as part of their duty of assistance, to take steps to insure that trade with or between burdened societies is free of these defects and functionally contributes to bringing burdened societies to wellorderedness, or at least constitutes no obstacle to securing well-orderedness. Well-ordered peoples should regard their trade relations with burdened societies as part of an overall aid package. Trade between well-ordered peoples is different. Since well-ordered peoples secure a well-ordered domestic order, property rights, the rule of law and so on are secured. While there may still remain issues of informational transparency in particular transactions, they are not significant overall. Further, since well-ordered peoples are independent and self-sufficient (qua 10

12 well-ordered) 15, trade between them is, even in the face of substantial differences in wealth or economic condition, presumptively free of duress, coercion and the like. It is akin to trade between individual and informed persons of potentially substantially different wealth where neither is driven to the transaction by survival needs or otherwise at the mercy of the other in a morally problematic way. 16 As between well-ordered peoples, the most compelling evidence that voluntary trade relations are fair is that they are mutually advantageous over the long haul. Long term trade relations that systematically disadvantage one or more parties while advantaging others are at least prima facie unfair, even if they are trade relations between well-ordered peoples. Such long term systematic failures of mutual advantage call for critical moral evaluation. Because well-ordered peoples are corporate agents, it does not follow from the fact that trade relations between them is mutually advantageous (at the corporate level) that they are mutually advantageous for all their individual members. But here it must be remembered that to be well-ordered a body politic must secure a domestic order at least mutually advantageous for all classes of economic participants over time; the economy of any well-ordered people, liberal democratic or otherwise, must be a genuine system of cooperation and thus a system of mutual advantage. Thus, so long as peoples are and remain well-ordered, free and fair international trade will be mutually advantageous for both peoples as corporate agents and for the various citizens or classes of citizens cooperating economically within them. (Of course, this still allows 15 Here Rawls s assumption that peoples have no fundamental interest in wealth above and beyond that necessary to well-orderedness plays an important role; this matter is taken up below. 16 Rawls s view of global economic justice, then, is not, as it is sometimes said to be, libertarian in structure. It is sometimes said to be so because it includes no patterned, ahistorical principle of distributive justice between peoples. But Rawls does affirm the duty of assistance as a requirement of global or international justice, and he makes reference to the need to secure and preserve fair background conditions for international trade. 11

13 for very large inequalities, both between peoples and between the individual members of decent but inegalitarian peoples.) Rawls s central point here is that it is, at least in the first instance, the responsibility of each body politic to secure mutual advantage (and, if it is to be not merely wellordered but also just, to constrain inequalities) between the various classes of participants within its own internal domestic economy. Well-ordered peoples are obligated to secure free and fair trade, a global economy structured at its most basic level as a system of long term mutual advantage between them. Though Rawls does not say as much, it is not unreasonable to suppose that well-ordered peoples are obligated, as with their duties of assistance, to act in concert and through common institutions to meet this obligation, if by so doing they might more effectively and efficiently discharge it. As they do so, through various trade organizations and the like, well-ordered peoples are to respect each other s political autonomy. No well-ordered people, whether liberal and democratic or decent, is to use its economic power within trade relations or the international institutions governing them to undermine the well-orderedness or political autonomy of any other people. It bears emphasizing here that nothing in Rawls s view stands in the way of a relatively sophisticated understanding of what is required as a matter of transactional justice in trade relations. Rawls s position is simply that mutually advantageous trade between well-ordered peoples is presumptively just, and that international economic justice requires no more than the long term preservation of such trade relations. This is consistent with the view, though Rawls fails to highlight this fact, that as a matter of transactional justice, even between well-ordered peoples, there can sometimes be particular inequalities (often in terms of knowledge of or abilities to externalize or absorb risks or costs, etc.) the effect of which is to leave one party with a bargaining position so superior to that of the other (in the relevant context), that the apparent voluntariness and mutual advantage of the transaction entered cannot finally vindicate it against 12

