LP starts by imagining an international original position where representatives of peo-
ples, behind a veil of ignorance, decide which conception of justice should determine their mutual undertakings. This starting point, as many have noticed, is controver- sial. In fact, some of Rawls’ early critics have found his insistence on this two-level strategy as lacking any principled defence (see Richards, 1982; Barry, 1973; and 1989: 183–9, 234–41; Pogge, 1989; Moellendorf, 2002). Many have argued that, by start- ing from peoples as corporate agents, Rawls does not even consider the possibility of a global original position and in so doing takes for granted that some form of in- ternationalism must be the appropriate conception of justice for global politics. here I concentrate on Thomas Pogge’s famous attempt to argue in favour of a global orig- inal position. I do so because Pogge’s treatment of the argument is arguably the best
in the literature. however, an important caveat should be acknowledged. Pogge’s Re-
alizing Rawls was published in 1989 – that is, previous to the publication of PL, or
of either version of LP. Since my interpretation of LP is based on the continuity of Rawls’ international theory with, broadly speaking, the whole of Rawls’ political phi- losophy (thus including aspects of his so-called ‘political turn’), it would seem rather unfair to criticize Pogge for something that he could not have taken into consider- ation. I accept this point. The purpose of this section of the chapter is not, then, strict- ly speaking to criticize Pogge’s view; rather, I use Pogge’s work as an illustration of how the development of Rawls’ ideas has made straightforward cosmopolitan ex- tensions of the original position implausible, not necessarily as a critique of Pogge’s work.
In Realizing Rawls, Pogge puts forward three possible ways of extending the orig- inal position to international (or global) politics. The first two employ the original position device twice: once at the domestic level, and once at the international or global level. According to what Pogge calls the first reading (R1 in Pogge, 1989: 242), in the second original position we find representatives of ‘persons’. According to what Pogge calls the second reading (R2 in Pogge, 1989: 243), we find representatives of states. Finally, Pogge proposes his own alternative original position (G in Pogge, 1989: 246ff). G is a fully global original position. It is clearly distinct from R2 since in G we find representatives of persons rather than states. But it is also different from R1 since it does not presuppose that the original position should be applied twice, first in domestic societies and then globally. Instead, in G, we start from a global orig- inal position and then use the framework of original position reasoning in order to decide which political structures and principles of distribution are more appropri- ate for global politics. G, in other words, provides a moral baseline from which to assess the entire international architecture, with its system of states and of international institutions.
In arguing for G, Pogge mentions a number of issues that will become central fea- tures of academic debate concerning LP and global justice more broadly, such as the arbitrariness of nationality, the extent of permitted inequalities and of how such in- equalities affect global background justice. Pogge should be given ample credit for the penetrating nature of his critique. I will try to respond to some of Pogge’s objections in the following sections of the chapter, but at this juncture it is worth noting how, when considering LP from the vantage point of Rawls’ political turn, it is the very idea of imagining a global original position on the model of G that seems problem- atic. Simply put, the problem with G is that it is a transposition of the original po- sition to global politics which lives intact the main features of Rawls’ domestic orig- inal position, and yet, at least from PL onwards, it is increasingly evident that the fea- tures of the original position that Pogge assumes we can globalize are to be under- stood as features of liberal democratic institutions.
Let me provide some examples. how would Rawls design a global original po- sition? What types of ‘goods’ would representatives of persons be called to assign? What type of knowledge would be available to representatives of individuals in the global original position? Original position reasoning is premised on a precise un-
derstanding of ‘persons’. In Rawls’ domestic theory, persons are seen as free and equal. As free and equal, persons are said to possess two moral powers: a capacity for a sense of justice and a capacity for a conception of the good (JAFR: 19). These moral pow- ers, in TJ, provide the content of moral personality (see TJ: 10–19). yet, at least from
PL onwards, Rawls is clear that the conception of the person that provides the ba-
sis for his theory is not to be considered as a permanent feature of persons qua per- sons. In other words it is not a way of portraying human beings generally. As Rawls states, ‘it is important to keep in mind that justice as fairness is a political concep- tion of justice’, and this implies also that ‘the idea of the person, when specified into a conception of the person, belongs to a political conception’ and is ‘both normative and political, not metaphysical or psychological’ (JAFR: 19). According to Rawls, ‘the conception of the person is worked up from the way citizens are regarded in the pub- lic political culture of a democratic society’ (JAFR: 19), and hence is emphatically not a way of confronting the deeper issue of how to characterize human beings gen- erally.
The analogous task we face at the global level, then, is to find a political conception of the person that can be the starting point for conceiving of the idea of global pol- itics as a form of social cooperation between certain types of political agents. Even if we were to grant the plausibility of this exercise, there would be no certainty that the results would be analogous to Rawls’ views in the domestic case. Rawls’ conception of persons as free and equal is the result of his interpretation of the public political culture of a liberal democratic society. yet the global public political culture is not liberal democratic (and, in fact, one might be excused for thinking that it is precisely the fact that the world is not a Ralwsian liberal polity that seems to drive the reformist zeal that guides so many cosmopolitans).
note how the latter problem also has important repercussions for the type of ‘goods’ that representatives of the parties will assign in the original position. In Rawls’ do- mestic theory, representatives of the parties are required to choose between differ- ent conceptions of justice that would distribute valuable ‘resources’ (what Rawls calls primary goods) between individuals. In TJ Rawls maintained that primary goods are ‘things which it is supposed a rational man wants whatever else he wants’ (TJ: 79). But, once again, from PL onwards Rawls clarifies that the content of the list of pri- mary goods is to be specified in accordance with a conception of citizens in a liber- al democracy, not of persons generally. Primary goods are suited for ‘the normal cir- cumstances of human life in a democratic society’ (JAFR: 57–8). They are not things that it is rational to desire independently from one’s context of life. Rather, they are ‘needed and required by persons seen in light of the political conception of persons, as citizens who are fully cooperating members of [a democratic] society, and not mere- ly as human beings apart from any normative conception’ (JAFR: 58). Thus a glob- al original position would be seem to lack this type of specification: it would not have a basic ‘currency’, since according to Rawls the latter is mediated by our understanding of liberal democratic citizenship.
In this respect the problem for those who wish to globalize the original position is rather similar to what David Miller has called the ‘metric’ problem (Miller, 2007:
62–8). In his National Responsibility and Global Justice Miller discusses the problem of extending the idea of equality of opportunity to global politics. The main difficulty in doing so, according to Miller, is that we would lack the cultural understandings that are presupposed by the very attempt to delineate what the principle of equal- ity of opportunity requires in the abstract (2007: 65–6). In a Rawlsian framework the problem is rather similar. Considering primary goods as a currency that can be distributed according to principles of justice chosen in the original position, we need to recognize that the very idea of primary goods is dependent on the institutional characteristics and the public political culture of a democratic society.