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This article argues that populism, cosmopolitanism, and calls for global justice should be understood not as theoretical positions but as appeals to different segments of democratic electorates with the aim of assembling winning political coalitions. This view is called democratic realism: it considers political competition in democracies from a perspective that is realist in the sense that it focuses not first on the content of competing political claims but on the relationships among different components of the coalitions they work to mobilise in the pursuit of power. It is argued that Laclau’s populist theory offers a sort of realist critique of other populists, but that his view neglects the crucial dynamics of political coalition-building. When the relation of populism to global justice is rethought from this democratic realist angle, one can better understand the sorts of challenges each faces, and also where and how they come into conflict.
The issue of statelessness poses problems for the statist (or nationalist) approach to the philosophy of immigration. Despite the fact that the statist approach claims to constrain the state’s right to exclude with human rights considerations, the arguments statists offer for the right of states to determine their own immigration policies would also justify citizenship rules that would render some children stateless. Insofar as rendering a child stateless is best characterized as a violation of human rights and insofar as some states have direct responsibility for causing such harm, the problem of non-refugee stateless children points to greater constraints than most statists accept on states’ right to determine their own rules for membership. While statists can ultimately account for the right not to be rendered stateless, recognizing these additional human rights constraints ultimately weakens the core of the statist position.
All cosmopolitan approaches to global distributive justice are premised on the idea that humans are the primary units of moral concern. In this paper, I argue that neither relational nor non-relational cosmopolitans can unquestioningly assume the moral primacy of humans. Furthermore, I argue that, by their own lights, cosmopolitans must extend the scope of justice to most, if not all, nonhuman animals. To demonstrate that cosmopolitans cannot simply ‘add nonhuman animals and stir,’ I examine the cosmopolitan position developed by Martha Nussbaum in Frontiers of Justice. I argue that while Nussbaum explicitly includes nonhuman animals within the scope of justice, her account is marked by an unjustifiable anthropocentric bias. I ultimately conclude that we must radically reconceptualise the primary unit of cosmopolitan moral concern to encompass most, if not all, sentient animals.
Contemporary liberalism and republicanism present clearly distinct programs for domestic politics, but the same cannot be said when it comes to global politics: the burgeoning literature on global republicanism has reproduced the divide between cosmopolitan and associational views familiar from long-standing debates among liberal egalitarians. Should republicans be cosmopolitans? Despite presence of a range of views in the literature, there is an emerging consensus that the best answer is no. This paper aims to resist the emerging consensus, arguing that republicans should be cosmopolitans. The considerations offered against cosmopolitanism generally rest on an incomplete understanding of the relationship between economic inequality or poverty on the one hand, and domination on the other. Insofar as republicans agree that promoting freedom from domination should be our central political aim, they should regard the reduction of economic inequality and poverty at home and abroad as equally pressing.
G. A. Cohen argues that John Rawls’s focus on the basic structure of society as the exclusive subject of social justice is misguided. I argue that two understandings of the notion of basic structure seem to be present in the literature, either in implicit or in explicit terms. (1) According to the first, the basic structure is to be equated with a given set of institutions: if they endorse the right principles of justice, the basic structure of society is just; (2) According to the second, a society has a just basic structure if and only if its institutional web manages to realize the relevant principles of justice as well it can. In (2), the institutional structure is not a given: different social circumstances call for different institutional solutions in order to achieve a just basic structure overall. The first part of the paper make a case for (2), and explores some of its normative implications. The second part asks which consequences this understanding may have for the idea of a global basic structure.