14 objection. Well-ordered peoples may enter into agreements apparently voluntary and mutually advantageous which are nevertheless morally suspect. It is not difficult to imagine a circumstance, for example, in which due to large technological, informational, or wealth differences one or several well-ordered peoples party to a particular trade deal enjoy such an asymmetrically superior ability to absorb without economic disaster or to externalize successfully some cost or risk associated with that deal (perhaps tied to domestic currency stability, or to environmental concerns) that its terms are rendered morally suspect, notwithstanding the well-orderedness of all the parties and the appearance of voluntariness and mutual advantage. Here a charitable reading of Rawls s position would allow that while great economic or material inequalities between well-ordered peoples are not per se objectionable, and while the well-orderedness of trading partners is sufficient, despite great economic or material inequalities, to generate a presumption that trade relations are voluntary and thus mutually advantageous, such inequalities may nevertheless prove objectionable in particular transactions. There is nothing inconsistent in this position. It is perfectly consistent to hold that very great inequalities between peoples a) do not matter in themselves as a matter of global economic justice (assuming that the global social/economic minimum at which the duty of assistance is aimed is universally realized), b) do not constitute in themselves a reason to reject the presumption of voluntariness and mutual advantage in trade relations between well-ordered peoples, yet c) may still matter a great deal as a matter of transactional justice between particular parties in particular contexts for particular reasons. Well-ordered peoples committed to free and fair trade, then, will have good reason to institutionalize mechanisms that insure that the presumption that voluntary and mutually advantageous trade between well-ordered peoples is just is treated as just that, a presumption, rebuttable on a transactional basis in particular cases for compelling reasons. 13

15 II.c. Rawls s view of the status quo. Before saying a word about the nature and merits of Rawls s case for these twin requirements of global or international economic justice the duty of aid and the principle of free and fair trade I want to highlight how much can be said against the status quo without introducing any further requirements of global economic justice. First, well-ordered peoples have obviously failed, individually and collectively, to discharge their obligations of aid to burdened societies, including those left so as a legacy of colonialism or other historical injustices. Given the wealth and technological, institutional, cultural and political development of the most developed of well-ordered peoples, it is morally astounding that there are any burdened societies at all left on Earth. Well-ordered peoples must collectively realize institutional arrangements capable of effectively and efficiently discharging their duties of aid, and they must do so in a manner, through institutions and practices, that secures political autonomy for all currently burdened societies. 17 Second, the most economically powerful of well-ordered peoples have failed, even if less obviously, to refrain from using their economic power in trade and other economic relations to undermine the political autonomy of other, economically less powerful well-ordered peoples. Wealthy well-ordered peoples, whether acting individually or collectively, must cease imposing on less wealthy well-ordered peoples conditions for sustained economic relations unrelated to their remaining well-ordered. 18 These conditions are corrosive of mutual respect and breed contempt and hostility between peoples. 17 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pg Rawls expresses some sympathy with Thomas Pogge s proposal for a Global Resource Dividend system of taxation and wealth transfers provided it is aimed solely at enabling well-ordered peoples to meet their obligations to aid burdened societies. 18 Rawls would presumably endorse many of the criticisms Joseph Stiglitz makes of some IMF and World Bank conditionality demands, demands that have been made both on burdened societies and well-ordered peoples alike. See Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton Publishers, 2003). 14

16 Third, well-ordered peoples have failed to secure the background conditions essential to free and fair trade between them. They have permitted the monopolization of markets, cartels, and oligopolies. And they have failed to institutionalize mechanisms to insure that trade relations are in fact mutually advantageous to all peoples, both transactionally and over the long term. Wellordered peoples must take steps to insure that organizations such as the WTO are structured so as to be able reliably to produce rules to govern and secure between them genuinely free, fair and mutually advantageous trade. 19 Most people have the (surely correct) moral intuition that the global or international economic status quo is unjust and thus unacceptable. But the features of the status quo that give rise to this widespread if not universal moral intuition may well all vanish were we simply to realize Rawls s two requirements of global or international economic justice. Global economic inequalities would surely remain, but it is hard to know how large they would be. It seems likely that they would be less large than they are today. In any case, severe and crippling poverty would be no more. The neoliberal so-called Washington Consensus would no longer govern (if it still does) within the halls of the World Bank, IMF and other international economic institutions. Double standards on trade (U.S. protectionism for domestic agriculture while insisting on open agricultural markets elsewhere, etc.) would be no more. The WTO would live up to its Charter, as would other potentially progressive international and regional bodies. Under such conditions, it is fair to wonder why exactly the remaining economic inequalities would matter morally speaking, even if they were still relatively large. That they would not matter is something I will argue below. But, first, having set out Rawls s requirements of global or international economic justice and argued that they are richer and more demanding than critics 19 Whether this requires the democratization of such organizations (e.g., the WTO), or just better implementation and enforcement of standing institutional commitments, is a policy question that turns on empirical claims beyond the scope of Rawls s project and this paper. 15

