The republican tradition seems to have a blind spot about global justice. It has had little to say about pressing international issues such as world poverty or global inequalities. According to the old, if apocryphal, adage: extra rempublicam nulla justitia. Some may doubt that distributive justice (as opposed to freedom or citizenship) is the primary virtue of republican institutions; and at any rate most would agree that republican values have traditionally been realized in the polis not in the (oxymoronic) cosmopolis. The article sketches a republican account of global non-domination which suggests that duties of distributive justice are not bounded to the institutions of a single society. In particular, it argues that republicans have good reasons to seek to curb those global inequalities which underpin what I call capability-denying domination.
Philip Pettit (1996) ‘Freedom as Antipower’ , Ethics106(3): 576-604.
2.
See e.g. David Miller ( 2000) Citizenship and National Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
3.
Thomas Nagel (2005) ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs33(2): 113-47.
4.
John Rawls ( 1999) The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
5.
James Bohman (2004) ‘Cosmopolitan Republicanism’ , Journal of Political Philosophy12(3): 336-52.
6.
Rainer Forst (2001) ‘Towards a Critical Theory of Transnational Justice’, Metaphilosophy32(1-2): 160-79, at p. 166.
7.
For an application of critical republicanism to issues of multicultural justice, see Cécile Laborde (2008) Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
8.
Judith N. Shklar ( 1998) ‘The Liberalism of Fear’, in Judith N. Shklar, Stanley Hoffmann and George Kateb (eds) Political Thought and Political Thinkers, pp. 3-20. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
9.
On the new global politics of resistance, and ‘cosmorepublican liberty’ see Lawrence Quill ( 1995) Liberty after Liberalism: Civic Republicanism in a Global Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan .
10.
Andrew Hurrell (2001) ‘Global Inequality and International Institutions’, Metaphilosophy32(1-2): 34-57, at p. 43. On global public opinion, see James Bohman (1997) ‘The Public Spheres of the World Citizen’, in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (eds) Perpetual Peace. Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, pp. 179-200. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
11.
David Miller (2000) ‘Bounded Citizenship’ , in Miller (n. 2).
12.
Stuart White (2003) ‘Republican Cosmopolitanism’ , in Daniel Bell and Avner De-Shalit (eds) Forms of Justice: Critical Perspectives on David Miller’s Political Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
13.
See notably White (n. 12); and Maurizio Viroli (1995) For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
14.
Robert Goodin (2003) ‘Folie Républicaine’ , Annual Review of Political Science6: 55-76. Philippe Van Parijs ( 1999) ‘Contestatory Democracy versus Real Freedom for All’, in Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon (eds) Democracy’s Value, ch. 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
15.
See the other contributions to this volume, as well as Samantha Besson and José Luis Martí (eds) (2009) Legal Republicanism: National and International. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
16.
Nagel (n. 3); Andrea Sangiovanni (2007) ‘Global Justice, Reciprocity, and the State’, Philosophy and Public Affairs35(1): 3-39.
17.
On social equality see Elizabeth Anderson (1999) ‘What is the Point of Equality?’, Ethics109: 287-337. David Miller (1995) ‘Complex Equality’ , in David Miller and Michael Walzer (eds) Pluralism, Justice and Equality, pp. 197-225. Oxford: Oxford University Press. David Miller (1999) Principles of Social Justice, pp. 15-16, 240-1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
18.
See, similarly, Rainer Forst’s distinction between maximal and minimal justice: ‘maximal justice is the result of the justificatory discourses made possible by [the basic] structure, discourses about the details of economic production and distribution, of the legal system, the educational system, and so forth. Not all of this is covered by minimal justice, for this only establishes a threshold of political and social equality, making justificatory discourses possible in the first place’. Forst (n. 6), p. 172.
19.
For an insightful discussion, see Charles Beitz (2001) ‘Does Global Inequality Matter?’, Metaphilosophy32(1/2): 95-112, p. 97.
20.
Hurrell (n. 10), p. 44.
21.
David Miller ( 2007) National Responsibility and Global Justice, pp. 77-8. Oxford : Oxford University Press.
22.
Chris Bertram ( 2005) ‘Global Justice, Moral Development and Democracy’ , in Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse (eds) The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, pp. 75-90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,.
23.
Onora O’Neill ( 1986) Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Development and Justice. London: Allen & Unwin .
24.
James Bohman (2005) ‘The Democratic Minimum: Is Democracy a Means to Global Justice?’, Ethics and International Affairs19(1): 101-16, at p.106.
25.
James Bohman (2005) ‘Constituting Humanity: Democracy, Human Rights, and Political Community’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, suppl. 31: 227-52.
26.
Thomas Pogge ( 2002) World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, p. 20. Cambridge: Polity Press.
27.
Philip Pettit ( 2007) ‘Republican Freedom: Three Axioms, Four Theorems’ , in Cécile Laborde and John Maynor (eds) Republicanism and Political Theory, pp. 102-31. Oxford: Blackwell .
