The Democratic Grounds of Justice

• In Event: Democratic Boundaries

Abstract

Some political theorists endorse something like the “all affected principle,” according to which those affected by potential decisions ought to have a right to participate in making them. The effects of our actions often being global, we ought to establish a cosmopolitan constitutional order to share authority over political boundaries and over the policies of societies that affect outsiders. These are conclusions about political justice—how we ought to arrange collective decision-making. In this paper, I argue that these arguments also have implications for social and economic justice—how we ought to arrange the terms of social interaction more generally. The argument for cosmopolitan political justice supports a cosmopolitan account of the scope of social justice. We have demanding social justice obligations not only to our compatriots or fellow residents of our state, but to people worldwide. These obligations derive in part from our duties to share decision-making authority worldwide. Roughly speaking, global democracy grounds global (social) justice.

If we were to observe what are our political justice obligations—sharing authority with those whom we affect, and who affect us—we would need to engage in extensive social cooperation. We would need institutions and practices that constituted the proper sharing of authority, and exercised that authority over the activities that affected constituents. This is precisely the kind of interaction that many philosophers have agreed trigger justice obligations—though some of these philosophers believe that such interaction is limited to members of the same state. We ought to establish a global political community, and the establishment of that community would cause its members to owe social justice to one another—that is, to organize interaction on fair terms, suitable to free and equal people. When authority is properly shared, nobody can claim that their interactions are insufficiently dense or substantial to trigger these social justice obligations.

In the world as it is, we do not observe our obligations of political justice. We do not share authority properly with outsiders. But this does not obviate the obligations that would follow if we did what we ought to, politically speaking. The obligations of social justice persist, I argue, even when we do not engage in obligatory political coordination. We sometimes have an obligation to do something, which something would lead us to incur further obligations. In some cases, failure to meet that first obligation, while wrong, does prevent us from incurring those further obligations. But in other cases, I believe, the further obligations persist even when we refuse to act in the way that normally would be necessary to trigger those obligations. I suggest that this is because, in these cases, there is a congruence between the reasons that support the initial obligation to act, and the reasons that generate the further obligations were one to so act. To put it another way, in these cases, it would be especially perverse for agents to be able to escape the further obligations by violating their duty to act in ways that would incur those obligations. The case of global justice is such a case, I argue. When we refuse our obligations in political justice, we do refuse to entangle ourselves with the lives of others in ways that would trigger further obligations of social justice. But that wrongful refusal does not free us from those further obligations.

There is another reason why the violation of the requirements of political justice does not eliminate substantial social and economic obligations to foreigners. Violating these requirements generates obligations to repair the wrongdoing. The idea that wrongdoing leads to reparative obligations is familiar. The challenge here is to explain why the proper means of repair for violations of global political justice would entail something like observing principles of egalitarian social justice with respect to those politically wronged. I argue that these currencies of justice—social and political—are not so different, or incommensurable, as one might think. In both cases, the concern is with securing fair terms of cooperation among free and equal people. Denial of political entitlements threatens equal freedom. Social justice concerns, among other things, benefits (such as rights and material resources) that help secure that equal freedom. If anything, those social benefits, and the power that accompanies them, become more urgent when one’s political rights are denied. So the benefits of social justice are an apt form of compensation for the denial of political entitlements. We have reasons sounding in reparation to provide the benefits of social justice so long as we deny people’s claims in political justice. These reparative obligations hold even if, contrary to the previous argument, we do not owe social justice to the people whose political claims are wrongly denied.

Author

• James Lindley Wilson, University of Chicago