ALSP08: Future Trends in Global Justice Research

As I mentioned yesterday, a theme of many of the discussions at ALSP08 was the current state of global justice research. The round table event which concluded the conference was on the theme of Future Directions in Global Justice Research. Several interesting issues were raised which I will discuss briefly here.

Firstly, Professor Stephen Gardiner raised the issue of environmental ethics and climate change. He called this issue the 'elephant in the room', and argued that given the dire scientific prognosis, we really should be doing as much as we can to debate the ethical issues that arise from climate change. He specifically raised the issue of what he called 'transition ethics', by which I think he meant the ethical problems which are going to face us during the huge changes to the planet that are up ahead. This presumably includes refugee and migration issues, resource scarcity and property rights, as well as the ethical implications of various mooted solutions, including the topic of Gardiner's plenary lecture - geoengineering. Gardiner expressed disapointment that more had not been done in this area since he first started publishing on the issue. I don't think many people would argue with Professor Gardiner on the urgency of environmental issues, although I suppose some people might dispute the relevance or helpfulness of philosophy in the face of such a huge practical problem. I am inclined to agree with him that we do need philosophy in relation to problems such as these, especially when we are treading new ground, as we would be in the case of geoengineering.

Professor Simon Tormey raised another concern about the current state of global justice research. He highlighted that all but one of the conference delegates were affiliated to institutions from the Global North, and was concerned that there is a lack of voices from Global South in western philosophical discourse on global justice. Given that these are the people most affected by the current unjust state of the world, we should be listening more closely to their views. Professor Tormey warned against an 'us' and 'them' mentality, and against us merely perceiving members of the Global South as victims. We should respect their agency and the fact that their views on how best to acheive global justice, as well as what global justice consists of, may differ from ours. Again, I find it hard to disagree with Professor Tormey on this point, but I'm not sure how to best solve this problem.

A question was raised about the challenge to traditional methods of global justice research, as well as to moral and politial theory more generally, from so-called 'experimental philosophy'. This new area of research which uses methodology from the cognitive sciences has posed challenges to our theories of mind and agency. As one of the panelists pointed out, these challenges are broad ones which if forceful, have implications for philosophy in general, not just global justice research. Stephen Gardiner argued that in terms of the branch of experimental philosophy which is seeking to find an accurate picture of what people think about issues of justice and ethics, we should pay no attention to the results when it comes to people's opinions on climate change, because they simply do not know what they think. I am generally not well disposed towards this type of experimental philosophy, but I am mildly optimistic about its applications, especially in the realm of motivation. After all, in order to acheive global justice or solve some of the problems presented by climate change, we do need to be able to motivate people to act differently to how they currently do.

Finally there was some discussion about closing the gap that currently exists between the Global Justice Research that takes place in philosophy and political theory departments, and traditional IR theory as done in politics departments. Participants seemed to agree that this gap exists in North American as well as European (both Continental and British) departments. It is strange that we work on such similar areas to IR theorists yet rarely interact with them on a professional level. Several differences between the disciplines were pointed out. Firstly, IR theory is still dominated by realism, whereas in political philosophy the statism inherent in realism is just one of many approaches. Secondly, IR theorists are primarily concerned with feasibility, whereas in political philosophy and normative theory we tend to deal more often in questions of normativity first, and feasibility second (if at all).

ALSP08: History and Current State of Global Justice Research

A major theme of ALSP08 turned out to be the state of global justice research. I suppose this is not surprising given the concentration of people working in the area at the conference. In the second plenary session and the round table both Margaret Moore and Kok-Chor Tan gave helpful insights into the development and aims of global justice research.

Prof. Tan began his plenary lecture with a brief history of global justice research as he saw it. I think his description was very accurate and so I will quickly reproduce it here.

Tan argued that global justice research has progressed in a number of stages. The first stage was essentially Rawlsian, and consisted of the attempts by Thomas Pogge and Charles Beitz, amongst others, to extend Rawls' theory of social justice from the domestic to the global sphere. This stage consisted of positive arguments for global egalitarianism of some sort.

The second stage was a response to these positive arguments, and so was necessarily more negative. It consisted of arguments against global egalitarianism from people like David Miller - arguments which stressed the limits on global egalitarianism posed by our associative obligations and personal projects. There followed a set of responses to the these negative arguments from global egalitarians like Tan.

The third stage, which Tan argues is the one we are currently in, rejects the premises of the first stage. People like Nagel and Blake are claiming that it is not actually possible to extend justice from the domestic sphere to the global one, because of the significant differences between the two spheres. David Miller also makes these types of argument, as does Rawls arguably in his later work. The appropriate response to these third-stage arguments from global egalitarians, argues Tan, is to go back to the beginning and show why we should care about global equality, independently of the Rawlsian arguments of the first stage. This is the type of argument that Tan is now attempting to make.

I found that Tan's description struck a chord with my own perception of how the debate in global justice has developed. It seems very important to me to make the distinction between the first-stage arguments for global egalitarianism which rely on, as I put it, a relational conception of justice, and the third-stage arguments which do not. The difference between a relational and a non-relational conception of justice is that a relational conception views justice (or more specifically egalitarian justice) as being grounded in associations, interactions and relationships between people. On this type of view considerations of egalitarian justice only arise once people stand in certain relationships with each other. A common form of this type of position is the statist argument that considerations of egalitarian justice arise through political associations. A non-relational view does not see justice as dependent on associations and relationships in this way.

One can, I think, identify a stage prior to the first Rawlsian stage that Tan identifies. This is perhaps the preliminary stage which lays the groundwork which is necessary if discussions on global justice are even going to get off the ground. I'm thinking here of Peter Singer's seminal article 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality' and the literature on duties to the distant poor that followed. Singer's approach is, of course, non-relational, and so now it seems perhaps we have gone full circle!

