Global justice: Shaped rather than found

Introduction

The main ambition of this article is to set an agenda for an alternative way of thinking about global justice to those which dominate the field today. It argues that what is needed is substantive engagement with principles of justice derived from a variety of approaches beyond the Western canon. In particular, the article aims to set the scene for the incorporation of comparative political theory (CPT) into thinking about global justice.

Attempts to specify principles of just world order have proliferated over the last decade or so. While the ensuing discussion has been fertile in terms of the diversity of the content of the proposals and the field now contains a significant diversity of approaches, it nonetheless remains within a generally constrained horizon of post-Rawlsian liberal thought. Thus, significantly less diversity is apparent in terms of meta-theoretical starting points and philosophical methods.

More specifically, almost all accounts of global justice are drawn entirely from within liberal, post-Rawlsian traditions of thought. None of the major accounts of global justice anywhere draws upon or examines accounts of justice from outside the traditional canon. For instance, there is no mention of Islamic justice or ‘Confucian’ justice in the works of Valentini, Hassoune, Pogge, Brock, Caney and Moellendorf. ¹ This is a troubling tendency for a philosophical/political project that in principle seeks to identify rules that apply to everyone on the planet. As Simon Caney points out, this epistemic parochialism amounts to a ‘blind refusal to consider competing approaches (and) is … a form of philosophical arrogance …. Such unthinking and complacent parochialism leaves one epistemically handicapped’. ² To assume that the content of a global account of justice can be developed without the contributions of the cultures and contexts in which it is applied is epistemic parochialism, ‘it seems odd to arbitrarily privilege ideas drawn from the western experience, and then claim that they apply elsewhere, with no examination of what other traditions have to offer’. ³ The world we exist in is a world, in Dallmayr’s terms, ‘after Babel’, that is:

after the scattering of languages and peoples. This means that we cannot proceed from a presumed unity or univocity of humankind but have to take seriously the diversity or multiplicity of languages, customs, and cultural traditions. Hence, any move or journey in the direction of cosmopolis today can only occur in the mode of sustained dialogue, the mode of cross-cultural and interreligious interaction. ⁴

Questions concerning the fairness of international economic order are of concern to all affected by them. It would seem therefore that a prima facie case exists that any global account of justice must engage in investigations into the compatibility or incompatibility of different values and different traditions of ethical and moral and political thought. In this vein, Farah Godrej has argued that a truly global cosmopolitan theory ‘would be one in which we might bring the idea of Gandhi or Confucius to bear on our discussion of freedom or justice, in the same way that we would use Rawls or, Marx or Hobbes’. ⁵

This article begins by arguing that academic theorizing has been dominated by approaches derived from a very narrow methodological base inappropriate for the circumstances of global justice. The article argues that this situation has come about because of the underlying methodological and philosophical starting points of Western liberalism in enlightenment foundationalism.

For the purposes of argument, it examines the global egalitarian (GE) account of global justice as exemplary of this tendency in the field more broadly. GE advances the most ambitious accounts of justice setting ambitious goals for global redistribution. ⁶ While the GE approach has by no means secured universal consent, nonetheless, most discussions of global justice occur within their shadow and within a general horizon of post-Rawlsian liberal political thought (with the obvious exception of utilitarians such as Singer). ⁷ The article argues with particular reference to GE, that developing principles of global justice requires a non- or anti-foundational starting point which approaches justice as, in Rorty’s words, something ‘shaped rather than found’. The article begins by demonstrating that the limits of GE’s epistemic parochialism extend from its foundationalist assumptions. The result of this parochialism in these approaches is that the solution to global justice lies in the universalizing of (Rawlsian) liberalism because, in effect, liberalism defines justice tout court. The article claims that separating these claims is necessary because it is not self-evident that any form of liberalism can be unproblematically universalized or that a viable account of global distributive justice (GDJ) can be derived from within liberalism alone.

