Book Symposium on Pablo Gilabert’s From Global Poverty to Global Equality: A Philosophical Exploration and Mathias Risse’s On Global Justice Introduction

The literature on theories of justice over the last half century has come in two waves. The first wave, triggered by Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, formulated questions about the relative privileges and burdens within the confines of a given society. The second wave, which gained momentum in the 1990s, has taken questions of distribution to the global level. Given that some of the most staggering inequalities in income, wealth, and other material as well as immaterial goods today exist between countries rather than within them, this shift in emphasis was only logical. The present book symposium, which is based on presentations at a workshop co-hosted by the Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l’Université de Montréal (CREUM) and the Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Philosophie Politique (GRIPP) in December 2012, analyses two new and important contributions to this literature on global justice. Over the last two decades, global justice theorists have often been said to fall into two camps. Statists on the one hand, who argue that principles of egalitarian justice only exist within the confines of the state; and globalists on the other hand, who take egalitarian principles to be global in scope. Debates between these two camps, and even their labelling as such, have sometimes obscured the fact that the scope of our principles of justice is only a derivative feature that depends on the grounds of justice on which they are defended. One of the refreshing features of both of the books discussed in this symposium is that they leave behind the stale dichotomy between statists and globalists. For Gilabert, scope derives from identifying the factors relevant for grounding duties of justice – from what he calls moral desirability conditions – as well as from considerations about the prospect of discharging these duties – that is, feasibility conditions. For Risse, scope varies with the different grounds of justice he invokes and, as he puts it, “the term ‘scope’ does not do much independent work” (Risse 2012, fn 2 on p.5). Having said that, the grounds of justice Gilabert and Risse mobilise in their arguments, and hence the conclusions about global justice they arrive at, are far from similar. The objective of the present symposium is to analyse and critically discuss these different grounds of justice. In this brief introduction, I will limit myself to two sets of remarks on each book. First, I shall sketch some of their central features; second, I will provide an overview of the issues taken up by the contributors to the symposium. Note that the contributions to the symposium do not represent a comprehensive analysis of the two books, but concentrate on those aspects that attracted their authors’ critical attention. Following the order at the workshop in 2012, I shall start with On Global Justice by Mathias Risse. Mathias RISSE defends what he calls pluralist internationalism. His position is pluralist in the sense that it admits a number of different grounds of justice, cutting across the divide between relationalists and non-relationists. More specifically, the grounds of justice discussed in the book are “recognizing individuals as human beings, members of states, co-owners of the earth, as subject to the global order, and as subject to a global trading system” (Risse 2012, 11). His position is internationalist, because he agrees with globalists that international relations give rise to their own principles of justice, even though they tend to be weaker than principles of justice within states. Two distinctive features of Risse’s account should be underlined here. First, his discussion of common ownership of the earth as one important ground of …