Shared Understandings, Collective Autonomy and Global Equality more

Shared Understandings, Collective Autonomy and Global Equality1 Chris Armstrong, University of Southampton The relationship between the claims of global distributive justice, national selfdetermination and cultural diversity has attracted much attention recently. Three of the most commonly-voiced objections to global distributive justice – and especially, on some accounts, the egalitarian variety – are first that it is incompatible with respecting the collective autonomy of national communities; second that it cannot be achieved without endangering cultural diversity, perhaps even crushing it in instituting the kind of global state that egalitarian justice might require; and third that articulating and / or implementing principles of equality at the global level simply cannot be done. On this last view, we have no metric at the global level by way of which to judge whether resources or opportunities, for example, are equally held, given that different communities differ in the way they conceive and value the goods they distribute amongst themselves. The American philosopher Michael Walzer is a prominent theorist of equality at the domestic level, but his apparent resistance to any form of global distributive justice is much-noted; indeed he has been understood to advance all three of the above claims on the way to rejecting any version of global distributive justice. This paper argues for a more nuanced view. In his most recent work – and also, to a lesser extent, in the very work that has been claimed to give evidence for his objections – Walzer demonstrates a surprising degree of sympathy for the claims of global distributive justice, even of the egalitarian variety. But the precise nature of this commitment to global equality remains to be explicated. The paper therefore examines the contours of Walzer’s global egalitarianism, paying particular attention to the conclusions we might draw firstly for our understanding of the opposition between global equality and national self-determination (which is more complex than has sometimes been thought), and secondly for the relationship between global equality and shared understandings. I Walzer on universalism For Walzer, justice is ‘a social invention, variously made.’2 One implication of this is that theories of distributive justice must take account of divergent social meanings; intelligible principles of distributive justice can only be worked up with due reference to how different communities in fact conceive and value the social goods that they distribute amongst themselves. To put it most strongly, all arguments about justice are thus simply appeals to common meanings.3 As egalitarians, for instance, we work up our arguments for socio-political reform from the ideas already present in our political cultures, and not from some ‘external’ source: ‘Moral and intellectual reform begins with intra-hegemonic struggle...it is in large part a rearrangement of ideas already present in the old [system].’ Any culture 1 PDF Created with deskPDF PDF Writer - Trial :: http://www.docudesk.com is likely to provide resources for social criticism, simply in virtue of the fact that elites tend to promise us more in the way of equality (or freedom, or justice) than they actually deliver - equality typically has a ‘real but distinctly limited value’ in the hegemonic culture, but it also has larger, ‘utopian’ meanings which are occasionally invoked within that hegemonic culture and which allow for radical criticism from the disaffected.4 Indeed all radical change has arisen from the kind of ‘organic’ social criticism whereby regimes are called upon to practice what they preach - or, more precisely, to deliver on their promises.5 By contrast to this model of ‘internal’ social criticism, Walzer opposes the kind of philosophical ‘abstraction’ typified by the search for transcendental principles external to the shared understandings of a given community. If such transcendental principles are discovered, a higher status will usually be claimed for them vis-à-vis everyday common understandings. The problem is that this mode of accessing moral principles slides too easily into authoritarianism, whereby the values of the community are ridden over rough-shod as the newly discovered ‘truth’ is implemented.6 It is usually taken as a consequence of this view that global distributive justice is simply unintelligible (given that we do not agree, globally, on the meaning of the social goods that might be distributed), and that any attempt to impose it from without will be unjust by definition. Certainly philosophical ‘authoritarianism,’ whereby communities might be governed by ideals not shared by them, is at least as much of a danger globally as it is domestically.7 But this does not mean that Walzer is not a universalist on justice. In fact he distinguishes between two forms of universalism, which he calls ‘covering-law’ and ‘reiterative universalism.’ The first suggests (in the mode of abstraction) that there is from the outset a single moral law, which is accessible to reason and ought, when found, to be imposed upon all - regardless of their actual beliefs. On the second view the content of any universal morality is precisely those principles which empirically speaking are common to diverse communities. Elucidating what is universal is a descriptive exercise insofar as it entails delineating the overlaps between the shared understandings of distinct communities. The first form of universalism will impose ‘external’ constraints on any community, whereas the second, properly understood, imposes only ‘internal’ constraints. Philosophical authoritarianism is not a danger here, because the social critic is only interpreting what is already present in a political culture. No special status is presumably to be claimed for that interpretation, beyond pointing to its coherence. When sketching the principles of global justice, we must work on the basis of what is already present, and reiterated across cultures; but we should not expect too much convergence. To use another of Walzer’s well-known metaphors, globally there is a common convergence on a ‘thin’ set of issues concerning human rights and the conduct of war (‘The principles of political independence