Abstract
Over the past decade, philosophers have increasingly explored the duties of justice at the global scale, in light of the rapid globalization of the world. Global Justice and Develop-ment by Julian Culp, a young academic based in Frankfurt, adds to this growing body of literature.
The book consists of two parts. In the long first part, Culp presents and criticizes a range of approaches to distributive justice at the global scale, and argues in favour of a discourse -theoretic approach (discussed below). In the second part, he outlines the consequences of the latter approach for the practice of international development policies.
The first part covers globalist, statist, transnational and international perspectives of global distributive justice, dedicating a chapter to each of these approaches. Each chapter contains a detailed discussion of the various sub-streams of each approach. For instance, Culp distinguishes between a practice-dependent and practice-independent account of globalism. Likewise, he discusses ‘strong statism’, which rejects any claims for distributive justice beyond the state, as well as ‘weak statism’, which only accepts some responsibility for justice in case of absolute deprivation. Culp presents and subsequently critiques each sub-stream, meticulously spelling out well-known and less well-known arguments. For instance, he argues that the globalist approach has to be abandoned, because it implies accepting a world state, which has already been dismissed by Kant because of the likely undesirable consequences. In his discussion of weak statism, Culp argues powerfully that the approach only takes the perspective of the recipients of justice into account and fails to develop an argument regarding the responsibility for mitigating absolute deprivation. Transnationalism is presented as a ‘promising middle ground’ (p. 74) between globalist and statist perspectives. It neither extrapolates domestic justice to the global scale, nor fails to take the global condition of pervasive inequalities truly seriously. Yet, by accepting the plurality of transnational relations and perceiving these relations as the contexts for justice, transnationalism fails to provide coherent and public principles of justice.
Drawing on a number of authors, most notably Rawls, Pogge, Buchanan and Forst, Culp then argues that a discourse-theoretic approach to internationalism provides the most compelling conception of global justice. Discourse-theoretic or democratic internationalism claims that ‘a fundamentally just global basic structure’ (p. 130) is prevalent if all persons ‘can effectively engage in the exchange of reasons concerning their common institutions on an equal footing’ (p. 124). This requires at the international level that all representatives of ‘fundamentally just states’ ought to be granted ‘a sufficient degree of justificatory power in international processes of opinion and will formations’ (p. 125). For this to occur, excessive socio-economic inequalities between states are to be curbed ‘through appropriate regulatory mechanisms’ (p. 125). At the national level, it requires the establishment of domestic conditions that enable all members of a state to participate in the processes of deliberation and justification. Importantly, these two levels are connected, because the international agreement about acceptable socio-economic inequalities determines the resources available at the national level to create the domestic conditions for proper deliberative processes. Because this is so, Culp argues that states ‘must engage in enabling other states to meet their intranational conditions of fundamental justice’ (p. 128, italics in original), thereby explicitly (and finally) linking global justice to international development practice and procedural justice to substantive implications.
In the book’s second part, Culp turns to defend a particular form of development practice. Drawing on Sen and Nussbaum, he argues that capabilities provide a better metric for assessing development than economic growth. Yet, Culp criticizes Sen for being too open-ended and Nusbaum for her top-down identification of 10 basic capabilities. Drawing on discourse-theoretical internationalism, he then argues that justice requires ‘the realization of those capabilities that enable democratic procedures to occur’ (p. 150). International development practice, in turn, is warranted because, and to the extent that, it promotes the realization of these capabilities. The fundamental treat of discourse-theoretic internationalism is then that it ‘takes the relations of justificatory power, rather than the distribution of goods, as fundamental’ (p. 170).
While Culp’s presentation of discourse-theoretic internationalism is rich and convincing, it is also highly open-ended when taken seriously. Indeed, while Culp claims that the primary demand of global justice is to establish the political and socio-economic conditions necessary for reasonably democratic arrangements, he refrains from specifying which conditions are required to enable democratic will formation. In this way, he can avoid the overly intrusive, top-down, approach of Nussbaum which he severely criticizes. Yet, if the establishment of the basic socio-economic conditions for democratic arrangements is taken serious, it seems that a specification of a list of basic capabilities cannot be avoided. The discourse-theoretic approach is not the solution.
Global Justice and Development is not an easy read, for at least three reasons. First, virtually every argument is repeated at least three times: once when the author looks forward to the next section, once when the argument is developed in detail and once when the argument is summarized. Second, Culp has a tendency to write overly complex sentences. Third, the book does not contain a single graph, table or figure, to illustrate, summarize or support the often complex arguments put forward in the text. It consists of 170 pages of plain text and another 20 of endnotes. These make the book a terribly slow and annoying read. And that is too bad, as there is a powerful message here. The book would benefit substantially from a more easy-flowing argument with a more elaborate and practical exploration of the implications of the discourse-theoretic approach for international development practice.