The first part of the argument concludes that profound value pluralism undermines the suitability of the GE solution to global justice; it therefore falls at the first hurdle. However, contrary to statist views, this condition does not undermine the case for an account of global justice per se. ⁸

The second section argues that Rorty’s philosophical anti-foundationalism points towards a different approach to justice that sees it as something ‘shaped rather than found’ and that such an approach opens the way for a CPT of global justice. Responding to the question of how to shape an account of global justice in Rortyian sense requires engagement with political and moral discourses beyond the liberal imaginary. Such a project is the focus of CPT. The final section of the article concludes that developing a theory of global justice requires at least a theoretical engagement with non-Western political thought somewhat in the manner identified by Fred Dallmayr, Farah Godrej and Andrew March as the province of CPT. ⁹

The logic of GE justice

It is possible to delineate at least the following three varieties of liberal cosmopolitan approaches to global justice:(a) liberals who advocate egalitarianism derived from Rawlsian method and first principles (relational); (b) liberals who derive their account of justice from the liberal account of personhood (non-relational), these can be both Rawlsian and non-Rawlsian and can include Kantians and rights theorists; and (c) liberals who do it from an alternative theory of justice such as utilitarianism, for example, Singer. ¹⁰ However, until very recently, discussion of global justice, understood as GDJ, has been dominated by Rawlsian and post-Rawlsian approaches to justice. ¹¹

The focus of this article is with the GE claims of (a) and (b). This is because while all cosmopolitan theorists of global justice are concerned with helping the least well-off in the globe, egalitarians set the most ambitious standards. They seek not only to alleviate poverty but also to ensure a globally egalitarian distributive order which seeks to maximize the wealth of the poorest. Global egalitarianism presents not only the most ambitious but also the most revolutionary intrusion of a cosmopolitan standard into domestic arrangements. Any such claims require close scrutiny.

GE arguments exemplify and amplify tendencies common to much liberal discussion of global justice in that they seek to extrapolate the ‘internal’ principles of liberal thought to the international or global realm. ¹² They express debates internal to liberalism as to the correct global deductions from liberal premises. In this, they are liberal in a methodological sense. Valentini categorizes this logic as one of ‘extension’, in which the justification for global justice depends on the answer to the question, ‘Can principles of justice be meaningfully extended from the domestic context to the world at large?’ ¹³ That is, whether some form of liberal domestic justice can be universalized. The language in this formulation is important because it implies not only that domestic liberalism can be globalized but also that justice is the result of that globalization. The ‘domestic’ here of course means the liberal egalitarian (Rawlsian) conception of justice and for non-Rawlsian liberalism more generally.

Global egalitarians cite two criteria that allow a positive answer to the extension question. The first Valentini calls the non-relational answer, which holds that ‘since liberal–egalitarian principle of domestic justice rest on inherently universalistic grounds they ought to apply globally’. ¹⁴ Examples of this are Beitz’s revisions to his earlier work and Moellendorf (both of whom argue for the global extension of a Rawlsian difference principle), Simon Caney and Kok Chor Tan, ¹⁵ all of whom rest their claims for the universalization of liberal justice on a claim that the liberal conception of the person is true. According to Moellendorf, because the liberal account of the person is true, the ‘truth of conception of justice stands, and can be separated from the comprehensive doctrine from which it arose’. ¹⁶ In other words, liberal justice is derived from a true conception of the person, and so its account of justice must also be true and non-culturally relative, nor part of a comprehensive doctrine, and therefore can be externalized.

Relational justifications take the form that:

the possibility of extending principles of justice from the domestic to the international realm … depends on whether there exists a ‘global basic structure’ similar enough to the domestic one to warrant the application of liberal egalitarian principles of justice. ¹⁷

Much of the ensuing controversy then surrounds whether the international or global sufficiently replicates the conditions of the domestic account of justice to allow its application globally. The question of whether global justice is possible is answered in the affirmative by externalizing one particular account of justice. The entire architecture of global egalitarianism rests on this claim.

While the internal logic of the egalitarian argument is clear and makes sense within the context of liberal thought, it nonetheless rests on the conflation of several issues. First, the argument for a global account of justice is conflated with the arguments for cosmopolitan universalism. This is an unnecessary conflation as the question of cosmopolitan universalism is analytically and substantively distinct from the question of the content and form of that universalism. Cosmopolitan moral universalism could take many forms that are not identical with methodological liberalism.

Second, the arguments defending the need for an account of GDJ are conflated with defending a specific liberal account. Not only is justice global, but it is so as a result of the internal features of a specific liberal account. In the non-relational account, this is because the internal conception of the person generates its universal applicability, whereas for relational accounts, the globalization of the egalitarian model cannot be separated from the presence of the conditions of an account of global justice. In other words, if sufficient conditions of global economic interaction exist, then the internal egalitarian model applies.

However, none of these are necessary conflations, and it is important to separate the different elements. Developing a global account of justice requires the separation of the question of whether there is a need for a global account of justice from the form and content of any account of global justice and the methodological resources from which it can be derived.