and territorial integrity do not protect barbarism’8), but also extending to prohibitions against murder, deception and cruelty. But ‘thick’ common meanings (such as would be needed to underpin a fully-fledged scheme of distributive justice) are just not present at the global level.9 As Walzer puts it, ‘were we to take the globe as our setting, we would have to imagine what does not yet exist…We would have to imagine a common set of meanings.’10 Implementing such imagined common meanings would, by extension from the argument above, witness a slide into authoritarianism. Attempts to secure 2 PDF Created with deskPDF PDF Writer - Trial :: http://www.docudesk.com global distributive justice would not secure broad agreement, and might instead require an authoritarian state at the global level; and it is hard to envisage how a global state could be compatible with cultural diversity.11 Walzer’s arguments here have been controversial, but they also resonate with some more recent criticisms of (at least some visions of) global distributive justice. Rawls’s position in The Law of Peoples is redolent of Walzer’s in a number of ways. Whereas Rawls is keen to assure us that his eight principles of the law of peoples are ‘familiar and traditional,’ given ‘the [shared] history and usages of international law and practice,’ he is just as determined to remind us that the global public political culture, such as it exists, does not provide the much denser stock of shared ideas necessary to get a conception of global distributive justice off the ground.12 In the face of this, the imposition of global distributive justice would violate a fundamental norm of legitimacy: that principles of justice must be acceptable to all reasonable people. Though it is not employed by Rawls, the language of thick and thin could easily be applied here. More specific opprobrium has recently been levelled by David Miller at the idea of egalitarian global justice. Such an idea, Miller tells us, neglects to recognise that communities will legitimately define and distribute social goods in different ways; in fact no overall ranking of resources or opportunities is available that would enable us to declare that global equality had been satisfied.13 In view of this, global justice in particular is, barring extensive cultural homogenisation, a chimera. Despite this, the picture of Walzer as a stalwart opponent of global distributive justice was always a simplistic one. One early instance of sympathy for its claims comes during the well-known discussion of the ethics of immigration. Though he does want generally to argue for the right of communities to determine who might or might not enter them, he also admits the moral force of Henry Sidgwick’s claim that ‘a state possessing large tracts of unoccupied land [could not reserve] an absolute right of excluding alien elements.’14 Discussing Australia’s ‘whites only’ immigration policy, he admits a tension between the right of communal self-determination that he (generally) argues for, and the intuitive appeal of an argument linking the obligation to admit immigrants to the availability of space (and also, Walzer adds, resources); he appears unsure how to adjudicate between the two moral claims. In this particular case what is at stake is very specific: the legitimacy, or illegitimacy of refusing to admit non-white immigrants, rather than immigrants per se, to a rich and spacious country. And it is not claimed that in this case Australia has an obligation to admit immigrants in relation to its excess land: its leaders could legitimately choose between admitting diverse immigrants into its existing territory, and ceding excess land and remaining culturally (relatively) homogenous. But the claim that nation-states can possess resources that are in excess of what is needed, in the face of pressing need elsewhere,15 has by now been raised and cannot easily be dispensed with. Walzer suggests that some of this ‘excess’ of resources will need to be redistributed: not all of it, so that ‘simple equality’ resulted at the global level, but something short of it that would still allow, and inevitably result, in different levels of wealth between political communities (immigration would thus remain an issue ‘even after the claims of distributive justice have been on a global scale’16). But this is to admit the possibility that principles of global distributive justice might properly function, at least in a negative way, to criticise existing distributions. Whilst Walzer 3 PDF Created with deskPDF PDF Writer - Trial :: http://www.docudesk.com has not argued that they might have a positive role in delineating solutions cashed out in terms of duties of global distributive justice, that can of worms has at least been raised as an issue here.17 What form should global redistribution take, and how should we set its goals and parameters? This is a difficult question, since much of Spheres of Justice has been devoted to establishing that cross-community metrics of resources are not available to us: how then to judge the level of excess, and the level of entitlement? These questions are not pursued, and Walzer claims that the form of the redistribution can be ‘fixed by some version of collective mutual aid.’18 But the need for some kind of ‘distributive justice…on a global scale’ has been raised and not refuted decisively by any means. The question only achieves further attention in Walzer’s more recent writings, to which we now turn. II Securing global equality As is well known, Walzer has in recent years become more willing to call for military intervention to defend against gross human rights violations. He has not dropped the presumption against intervention, but he has ‘found it easier and easier to over-ride the presumption,’19 partly by expanding the category of abuses that presumably infringe the minimalist universal moral code sufficiently to over-ride the claims of collective autonomy. As part of that process, he has also argued more explicitly for the establishment or entrenchment of various global institutions, including a world criminal court with powers of arrest, and a United Nations with genuine powers of military intervention.20 But the shift in position on global distributive justice is more pertinent to our purposes here, and more