Responsibility and Global Justice

• Published date: 01 March 2017
• Date: 01 March 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12153
• Author: Mathias Risse

Responsibility and Global Justice

MATHIAS RISSE

Abstract. The two traditional ways of thinking about justice at the global level either

limit the applicability of justice to states—the only distributions that can be just or

unjust, strictly speaking, are within the state—or else extend it to all human beings.

The view I defend in On Global Justice (Risse 2012) rejects both of these approaches.

Instead, my view, and thus my attempt at meeting the aforementioned challenge,

acknowledges the existence of multiple grounds of justice. My purpose here is to

explain what my view has to say about responsibility. First of all, I explain what my

view implies about the responsibilities of the state for the realization of justice. Then

I explain that in addition to obligations of justice, my view also gives rise to obliga-

tions of account-giving. I end by sketching what all this implies for institutional

reform at the global level.

1.

The two traditional ways of thinking about justice at the global level either limit

the applicability of justice to states—the only distributions that can be just or

unjust, strictly speaking, are within the state—or else extend it to all human beings.

The view I defend in On Global Justice (Risse 2012) rejects both of these approaches.

Instead, my view, and thus my attempt at meeting the aforementioned challenge,

acknowledges the existence of multiple grounds of justice. On Global Justice seeks to

present a foundational theory that makes it plausible that there could be multiple

grounds of justice and to defend a specific view of the grounds I call international-

ism or pluralist internationalism. Internationalism grants particular normative rele-

vance to the state but qualifies this relevance by embedding the state into other

grounds that are associated with their own principles of justice and that thus

impose additional obligations on those who share membership in a state. The

grounds I discuss are shared membership in a state, common humanity, shared

membership in the global order, shared involvement with the global trading sys-

tem, and humanity’s collective ownership of the earth. Other than shared member-

ship in a state, it is humanity’s common ownership of the earth that receives the

most sustained treatment.

My purpose here is to explain what my view has to say about responsibility. I first

discuss some of the major themes from my book, inevitably leaving a considerable

range of questions unaddressed that will come to the reader’s mind. I hope that at

least a fair number of them have been addressed in the book. Once I have

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introduced those main ideas I proceed to the subject of responsibility, and discuss

it from two angles. First of all, I explain what my view implies about the responsi-

bilities of the state for the realization of justice. Then I explain that in addition

to obligations of justice, my view also gives rise to obligations of account-

giving. I end by sketching what all this implies for institutional reform at the global

level.

2.

The most striking fact about the political organization of humanity in our age is

that we live in states. States are organized societies with a government and a terri-

tory. The state’s territory is a region where the government can successfully enforce

its rules because it can generally physically overpower internal competitors and

discourage aggression by outsiders. Needless to say, many countries in Africa,

Central and South America, western and southern Asia, and eastern Europe have

low state capabilities, in a number of cases so low that they are sometimes called

“quasi-states.” Of course, other political arrangements are possible and have

existed historically. Political organizations that predate states include city-states

(which lack the territorial aspect of states), city leagues, empires (which lack the

relatively tight and unified organizational structure of states), or feudal structures

(which normally include complex internal structures). In a world of increasing

political and economic interconnectedness debatable (if perhaps not politically real-

istic) alternatives to the state system include a world state, a world with federative

structures stronger than the United Nations, one with a more comprehensive sys-

tem of collective security, one where jurisdictions are disaggregated, or one where

border control is collectively administered or abandoned entirely.

Nonetheless, it is the state that has been the politically dominant mode of organi-

zation in recent centuries. Two central philosophical questions arise about the state:

whether its existence can be justified to its citizens to begin with, and what is a just

distribution of goods within it. As far as the first question is concerned, philoso-

phers from Thomas Hobbes onward have focused on rebutting the philosophical

anarchist, who rejects the concentrated power of the state as illegitimate. For both

sides of the debate, however, the presumption has been that those to whom state

power had to be justified were those living within its frontiers. The question of jus-

tice, too, has been much on the agenda since Hobbes, but it has gained centrality in

the last fifty years, in part because of the rejuvenating effect of John Rawls’s 1971

Theory of Justice. It is because of his focus on the state that Hobbes got to set much

of the agenda for subsequent political philosophy. And that emphasis was pre-

served (at least initially) when Rawls did so much to renew debates in political

philosophy.

However, real-world changes, grouped together under the label “globalization,”

have recently forced philosophers to broaden their focus. In a world in which

goods and people cross borders routinely, philosophers have had to consider

whether the existence of state power can be justified not merely to people living

within a given state but also to people excluded from it (e.g., by border controls).

At a time when states share the world stage with a network of treaties and global

institutions, philosophers have had to consider not only whether the state can be

justified to those living under it, but whether the whole global political and

42 Mathias Risse

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