Both Beitz and Pogge are strongly influenced by Rawls but criticise his refusal
to extend his theory of domestic justice to the international sphere. However, as
Beitz acknowledges, Rawls’s position on global redistribution has its roots in his
assumptions about the ‘circumstances of justice’, meaning the circumstances under
which it makes sense to talk about justice and injustice. A starting point for Rawls
is the idea that justice is about the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of
social cooperation (Beitz, 1999: 131). This description introduces elements of a
social ideal into what should be a mere description of a social condition. Slaves in
ancient Greece were part of society but neither willingly cooperated nor (arguably)
benefited from the ‘polis’: ‘it would be better to say that the requirements of justice
apply to institutions and practices (whether or not they are genuinely cooperative)
in which social activity produces relative or absolute benefits or burdens that would
not exist if the social activity did not take place’ (Beitz, 1999: 131). The international
economy is not a cooperative scheme in Rawls’s narrow sense but it is one in Beitz’s
wide sense of ‘cooperation’. This has radical implications: Rawls’s two principles
of justice cannot be restricted to the nation-state but must – in some form – be
implemented globally.
Although Beitz later weakened the requirement for cooperation from actual
cooperation to the capacity for cooperation, he accepts that the absence of
cooperation weakens the duty to redistribute wealth between states. In an imaginary
world of self-contained (‘autarkic’) states redistribution would be limited to
providing states lacking natural resources with the ability to acquire the conditions
for just political institutions and satisfy its citizens’ basic needs (the idea that
resource-rich countries pay a dividend tax is developed by Pogge and is discussed
later). Where countries are not autarkic and thus potentially cooperative a stronger
principle of distribution is required: Rawls’s ‘difference principle’ – whereby the
poorest class must be made as well off as possible – should be extended globally.
Thomas Pogge digs further down into what he sees as the incoherence of Rawls’s
non-extension of domestic justice to the world. The moral universalism implicit in
Rawls’s theory should, he argues, commit us to the position that all persons should
be subject to the same system of fundamental moral principles and thus to the same
assignment of the benefits and burdens arising from the application of those
principles. Of course, at a less fundamental level people may be treated differently,
but that differential treatment must be justified by reference to the fundamental
principles. Equality is the default position. Inequalities that cannot be justified
within a particular nation-state should not in principle be justified between nation-
states. The task for critics of cosmopolitanism is to find principled reasons for
treating the cases differently. To explore the possibility that such principles might
be established Pogge imagines a country called Sub-subbrazil (Pogge, 2002: 100).
As its name suggests it is modelled on Brazil which, by various measures, such as
the Gini Index, is one of the most unequal in the world, and thus can be used as
a domestic counterpart to the global inequality that exists between the rich West
(or north) and the poor south. Sub-subbrazil might not be objectionable if the
economic order was accepted by the majority, so we have to imagine that peaceful
change from below is not possible and it is therefore not meaningful to talk of
majority support for the existing economic system: Sub-subbrazil is just such a
country.
Chapter 22 Global justice 487