intriguing. Originally, in Spheres of Justice, Walzer gave the impression (his comments of justice and immigration cited above notwithstanding) that there could be no global distributive justice, because we could not agree on what that meant in practice, given cultural pluralism. There has never been a universal ‘currency’ of distributive justice, because of the different ways in which different cultures understood the social goods they distributed amongst themselves. Nevertheless in his recent work, Walzer recognises that the most drastic forms of degradation and inequality occur in international society, and that there is a ‘global hierarchy’ that needs tackling.21 This hierarchy can be understood, at least partially, in a distributive sense. When evaluating the various contenders for an international regime of governance (ranging from a world state to international anarchy), Walzer suggests four criteria for judging them: (global) distributive justice, individual freedom, cultural pluralism and the promotion of peace.22 We learn little at this stage about how to balance these priorities together (though see Section III), but in any case principles of distributive justice are now presented as one important criterion for the evaluation of a regime of global governance. It is reiterated that a world state would be undesirable, but at the same time it is conceded that its ability to pursue global distributive justice, and ‘egalitarian reforms’ specifically, would be one thing that counted in its favour.23 On his current presentation, greater global equality – for individuals as well as communities – is other things being equal a desirable goal. As we will see below, instead of a world state, Walzer’s preferred vision is of a world of well-governed states – but that vision is at least partly attractive because it serves the 4 PDF Created with deskPDF PDF Writer - Trial :: http://www.docudesk.com goal of narrowing global inequalities. It is suggested that the autonomy of nationstates is to be defended (amongst other reasons) because it serves that end: entrenching state power (at least for some states) is likely to get us closer to global egalitarianism than any alternative strategy. Walzer’s global approach is presented as an outgrowth of, or at least a parallel case to, his approach to the politics of multiculturalism. Walzer has long argued that a satisfactory theory of equality must be liberal in its basic intuitions; indeed his theory of complex equality represents an exercise in extending the liberal ‘art of separation’ onto the terrain of distributive justice.24 But Walzer has also long argued that liberalism is incomplete as a political theory, and one important reason for this is that it pays insufficient attention to our associational life, and our life as members of communities, institutions and groups. This after all forms the substance of the periodic ‘communitarian correction’ of liberalism, on his view. Rather than communitarianism representing a genuine competitor to liberalism, various versions of the communitarian challenge to liberalism have emerged at different times to correct one of its key defects: its stubborn treatment of individuals outside of their associational context. But this myopic form of liberalism is self-defeating, because individuals do live their lives in associational contexts that any adequate theory of justice must attend to. For this reason a viable egalitarian politics will be liberal, but it will not be exclusively liberal. In terms of domestic egalitarian politics, liberalism is characterised by an ‘emancipatory’ model, which focuses on granting equal opportunities to individuals, broadly speaking regardless of their group membership. But according to Walzer the goals of the emancipatory model – though laudable – cannot effectively be secured by an approach which focuses on granting opportunities to individuals but neglects the groups to which they belong. We should pay attention to the groups individuals are members of if we want to secure equality. This is not because groups matter morally; it is a matter chiefly of political efficacy. In practice, delivering on the promise of equality means supplementing the emancipatory model with a model of ‘empowerment.’ The empowerment model is a necessary correction or, better, supplement to the emancipatory model. It focuses on building the capacities, autonomy and security of the groups to which individuals belong.25 This focus is important because oppressed groups often suffer from stigma, exclusion and marginalisation, and political remedies may need to be finely tailored to overcome those evils. This is not to say, though, that empowerment will be achieved by a politics of ‘recognition,’ simply understood. Rather than arguing directly for the eradication of the stigma felt by oppressed groups, Walzer believes that the removal of stigma will likely be achieved indirectly, as a result of a given group’s achievement of material security, political resources, and institutional stability. On the empowerment model, then, though the goal remains the achievement of equal opportunities or resources for individuals, the achievement of this depends on strengthening, rather than ignoring, the groups to which we belong. For it is once the groups to which we belong have a secure material basis that selfrespect, and broader social respect, might be expected to follow. This is why Walzer calls his multiculturalism a ‘meat-and-potatoes’ (rather than, for instance, a recognition-based) variety: ‘the material strength of groups [the safeguarding oof the meat and potatoes of their collective life] compels their mutual respect.’ This material 5 PDF Created with deskPDF PDF Writer - Trial :: http://www.docudesk.com strength contributes to the sense of efficacy of a group’s members, and provides a much surer route towards the liberal goal of equality.26 Walzer depicts his position on global justice as a more or less straightforward extension of this ‘meat-and-potatoes’ model of multiculturalism to the global scale. Unfortunately, cosmopolitans tend to simply reproduce the emancipatory model at the global level, and show no concern for the fact that global equality for individuals – whilst unquestionably the normative goal – requires us to empower them via strengthening the groups to which they belong. As such liberal cosmopolitan theories, as currently understood, appear incapable of delivering on their goals. Like the domestic emancipatory model, they are toothless in a world characterised by intense feelings of belonging and identity - which should be used as tools for achieving justice, not seen as mere obstacles to it. Global equality will not in fact be served by a simple jump forwards to purely global institutions, though such institutions are certainly necessary. Rather, the delivery of equality at the global level involves a two-track process, whereby on the one hand global institutions are created that can regulate the environment, trade, labour and resources, but on the other hand weak states themselves are strengthened. We certainly do need to move in the direction of further political centralization, and civil society organisations such as global political parties, global unions, and global movements pursuing, for instance, gender equality can play a role in this,27 as can regional associations such as the European Union. The present state system cannot provide an adequate response to all of the inequalities that characterise the contemporary world. But we also need to strengthen states at the same time – at least states which, at present, are not capable of delivering meat and potatoes to their citizens. Thus as with the domestic brand of multicultural politics, it is clear that ‘[t]he terrible poverty of so many people, in the third world especially, cannot be addressed without attending to the groups to which they belong.’28 In the long term, global equality will only be served by securing ‘an empowered and effective state’ for all individuals.29 The ‘empowerment’ model suggests a two-track strategy because what is needed is not only the addition of an additional layer of governance alongside the existing, imperfect state system, but also the simultaneous fulfilment of the ideal of a world of capable, functioning states.30 The idea that ‘a completed universalised state system’ is imperative is not new to Walzer,31 but the idea that this is an agent of global egalitarianism is a new and significant emphasis. What is also new is the suggestion that achieving the ‘completed’ state system will place obligations on the inhabitants of wealthier states: indeed he suggests that Thomas Pogge’s Global Resources Dividend as an example of the kind of mechanism that could usefully achieve the resource flows necessary to deliver on this vision.32 Thus a ‘meat-and-potatoes’ vision of global politics would depend on nations enjoying genuine material security, with other nations similarly situated, and ‘roughly equal’ to themselves in wealth and power. This, presumably, will also engender a sense of efficacy on behalf of citizens, which might otherwise be damaged by a premature rush to global centralisation;33 ‘On the way to becoming citizens of the world, they must have an opportunity to be, and they must learn to be, competent citizens of a particular state.’34 Thus a world of dispersed power – with some centralization, but also a strengthening of many states – is Walzer’s preferred solution. This vision of global egalitarianism is highly suggestive, and has been said 6 PDF Created with deskPDF PDF Writer - Trial :: http://www.docudesk.com by some to represent an antidote to forms of cosmopolitanism which have been criticised for their institutional naivety, or for making excessive demands on our moral capacities.35 The next two sections, though, seek to examine in further depth quite where it leaves us in terms of Walzer’s erstwhile theoretical commitments. The first seeks to delineate the contours of his global egalitarianism more carefully, drawing some conclusions for the study of global egalitarianism along the way. The second examines the relationship between Walzer’s egalitarianism and his emphasis on shared meanings, which appears more and more troubled. III Global egalitarianism and national self-determination We can distinguish between several views on global equality. Firstly, we might believe that all individuals across the globe are entitled to equal concern and respect. It is controversial whether, and how, this view would require us to limit global inequalities in practice.36 Secondly, we might believe that many if not all global inequalities are pro tanto unfair, although there might be principled reasons (such as a concern for collective autonomy) which dictate that, all things considered, we should not address them. Thirdly, we might believe that many if not all global inequalities are unjust all things considered, and should be rectified. At least some global inequalities are sufficiently unfair that this unfairness outweighs any competing moral claims (such as collective autonomy) and should be acted upon. Note that this third view remains indeterminate on the question of who has a responsibility to do so. Fourthly, we might believe that many if not all global inequalities are unjust, that they should be addressed, and that we all share an equal responsibility to address them.37 It is this last view which will give rise to duties of global distributive egalitarianism. An important point to make at the outset is that these views betoken considerable diversity, and a general reference to ‘global egalitarianism’ is inadequate in the face of such diversity. Although the first view may be combinable with a wide variety of political positions, it would certainly be legitimate for adherents of either our second, third and / or fourth views to describe themselves as global egalitarians. Furthermore, any opposition between global egalitarianism and national self-determination is unhelpful unless we further specify what we take global egalitarianism to mean. A belief in our second view is obviously compatible with some degree of national self-determination. At least some self-professed global egalitarians hold that the claims of global egalitarianism can, at least on some issues, be defeated by the claims of national self-determination, with the devil residing in the detail.38 More importantly even our third view may be compatible with substantial national self-determination, depending upon whom we believe to be responsible for rectifying inequalities. We might believe that global inequalities are unjust, but also believe that states bear the brunt of the responsibility for making good on equality. To push the argument still further our fourth view, too, can be reconciled with some degree (and perhaps a substantial degree) of national selfdetermination, depending upon which goods, relations or opportunities we would see distributed on an egalitarian basis. Global egalitarians need not, after all, be egalitarians with regards to all goods. 