What the externalization question does not allow is whether a global account of justice can be understood from the perspective of the globe first and that it may require an account that is not merely a domestic one universalized. This is especially relevant in the case of justice because of the profound normative and political diversity characterizing the domain of applicability. Because of its scope, any account of global justice should in principle be acceptable to everybody on the planet. However, as many critics of GE note, profound normative pluralism is a condition of globalization and limits the terms of mutually understood grounds of justification. ¹⁸ As Valentini claims, ‘the presence of deep value pluralism at the global level suggests caution in advancing the claim that liberal-egalitarian domestic justice should apply globally’. ¹⁹ Under these circumstances, global egalitarianism lacks the justificatory consensus necessary for its own application, that is, it is unlikely to be able to attain universal intersubjective justification and could justifiably be seen as an imposition of a specific liberal domestic account on the world, and as such may not be applicable. An unreflectively globalized liberalism is likely to meet with a range of responses from incredulity to outright opposition.

Beyond monism: justice shaped rather than found

The problems with the GE accounts outlined above ultimately stem from certain basic philosophical and meta-theoretical assumptions regarding how moral knowledge can be attained. Bikhu Parekh calls this philosophical monism which assumes that we

have the capacity to discover the structure of human nature … We are able to arrive at the objective and universally valid knowledge required to decide what way of life is fully human and which ones are false or inferior. ²⁶

According to Parekh, this style of thinking while acknowledging diverse conceptions of the good ultimately demands that only one can be a truly human way of life which ‘remains the norm by which to judge and grade such different ways of life as unequally endowed or enlightened individuals prefer to lead’. ²⁷ This section argues that a monist approach is a problem for any viable cosmopolitan thought that aims to be anything other than an exercise in philosophical problem solving, and instead, a pragmatic approach may provide a better starting point.

It is precisely the logic of monism that neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty sought to question even while defending liberalism. Rorty was an anti-foundationalist philosopher who was sceptical of the types of claim made by GE as in some way able to ground values. But there is sufficient evidence in his thought to claim that he was nonetheless a cosmopolitan in his desire to increase solidarity and decrease unnecessary suffering globally. ²⁸ The argument of this section is that Rorty’s anti-foundationalism paves the way for a better account of global justice by suggesting a focus on conversationally ‘shaping’ rather than philosophically ‘finding’ the principles of a better world order (or classless liberal utopia in his terms).

Rorty criticized enlightenment and particularly post-Kantian thought for approaching its task as if it were to discover truths that were to be found and that such truths would provide the philosophical foundations upon which enquiry could proceed and would deliver the answers through some sort of derivative calculation. The job of philosophy since Plato according to Rorty was to find the truth that was ‘in nature’ or out there and to mirror it. Rorty claimed:

(A)ccording to this platonic myth, the life of reason is not the life of Socratic conversation but an illuminated state of consciousness in which one never needs to ask if one has exhausted the possible description of, or explanation for, the situation, one simply arrives at true beliefs by obeying mechanical procedures. ²⁹

Such a truth counts as a trump card; if only we have the right method, the right way of following logic or reason that conforms with reality, we can arrive at the correct result, at true knowledge and consequently abolish ambiguity and uncertainty. The choice of method therefore is crucial to increasing one’s chances of discovering or arriving at the truth. Reliance on correct method contains a notion ‘that god, or evolution or some other underwriter of our present world-picture has programmed us as machines for accurate verbal picturing, and that philosophy brings self–knowledge by letting us read our own program’. ³⁰

Many liberals, like others, hope to escape what Rorty claims is the deep contingency of social and political thought, by claiming to have found the truth. Amartya Sen argues this results in a ‘transcendent’ understanding of justice that can be defined clearly for all time, and the goal of a theory of justice is to find that definition. ³¹ It is true of any approach that seeks to identify metaphysical essences of humanity, such as reason or self-interest. As noted above, this logic is present in Moellendorf’s claim that the Rawlsian conception of the person is true and therefore universalizable and in the arguments for cosmopolitan justice based on ‘extension’.

