Abstract
In this paper, I stress the role of capabilities and well-being for an understanding of global justice. I focus on the distinction between the process and outcome aspects of justice. From this viewpoint, I review Sen’s and Nussbaum’s notion of capabilities and Rawls’ and Pogge’s understanding of international and global justice. Rawls’ insistence on the process aspect explains his conception of justice as fairness and his criticism of cosmopolitanism. Nussbaums’ bias toward outcomes and well-being explains her criticism of Rawls and allows characterizing her proposals as justice as benevolence. Pogge forcefully highlights, however, the outcome orientation of main tenets of Rawls’ theory and proves the importance of the international basic structure for global justice. I finally argue that, despite fully accepting Pogge’s main argument, capability and well-being deprivation are dramatic evidence for basic injustice and lack of opportunity for individuals on an international scale.
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Notes
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I do not dwell on the problem of the distinction between peoples and states.
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Rawls concludes a comparison between the Law of Peoples and cosmopolitan views with the following comment: If two societies are well-ordered internally, the Law of Peoples is indifferent toward further redistribution between the least well-off in those different societies, whereas cosmopolitan approaches are not indifferent. The reason—he says—is that these views are concerned about well-being, rather than justice (Rawls 1999: 120).
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To regard dignity and fairness as outcomes sounds very imprecise. I will comment on this point below.
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This is the main reason why Sen assures that capability theory can only offer a “partial theory of justice.” Nussbaum also asserts that her capability approach offers a “partial theory of justice,” but the main reason she adduces is that her approach is silent about redistribution above the threshold of a decent social minimum of capabilities of all citizens.
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This is an important reason why justice, understood from the idea of capability, can be naturally extended to disabled persons and non-human animals (Nussbaum 2006).
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As far as I know, Nussbaum has not used this expression. However, in the book in which she applies her theory to disabled persons and non-human animals, we can find a reflection about the importance of benevolence for her theory, which is absent from previous work (Nussbaum 2006: 58, 63, 90f., 108, 408–415). Nussbaum also asserts that her capabilities approach intends to revive Grotius’s notion of natural law, without questioning its compatibility with political liberalism (Nussbaum 2006: 36, 230, 315). Parellada (2006) argues that the capability approach actually conceives of justice as universal benevolence, that this is incompatible with Rawlsian political liberalism, and that Leibniz’s notions of natural law and wise charity are helpful for this conception of justice.
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It is difficult to introduce these causal links into a formula, apart from the obvious fact that processes must respect human rights. This difficulty might explain why, when Pogge offers a criterion of basic justice, he resorts to human rights in a similar way as when Nussbaum resorts to capabilities: “[S]ocial institutions [should be] designed so that all human beings, insofar as reasonably possible, have secure access to the objects of their human rights” (Pogge 2002a: 50). Nevertheless, causal links are somehow present in this formulation through the emphasis on institutions and by not presenting rights as outcomes.
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Cf. Milanovic (2005) for a clear analysis of three different concepts of international and global inequality.
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UNDP 2005: 130. In the 2005 Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (Hong Kong, 13–18 December 2005), the parties agreed to eliminate all forms of export subsidies by the end of 2013. Developing countries fought in vain for 2010, even though the recommendation of the United Nations Development Programme was actually 2007 (UNDP 2005: 147). We shall see whether export subsidies finally come to an end in 2013. In any case, the fuss about this concession buried talks about the other very substantial forms of agricultural subsidies, which are still in place.
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Parellada, R. (2013). Human Capabilities and Global Justice. In: Merle, JC. (eds) Spheres of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5998-5_36
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