Cosmopolitan Constructivism

“A global institutional scheme is imposed by all of us on each of us. It is imposed on us in that we cannot simply drop out and renounce participation.”

Pogge, Realizing Rawls, p.276 Rawls´ global constructivism will here be contrasted to cosmopolitan constructivism. Cosmopolitanism is a complex notion in and of itself; the different versions of it complicate matters further. As already indicated, I will focus only on the cosmopolitan account developed by Thomas Pogge and Charles Beitz. Both approve of Rawls´ methodology and the results that flow from it in a domestic context, but both protest against the global version of it. Both Pogge and Beitz advocate a global justice view that is not constructed in two stages but in one: the parties, who are representatives of individual citizens, decide on the global original position, behind the global veil of ignorance that comprises the two different veils presented by Rawls, on the global principles of justice. According to these philosophers, if the veil of ignorance is supposed to exclude us from knowledge about morally arbitrary facts, then the county we are born into is certainly one of them. All people in the world should be treated equally and there should be a consensus on globally guaranteed human rights as well as global distributive principles. These guarantees and distributions may be done by local offices but they are merely delegating the decisions made globally; therefore, their position is that institutions are just or unjust if they take into account and consider rights and liberties and distributional shares of all the people around the world equally.

Pogge and Beitz start with Rawls´ constructivist’s device of original position, but do not use other elements of Rawls´ constructivism. This makes their version more dogmatic with less heuristic potential.

I will explain this below.

Beitz in his influential monograph, Political Theory and International Relations (1979), presents two arguments about why Rawls´ original position should be undertaken in one move and why the parties in such an original position would choose to apply Rawls´ distribution principle, so-called the difference principle, globally. The first argument says that the undeserved inequalities between individuals, those of different talents, social positions and wealth, are analogous to the undeserved inequalities between states, which comes down to the possession of natural resources and the ability to exploit them. The second argument says that if justice is a virtue of social institutions then there must be some kind of institution in order for justice to be done. Beitz argues that the system of international economic interdependence constitutes a scheme of social cooperation analogous to that of domestic social

institutions.

If we combine the two arguments we see, according to Beitz, the necessity for principles that apply directly to individuals globally. The consequence of this argument is that the well-being of all individuals in the world is compared according the same criteria. The principles of justice will provide provisions for the cases when the well-being of individuals is disturbed. Societies are seen as having an instrumental role as the executors of justice. The details of justice are decided on the global level in the global original position where the parties are individuals, but do not know their personal characteristics or the characteristics of the states they live in. Beitz does not make use of the reflective equilibrium test in his conception nor does he mention the test of public reason. The first is an important connection to real-world politics, while the letter to both the theoretical as well as practical approaches to pluralism. This needs further explanation.

First, taking the individual, as the unit in the original position requires a global distributive principle, which would require some serious transfers from rich countries to poor ones. Even more so, the countries per se would not be important and would not have any legislative but only executive power;

legislation would be a global demos. Transfers would be indefinite. This picture is far from being anything like a “considered judgment” by your or I, or by contemporary world leaders. It might be taken under consideration in hypothesis but in thesi it is too ambitious and therefore useless as a specific guideline. Secondly, parties in a global original position are noumenal selves, which as such perceive themselves as free and equal. After the veil has been lifted they might find themselves in societies where freedom and equality of individuals is not cherished in the same way as in liberal societies. The liberal ideal which they now need to abide by and which would be proclaimed publicly would be taken as imperialistic and certainly would not lead to a peaceful and stable world. Thus Beitz´s constructivism does not pass the test of reflective equilibrium or of public reason. Beitz defends his position by arguing that we do not begin with an actually existing structure and asks whether it is reasonable for individuals to cooperate in it. Rather, we begin with the idea that some type of structure is both required and inevitable, given the facts about the extent and character of the division of labor, and work towards the principles the structure should satisfy if it is to be acceptable to individuals conceived as free and equal moral persons (Betiz 1979). The Rawlsian answer to this could be that the actually existing people need to find the proposed principles that correspond to their sense of justice. On a global plane, many different cultures need to approve the same global principles of justice as the expression of their own views. With Beitz´s conception this is impossible.

Thomas Pogge presented his view on how to extend Rawls´ principles of justice on a global level even before Rawls himself had a substantial theory about it. In his well-known monograph Realizing Rawls (1989), Pogge suggests the global original position as a method for arriving at the principles of justice

for the world at large. He therefore criticizes Beitz for trying to draw a parallel between natural endowments and natural resources. Having property rights or eminent domain over a natural asset is very much a social fact which depends on the benefits and burdens of social cooperation (Pogge 1989:

252). It is the main responsibility of everyone to make this cooperation just. This is done best if we start from the global perspective which then constrains the national one. It is the global perspective that decides how much room one should leave for differences in national institutional arrangements and national conceptions of justice.

