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On Global Justice This page intentionally left blank On Global Justice Mathias Risse P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S P R I N C E T O N A N D O X F O R D Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket Photograph: Earth by Yuri Arcurs. Courtesy of Dreamstime. All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Risse, Mathias, 1970– On global justice / Mathias Risse. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-691-14269-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-691-14269-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Internationalism. 2. Distributive justice. 3. Human rights. I. Title. JZ1308.R57 2012 340(cid:101).115—dc23 2011053393 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon and Univers Printed on acid-free paper. (cid:104) Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Für meine Eltern, Josef und Maria Risse, In grosser Achtung und mit viel Liebe And for my wife, Kozue Sato Risse, Who has done the most beautiful thing for me This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Chapter 1: The Grounds of Justice 1 Part 1: Shared Citizenship and Common Humanity Chapter 2: “Un Pouvoir Ordinaire”: Shared Membership in a State as a Ground of Justice 23 Chapter 3: Internationalism versus Statism and Globalism: Contemporary Debates 41 Chapter 4: What Follows from Our Common Humanity? The Institutional Stance, Human Rights, and Nonrelationism 63 Part 2: Common Ownership of the Earth Chapter 5: Hugo Grotius Revisited: Collective Ownership of the Earth and Global Public Reason 89 Chapter 6: “Our Sole Habitation”: A Contemporary Approach to Collective Ownership of the Earth 108 Chapter 7: Toward a Contingent Derivation of Human Rights 130 Chapter 8: Proportionate Use: Immigration and Original Ownership of the Earth 152 Chapter 9: “But the Earth Abideth For Ever”: Obligations to Future Generations 167 Chapter 10: Climate Change and Ownership of the Atmosphere 187 Part 3: International Political and Economic Structures Chapter 11: Human Rights as Membership Rights in the Global Order 209 Chapter 12: Arguing for Human Rights: Essential Pharmaceuticals 232 viii • Contents Chapter 13: Arguing for Human Rights: Labor Rights as Human Rights 245 Chapter 14: Justice and Trade 261 Part 4: Global Justice and Institutions Chapter 15: The Way We Live Now 281 Chapter 16: “Imagine There’s No Countries”: A Reply to John Lennon 304 Chapter 17: Justice and Accountability: The State 325 Chapter 18: Justice and Accountability: The World Trade Organization 346 Notes 361 Bibliography 415 Index 453 Preface In James Joyce’s short story “The Boarding House,” we learn about one character that “she dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat” (Dubliners, 1992, 58). That person presumably cut through all complexities of a moral question by formulating a clear and strong posi- tion that simply ignored all voices of doubt. The contemporary debate about global distributive justice is not amenable to this kind of approach. In an increasingly politically and economically interconnected world, it is hard to ascertain what justice requires. It is diffi cult to spell out how principles of justice apply, to begin with, and hard to assess what they entail for pressing political questions ranging from immigration to trade and climate change. The two traditional ways of thinking about justice at the global level either limit the applicability of justice to states or else extend it to all human beings. The view I defend rejects both these approaches and in- stead recognizes different considerations or conditions based on which individuals are in the scope of different principles of justice. To my mind, fi nding a philosophically convincing alternative to those approaches is the most demanding and important challenge contemporary political phi- losophy faces (one that in turn refl ects the signifi cance of the political is- sues that are at stake). It is in light of my confi dence in the importance of this kind of work—but indeed only when taking that perspective—that I feel like the “good author” in Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, “who really cares about his subject” and therefore “wishes that someone would come and destroy him by representing the same subject more clearly and by answering every last question contained in it” (1996, 57). My own view, and thus my attempt at meeting the aforementioned challenge, acknowledges the existence of multiple grounds of justice. This book seeks to present a foundational theory that makes it plausible that there could be multiple grounds of justice and to defend a specifi c view of the grounds that I call internationalism or pluralist internationalism. Internationalism grants particular normative relevance to the state but qualifi es this relevance by embedding the state into other grounds that are associated with their own principles of justice and that thus impose additional obligations on those who share membership in a state. Other than shared membership in a state, it is humanity’s common ownership of the earth that receives the most sustained treatment. And it is probably in the conceptualization of common ownership as a ground of justice that my view seems strangest.