7 PDF Created with deskPDF PDF Writer - Trial :: http://www.docudesk.com One vocal opponent of global egalitarianism, David Miller, accepts our first claim but is reticent about the second. His general position is that whilst at the global level we rightly make ‘absolute’ moral judgements about the ills of poverty, ‘comparative’ judgements about equality and inequality are out of place. He also suggests that global egalitarianism is to be rejected at least partly because it is incompatible with collective autonomy, which leaves open the possibility that inequalities are pro tanto unfair but not, all things considered, unjust. But the general position is that global inequalities are not intrinsically worrying in the first place, although some global inequalities may have deleterious effects on other values (such as that of political equality between states).39 Thus Miller can object to global inequalities on instrumental grounds, as when inequality disturbs the potential for political equality. But he will reject our third claim, at least if we read it as raising an intrinsic objection to inequality. Finally, as is well known, he does not accept the fourth either, arguing instead for a much more complex division of labour in dealing with the (by hypothesis ‘absolute’) issues of global poverty and human rights violations. I want to suggest that, for all that Walzer’s position is often taken to run rather parallel to Miller’s, it is significantly different. Walzer is not denying, now, that global egalitarianism is our goal. He accepts our second and even third claims: there are global inequalities that are unjust, and should be rectified. His recent work displays a surprisingly easy acceptance that global equality is a valid goal of global governance, and that national autonomy itself is to be respected (in part) because it is instrumentally useful to secure greater individual-regarding global equality. Global distributive justice straight-off might be over-ruled for pragmatic reasons (see below), but global egalitarianism is still an appropriate criterion by way of which to assess the justice of the contemporary world (I examine in the next Section what thr precise content of this global egalitarianism might be). As argued at the end of section I, this view that criteria of global distributive justice might provide an appropriate tool for criticising global distributions is not new to his work either. What Walzer does share with some sceptics of ‘cosmopolitanism’ is that, like Miller, he rejects our fourth claim: responsibility for tackling global inequalities must be distributed not equally, but with a view to existing institutional structures, and to already-existing allegiances, though in cases of emergency or remedial justice they may fall on distant others. The language of global distributive justice plays a ‘negative’ role in criticising distributions, but does not commit us positively to global egalitarian duties. Instead, Walzer suggests that the institutions that exist now condition the responsibilities we have as actors. The existence of the state in particular is crucial; we therefore find an argument for a distribution of responsibilities rather like Miller’s.40 He still maintains that intervention by external powers in the affairs of (more or less) sovereign states is quite likely to go wrong, which is why pragmatically he still affirms that ‘Social change is best achieved from within.’41 In addition, he does suggest that individuals in effective states will bear responsibility for success and failure; national communities might be entitled to the benefits of good decision-making, and national autonomy should lead us to accept some global inequalities.42 But he simultaneously affirms that global equality is the underlying moral requirement. The resulting world of stronger states, where states are entitled to at least some of the product of good decision-making, will be less than 8 PDF Created with deskPDF PDF Writer - Trial :: http://www.docudesk.com fully egalitarian. But we should nevertheless accept it because it represents the most egalitarian world we could realistically achieve.43 The reason Walzer’s is a meat and potatoes global egalitarianism, evincing the need for strong states with some selfdetermination, is that this is likely to be the most successful route toward the liberal goals of distributive equality for the individuals of the world. To repeat, then, a remaining point of divergence from many contemporary cosmopolitan theorists is that, though Walzer admits that the language of global distributive justice is appropriate to diagnosing the inequalities that characterise the contemporary world, this does not, on his view, commit us to formal duties of global (re)distributive justice as the appropriate remedy. Importantly, we can accept our third view and believe that the remedy for the unjust inequalities is global distributive justice, or we can believe that the remedy is mutual aid and charitable giving, and his position here does not seem to have shifted much from Spheres of Justice. The argument remains that at the global level ‘for now at least, ordinary moral principles regarding humane treatment and mutual aid do more work than any specific account of distributive justice.’44 It is also suggested that what Rawls called ‘natural duties’ would provide a strong critique of global inequalities,45 though some global transfers will be necessary. Like Rawls, he suggests that Thomas Pogge’s idea of Global Resources Dividend might provide a useful mechanism for securing the goal of a world of independent, fully-functioning states.46 But like Rawls, he does not quite commit himself to presenting the Dividend as an instantiation of global distributive justice in practice. IV Global egalitarianism and shared understandings I will not focus any further on