28.
As he puts it, ‘ensuring your social freedom will require eliminating those material and related disadvantage that expose you to control by others. They don’t compromise liberty in the manner of social control, but condition the range and ease with which liberty may be exercised - they reduce the worth of liberty’. Philip Pettit (2007) ‘Joining the Dots’ in M. Smith, H. G. Brennan, R. E. Goodin and F. C. Jackson (eds) Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit, p. 303, n. 43. Oxford: Oxford University Press. In another paper, Pettit has suggested that poverty might indicate a lack of ‘optionfreedom’, while domination is a paradigmatic case of lack of ‘agency-freedom’. See Pettit (2003) ‘Agency-Freedom and Option-Freedom’, Journal of Theoretical Politics 15(4): 387-403.
29.
Pettit (n. 27), p. 103, italics added. Cf. also Pettit (2006) ‘The Determinacy of Republican Policy: A Reply to McMahon’, Philosophy and Public Affairs34(3): 275-83.
30.
The thought is pursued in Pettit’s more recent paper: (2008) ‘The Basic Liberties’, in Matthew Kramer, Claire Grant, Ben Colburn and Antony Hatzistavrou (eds) The Legacy of H. L. A. Hart: Legal, Political and Moral Philosophy, pp. 201-21. Oxford: Oxford University Press. There, Pettit argues that free persons have a suitable degree of protection against alien control in the realm of certain choices that he describes as the basic liberties, and which would include basic capabilities.
31.
Philip Pettit (1997) Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, p. 55. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
32.
Ian Carter (2007) ‘How are Power and Unfreedom Related?’, in Laborde and Maynor (n. 27), pp. 58-82, at 64-6. Christopher McMahon (2005) ‘The Indeterminacy of Republican Policy’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 33(1): 67-93, at p. 69. Jeremy Waldron (2007) ‘Pettit’s Molecule’, in Smith et al. (n. 28), pp. 143-60.
33.
Philip Pettit (2005) ‘The Domination Complaint’ , in Melissa Williams and Stephen Macedo (eds) Political Exclusion and Domination: NOMOSXLVI, pp. 87-117, at p. 94. New York: New York University Press. See also Pettit (n. 29), pp. 278-9; and (n. 27).
34.
On this, see Richard Dagger (2005) ‘Domination and the Republican Challenge to Liberalism’, in John Christman and Joel Anderson (eds) Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism, pp. 177-203. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cécile Laborde (2006) ‘Female Autonomy, Education and the Hijab’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 9(3): 351-77.
35.
Pettit ( 2001) A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency, p. 174. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pettit (n. 29).
36.
Amartya Sen ( 1982) Poverty and Famine: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation . Oxford: Clarendon Press.
37.
For suggestive links between freedom as non-domination and the capabilities approach, see Pettit (n. 35), ch. 7; and Pettit ( 2001) ‘Capability and Freedom: A Defence of Sen’ , Economics and Philosophy17(2): 1-20.
38.
Sabina Alkire ( 2005) Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction, p. 56. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
39.
Pettit provides a list of resources of domination in (n. 31), p. 59, but does not sufficiently distinguish between institutional and agent-relative resources.
40.
Ibid. pp. 32, 64.
41.
Pettit, this volume.
42.
Ibid.
43.
Joseph Stiglitz ( 2006) Making Globalization Work. London: Penguin.
44.
Darrell Moellendorf (2005) ‘The World Trade Organization and Egalitarian Justice’, Metaphilosophy36(1/2): 145-62.
45.
Pettit does recognize that ‘representative states may be subject to the alien control of public, international bodies’ but he sees the latter, not as systemic structures of domination but, rather, as third parties endowed with their own agent-relative power. He also thinks that they tend to ‘relatively accountable and non-arbitrary’, which may be true of the majority of international organizations (IO), and may be true of their dealings with western representative states, but fails to account for the structurally dominating position that IOs such as the IMF, the World Bank or the WTO have over developing countries. Pettit concludes that only a ‘perverted sense of priority’ would put the reform of IOs on the republican agenda. This is true only if what I have called the ‘Pogge hypothesis’ is implausible.
46.
On shared responsibility, see the chapters by Elizabeth Ashford and Simon Caney in Thomas Pogge (ed.) (2007) Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Iris Marion Young (2004) ‘Responsibility and Global Labor Justice’, Journal of Political Philosophy 12(4): 365-88. Like such accounts, the republican account is vulnerable to the critique that the shared responsibility is too vague to ground a clear duty to act on the part of specific agents. It is true that this vagueness is detrimental to a precise legal account of rights and duties, but it is not so detrimental to a more political account of civic responsibility, such as that favoured by republicans.
47.
Bohman (n. 5), p. 340. See also Adil Ahmad Haque (2005) ‘Justice Without Borders: A Reply to Nagel’. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=654941.
