The Human Right to Democracy and the Pursuit of Global Justice

This chapter addresses two interconnected questions about human rights and the pursuit of global justice: Is there a human right to democracy? How does the achievement of human rights, including the human right to democracy, contribute to the pursuit of global justice? The chapter answers the first question in the affirmative. It identifies three reasons for favoring democracy and explores the significance of those reasons for defending it as a human right. It answers important worries that acknowledging a human right to democracy would lead to intolerance and lack of respect for peoples’ self-determination, exaggerate the importance of democracy for securing other rights, generalize institutional arrangements that only work in some contexts, and tie human rights to specific ideas of freedom and equality that do not have the same universal appeal and urgency. Regarding the second question, the chapter distinguishes between basic and non-basic global justice and argues that democracy is significant for both. It claims that the fulfillment of human rights constitutes basic global justice, explains how a human right to democracy has significance for the legitimacy of international besides domestic institutions, and shows how forms of global democracy and the exploration of cosmopolitan and humanist commitments underlying human rights may enable and motivate the pursuit of non-basic demands of global justice (such as those concerning socioeconomic equality). The key claim in the chapter is that the fulfillment of the human right to democratic political empowerment is crucial for the pursuit of global justice.

The Link between Subsistence and Human Rights

This chapter constitutes an exploration and evaluation of the so-called “linkage argument” in support of the inclusion of a right to subsistence among human rights. While it is uncontroversial that avoiding poverty is hugely important for all humans, the human right to subsistence and other socioeconomic human rights are often regarded as social goals rather than genuine rights. The linkage argument aims to show that a commitment to the existence of any human rights at all entails a commitment to the inclusion of a right to subsistence among them. I argue that the linkage argument does not succeed in vindicating the inclusion of a right to subsistence among moral human rights, but I conclude that a modified version of it might support the justification of a legal human right to subsistence.

The Right to Resist Global Injustice

This chapter tries to motivate support for what it terms the Right of Resistance against Global Injustice, where this should be understood as a right to bring about greater global justice. More specifically it defends two conceptions of this core idea. Roughly stated, the first maintains that persons have the right to take direct action that will immediately and directly secure their rights or the rights of others (what is referred to as the Right of Resistance against Global Injusticei (RRGIi)). The second holds that persons have the right to engage in action that transforms the underlying social, economic, and political structures that perpetuate injustice in order to bring about greater justice in the future (what is referred to as the Right of Resistance against Global Injusticeii (RRGIii)). These formulations are approximate and need to be explicated more fully, but they express the key ideas. The chapter seeks to specify these more fully, and to address various questions about the meaning, content, grounding, and limits of these rights.

Global Justice and the Role of the State

The chapter critically analyzes the role played by the state in the global justice debate. It surveys the different ways in which statists and cosmopolitans invoke the state either to justify the scope and content of their preferred principles of justice or to explain how such principles might be realized. The chapter also distinguishes between two conceptualizations of the state: as a system of institutions and as an agent in its own right. On the basis of this analysis, the authors conclude that both at the level of justification and at that of realization, the most plausible positions with respect to global justice lie somewhere in between full-blown cosmopolitanism and full-blown statism. While principles of egalitarian justice are not confined to the state, they do not extend in identical form to the global realm. Similarly, while the state—as we know it—is insufficient to realize plausible principles of justice (be they statist or cosmopolitan), what realizing justice requires falls short of the creation of a comprehensive global sovereign.

Global Justice and Global Citizenship

While the concept of global citizenship has a pedigree dating back more than 2000 years, as well as many current advocates and interpreters, scholarly critics tend to dismiss it as simply incoherent. How, they ask, can it be possible to practice global citizenship in the absence of some global state? This chapter argues that, although the full formal trappings of citizenship are not likely to emerge anytime soon at the global level, individuals can make important contributions toward realizing its substance there. In assuming duties to promote comprehensive rights protections for others who do not share their state citizenship, and promoting the sort of supra-state institutional transformation that could more reliably secure such protections, they can enact some key aspects of global citizenship. Further, such an institutionally developmental approach to global citizenship is shown to be less distinct than claimed from domestic conceptions, which define citizenship partly in terms of ideals and practices that are acknowledged to need further development.