Pogge´s suggestion gains a clear institutional image in his later writings. He suggests namely that GRD should be introduced. GRD is an elaborate version of global distributive method. The idea is rather simple: those countries that use or sell their natural resources have pay to tax on them, the money goes into a big pool and then through some sort of agency, similar to the various United Nations agencies, is distributed to those who need it the most. GRD is a charge on consumption. GRD would require no central bureaucracy, nothing like world government. GRD would be, conversely from traditional development aid, a matter of entitlement and would not call for a special relationship between the

“donor” and the “recipient”. Acceptance of GRD payments would be voluntarily, i.e. a society may refuse greater affluence if it chooses (Pogge 1992).

The idea for GRD would, according to Pogge, be accepted even in Rawlsian second original position let alone the global original position. Pogge´s proposal is more elaborate than Beitz´s²⁴ and though less subjectable to the realism- objection i.e. to the problem of implementation of the cosmopolitan ideal, its methodology is still subject to “the liberal- imperialism” objection. The theoretical guidelines for the world at large are to be constructed according to the liberal blue-print model, i.e. starting from the individuals as free and equal, and allowing the divergence from the liberal ideal only in so far the basic

24Tim Hayward explains in his article “Thomas Pogge´s Global Resource Dividend: a critique and an alternative” (2005) how GRD is a highly disputable concept. Hayward quotes Joseph Heath, for instance, who has argued that the distributive effects though GRD would be random because even if the dividend goes to the poor, it is levied on the extraction of primary resources whose territorial distribution includes both some rich and some poor nations. More crucially, in taxing the immediate products of primary extraction, it falls most heavily on those nations dependent on such activities rather than upon those with more capital-intensive production techniques. This means that in practice it could tend to fall on poorer, rather than richer, nations. Recognizing this, Pogge’s response is that the cost would be passed on to richer nations in the form of higher commodity prices. Heath objects that it would be passed right back to poorer nations in the form of higher prices for manufactured goods, which is what those commodities are exchanged for. Pogge does recognize that applying the GRD to certain kinds of resources would quite foreseeably harm the poor directly. He accordingly says that the GRD should apply not to the cultivation of basic commodities such as grain, beans or cotton, for instance, but rather, when it is land use at issue, raising cattle or growing crops such as tobacco, coffee, cocoa or flowers. Tim Hayward suggests that such ad hoc qualifications could be seen as compounding rather than alleviating poverty (Hayward 2005: 4). Unfortunately, it is not the focus of my work and I do not have here enough the poor space to greatly elaborate on it. But it suffices to point to the fact that there are many philosophers who think that it would damage the arbitrariness of the proposal. If poor people are under economic pressure to switch from producing food crops to cash crops this would not be relieved simply by squeezing profit margins on the latter as well. The arbitrariness may also extend to the quantification of the proposed tax: about the rate at which it should be set; about identifying the relevant sum of economic value of any given resource that the tax would be applied to. Further, there are questions about the point at which the process should the tax be applied. What kinds of costs are associated with the processes?

standards of living are met for everyone. The question is of course who decides what “basic” is and how much is considered “basic”.

To conclude, there are two major objections to the cosmopolitan view presented here. First, cosmopolitans take the liberal conception of justice in its Rawlsian version, with free and equal moral persons at its base for a global standard. In doing so, they deny the plurality of conceptions of justice and though being constructivist are also dogmatic. Second, the approach does not prescribe any normative value to states as institutions, i.e. it does not take different constitutions as the expressions of different conceptions of justice worthy of being preserved as such. It gives them a purely instrumental role. States as regional institutions are there only to put into practice the principles arrived at the global level through global original position. However, these smaller units do not generate any special rights or duties. Even more so it turns the question of distributive justice into a question of universally recognizable moral virtue and hence the approach distances itself from the real-world politics.²⁵

However, cosmopolitans claim that they focus on real world problems, problems that individuals around the world have e.g. poverty and starvation. The approach advocates a so-called “normative individualism”, the idea that the moral value of an individual is a model for politics and law. Each person´s human rights should be respected and each well-being taken care of equally. The conception amounts to prescribing to individuals around the world negative duties of not harming others, as well as the positive duties of actively helping people around the world. Human rights respect and the respect for negative duties are notions that would not be denied by other liberal or communitarian philosophers.

Positive assistance however, is very much culturally conditioned and unless it falls under a domain of human rights protection, cultural plurality should be respected. Cosmopolitans do not recognize this;

they set a liberal ideal and think it applicable in its ideal form to the world as it is.

While Rawls´ constructivism starts from the equality of different cultures and freedom of practicing it, cosmopolitans start from free and equal individuals and impose liberal criteria to the world at large. It denies normative value to groups of any kind. The method does not use the test of reflective equilibrium but rather appeals only to the reasonable thinking of those raised in liberal countries. In advocating global original position, respectively global constructivism, cosmopolitans create an ideal theory of global justice that requires too much from real world politics, e.g. dissolvent of states, or redistribution of goods in extensive amounts.

25 There may exist societies that do not care for material goods or care to participate in global distribution, or even to receive a portion of it, as it would be offensive to them, e.g. Tibet.