Rorty argues that appeals to such universal truths, while they may be philosophically interesting, are less useful and persuasive than they promise. Rorty invites liberals to give up the hope of finding ‘the a priori structure of any possible enquiry or language or form of social life’. ³² His mission was to develop an alternative way of thinking about philosophical tasks derived from American pragmatism. As a pragmatist, he argues that our philosophical, moral and political languages are better understood as different ways of coping with certain situations and some are more successful than others. Liberalism, he argues, is persuasive, if at all, not because it mirrors something essential about humans but because it has been useful in dealing with certain problems. We should not, he argues, defend liberalism on the grounds that it represents some deep essential truth that we have ‘found’, with the implication that others who do not recognize it are in some way in need of ‘enlightenment’ or correction. Instead, it is much more useful to think pragmatically about truth and ideas because doing so will more likely command attention and loyalty. In a famous passage, he argued:

If we give up this hope (of evading contingency), we shall lose what Nietzsche called ‘metaphysical comfort’, but we may gain a renewed sense of community. Our identification with our community – our society our political tradition, our intellectual heritage – is heightened when we see this community as ours rather than nature’s, shaped rather than found, one among many which men have made. In the end what matters the pragmatists tell us, is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right. ³³

People will be loyal to a system or practice not because it can be shown to be rationally true, but because they have helped shape it, they have ownership of it and it reflects their purposes. Carrying on in the ‘found’ mode is, therefore, both somewhat misguided and practically counterproductive.

Among other things, proceeding with an account of justice as found is likely to be met with resistance by those who do not share its basic presuppositions or are committed to their own monistic truth. On the other hand, beginning in a pragmatic mode takes the ‘moral pressure’ off liberals to construct a transcendent account of justice to which all must conform, and has the pragmatic advantage of fostering the liberal virtue of tolerance. According to Rorty, we have good, even justified, but not ‘True’ reasons for being committed to liberalism. Liberals value the type of society it permits, and because it works well in the context of managing competing demands of mass societies and capitalism, it seems to lead to less unnecessary suffering. Therefore, liberals can present its merits to others as having delivered certain benefits in coping with certain problems and can abandon its monism and proceed in a persuasive edifying mode.

Thus, monism and foundationalism provide reasons for the total absence of non-Western, yet alone non-liberal, conceptions in GE accounts of justice. Monism provides the assumption that GE is in some sense epistemically privileged when it comes to formulating principles of justice. This can be seen in the debate over whether liberalism can coexist in any relation of justice with non-liberal orders. The GE response to Rawls indicates its difficulty with the idea of tolerating non-liberal societies. In this account, at least it seems clear that there can be only one account of justice, that it is liberal and that it can be universalized, by implication ridding the world of unjust political systems. Justice therefore can only be realized with the final universal acceptance of GE’s claim to truth. The GE position epistemologically privileges itself and, through the idea of extension, includes an assumption of non-liberal thought as inferior or wrong.

Monism implies an inherently unequal relationship between liberal and non-liberal thought. As a consequence, the only relevant discussions to be had concerning the principles of global justice occur within liberalism because it has ‘found’ the truth. To paraphrase Todorov:

The non-liberals … are posited as inferior from the start, for it is the liberals who determine the rules of the game. The superiority of those who promulgate liberalism … is already contained in the fact that it is they who are speaking while the non-liberals listen. ³⁴

Such a practice is problematic, to say the least when one is considering rules that potentially apply to every person on the planet. Yet, few GE theorists recognize the importance of this.

Todorov drew a second lesson from the encounter between the Spanish and the Americans. In their paltry attempt at moral dialogue, the Spanish use the only moral language they have, their own, to address an audience entirely unfamiliar with it. However, as Chris Brown observes, this language is rendered obsolete, and its vocabulary does not actually work in the context in which it is applied because:

[I]t attempts to ground moral obligations in a conception of the world that explicitly and implicitly precludes its application to the actual circumstances of the New World … the Spanish lawyers may believe their own story but the ground upon which they are attempting to make a stand is shifting beneath their feet. ³⁵

The same could be said of the GE and other liberal approaches; the existence of a global plurality of moral languages, a world beyond the liberal demos, without a reflective equilibrium, precludes the application of the GE solution to the actual circumstances of global injustice and suffering. The ground has shifted in that the context in which GE was developed no longer applies. There are other extant philosophies, beliefs and religions in the world which derive their conclusions about ethics, justice and morality from substantively different justificatory premises which may or may not be compatible with liberal principles. Any account of global justice needs at the very least to engage with these different discourses of justification.

The conclusion to be drawn from the argument so far is that while we have good reasons for attempting to think constructively about global justice, the language and methods employed so far have been less than fully suited to the task because they rest on assumptions that are contested globally.