17 typically let on, I want next to outline Rawls s argument for these requirements. III. Rawls s Argument. Nowhere in LP does Rawls withdraw his view that all peoples ought to be governed domestically, if they are to be just, by his two principles of justice or some other suitable principles drawn from the family of generically liberal conceptions of justice. What Rawls does insist on is, first, that as a matter of principle or right this requirement cannot, from a liberal democratic point of view, be legitimately enforced against nonconsenting polities within a just international order, and second, that the first principles governing a just international order are not the, or some analogue of the, principles constitutive of any liberal democratic conception of domestic justice. That all the world s peoples be liberal and democratic, that they all internally adopt and honor the difference principle in their own respective domestic orders, is part of the liberal democratic aspiration for the world. But it is one to be pursued through a peaceful, respectful, noncoercive politics of persuasion, example, diplomacy, and so on, within an international order that, as a matter of principle or right, need not be organized as a liberal democracy. A fully just world, on Rawls s view, is one within which all well-ordered peoples are liberal and democratic and joined voluntarily in a federation of liberal democratic states. But this is a world that must be won, as a matter of principle and right, through the selfdetermination of well-ordered peoples governed by the law of peoples. Liberal democratic peoples may exercise force under the law of peoples to secure a world of well-ordered peoples. But since a people need not be liberal and democratic to be well-ordered, they must be prepared to tolerate, as a matter of principle and right, those well-ordered peoples that are not liberal and democratic. In one important sense, then, Rawls never backed off his commitment to the universal reach of liberal democratic principles of justice. But then the question arises: Given this 16

18 commitment why did he end up with a theory of international or global justice, and international or global economic justice in particular, so apparently at odds with his views regarding domestic justice? How could someone committed to the proposition that justice everywhere requires liberal democracy think as a matter of principle that some nonliberal and nondemocratic regimes ought to be tolerated within an international order to which neither Rawls s two principles nor those of any other liberal democratic conception of justice ought to apply? Let us take these issues up in reverse order, asking first why Rawls does not simply make his two principles of justice or the principles of some other liberal democratic conception of justice directly applicable to the international order, and then asking why he thinks some nonliberal and nondemocratic states merit respect, recognition and toleration within that order as a matter of principle or right. Rawls offers a constructivist and contractualist argument for the principles of global or international justice, including those governing the global or international economy. 20 The argument begins realistically enough. Liberal democratic peoples already exist as bodies politic. Possessed of territory and the capacity, delivered through institutional design, to determine a conception of their own good and to identify and shun unreasonable means to it, liberal democratic peoples or bodies politic are artificial corporate moral agents. More importantly, they are artificial corporate moral agents constituted through independent and institutionally embodied systems of political and legal authority and obligation running between citizen members and binding them one to another in a prima facie morally significant manner. To belong as a citizen to a liberal democratic body politic is to belong to something, a system of authority and obligation, from which obligations of prima facie moral force arise. A liberal democratic body politic, then, demands respect not simply as a corporate moral agent, but as a 20 For a fuller account and sympathetic reconstruction of Rawls s argument, see my Rawls on International Justice: A Defense, Political Theory, 32 (2004), pgs , and Political Authority and Human Rights, in Rex Martin and David Reidy, eds., A Realistic Utopia: Essays on Rawls s The Law of Peoples (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, forthcoming). 17

