Noah: Revisiting Nagel on Global Justice

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 After reading Taiwo’s Reconsidering Reparations, I am deeply persuaded by his account detailing the Global Racial Empire’s influence on our current world order. There is clear reason to pursue a justice for the global south on account of the various injustices outlined. 

Revisiting The Problem of Global Justice, I think Nagel is mistaken in his cosmopolitan approach vindicating powerful nations from their obligations to global justice. Where before I was persuaded by his reasoning, now I think he puts the cart before the horse, wrongly considering political legitimacy as the standard which holds institutions/nations responsible for justice, rather than how historical injustice has paved the way for illegitimate government that still has justifiable claim to justice. I side with Taiwo in viewing justice as a debt owed to the global south on account of historical and continued abuses to its political/economic/social legitimacy for the gain of wealthy nations. When you add the dimension of historical injustice to Nagel’s argument, it becomes far less compelling. 


Although Nagel entertains the possibility that our current global institutions could provide a case universal justice, he ultimately decides against it: “current international rules and institutions may be the thin end of a wedge that will eventually expand to seriously dislodge the dominant sovereignty of separate nation-states, both morally and politically, but for the moment they lack something that according to the political conception is crucial for the application and implementation of standards of justice: They are not collectively enacted and coercively imposed in the name of all the individuals whose lives they affect; and they do not ask for the kind of authorization by individuals that carries with it a responsibility to treat all those individuals in some sense equally” (138). 


Nagel states that the our current international institutions--acting without universal regard for all and operating without the granted authorization which entails treating everyone equally—do not meet the standards to warrant a responsibility global justice. 


Nagel seems to use this fact as an excuse to wipe our (the global north’s) hands clean: “Justice applies only to a form of organization that claims political legitimacy and the right to impose decisions by force, and not to a voluntary association or contract among independent parties concerned to advance their common” (140). Upon first read, I fully bought this argument. I think if one views the current global state of affairs as a randomly generated outcome—“here’s some poverty, there’s some wealth, it’s a shame that things somehow ended up this way”—the notion of each country having a respective duty of justice to their people seems really intuitive. 


However, the Global Racial Empire brings new concerns to this perspective. For example, how does a country like Sierra Leone, which exports hundreds of millions of dollars worth of diamonds a year to wealthy nations, remain one of the most impoverished nations on the globe? The most obvious answer is colonialism. Sierra Leone’s infrastructure is overwhelmingly shaped by its colonial history of resource extraction. Investment education or healthcare systems were ignored in this colonial pursuit, and as a result, today, over one in 20 women die giving birth, and over half the population is illiterate. 


As Taiow states, “History is not merely an interesting point of comparison for our contemporary problems. Everything we experience happens in the flow of time from past to present, and so when we struggle to stay afloat in the present—to access health care, to secure food, to form healthy relationships—we are swimming among the currents of history” (24). Telling Sierra Leone, which has a gap per capita less than 1/100th of the US’s, that we have no duty towards balancing the scale, when this disparity is a direct result of our action, is crazy. It’s like if we were playing monopoly and we start with half the property and decide to take half our opponent’s property too, and then at the end of the game we claim that our victory was merited on account of our skill. 


The notion that duties of justice need not apply to Sierra Leone because there is no politically binding institution linking the global north to global south is highly objectionable. There is absolutely claim to requesting individuals (like me) who have benefited immensely and directly from these historical abuses by virtue of their residence in the global north, regardless of their national boundary. Instead of asking wether international institutions meet the necessary criteria for global justice, Nagal should consider if the nature of the Global racial empire and historical injustice warrant an international obligation for justice. And after reading Taiwo, I believe the answer to this questions is an obviously yes. 

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