The next claim is that Rorty’s account of philosophical method sheds light on possibilities for theorizing global justice that are more appropriate to the global condition. ³⁶ Because of his anti-foundationalism, Rorty’s style of arguing has been associated with anti-cosmopolitanism and anti-universalism in general. ³⁷ His comments regarding human rights, and what seems like his communitarian starting point, as well as his rejection of a view from nowhere, can easily be associated with an acceptance of the statist status quo and not with cosmopolitanism. But this is only because so much cosmopolitanism has rested on foundational claims. Rorty’s point is merely that such a community needs to be shaped, and solidarity forged, rather than asserted as required by some law we have not made ourselves.

While Rorty’s approach also bears resemblance to the social liberalism of David Miller, Michael Walzer ³⁸ and Rawls, it is much more hopeful regarding the possibilities of a global account of justice than is often concluded. Rorty argued that we should think about cosmopolitanism (or universalisms) of scope in terms of a pragmatic conversation in which the West no longer seeks to claim that it has discovered philosophical truths through some ahistorical reason, and therefore, we are obliged by morality to treat each other as equals.

In Rorty’s account of pragmatism and rejection of foundationalism, he emphasizes that it is not reason or rationality that will suffice to create a global liberal utopia. Instead, the prospects for progress depend more upon our capacity to tell each other moving stories. Progress occurs when we can successfully tell stories that work to limit cruelty and expand our sense of solidarity, that help us to see our differences as something in common, and not see variations as departures from the essence of a ‘true’ humanity. The task is to expand the realm of solidarity and fellow feeling and realize ‘a global democratic utopia … a planet on which all members of the species are concerned about the fates of all the other members’. ³⁹ Thus, approaching global justice as shaped not found, as without foundations, means a rejection of the idea of justice as ahistorical transcendental principles derived from a true essence of rationality or humanity. Such a view, as is commonly noted, automatically distinguishes between humans who are rational and those who are not human because they are not rational. Taking a pragmatic starting point according to Rorty is to see ourselves and others as not more or less rational, but more or less open, more or less cruel, more or less fearful of differences, better or worse at responding to suffering. The task is not to define ultimately rational principles and then expect them to gain universal acceptance on that basis; it is rather to build solidarity. In this pragmatic anti-foundationalism, there is an opportunity indeed an imperative towards openness, towards listening to other stories and finding what works to bring about reduced suffering.

Thus it is entirely plausible to make a pragmatist and even liberal argument in favour of the pursuit of some sort of universalism, of an inclusive and non-foundational type built by humans out of common struggles and trials and ever expanding consciousness of each other’s struggles. In pragmatic terms, there may be a shared common purpose of reducing unnecessary suffering, including poverty, around which a common vocabulary or sense of solidarity may emerge that is appropriate for this task. Rorty argues:

I think that the rhetoric we Westerners use in trying to get everybody to be more like us would be improved if we were more frankly ethnocentric and less professedly universal. It would be better to say, ‘here is what we in the West look like as a result of ceasing to hold slaves, beginning to educate women, separating church and state, and so on. Here is what happened after we began treating certain distinctions between people as arbitrary rather than fraught with moral significance. If you would try treating them that way, you might like the result’. Saying that sort of thing seems preferable to saying, ‘look at how much better we Westerners are at knowing what differences between persons are arbitrary and which not, how much more rational we are’. If we Westerners could get rid of the notion of universal moral obligation created by membership in the species, and substitute the idea of building a community of trust between ourselves and others, we might be in a better position to persuade non-Westerners of the advantages of joining such a community. ⁴⁰

Rorty’s pragmatism crucially suggests we need to enquire into how to achieve the goal of shaping a new shared account of justice. It suggests that justice should not be considered as something that we in the West (or more specifically liberal political philosophers) have discovered, but rather that shaping the appropriate vocabulary is a common project for the planet. It invites us to think about new and different vocabularies of justice and how they may be created.

Thus, instead of making the argument for global justice dependent on whether the ‘domestic’ conception can be externalized, a pragmatist would ask instead what type of global account of justice can be constructed or shaped by all affected by globalization. Thus, addressing global justice might begin with addressing the problems of severe global poverty and human suffering not from seeking to make the world conform with an abstract idealized philosophical account of justice. It might, as Sen argues, begin with injustice, because global justice is best understood as a response to human problem, and not a philosophical edict to which the world must be made to conform. The task is then to find the appropriate language and vocabulary for dealing with this issue, perhaps such a language itself has to be shaped rather than found. The existence of profound diversity suggests that perhaps the language of Rawlsian egalitarianism, or foundational liberalism, is not the most appropriate to the task.