Thinking Normatively about Global Justice without Systematic Reflection on Global Capitalism

Given the huge impact of capitalism on global justice, it is a significant weakness of liberal political philosophy devoted to global justice that it has paid relatively little attention to this impact. Symptomatic of this weakness are the political ineffectiveness and explanatory reticence of liberal theories of global justice in the face of the large and arguably growing gap between theory and practice. This chapter discusses Rawls’s Law of Peoples as an paradigmatic case, taking particular issue with his vision of a realistic utopia and his idea of democratic peace. It aims to show how the mainstream liberal approach is vitiated in its grasp of relevant facts and in its normative plausibility by the separation of the political and the economic, of the normative and the causal, and by the resulting ideological reconciliation with the status quo.

Immigration

This chapter analyzes the debate between advocates of open borders and defenders of the state’s right to control immigration. It examines four arguments for the former view. (1) As common owners of the earth, everyone has the right to enter any part of it. (2) Equality of opportunity at global level requires that people should be free to move between countries. (3) There is a human right to immigrate to any country one chooses. (4) States cannot coercively exclude immigrants unless they also allow them to participate democratically in the making of immigration policy. It then considers four arguments that can be used to justify border controls. (1) Citizens have a right to freedom of association that includes the right not to associate with unwanted others. (2) Distributive justice presupposes a cultural community, the protection of which requires selective admission. (3) Stronger forms of democracy demand a high level of trust among citizens, which increased diversity may threaten. (4) Members of a political community have ownership rights over its collective assets, access to which requires their permission. It concludes by noting areas of convergence between the two sides in this apparently polarized debate.

Global Gender Justice

This chapter surveys the rapidly expanding philosophical work on global gender justice. The chapter clarifies some central themes, beginning by identifying several structural features of the current global order which are facially gender-neutral but are profoundly reshaping global gender relations and divisions of labor. The feminization of the global labor force raises questions about the justice of migration for gendered employment such as sex and domestic work as well as the international trade in procreative services. The chapter also touches briefly on some gendered implications of environmental degradation. It raises epistemological questions about identifying, measuring, and explaining gender injustice and discusses how political responsibility for addressing injustices should be assigned. Overall, the chapter shows that gender concerns are integral to most aspects of global justice and that reflection on these sheds new light on some central issues of global justice.

Capabilities, Freedom, and Severe Poverty

Severe poverty is a key challenge for theorists of global justice. Most theorists have approached this issue primarily by developing accounts for understanding which kinds of duties have relevance and how responsibilities for tackling severe poverty might be assigned to agents, whether individuals, nations, or states. All such views share a commitment to ending severe poverty as a wrongful deprivation with a profoundly negative impact on affected individuals. While much attention has prioritized identifying reasons for others to provide relief, this chapter examines the nature of the wrongful deprivation that characterizes severe poverty. One influential view is championed by Martha Nussbaum in her distinctive capabilities approach. An individual might be considered to experience severe poverty where she is unable to enjoy the use of the capabilities which should be available to her. But this position raises several questions. Take the fact that about 1 billion people are unable to meet their basic needs today. Would the capabilities approach claim the number is much higher given its wider grasp of human flourishing beyond mere material subsistence—and what implications would flow from this? Or would the capabilities approach claim only a portion of those unable to meet their basic needs are in a wrongful state because their circumstances are a result of free choice—and what would this mean? These questions indicate a potential concern about whether the approach is over- or underinclusive and why.

What Second-Best Scenarios Reveal about Ideals of Global Justice

While there need be no conflict in theory between addressing global inequality (inequalities between people worldwide) and addressing domestic inequality (inequalities between people within a political community), there may be instances in which the feasible mechanism for reducing global inequality risks aggravating domestic inequality. The burgeoning literature on global justice has tended to overlook this type of scenario, and theorists espousing global egalitarianism have consequently not engaged with cases that are important for evaluating and clarifying the content of their theories. This chapter explores potential tensions between promoting global and domestic inequality. It introduces a class of second-best scenarios that global justice theorists have neglected in order to demonstrate the importance of such scenarios as an aid to constructing and evaluating ideals of global justice.