The service conception of political legitimacy we discovered in the last chapter makes it necessary for us to look for another justification of egalitarian duties of justice. Since equal concern is not a necessary condition of legitimizing the exercise of power we are at this point left with no concrete reason why equality in the distribution of goods should even matter within states. This does not mean that it can rule out in general that egalitarian justice is of importance globally. However, we first have to find a reason why it can be thought to matter at all.
To recall, Nagel’s rejection of the idea of global egalitarian justice is based on the three necessary conditions of the application of distributive equality that make up his actual practice view of justice. The first requirement states that egalitarian justice requires a sovereign authority for its enforcement. The second one asserts that such obligations of justice can only arise among members of a non-voluntary association. Finally, the last condition tells us that the common authority of such an association has to enforce rules in the name of all its members. With a look to our real world, Nagel’s position regarding international distributive justice can then be stated as follows:
109
1. Egalitarian justice presupposes an association that members cannot leave at a reasonable cost and that is ruled by a common coercive authority that acts on behalf of its subjects.2 3 2
2. Only existing nation states present such social contexts. Beyond the borders of these states all interactions constitute optional exchanges. This is to say that we cannot be forced to enter into international practices with others.2 3 3 Our transnational interactions therefore do not generate duties of egalitarian justice. We have of course also involuntarily acquired stringent duties to not harm, and moral duties to deliver aid in emergency situations toward people outside our political community.2 3 4 At present there also do not exist any common coercive transnational institutions that act in the name of those they coerce. Nor does an international consensus on what distributive justice requires exist.2 3 5 Nagel thinks that, consequently, we have to arrive at the following conclusions that amount to a negation of the idea of international egalitarian justice.
3. There are no international authorities that could determine and administer transnational egalitarian justice. States do not require the help of any international institutions to fulfil their obligations towards their citizens. Furthermore, states cannot be forced to establish international institutions of socio-economic justice.2 3 6 Thus, greater
232 See Thomas Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice”, Philosophy & Public Affairs 33(2)
(2005): pp. 113-147 , p. 128.
233 See Thomas Nagel, ibid., pp. 121, 140. 234 See Thomas Nagel, ibid., p. 118.
235 See Thomas Nagel, ibid., pp. 114, 115, 138. 236 See Thomas Nagel, ibid., p. 131.
110
international equality has to come about voluntarily, and not through conformity to duties of egalitarian justice.
However, as we saw, Nagel’s interpretation of egalitarian justice rests on a particular understanding of what triggers these obligations. The connection Nagel establishes between coercive authority and distributive equality is not only flawed (as the service-conception of authority shows). It also significantly differs from John Rawls’s understanding of what justifies egalitarian duties.
For Rawls, egalitarian considerations are important since “they provide a way of assigning rights and duties in the basic institutions of society and they define the appropriate distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.”2 3 7 On this Rawlsian view, there is no necessary limitation of the sort of social cooperation that is morally relevant to existing states.2 3 8 It is Rawls’s justification of equal concern that some egalitarian philosophers employ that, on the one hand, want to stay within the practice-dependent framework of justice but who, on the other hand, reject Nagel’s view of equality. We now need to examine their arguments to see whether these philosophers offer us a better explanation for why egalitarian justice matters and what detrimental inequalities it prohibits.
237 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harv ard Univ ersity Press, 197 1), p. 4. 238 Rawls’s own position on the question whether or not there are global egalitarian duties is not
entirely clear. He does reject a global Difference principle since such a principle would not be sensitiv e to the ambitions of the beneficiaries of global redistributiv e obligations (Rawls takes local political cultures to be crucial for how well off societies are). Global distributiv e duties, in Rawls’s v iew, would hav e to be implausible because they lack a “cutoff point” (John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harv ard Univ ersity Press, 1999), p. 119). But Rawls’s v iew of global justice has also been taken to imply not only a rejection of a global outcome standard but of global egalitarian duties as a whole. As such, Rawls’s position has been criticized by a number of philosophers, see (for instance) Allen Buchanan, “Rawls’s Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World”, Ethics 110(4) (2000): pp. 697 -7 21; Kok-Chor Tan, Justice without Borders (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ ersity Press, 2004). The arguments of adv ocates of the reformed practice v iew of justice we will discuss here present an attempt to expand Rawls’s justification of egalitarian duties to the global sphere.
111