The importance of Rorty’s view for thinking about global justice is twofold: first, Rorty invites liberals to reconceive their theories in a more ‘ironic’ way. Such a turn would not refute the goal of global justice but suggest only a different way of arguing for and thinking about it. The horrors of poverty and inequality that liberals seek to address may be best pursued by a pragmatic rather than a foundational liberalism. Rorty is not suggesting abandoning liberalism in the search for global justice, but only to rethink how its arguments are made to others. ⁴¹ This alternative has the advantage of not alienating the intended audience from the outset. ⁴² Thus, as Cochran claims, ‘by undermining the universal moral authority of our claims about human rights, we may even serve to enhance our powers of persuasion’. ⁴³ The prospects of developing a viable account of global justice will thus be enhanced if we approach it as ‘shaped’ rather than ‘found’. This is both a necessary prerequisite of any account of global justice and, if Rorty is right, more likely to contribute to a heightened identification with, and therefore legitimacy of, the goals of global justice and cosmopolitanism in general. In sum, the consequences of pragmatism for thinking about global justice are that first we cease to conduct theorizing about global justice in the model of discovery and shift to a model of shaping. Such a shift does not require the abandonment of any substantive content or account of justice, rather a repositioning and re-understanding of its provisional and contingent nature. ⁴⁴

However, Rorty’s approach is of course not without its critics; most often, he is accused of relativism and of failing to address the issue of how and whether we can make ‘better’ or worse’ judgements between different contributions or perspectives. Rorty’s pragmatist response is that the answer lies in finding what ‘works’ best rather than formulating some strict criteria of judgement against which all can be measured in terms of truth. For Rorty, the criticism rests on the very assumption he wishes to challenge, that such transcendental or ‘objective’ criteria can be found. While these are important points, they cannot be explored in depth here nor is it necessary to defend him on these points; it is sufficient to note that these are problems that any pragmatist needs to address. What can be argued here is that Rorty’s position needs to be partially supplemented by an explicit openness to what may be learned, what may be useful, in other traditions and ways of being because there is a cause for misgiving in Rorty’s account of liberalism and global solidarity. It is not always clear whether he is making an argument, not unlike that of Tan, that liberals should be better persuaders, that ‘liberals should exercise tact and caution in their attempts to universalise their morality, that they be less unreflective when engaging other (cultural) points of views’. ⁴⁵ This suggests that the task of solidarity building might still be primarily a task of spreading liberalism.

Rorty like other liberals believes it would be a good thing if everyone were liberal, but only on pragmatic grounds, not foundational ones. However, he spends insufficient time on what the contribution of non-liberals might be to the task of solidarity. But if the challenge of building global solidarity on pragmatic terms is taken seriously, then it might also involve the possibility that what is shaped is truly shaped by all and reflects their input. It might require that liberals increase their levels of solidarity and common sentiment with non-liberal people by welcoming and engaging with non-liberal truths. The point here is that anti-foundationalism and shaping are not enough without mutuality and exchange and openness to the possibilities offered by other solutions to pragmatic problems. Solidarity may come from engaging in shared projects, such as eliminating global poverty to which liberals and non-liberals alike may contribute their solutions.

Therefore, Rorty’s meta-ethical claims endorsed here are only the beginning of an adequate account of global justice. Rorty gives us little in the way of reflection on modes of dialogue and conversation or reflection on how we might evaluate other people’s traditions. At times, certainly in his earlier work, he appears to have fallen prey to the myth of incommensurability, for he offers no ‘transcendental’ escape from our own community’s standards or vocabularies. Nonetheless, Rorty’s starting point can be usefully supplemented by others like Gadamer and those who reflect on the nature of dialogue and conversation. ⁴⁶ Such thinkers largely share Rorty’s rejection of the search for a transcendental ahistorical truth out there and look instead to the conversation between different starting points, vocabularies and the possibilities for understanding across and between these vocabularies.

If we respond to the idea of global justice in this way, we open the door to other traditions of thought as potential contributors to the collection of human stories about how to respond to poverty injustice and suffering. We can engage in conversation with other potential story tellers from whom we may learn something. Such a task is part of the justification for the emergent field of CPT which forms the third part of this article.

Towards a comparative theory of global justice

It should be clear that nothing that has been said above should be equated with the argument that profound cultural diversity undermines the case for cosmopolitan justice. The goal is to draw attention to the epistemic deficit of non-Western thought in debates on global justice and how it may be remedied. If we are to think of global justice as shaped rather than found, then we need to examine and reflect upon which accounts of justice are contributing to the shaping of it.