Walzer’s claim that principles of global egalitarianism might provide a negative evaluative criterion, but need not be cashed out in terms of global egalitarian duties – other than to note that such a position is logically coherent, if unlikely to go far in addressing the ever-widening gap between the global rich and poor. I will focus instead on the claim (our third claim from the last section) that global egalitarianism provides an intelligible set of criteria for criticising existing distributions. One thing that is particularly interesting about Walzer’s recent arguments about global equality is that he makes no appeal therein to his concerns about social meanings being particular to specific communities. But on what grounds might Walzer maintain, in the light of his earlier arguments, that the concept of global equality is even intelligible? We need to work out where Walzer has left his scepticism about global principles of distributive justice based on the diversity of social meanings across communities. It might be suggested that Walzer’s global egalitarianism, and his concern for respecting local meanings, are not incompatible in the first place: his well-known theory of complex equality demands that we distribute goods according to shared understandings,47 and if all communities distributed goods according to their own distinct understandings, a kind of global complex equality would result. Thus for ‘global equality,’ we should read complex equality made doubly complex as it maps across different national communities. But this cannot be right. Walzer is clear that it is a result of historical accident (largely contingent upon the separation, and sheer pluralism, of social 9 PDF Created with deskPDF PDF Writer - Trial :: http://www.docudesk.com spheres in modern societies) that distributing goods according to shared understandings will result, in liberal Western societies, in something we could legitimately call equality.48 Distributing goods according to shared understandings in traditional societies is just as likely to lead to hierarchy, caste privilege and exclusion (a conclusion that was accepted, it seemed). So when Walzer discusses global equality, he cannot be arguing for complex equality writ globally, though he might be arguing for something more ‘simple’, such as rough equality of welfare, or resource holdings, for instance. But can such a notion be intelligible cross-culturally? The connection between Walzer’s ‘internalist’, interpretivist methodology and the criteria of global egalitarianism stands in need of further specification. It is unlikely that Walzer now believes that there are no cultural obstacles to implementing global principles. More likely is that he believes that global distributive principles will still need cashing out in terms of the shared understandings of distinct communities. But once he would have argued that this made such distributive principles unintelligible. Now, he must hold that global distributive justice, and even global egalitarianism, is a meaningful concept regardless of pluralism with regard to social meanings. How are we to understand this apparent shift in position? One way in which the position might be explained is to make a distinction between cases of injustice – which Walzer accepts that we can sometimes agree on cross-culturally, and principles of justice, on which agreement will be lacking. But Walzer seems by now to have transcended this earlier distinction. Walzer has argued in the past that we can cross-culturally agree on clear cases of injustice in some, usually extreme cases. But these instances are scattered, and our judgements about them, even when collected together, are too patchy to knit together into actual principles of global justice.49 For the sweeping condemnation of global inequalities that has been mounted cannot sensibly be portrayed as referring to a disconnected series of isolated cases. Although he may not be explicitly engaged in formulating principles, neither is he on the safe ground of case-by-case analysis: some kind of step-change seems to have occurred. This shift could be explained in several ways. A first possibility, albeit an unlikely one, is that he has come to distinguish questions of ideal theory (at which level global distributive principles are appropriate) more sharply from questions of implementation. In a similar way Simon Caney responds to critics of global equality of opportunity by sharply separating the difficulty of spelling the ideal out in practice from questions about its normative desirability.50 A second - again unlikely - possibility is that shared meanings have recently emerged, perhaps as a result of cultural globalization, which would make elaborating principles of global distributive justice a plausible enterprise across cultures. When Walzer argues for a stronger version of humanitarian intervention, he is explicit that we cannot just short-cut to the moral conclusions we want (a maximal account of human rights, for instance). We need to track emerging practices and institutions in international society.51 But still, he could argue more or less plausibly that the content of his new, slightly more interventionist position on human rights is supported by the evolving global human rights culture.52 That culture may be steadily shifting, and Walzer’s position may reflect those shifts. But it would be a much more surprising conclusion if the shared understandings necessary to sustain global egalitarianism had emerged in such a short period. 