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Article Excerpt
'Cosmopolitanism' is not-or not yet-the name of a determinate political philosophy. Although many contemporary theorists have put forward views that they describe as cosmopolitan, there is little agreement among them about the central elements of a cosmopolitan position. Almost nobody advocates the development of the kind of global state that would give the idea of 'world citizenship' literal application. Instead, disparate views have been advanced under the heading of cosmopolitanism, and these views share little more than an organizing conviction that any adequate political outlook for our time must in some way comprehend the world as a whole.
To some people cosmopolitanism is primarily a view about sovereignty. To others it is primarily a view about culture and identity. To many philosophers, however, it is primarily a view about justice, and in recent years there has been an increasing flow of books and articles devoted to the subject of'global justice.'
In part, the focus on justice reflects the continuing influence of John Rawls, who insisted that " [j ]ustice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought." (1) In so doing, Rawls, elevated the concept of justice above other important political, ideas such as liberty, law, equality, power, rights, obligation, security, democracy, and the state, and gave it a privileged place on the agenda of contemporary political philosophy. It is testimony to Rawls's influence that justice-especially 'distributive,' or economic, justice-has remained a central preoccupation of political philosophers ever since.
Yet there is disagreement about the bearing of Rawls's own work on cosmopolitanism considered as a view about justice.
In the cosmopolitan literature, Rawls figures both as hero and as villain. As hero-for saying that a just society cannot permit the distribution of income and wealth to be influenced by morally arbitrary factors such as people's native abilities or the social circumstances into which they are born. Cosmopolitans see this as paving the way for a recognition that national boundaries are equally arbitrary from the standpoint of justice. As a matter of justice, the accident of where one is born should have no effect on one's economic prospects.
As villain-because Rawls himself refused to draw this conclusion. In A Theory of Justice, he argued that the "primary subject of justice" is the "basic structure" of an individual society. The basic structure comprises a society's major social, political, and economic institutions. Rawls's principles of distributive justice are universal in the sense that they apply to the basic structure of each society taken one at a time, but not in the sense that they apply to the global distribution of income and wealth as a whole. So, according to Rawls's 'difference principle,' the laws and institutions of the United States should be designed in such a way as to maximize the position of the worst-off Americans, and the laws and institutions of Bangladesh should be designed in such a way as to maximize the position of the worst-off Bangladeshis. But justice does not require that the worst-off Bangladeshis should be as well-off as the worst-off Americans. Indeed, it does not require that the best-off Bangladeshis should be as well-off as the worst-off Americans. According to Rawls, the principles of distributive justice impose no constraints at all on the distribution of income and wealth between the United States and Bangladesh or among citizens of the two countries.
A Theory of Justice was published at a time when globalization was not yet a word in our everyday lexicon and few people described themselves as cosmopolitans. Virtually all political philosophers at the time assumed that the individual society was the default unit of analysis. So if he had written nothing further on the subject, Rawls's failure to question this assumption might have been taken to reveal nothing more damning than a lack of prescience or a failure of imagination. Yet when, late in his career, Rawls explicitly addressed issues of global justice in light of the extensive literature that had by then emerged on the subject, he refused the invitation of sympathetic cosmopolitan critics to apply his theory of distributive justice globally. Instead, he argued that relations among societies are governed by the "law of peoples." (2) The law of peoples sets out principles of justice to govern international relations, but they are not principles of distributive justice. In other words, they do not concern themselves with the distribution of income and wealth per se, but instead presuppose the existence of separate societies within which distributive principles do apply. In taking this position, Rawls cemented his ambiguous status-part hero, part villain-within the cosmopolitan literature.
I believe that this mixed assessment gets things backwards. On the one hand, Rawls is not the hero that cosmopolitans take him to be, because he never did say that morally arbitrary factors should...
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