19 people, or a well-ordered people a particular kind of social group within which individual members are morally bound to one another in some significant sense. 21 As well-ordered peoples, corporate moral agents within which members are morally bound to one another in some significant sense, liberal democracies are entitled and bound to justice in their mutual relations. 22 Suppose now a world within which only independent well-ordered liberal democratic peoples exist. This is a world within which domestic justice is secure for all individual persons. But what does justice require of these peoples in their relations to one another? Liberal democratic peoples are committed most fundamentally to the ideal of justice as reciprocity. Justice, then, requires of them that they act toward one another in accord with principles that 21 Rawls, Law of Peoples, pgs. 27, 61-62, 69. Rawls s treatment of liberal democratic peoples as corporate moral persons should surprise no one. As early as 1963 he had written: [t]he term person is to be understood in a general way as a subject of claims. In some cases, it means human individuals, but in others it refers to nations, corporations, churches, teams and so on. Although there is a certain logical priority to the case of human individuals, the principles of justice apply to the relations among all these types of persons, and the notion of a person must be interpreted accordingly. John Rawls, Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice in Samuel Freeman, ed., Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pg John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pgs. 35f. Well-orderedness requires that a people be governed effectively and publicly by a scheme of justice that all or nearly all members accept, know others accept, and are prepared and inclined to honor. Within well-ordered peoples, whether liberal and democratic or not, the subsistence and security needs of all members are met, as are other fundamental human rights, including the rights to formal justice and the core elements of the rule of law, to some meaningful, even if only indirect, measure of political participation, to freedom of conscience and thought, including some meaningful degree of freedom of religion, to political dissent, to ownership of private property, and freedom from servitude. Further, all well-ordered peoples organize their own domestic economies on terms mutually advantageous to all classes of participants over time. Rawls suggests several careful and overlapping lines of argument here, referencing work by Hart, Shue and Soper. But the basic idea seems to be that all this is required by the fundamental commitment, shared by all well-ordered bodies politic, to the moral status of all members as persons, even if not free and equal as in the liberal democratic understanding. If it is to be persons that are the parts through which bodies politic are constituted, and it must be if we, as persons, are to have any reason to respect bodies politic as corporate moral agents, then bodies politic must be constituted as well-ordered. 18

20 they all could freely and reasonably accept, without manipulation, coercion, and so on. But what principles would these be? Here Rawls puts to use his familiar original position argument. But this time the agents in the original position represent liberal democratic peoples (not individual persons) concerned to determine the principles that ought to govern their interactions on the global stage as peoples. Here it is important to get Rawls s view right. Rawls does not make the agents in the international original position represent peoples (rather than individual persons) because he thinks that there is no global basic structure, or that the world is not a closed system, or that political membership is something for which individual persons should be held responsible. Rather, he makes agents in the international original position represent peoples because in the real world we live in, for which we need principles of international or global justice, liberal democratic peoples exist and deserve and owe one another moral recognition and respect. And a world of only liberal democratic peoples is a world within which all individual persons receive (domestic) justice. International cooperation, then, both in the real world we live in and in a world within which all individual persons receive (domestic) justice, presupposes independent and largely autonomous political-legal systems. 23 International cooperation is just that, international. The political question Rawls takes up in LP is not whether we ought to have independent and largely autonomous liberal democratic states. To be sure, that is an important question. And Rawls answers it in the affirmative, citing the need to assign control over and responsibility for territory and resources to well-defined institutional political agents, 24 the great good of political 23 For example, there is no international system of property rights above and beyond that constituted through treaty by states in control of their own domestic systems of property rights and monetary policy. 24 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pgs. 8,

21 membership and autonomy, and so on. But it is not the question at the heart of LP. The question there is how well-ordered liberal democratic peoples ought to interact with one another, how they ought to cooperate as independent peoples. Given their status as corporate moral agents deserving of respect and recognition because they are well-ordered and thus a system of political and legal authority and obligation with prima facie moral significance or force for all their individual members, liberal democratic peoples must regard their international cooperation as parasitic or supervenient upon their own domestic political and legal orders. 25 It is appropriate, then, Rawls maintains, to structure the international original position so that the agents represent peoples rather than individual persons. And this is appropriate even if we suppose a world within which there are only liberal and democratic peoples and thus only liberal democratic citizens. But what principles would agents representing liberal democratic peoples in an appropriately adjusted original position agree to? This depends on their interests and knowledge. The latter is relatively straightforward. They know that they represent liberal democratic peoples, but they do not know the size of the territory, the resources, the national ambitions, and so on of the peoples they represent. They are, to that extent, behind the familiar veil of ignorance. The former is a bit less straightforward. What are the fundamental interests shared by all liberal democratic peoples and thus of interest to agents representing them in an international original position behind a veil of ignorance? The fundamental interests of liberal democratic peoples are not something to be determined through an empirical survey of the ends and interests contingently affirmed by existing liberal democratic peoples. These are too likely to be tainted by morally suspect materialist and consumerist influences endemic under conditions of late capitalism. Rather, the 25 I owe a debt to Samuel Freeman for bringing this issue to my attention. 20