In the context of the arguments made above, it makes sense to argue that any account of GDJ needs to at least engage in comparative investigation of different accounts of justice and, where possible, identify, at least in principle, areas of agreement and disagreement. This might involve examining both the scholarly traditions and popular traditions of political thought in Western and non-Western cultures as well as the works of individual thinkers. ⁴⁷ Such work is the terrain of the emergent field of CPT.

A meeting of cosmopolitanism and CPT is required in order to shape a more genuinely inclusive account of global justice. The content of such a meeting is beyond the scope of this article; what can be suggested here is why such a meeting might be useful and how it might proceed. Further substantive argument must await further treatment. ⁴⁸

CPT is a relatively new and still developing field of political thought informed by a primary goal of making unfamiliar non-Western political thought familiar to mainstream political theory. This includes interpreting and understanding non-Western political thought on its own terms. So far, CPT has been dominated by something like a Verstehen, or even a historicist approach, in which we as outsiders seek to understand ‘them’ on their own terms, or to enter into their world view, and explain it to ourselves. Part of CPT’s brief is to de-provincialize the canon of Western political theory and to see non-Western political thought as a resource as equal in value.

Largely in agreement with Godrej, Fred Dallmayr, the acknowledged godfather of CPT, sees its task as contributing to intercivilizational understanding. CPT’s purpose is to build bridges between cultures and traditions and through that enlarge a sense of global solidarity, while avoiding other modes of contact involving domination or assimilation. Dallmayr’s work is explicitly informed by the philosophical hermeneutics of H. G. Gadamer and he sees CPT as part of a global ‘fusion of horizons’ between different cultures and traditions. Dallmayr has also been a trenchant critic of liberal cosmopolitanism and the tendency to unproblematically extrapolate Western political theory to the globe. ⁴⁹ Thus, while addressed to cosmopolitanism in general, their arguments parallel those being made here. If we accept the possibility that justice is something that can be shaped rather than found, an obvious next step is to turn towards the possible sources for shaping a global account of justice provided by CPT.

Recent interventions have sought to push the field in a more ‘engaged’ direction, that is, towards the idea of comparative evaluation and not mere retrieval of non-Western thought. Andrew March argues that:

[E]xploring the normative implications for us of principled value-conflict is an appropriate task of engaged political theory and could be made the centerpiece of the comparative political theory project. Thus, comparative political theory may be conceived of as ‘justificatory’ comparative political theory. ⁵⁰

March’s vision is for a CPT which engages in comparison of points of contestation between different traditions and their representatives with an eye to substantive issues and proposals of interest to political theory such as the content of justice or fairness, the acceptability of human suffering and its possible remedies. Such an approach is appropriate to the task of a theory of global justice. CPT can help investigate what resources there are in other traditions of thought for thinking about how justice is understood in differently located thinkers and traditions. CPT not only widens the canon, identifies areas of deep value conflict or disagreement, and also possible consensus or overlap between different traditions of thought. In this context, different ways of thinking about fairness and distributive questions can be brought into touch with each other in attempts to design a just world order. Real differences of value may likely appear and stand in need of understanding and of possible resolution.

Thus, the first task of a CPT of global justice is to identify the resources that may exist in other traditions of thought. What, for instance, does a Confucian political tradition suggest about distributive questions? Islam? Hinduism? How do indigenous peoples think about fairness? Are there grounds for agreement, can we anticipate likely areas of disagreement?

Beyond that, there are a number of possible paths a CPT of global justice might take. CPT may help to reflect on principles of global justice which may be in reflective equilibrium with the considered judgements of as many cultures and perspectives as may possibly be effected by practices based on those distributive principles. Alternatively, an extant account, such as global egalitarianism, could be ‘tested’ or brought into conversation to ascertain how it may or may not conflict with ‘non-western’ traditions or whether it could form the focus of an overlapping consensus. This would employ CPT approaches to determine where such deep value conflicts may arise and why. This approach would take the Rawlsian starting point as a grundnorm for assessing all international institutions. A CPT of global justice might in this vein look to see what sort of global overlapping consensus could be constructed to fit this grundnorm.

Such an approach while certainly potentially productive has its limitations because it begins from an already presupposed standard of justice. Because justice is such a comprehensive conception in the Rawlsian framework, it speaks to the nature of the political order in totality. It is an argument that any political order must meet the criteria of justice. Such an assumption may not be common to non-Western thought (and to some Western thought); the relationship of the political order to questions of fairness and distribution may be secondary to other concerns such as order. This may well translate into conceptions of an international or global political order that has values other than justice as its main priority.