10 PDF Created with deskPDF PDF Writer - Trial :: http://www.docudesk.com Thirdly, perhaps Walzer has been persuaded by accounts such as Martha Nussbaum’s that suggest that there are some things (such as core capabilities) that all citizens need, regardless of which community they hold citizenship in, though as Nussbaum says the relevant capabilities might still be delivered differently in different cultural contexts;53 it might on this basis remain possible to talk meaningfully of global distributive justice and to diagnose at least the more egregious inequalities. On this basis, it is important to recognise that when Walzer talks of global equality, he might mean something rather sufficientarian in character, involving access to basic resources or capabilities; global inequalities would therefore refer to instances where individuals were deprived of these basic preconditions of an adequate life. Such a conception of equality would presumably still fall prey to questions about cultural diversity, but might face such questions less acutely. Nussbaum’s own position is rather sufficientarian in character, though it is interesting to note her own view that it does depend on accepting some rather ‘thick’ conception of the good life. We do not know which of these arguments, if any, explain the apparent shift in position. But perhaps Walzer’s discussion of global equality should not surprise us in any case: as some astute critics have pointed out, although Walzer’s official definition of equality hinges solely on whether goods are distributed in accordance with their meanings or not (at least in Western societies exhibiting a plurality of spheres and distributive criteria), he does from time to time assess distributions as more or less egalitarian according to apparently more ‘objective’ criteria. Thus he concedes that a pluralist society in which all goods were distributed according to their distinct meanings, in their distinct spheres, might lead to the same people being ‘successful’ in every sphere, and concedes that this ‘would certainly make for an inegalitarian society’.54 Whether or not we think such a situation probable (and it may be much less probable than some of Walzer’s critics have supposed, for conceptual as well as practical reasons), the point is that here Walzer concedes that even in (spherically) pluralist societies the distribution of goods according to their own principles - and thus the eradication of what he calls dominance, defined as the illicit conversion of advantage between spheres – might not lead to equality. But if Walzer’s official position is that equality is the absence of dominance, he must also, here, be operating with an unofficial, perhaps more ‘simple’ conception of equality.55 But what might that be? If Walzer is operating with a background conception of equality, which we can use to judge whether spherical pluralism might or might not secure equality in practice, then the status of that conception – and its seeming independence from shared understandings about the meanings of social goods – is puzzling. The most provocative suggestion would be that the theory of complex equality offers not a definition of equality, but an account of how we might (in most cases, in liberal democracies…) deliver equality in practice. If this is right, the implications for the theory of complex equality are serious: it turns out that Walzer is really offering a set of political strategies for achieving equality, however it comes to be defined (and the work of defining it remains to be done). One possibility, then, is that we need to separate the levels of theorising more carefully. At the level of ideal theory, Walzer might be committed to a conception of equality as something like equality of welfare; this principle would be universal and non-contextual. At the level of non-ideal theory, he could then take the view that equal welfare will be 11 PDF Created with deskPDF PDF Writer - Trial :: http://www.docudesk.com served by different goods in different cultural contexts. Given that different goods contribute differently to the welfare of different individuals in different social settings - perhaps partly because they conceive of them and their value in different ways56 - the universal goal of equal welfare might be served best by distributing different goods according to different principles in different contexts. This would be a troubling concession for Walzer, for it would redefine his distributive theory as a ‘mere’ method of application, dependent on a prior, undisclosed theory of egalitarian justice. But for present purposes the significant point is that it would render his apparently untroubled discussion of global equality and inequality less puzzling: though the theory of complex equality is not applicable across communities, there is a background conception of equality which does not depend so clearly on a given conception of social goods, and which can readily be used to appraise global inequalities. The onus would then be on Walzer to spell out the nature of this conception; he would owe us an account of what it means to discuss ‘global equality’, and what the relation is between that conception and (presumptively) shared understandings about the value of social goods. Just what role disagreement about the meaning of social goods across communities would then play in the delivery of global equality in practice remains to be seen. V Conclusions It has been show that a concern with the inequalities of resources and opportunities between individuals across the world has become steadily more explicit in Walzer’s work, to the extent that it makes sense to describe his position as a variant of global egalitarianism. Many global inequalities are now judged to be unjust by the standards of distributive justice. Where Walzer differs from some other global egalitarians is in his view of the appropriate remedies. Like Miller, he argues for a complex distribution of responsibilities, rather than arguing for a universal set of egalitarian distributive duties. In the here and now, the focus should be on discharging natural duties (presumably to avoid exploitation and so on), and to pursue a more uniform policy of state-building, which might need to be funded partly by some form of taxation (such as a Global Resources Dividend). His global egalitarianism is thus a parallel case to his multiculturalism, where the argument is that although liberals have identified the correct goal (individual-regarding distributive egalitarianism), they need to bolster their method with a commitment to bolstering associational – and in this case institutional life. By contrast to some prominent cosmopolitan positions, ‘What is lost is the hope of creating a more egalitarian world with a stroke of the pen.’57 But for Walzer, such a hope would be forlorn in any case. How all of this squares with his erstwhile theoretical commitments is less clear at present. If I am correct in my analysis, the tension between a concern for global inequalities, on the one hand, and a commitment to portraying justice in terms of the faithfulness of distribution to shared understandings, on the other, is not new to Walzer. But the issues have been elaborated recently such as to make the tension still more acute. My own suspicion is that Walzer is right that a concern for the distinct meanings of goods in different communities does not rule out commitment to global egalitarianism. But neither, contra Walzer, does it rule out commitment to egalitarian duties of global justice. 