Concerns about Nagel's Approach
In The Problem of Global Justice Thomas Nagel explores how some of the major philosophies we've been learning in our class can be applied on the global level. He points out how there is a lack of philosophy on what to do between states and across national lines. Millions live in extreme poverty, for example. But most of our philosophy on justice centers around what to do within our state.
Some of the theory is what he calls "cosmopolitan" and is based off of rights and duties that should apply to any fellow human. But some is "political", meaning the duties are only obligations between people who associate together, usually applying in a nation state.
Philosophers like Hobbes and Rawls seem to have focused their minds to the question to the likes of "how should we organize a just society?" The important word in this question is "we". Hobbes, from England, and Rawls, from America, were both focused on what and who was around them. This could be analogized to a set of new roommates who come together to make some rules about how to live well together. Now, Hobbes and Rawls tried to decide on certain fundamental human principles in doing so. But, regardless, both were using such principles to organize their "house".
Nagel is using these frameworks, which now serve as fundamentals to western philosophy, to explore something much greater than what they were intended for. In this I find issue.
First, what gives Nagel the authority to posit and reason about the entire world? He is a citizen of the same world as every other human being, but how could he possibly have the authority to try to determine what justice for billions of people from all different types of societies should be? The reason I worry about this, is that a large source of global suffering has historically come from one society impacting another. Countries exploit, war with, genocide, and spread diseases to other countries. Sometimes people from one country go and spread a harmful idealogy to another. It seems there is a sort of arrogance that exists in white western men to look outward at the world and see what impact they can make. This philosophizing seems to be an attempt to assess what type of impact we should be making. Or, perhaps it can also show that we have no obligation to make an impact (like the political approach). Regardless, perhaps we should just focus on our own country first. That said, people are suffering around the world. Nagel may argue that it is wrong to ignore it. I just want to bring up the fundamental dilemma that looking outwardly at the world can bring.
Second, in trying to create a framework for global justice, why should he use two prominent western modes of thought? Wouldn't a more sensible way be to survey theories of justice from all around the world and find parallels. Or to ask philosophers from all around the world to discuss and explore this question together? While I see the appeal in trying to address global poverty and to ensure we are good global citizens, I fear that doing it in a eurocentric way is, in a way, repeating the very type of thinking that has caused many problems of injustice in the world today.
Hey Josh, I appreciate your call for a more inclusive approach in exercising a transnational human rights structure. It is an unfortunate fact that much of historical philosophy is dominated by the white, the wealthy, the male, and the Western. Many of the frameworks of global justice today, such as the development of the United Nations, were done so through the domineering of Western powers. On these opinions, I fully agree with you. However, I think there is room to defend Nagel’s arguments. For one, his argument seems to rather be pointing out the fallacies of the Western cosmopolitan and political conceptual approaches. And two, I would argue that Western powers who once strong-armed the establishment of a global justice framework are now facing the consequences of outcasting – the US providing a shining example of such. We should really consider what Nagel argues towards the end “The Problem of Global Justice” on the global economic force providing a threat to the Western dominion. Perhaps cosmopolitan or political conception approaches are too narrow, but Nagel doesn’t seem to disqualify this. Indeed, he seems to point to the crumbling, dangerous fate of the structures currently in place, structures that have now come to hurt “power states” as we grow more internationally interdependent. Our internally-oriented human rights standards may be overlapping with other states, calling out the hypocrisies and eroded functioning of the present system.
ReplyDeleteOn my first objection: Though Nagel does note that the political conception is “probably correct,” he does not ground that defense on the Rawlsian basis. Nagel rejects a state legitimation of justice that Rawls proposes in the political conception, in fact critiquing that state’s “societal rules determining its basic structure are coercively imposed.” (126/8) The problem with the Rawlsian approach here is that state to state affairs are represented as a collective approach, when the concept’s emphasis of relativism (or anti-monism) does not match up with the need for a universalized “institutionalized methods of verification and enforcement.” Furthermore, Nagel writes that he disagrees with the concept’s application to global interactions: “Rawls conception is that sovereignty is constrained internally by the moral equality of individuals who are subjects of the state, but that same force does not operate externally.” (135) Because we live in a world now where globalization has made states incredibly intertwined in relations, a Rawlsian political conception cannot hold up.
The “bargaining among mutually self-interested sovereign parties” in the formation and exercise of a human rights system has actually led to consequences for the Western states who once dominated the transnational schema. (138) Without a unified authority on global justice, state to state interaction is “‘pure’ contracts, and nothing guarantees the justice of their results.” (141) As of recent, these Western domineers, especially the US, have faced outcasting from the transnational framework because they act hypocritically. I believe Nagel is rather trying to show that the Western-controlled system is failing, it is lacking a centralized commitment format. This quote puts it best: “Even if the more powerful states are motivated to some extent by humanitarian concerns to shape the rules in consideration of the weakest and poorest members of the international community, that does not change the situation fundamentally. Justice is not merely the pursuit of common aims by unequal parties whose self-interest is softened by charity. Justice, on the political conception, requires a collectively imposed social framework, enacted in the name of all those governed by it, and aspiring to command their acceptance of its authority even when they disagree with the substance of its decisions.” (140)
To the "What gives him the right?" point: If a state has to interact with other states, doesn't it have to ask what is necessary for those interactions to be just? Is it a 'right' to ask the questions he does, or a requirement of engaging in any interactions across one's borders in a responsible way? Interesting questions here. On the Western dominated approach question, it seems significant that he points to human rights, and to sovereignty, and to other concepts that may have originated in the West, like relativity theory and the calculus, but, like these, have been adopted as the framework for interaction and inquiry more broadly. Marxism dominates much of the Chinese approach to foreign policy -- is this a 'Western' framework? Lots of cool questions here.
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