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Are There Any Global Egalitarian Rights?

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Abstract

This article considers whether or not there are any global egalitarian rights through a critical examination of the political philosophy of Ronald Dworkin. Although Dworkin maintains that equal concern is the special and indispensable virtue of sovereigns and the hallmark of a fraternal political community, it is far from obvious whether the demands of equality stop at state borders. While some scholars in the field—most notably Thomas Pogge—posit the existence of negative rights in relation to social and economic inequalities at the global level, here I try to defend the existence of positive global egalitarian rights by appealing to Dworkin’s own two principles of ethical individualism. I also set out the framework for a version of what I call global luck egalitarianism based on Dworkin’s equality of resources and try to respond to David Miller’s charge that comparative principles of justice do not apply at the global level.

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Notes

  1. Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  2. For a critique of Dworkin’s way of making the choice/luck cut, see G. A. Cohen, ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, Ethics, 99 (1989): 906−944; ‘Expensive Tastes Rides Again’, in J. Burley (ed.) Dworkin and His Critics (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004). Dworkin’s replies to Cohen can be found in his Sovereign Virtue, ch. 7 and ‘Ronald Dworkin Replies’ also published in Dworkin and His Critics.

  3. See Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), part III; Henry Shue, ‘The Burdens of Justice’, Journal of Philosophy, 80 (1983): 600−608; Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), ch. 6; Brian Barry ‘Humanity and Justice in Global Perspective’ in his Liberty and Justice: Essays in Political Theory Volume 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 195−203.

  4. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1977), p. 180.

  5. Ibid., pp. 272−273.

  6. Ibid., p. 94n.1.

  7. Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, p. 1.

  8. Ibid., p. 6.

  9. Michael Blake, ‘Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 30 (2001): 257−296, p. 264.

  10. Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 196.

  11. Dworkin, ‘Ronald Dworkin Replies’, p. 376, emphasis added.

  12. Dworkin, Law’s Empire, pp. 196−197.

  13. Ibid., p. 207.

  14. Ibid., p. 196.

  15. Ibid., pp. 196−198.

  16. Ibid., p. 199.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Ibid. In contrast to communitarianism properly called, Dworkin argues that a community is not an agent or living thing with an ontological status and life of its own over and above the activities of its members. See Ronald Dworkin, ‘Liberal Community’, California Law Review, 77 (1989): 479−504, p. 494.

  20. Dworkin, Law’s Empire, p. 200, emphasis in original.

  21. Ibid., pp. 200−201.

  22. Ibid., p. 199.

  23. Ibid., p. 201.

  24. Ibid., pp. 213−214.

  25. Ibid., p. 208.

  26. David Miller, ‘Cosmopolitanism: A Critique’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 5 (2002): 80−85, p. 82.

  27. David Miller, ‘Limits of Cosmopolitan Justice’, in D. Mapel and T. Nardin (eds.) International Society: Diverse Ethical Perspectives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 180n.14.

  28. See, for example, Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).

  29. UN Charter, Article 2(7).

  30. UN Resolution A/46/182 (1991), emphasis added.

  31. See, for example, Simon Caney, ‘Entitlements, Obligations, and Distributive Justice: The Global Level’, in D. Bell and A. de-Shalit (eds.) Forms of Justice: Critical Perspectives on David Miller’s Political Philosophy (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 292−293.

  32. Chris Brown, ‘International Political Theory and the Idea of World Community’, in K. Booth and S. Smith (eds.) International Relations Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 94−95.

  33. For more on these explanations, see Colin Leys, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Richard Peet, Theories of Development (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).

  34. Jack Donelly, Universal Human Rights: In Theory and Practice, Second Edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 164−165.

  35. Paul Taylor and Devon Curtis, ‘The United Nations’, in J. Baylis and S. Smith (eds.) The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, Third Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 410.

  36. Available at: http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter, emphasis added.

  37. Dworkin, Law’s Empire, pp. 201−202.

  38. Ibid., p. 214.

  39. Ibid., p. 213.

  40. Ibid., p. 206.

  41. David Miller, ‘Justice and Global Inequality’, in A. Hurrell and N. Woods (eds.) Inequality, Globalization and World Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  42. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, pp. 203−204.

  43. Not everyone recognises the validity of the distinction between negative and positive rights, of course. See, for example, Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U. S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), ch. 2.

  44. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 378−379.

  45. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 37.

  46. Ibid., pp. 115−119.

  47. Ibid., p. 59.

  48. Ibid., p. 79.

  49. Ibid., pp. 68.

  50. Ibid., pp. 65, 79.

  51. Available at: http://www.udhr.org/UDHR/ART01.HTM.

  52. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 80n.23.

  53. Patrick Hayden, John Rawls: Towards a Just World Order (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), p. 136.

  54. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 71.

  55. See Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, p. 152; ‘Social and Cosmopolitan Liberalism’, International Affairs, 75 (1999): 515−529; ‘Rawls’s Law of Peoples’, Ethics, 110 (2000): 669−696.

  56. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pp. 115−119.

  57. Ibid., p. 118.

  58. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, pp. 140−141.