48.
Quentin Skinner (2007) ‘Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power’ in Laborde and Maynor (n. 27), pp. 83-101. Pettit (n. 27).
49.
A strong republican theme is that economic globalisation has been too depoliticized and left to the vagaries of seemingly natural market forces, which arbitrarily determine the fate of whole societies, denying their citizens minimal control over their collective destinies. See Steven Slaughter (2005) Liberty Beyond Neo-liberalism: A Republican Critique of Liberal Governance in a Globalising Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Press.
50.
Here I draw on Ryan Pevnick (2008) ‘Political Coercion and the Scope of Distributive Justice’, Political Studies56(2): 339-416; and Arash Abizadeh ( 2007) ‘Cooperation, Pervasive Impact, and Coercion: On the Scope (Not Site) of Distributive Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs35(4): 318-58.
51.
For a concise survey of the empirical literature on how international institutions promote global justice, see Simon Caney (2006) ‘Cosmopolitan Justice and Institutional Design: An Egalitarian Liberal Conception of Global Governance’, Social Theory and Practice32(4): 725-56.
52.
Pettit, this volume.
53.
For criticisms of such ideals, see Miller (n. 21), ch. 2.
54.
Duncan Ivison, this volume; Forst (n. 6).
55.
For an identification of relevant metrics of poverty and inequality, see Ingrid Robeyns ( 2006) ‘Assessing Global Poverty and Inequality’ , in Christian Barry and Thomas Pogge (eds) Global Institutions and Responsibilities: Achieving Global Justice, pp. 29-47. Oxford: Blackwell.
56.
Pogge (n. 26), p. 184. For a good discussion of the institutional implications of this demand, see Caney (n. 51).
57.
Pettit, this volume.
58.
John Braithwaite (2007) in Smith et al. (n. 28), pp. 161-81.
59.
David Miller (1988) ‘The Ethical Significance of Nationality’, Ethics (98): 647-62. David Miller ( 2002) Citizenship and National Identity, p. 174. Cambridge: Polity Press.
60.
For the relevance of radical inequality to thinking about ‘real world justice’, see Thomas Pogge (2005) ‘Real World Justice’ , Journal of Ethics9(1/2): 29-53; Pogge (n. 26), p. 198.
61.
Proposals include: the Tobin tax, cancellation of Third World debt, Pogge’s idea of a Global Resource Dividend.
62.
Pettit, this volume.
63.
For concrete proposals (examples include equalizing influence in such organizations as the IMF, World Bank and WTO, facilitating the participation of vulnerable peoples, improving enforcement mechanisms, setting up international ombudsmen, improving democratic accountability) see Caney (n. 51), pp. 745-51. See also David Held (1995) Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance. Cambridge: Polity Press.
64.
Bohman (n. 5).
65.
Caney (n. 51), pp. 732-3.
66.
Pogge argues, in republican vein, that even when political choices are morally ‘closed’ (e.g. when they concern the protection of fundamental rights) ‘the primary and ultimate responsibility for their being made correctly should lie with the persons themselves’ (n. 26), p. 184, and he places what he calls a ‘human right to equal opportunity for political participation’ at the heart of his cosmopolitan proposals. Caney defends an instrumental view of democratic procedures, as the best way to achieve a basic justice threshold, but beyond that threshold, argues that competing ideals of justice be mediated fairly in an ‘international area where all those bound by global rules and regulations have a chance to shape the construction of the rules’ (n. 51), p. 743.
67.
Hurrell (n. 10), p. 47.
68.
Bohman (n. 24), p. 104.
69.
John Rawls (1999) The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bertram (n. 22), pp. 75-90. David Miller (1999) ‘Justice and Inequality’, in Andrew Hurrell and Ngaire Woods (eds) Inequality, Globalization and World Politics, pp. 248-72. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller (n. 21), pp. 62-75. Yet Miller rightly adds a crucial proviso, ‘if we could prevent the conversion of material advantage into political domination, there would be nothing inherently reprehensible about some nations being richer than other’ (italics added).
70.
Quentin Skinner (1997) Liberty Before Liberalism, p. 27. Cambridge: Cambridge University .
71.
Pettit, this volume.
72.
Pogge (n. 26); Forst (n. 6), p. 174.
73.
This is also true of imperial states which exercise unchecked domination over foreign peoples: they are liable to see their domestic liberties and rights undermined in the process. Witness the effects of the War on Terror today, and, more generally, James Bohman (2007) ‘Nondomination and Transnational Democracy’, in Laborde and Maynor (n. 27), pp. 190-216. Oxford: Blackwell. For an alternative view of the relationship between republicanism, empire and liberty in 19th-century Victorian thought, see Duncan Bell (2009, forthcoming) ‘Republican Imperialism: J. A. Froude and the Virtue of Empire’, History of Political Thought.