Prof. Moore stressed the need for a theory of global justice that can account for both the equal moral worth of all individuals (whether distant or not) and our intuitively valuable associative obligations. I was glad to hear her put it in this way, seeing as this is the criteria that I have set for the theories that I evaluate in my thesis. She also argued that the influence of Rawls and Rawlsians on global justice research identified by Tan is detrimental if it means that we only think about interactions between people in terms of the state. I think this is a very important point - at the moment we are restricted by the statist paradigm so that we think the only way to have global justice is through some kind of global state or quasi-state. We need to pay more attention to the more complex and individual interactions that people have with each other all over the globe, interactions that cross borders.

Back from Nottingham

And again I'm back in Sheffield, for slightly longer this time (a whole week! I'm heading to Bristol to stay with a friend this weekend) after the ALSP conference in Nottingham. The conference was excellent - interesting papers, good discussion and some really nice people. I got a lot out of it, and will be posting my thoughts on here over the next few days. My paper was well received, and a couple of the questions were really helpful, if a little challenging. I'm planning on revising it slightly and then submitting it to a journal soon (once I've made up my mind where to send it that is).

Journal Submission

I've had some really encouraging feedback about my paper on Miller's theory of rights for the ALSP conference, and my supervisor thinks it would be a good candidate for publication. Apart from the task of getting it up to scratch for submission, I've also got to decide where to submit it to. This, it seems, is an important decision, for several reasons.
The done thing is to only submit to one journal at a time, and journals can take up to a year to come back to you, so it's important not to aim too high and completely wreck your chances. However, getting accepted to a quality journal will enhance your CV no end, so it is worthwhile being a bit ambitious.
There is also the issue of which type of journal to submit to - a political theory journal or a more traditional philosophy journal. I've been advised that a philosophy journal would be a better idea because politics departments (in the UK at least) will regard that highly, whereas the reverse is not so true - philosophy departments might consider political theory publications less impressive. This accords with my general impression of UK departments, but given that I'm currently in a philosophy department perhaps that's not so suprising?
My initial impression is that the Journal of Applied Philosophy might me a good choice, although they have recently published a paper specifically on David Miller. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad sign. The Journal of Moral Philosophy is also a possibility.

ALSP paper

I sent my paper for the ALSP conference to the organisers on Friday. For anyone else who is interested I've made it available on Google Docs here.

Graduate Seminar 27th Feb

Yesterday I gave a draft of my paper on Miller for the ALSP conference at the department's graduate research seminar. I will be posting the paper here tomorrow when I've sent it to the conference organisers.

Generally I think the response to the paper was good, and there were several helpful questions and comments. The main point of contention seemed to be my argument that Miller's use of needs to ground his theory of basic rights in National Responsibility and Global Justice leaves them lacking objectivity, given his arguments in Principles of Social Justice (PSJ). Many people had the same thought - why can't Miller just have objective basic human rights at the global level as well as contextually specific needs based justice within solidaristic communities? I wanted to show that his contextual arguments in PSJ make this difficult - if the concept of needs has no content without a community-defined conception of harm, then how can needs ground basic rights without there being such a community at the global level? If Miller is committed to such a community, if he holds to the view that needs have no content without a community-defined concept of harm, then it seems to me that his basic rights are contingent on that community. Basic rights as I understand them can't be contingent in this way - mainly because of the work we want to do with them.

There were also a few questions about what exactly the difference was between a global 'solidaristic community' and humanity as such. The concern was that I was placing too much weight on there being something importantly different between the two. I think there is an important difference, because the solidaristic community that Miller describes is a type of relationship between persons, whereas humanity as such is just the set of all persons - there might not be any relationships between them at all. If there was a solidarisitc community that encompassed all persons then the rights it would support would be universal, but this is contingent on the membership of the community encompassing everyone - and it might not be the case that it did so.

Overall it was a helpful discussion in that it flagged up the areas which are likely to attract the most criticism, and which need more work.

ALSP 08 Abstract

The abstract for my paper for ALSP is reproduced below:

In recent work (National Responsibility and Global Justice 2007) David Miller has proposed a system of global basic rights, argued for via a humanitarian strategy, focusing on basic human needs. His position however remains non-cosmopolitan; he remains committed to strong national responsibility and social (rather than global) justice. His theory of social justice (Principles of Social Justice 1999) is pluralistic; he argues that there are three different principles of justice which apply within three different modes of relationship. One of these is the principle of need, which applies within solidaristic communities. Miller argues that need as a principle of justice is only feasible within such communities because they provide the necessary practical conception of need. This paper will explore the relationship between Miller's views in these two books. I will suggest that Miller's use of needs to underpin his system of basic rights might indicate that he is in some way committed to there being a global solidaristic community. If this were the case then it would provide ammunition for cosmopolitanism. I will suggest a way of reply for Miller, which will utilise his distinction between basic needs and societal needs to show how he might deny the existence of a global solidaristic community.

ALSP 08

I'm currently writing a paper for the upcoming Association for Legal and Social Philosophy conference on Global Justice which be held at Nottingham University from 27th-29th March this year. I've had my abstract accepted - now I just have to finish the paper.

My paper is entitled 'A Global Solidaristic Community?'. It addresses the role that the concept of need plays in David Miller's theories of social and global justice, and asks whether there is substantial and problematic divergence between his two theories.

I have been assigned to one of the panels on 'Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism', and from the other titles it looks like we will all be focusing on David Miller's work in some way or another. At the moment our panel is scheduled for 9am on 28th - which may mean a smaller attendance than if it were scheduled later in the day!