  59. Ibid., p. 170.

  60. See Thomas Pogge, ‘Priorities of Global Justice’, Metaphilosophy, 32 (2001): 6−24; ‘‘Assisting’ the Global Poor’ in D. Chatterjee (ed.) The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); ‘Severe Poverty as a Violation of Negative Duties’, Ethics and International Affairs, 19 (2005): 55−82.

  61. Thomas Pogge, ‘Human Rights and Human Responsibilities’, in A. Kuper (ed.) Global Responsibilities: Who Must Deliver on Human Rights? (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 14.

  62. See, for example, Mathias Risse, ‘How Does the Global Order Harm the Poor?’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33 (2005): 349−378.

  63. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, pp. 66−67.

  64. cf. Anthony J. Langlois, ‘Conceiving Human Rights without Ontology’, Human Rights Review, 5 (2005): 5−24.

  65. A somewhat similar point is made by Pablo Gilabert, ‘The Duty to Eradicate Global Poverty: Positive or Negative?’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 7 (2005): 537−550.

  66. The term ‘luck egalitarianism’ was first coined by Elizabeth Anderson, ‘What is the Point of Equality?’ Ethics, 109 (1999): 287−337, p. 289.

  67. Thomas Pogge, ‘A Global Resources Dividend’, in D. Crocker and T. Linden (eds.) Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).

  68. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, p. 140.

  69. Ibid., p. 141.

  70. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, p. 202.

  71. Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 9.

  72. Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, pp. 5, 324.

  73. Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?, pp. 9−10.

  74. Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, p. 5.

  75. Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?, p. 9.

  76. Ibid., pp. 9−10.

  77. Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, p. 6.

  78. Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?, p. 10.

  79. Ibid.

  80. Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, p. 6.

  81. Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?, pp. 94−5.

  82. Ronald Dworkin, ‘Liberalism’ in S. Hampshire (ed.) Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) 113−143, p. 125.

  83. Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?, pp. 35−36.

  84. Ibid., p. 96.

  85. Ibid., pp. 35−36.

  86. Ibid., p. 37.

  87. David Miller, ‘Against Global Egalitarianism’, Journal of Ethics, 9 (2005): 55−79.

  88. Dworkin, Law’s Empire, p. 272.

  89. cf. Samuel Scheffler, ‘Natural Rights, Equality, and the Minimal State’, in J. Paul (ed.) Reading Nozick (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).

  90. Miller, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, pp. 80−85.

  91. Pogge, ‘Cosmopolitanism: A Defence’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 5 (2002): 86−91, pp. 90−91. See also Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, pp. 78−79.

  92. Peter Singer, for example, argues that the rich must be scrupulously impartial between their own interests and those of people in other parts of the world such that they must keep transferring income and wealth until they have nearly reached the point of suffering disadvantage of ‘comparable significance’. Peter Singer, ‘Rich and Poor’ in his Practical Ethics, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 230.

  93. Thomas Nagel, ‘Ruthlessness in Public Life’, in his Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 84.

  94. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 59.

  95. Thomas Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33 (2005): 113−147, p. 131.

  96. This approach came to the fore during the late 1960s and 1970s during which time Robert McNamara famously advocated the approach to the Board of Governors of the World Bank. See Bruce Moon and William Dixon, ‘Basic Needs and Growth-Welfare Trade-offs’, International Studies Quarterly, 36 (1992): 191−212.

  97. Ronald Dworkin, ‘What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10 (1981): 283−345, p. 311.

  98. Cohen, ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, p. 908.

  99. Dworkin, ‘Equality of Resources’, pp. 293, 311.

  100. See, for example, Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  101. Miller, ‘Justice and Global Inequality’, p. 189.

  102. Ibid., p. 190.

  103. Ibid., p. 191.

  104. Dworkin, ‘Equality of Resources’, pp. 285−286.

  105. Miller, ‘Justice and Global Inequality’, pp. 192−193.

  106. Dworkin, ‘Equality of Resources’, pp. 296−297.

  107. Miller, ‘Limits of Cosmopolitan Justice’, p. 180n.14.

  108. Ibid., p. 171.

  109. Caney, ‘Entitlements, Obligations, and Distributive Justice’, p. 295.

  110. For more on this general approach to moral justification, see Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  111. Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, pp. 115−116.

  112. Miller, ‘Justice and Global Inequality’, pp. 190−191.

  113. For a much fuller treatment of the issue of securing compliance without a world state, see Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 5.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the University of Essex, Department of Philosophy Seminar, 8 February 2007, and at the International Justice and Human Rights section of the Annual Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), Pisa, Italy, 8 September 2007. I am grateful to Joel Smith, Mario Solis, Béatrice Han-Pile, Saladin Meckled-Garcia, Chiara Cordelli, Basak Cali, Fabian Schuppert and Julio Montero for their useful questions and suggestions on those occasions. I would also like to thank Laura Vallentini for taking the time to read and comment on a pre-publication draft, which benefited greatly from her attention to detail.

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Brown, A. Are There Any Global Egalitarian Rights?. Hum Rights Rev 9, 435–464 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-008-0063-5

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