La construcción del Convento:

The idea of global justice, that is to be defended in the following chapters of this dissertation, is both strongly inspired by John Rawls’ domestic political liberalism, and at the same time involves a departure from his view. Firstly, it follows the Rawlsian institutional or practice-dependent view of justice, according to which principles of justice are to regulate social and political institutions and their distributive effects on people’s life chances. Secondly, it is an egalitarian view, in the broadest sense of the term, according to which inequalities in life-chances are to be morally assessed through standards of justice. That is to say, what matters morally is not merely how people fare in absolute terms, but how they fare vis-à-vis each other. Thirdly, it endorses the idea of Rawlsian political justification, according to which, under conditions of pluralism, standards of justice are to be justified on public grounds, starting from commonly shared political ideals.

The departure from Rawls consists in a challenge to the domestic scope thesis, according to which principles of distributive justice apply to the basic

structure of a self-contained society. In chapter two I will argue why the different versions of the domestic scope thesis fail to limit the scope of justice to a domestic society, and why those reasons fail to warrant a domestic scope of justice. This challenge is based on the assumption that our present international order and the institutions comprising it significantly shape people’s life prospects and have important distributive effects in determining terms of ownership, production and transfer, access to global public goods and life opportunities across the globe.

Insofar as these distributive effects are morally significant, they ought to be subjected to standards of justice, which limit permissible inequalities in the effects of those global institutions on people’s life-chances. Secondly, it aims to complement the Rawlsian idea of political justification, with a moral defense of why public justification is the appropriate justification to offer to others under conditions of pluralism. As the argument of chapter three will demonstrate, public justification can be supported by, what I call, justificatory egalitarianism, i.e. taking people as equally valid sources of moral claims under conditions of pluralism.

The originality of the thesis advanced here consists in the claim that global egalitarian principles must be justified on global public grounds. Global egalitarian conceptions of justice, in particular the ones that promote a global egalitarian principle have been developed already in the very first accounts of global justice.⁶³ I believe that these views are on the right track in the normative views they promote, however they are insensitive to the problem of justification under conditions of pluralism. In my view they fail to respond to the fact of global pluralism, a relevant fact which limits the kind of justification that can be offered to global agents of justice. In order for global egalitarianism to be egalitarian in the right sense, it must

63 See Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations; Pogge, Realizing Rawls.

treat people as equals by taking them seriously in their different moral views and systems of beliefs they hold. In other words global egalitarianism must take global pluralism seriously in the kind of justificatory argument it advances. The thesis advances in the following chapters, especially in chapter three, is an attempt to work out the conditions of global public justification, a form of justification that treats people as equally valid sources of moral claims.

To sum up, the conception of global justice supported in this dissertation is an institutional egalitarian conception of global justice that rest on four fundamental

claims.

i.) A practice-dependent methodological commitment according to which global institutions and practices are the primary subjects of justice;

ii.) A principle of global justice is an egalitarian principle, i.e. inequalities in the distributive effects of those institutions on people’s life prospects requires moral justification;

iii.) Justification of a global egalitarian principle of justice must rest on global public grounds;

iv.) All persons are equally valid sources of moral claims upon global institutional arrangements.

An important point must be made here. Although the conception of justice that I am arguing for is a global egalitarian conception, it does not necessarily lead to endorsing a global difference principle. According to the Rawlsian institutional or practice-dependent methodological commitment, the requirements of justice vary according to the social practice in question. Principles are constructed for existing practices, that is, they are yielded by a suitably characterized method of reasoning,

the so called original position. The characterization of a suitable original position depends on the nature and purpose of the social practice in question. Based on this methodological commitment Rawls has argued that constructing principles for different social practices yields different principles of justice. What determines the normative requirements for one context or another, as Rawls put it,

is the distinct structure of the social framework and the purpose and role of its various parts and how they fit together, that explains why there are different principles for different kind of subjects.⁶⁴

On a public view of justification, the principles a constructivist procedure yields, depend on the political ideals present in the public culture of the relevant context.

Through a careful analysis of the political ideals present in the domestic and the global context one must examine the relevant analogies and dis-analogies of the two public contexts in question. What principles ought to regulate global institutions and their distributive effects on people’s life chances will depend on the global public ideals one can take for granted as fundamental ideas grounding the edifice of justification.

Working out the concrete normative requirements of justice for the global institutional order is beyond the scope of this dissertation. For the purpose of this thesis, I will put aside this very relevant normative question and limit my inquiry to the philosophical analysis of the reasons that ground the extension of the scope of justice, followed by an account of the appropriate kind of justification global egalitarianism requires under conditions of global pluralism, and finally to working out the conditions that need to be met globally for a global egalitarianism to be a feasible ideal.

64 John Rawls, “The Law of Peoples” in John Rawls: Collected Papers. Samuel Freeman (ed.).

Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999. p. 533.

CHAPTER II