On Global Justice by Mathias Risse (review)

What does global justice require within a system of sovereign nation states whose behavior is weakly coordinated by a set of rather imperfect international institutions? Working within the Rawlsian tradition in political philosophy, Mathias Risse answers this question by defending a view that he calls "pluralist internationalism." For Risse, as for John Rawls, the relationship between individual states and their citizens is normatively significant because it is characterized by immediacy and reciprocity, and also because within each nation state one can speak of an organized demos which is capable, in principle, of holding its government accountable. All of the Rawlsian requirements of social justice, including the difference principle, hold within each state, but only some hold globally because the relationship between states and their own citizens is "thicker" than that between states and humanity in general. In practical terms, his account entails that states have strong duties to reduce inequality of opportunity and to benefit the least advantaged through their domestic public policies, but they do not have these same duties with respect to people in other nations. Correcting the current wide disparities in national wealth and power are not therefore obligations of global justice in his account. However, individuals, states, and other institutions do have significant international duties of justice which are derived from four additional independent grounds: common humanity, co-ownership of the earth, membership in the global order, and participation in the global trading system.

Risse thus stakes out a moderate position, arguing both against statists who deny that states have any duties of justice beyond their own borders, and also against cosmopolitans who believe that globalization and the emergence of a global civil society entail that all of the Rawlsian principles of distributive justice apply globally. His pluralist internationalism combines relational and contingent grounds for human rights claims with nonrelational and natural ones which converge and diverge with respect to different concerns, yielding a nuanced and carefully argued account of what global justice requires. His pluralist account provides a "many-legged" justification for human rights claims, one which supports some conventionally accepted human rights based duties but not others. Risse also takes the "institutional turn" and sees the duties of justice, including those derived from human rights, as primarily (but not exclusively) borne by states, rather than individuals.

Risse's account of human rights is complex. He accepts the widely-shared conception of human rights that holds that each individual human being has good of his or her own, an equal and inherent worth, that deserves respect and provides a basis for ascribing to her or him a set of human rights. He avows that "We have learned the basic cosmopolitan lesson: moral equality is an essential part of any credible theory of global justice."¹ But he does not believe that "common humanity" alone is a sufficient ground for human rights, nor that an account of human rights is sufficient to define the demands of global justice. He understands human rights as "moral rights that are invariant with respect to local conventions, institutions, culture, or religion."² He defines natural rights as "moral rights whose justifications depend on natural attributes of persons and facts about the nonhuman world," but "only those natural rights are human rights that are needed to protect the distinctively human life."³ If so, then, "all natural rights give rise to human rights, but not all human rights are derived from natural rights."⁴ In addition to natural rights, there are also contingent facts about how the world works that give rise to associative rights that hold "because individuals live within a particular association, the global political and economic order."⁵ This leads him to describe human rights in general as membership rights in the global order, which includes both the natural order and the contingent historically derived social, political, and economic orders of human civilization. This kind of hybrid account of human rights makes a good deal of sense, and he develops it in a clear and careful way...