As a result, there may be good reason for being cautious about the term global justice when applied to non-Western political thought. Justice is a term that is itself laden with content and meaning, and such meaning is likely to be more contested and understandings differ more radically when looking across cultural boundaries, to use it as focus for CPT risks blocking the way to genuinely comparative exercise.

Thus, to begin with a discussion of justice is to begin with a culturally thick conception of the topic at hand, and doing so implies that whatever texts are encountered will be automatically assimilated into that question. They will not be understood on their own terms but instead interpreted first in terms outside their own tradition. The method of CPT would suggest requiring an understanding of what the questions that concern the other tradition are first and only then seeing how they may or may not fit into the question at hand.

For this reason, addressing poverty, or destitution, may provide a better focus for discussion than an ideal conception of justice. Amartya Sen has proposed that it is easier and more productive to identify instances and the content of injustice, and then to assess the global order from that perspective, on the basis that injustice is more easily identifiable than a determinative account of justice. ⁵¹ Any enquiry might need to ask of other thinkers and canons not ‘what is justice?’ but what are the resources for thinking about poverty and severe suffering. Different traditions may not reply the answer is a ‘just basic structure’ but instead something entirely different. The work on this is already underway though only just begun.

For instance, Caney, Linklater and Sen have all identified the possibility of significant cross cultural agreement in regard to core distributive goals such as eradicating severe poverty and avoiding unnecessarily harmful practices that cause it. ⁵² It is highly plausible that a global goal of avoiding the injustice of poverty ‘can be endorsed by people from different traditions and that they would do so for different reasons and rely on different modes of argument’. ⁵³ Thus, the important implication is the necessity of engaging in comparative political theorizing focused on questions of fairness, justice and alleviation of suffering.

Finally, any such theorizing should not neglect to identify what, if any, realms of agreement exist at the international or global level. Such agreement or consensus represents the basis of any possible globally shared moral view. A number of possible such areas of shared value may exist and may either complement or exist in contradiction to each other. These include a global moral discourse around statehood, nationalism, sovereignty, self-determination and the extant global discourse surrounding human rights.

The article has challenged the GE presumption of the existence of spurious universal liberal moral cosmology from the start even while being addressed to people from potentially entirely different cosmologies and justificatory backgrounds. This section began to explore what it would do to our accounts of justice to take non-Western ideas seriously as contributions to knowledge. Its conclusions suggest engaging with CPT would transform the theoretical landscape of global justice.

Conclusion

Rorty argued that different philosophical vocabularies arise in different times and places to suit different purposes; part of the ‘progress’ of philosophy is moving beyond outdated vocabularies when their circumstances no longer apply. ⁵⁴ Rawls’ vocabulary clearly applied to the nation state, and indeed to the liberal state, and the domestic context. If this is the case, then the GE method is inappropriate and less ‘useful’ in Rorty’s terms, to the problem of global justice. The circumstances of global justice suggest a new and different circumstance, and a new and different vocabulary for dealing with human suffering is required. Such a vocabulary may be a ‘global’ one, best shaped by bringing existing vocabularies into dialogue with each other. Therefore, we are directed towards wider resources for thinking about the principles that might govern global relations.

This article has been concerned with the theoretical task of thinking about global justice. It makes no claim about the practical task other than an implicit claim that theories of global justice need to take into account the circumstances of the hypothetical practical application. Put in slightly different terms, the construction of a global political theory of justice needs to move away from the methodological solipsism characteristic of most contemporary thought on global justice and towards a methodological pluralism drawn from CPT.

The goals of a theory of global justice and the practice of global justice and eliminating poverty should not be confused, but the latter should not be conducted without reflection on the former, nor the former without the latter. While any academic formulation cannot stand in for the result of actual deliberations between real people, real practical discourses, it can contribute to the task of understanding the backgrounds and contexts of those arguments. It can help shape new languages and vocabularies with which to grapple with problems of a global age.

This article has argued that while the circumstances of global life indicate the need for a more globally just world order, the liberal egalitarian account is misplaced. The existence of global value pluralism and the lack of a global reflective equilibrium undermine the applicability of this approach while not reducing the need for either an account of global justice or for a globally just international order. It argued that any such order must be consequently shaped rather than found; it must be the result of inputs from a variety of sources. The implication of this is that theoretical accounts of global justice need to draw upon resources from outside the standard canon.