12 PDF Created with deskPDF PDF Writer - Trial :: http://www.docudesk.com These duties might take a variety of forms, and a variety of justifications. But if it is intelligible, despite disagreement about the meaning of goods, to appraise distributions in terms of the language of global egalitarianism, then it is at the very least intelligible to posit duties of global egalitarian justice in response. 1 I would like to thank Keith Breen, Andrew Mason, David Owen and Adam Swift for their helpful comments on this paper. 2 Michael Walzer (2007) Thinking Politically: Essays in Political Theory (edited by David Miller. London: Yale University Press), p. 192. 3 Walzer (1983) Spheres of Justice: a Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York, Basic Books), p.29. 4 Michael Walzer (1988) The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books), p.99. 5 Michael Walzer (1994) Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (London: University of Notre Dame Press), p. 46. 6 Walzer is, it has to be said, ambiguous on whether such ‘abstraction’ is genuinely possible, but undesirable (because undemocratic, for instance), or whether it is in fact impossible (in which case its desirability is not an issue). For a discussion of this ambiguity, see Chris Armstrong (2000) ‘Philosophical Interpretation in the Work of Michael Walzer’, Politics 20(2): 87-92. 7 Walzer, Thinking Politically pp. 219-236; 22-37. 8 Michael Walzer (1997) On Toleration (London: Yale University Press), p. 21. 9 He has, to be sure, wavered on where this convergence comes from, at one point suggesting that thick moralities are worked up from a shared thin framework (‘elaborations of it’), at other times (his preferred version), suggesting that thick morality comes first, with thin morality existing at the overlap between different thick moralities; on ‘elaborations’, see Walzer (1987) Interpretation and Social Criticism (London: Harvard University Press), p. 25, p. 93. At one point he suggested that these constraints work ‘from the outside’; Michael Walzer (1995) ‘Response’, in David Miller and Michael Walzer (eds) Pluralism, Justice and Equality (Oxford, Oxford University Press), pp. 281-297, at p.293. But this surely cannot be right on his preferred version, which is that they are ‘reiterated’ across cultures by independent development. The starting point is emphatically not the same; Thick and Thin, p. 4. 10 Walzer, Spheres of Justice p. 29; Thinking Politically pp. 233-4. 11 Spheres of Justice, p.30; Walzer (2004) Arguing About War (London: Yale University Press), p. 176. 12 John Rawls (1999) The Law of Peoples, with The Idea of Public Reason Revisited (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), p.37, p.57. 13 David Miller (2007) National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 56-68. Similar concerns about global equality of opportunity have been voiced by Gillian Brock (2005) ‘Egalitarianism, Ideals and Cosmopolitan Justice’, Philosophical Forum 36(1): 1-30, and Margaret Moore (2007) ‘Justice Within Different Borders: A Review of Simon Caney’s Global Political Theory’, Journal of Global Ethics 3(2): 255-268. 14 Quoted in Walzer, Spheres of Justice, p.45. 15 Ibid. p.47. 16 Ibid. p. 48. 17 The quandary raised by the possession by some states of ‘excess’ land and resources is discussed at greater length by Michael Blake and Mathias Risse, ‘Migration, Territoriality and Culture’, unpublished manuscript. Blake and Risse reject Walzer’s apparent claim that maintenance of a ‘whiteonly’ immigration policy could have been a legitimate one (subject to the ceding of land and / or resources), but in any case theorise more fully the implications that follow for immigration policy when we begin from the assumption of common ownership of the earth. 18 Ibid. p.48. 19 Arguing About War, p.xiii; see also Thinking Politically, pp. 251-263. 20 Arguing About War, p.187. 21 Michael Walzer (2004) Politics and Passion: Towards a More Egalitarian Liberalism (London: Yale University Press), p.131. 13 PDF Created with deskPDF PDF Writer - Trial :: http://www.docudesk.com Arguing About War, p.171. Ibid. p.177. 24 Thinking Politically, pp.53-67. 25 Politics and Passion, p.33. 26 Ibid. p.38, 42. 27 Arguing About War, pp.179-80. 28 Politics and Passion, p.xiii. 29 Ibid. p.135. 30 There is obviously much more that might be said about the hypothesis that strengthening states will always, or even fairly reliably, serve the ends of global equality in practice, rather than fostering inequality and division. But assessing the predictive power of this hypothesis would take us too far beyond the immediate concerns of this paper, which are primarily to assess Walzer’s normative arguments on global equality, and their relationship with his erstwhile concerns about faithfulness to shared understandings. 31 Michael Walzer (1986) ‘The Reform of the International System’, in Ø. Østerud (ed) Studies in War and Peace, Oslo: Norwegian University Press, pp 227-250, at p.232. 32 Politics and Passion, p.176, n.6. For the details of Pogge’s Dividend, see Thomas Pogge (2002) World Poverty and Human Rights, chapter 8 (Cambridge: Polity Press). 33 Walzer, Politics and Passion, p.38, p.42. See also Chris Bertram (2005) ‘Global Justice, Moral Development, and Democracy’, in Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse (eds) The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 75-91. 34 Walzer, Politics and Passion, p.138. 35 Toni Erskine, for example, takes Walzer to provide an impetus for a form of ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’ which eschews ‘impartialist’ reasoning. Erskine (2007) ‘Qualifying Cosmopolitanism? Solidarity, Criticism and Michael Walzer’s “View from the Cave”’, International Politics 44: 125-149. Here I leave aside the question of whether Walzer rejects, or needs to reject, impartiality in all its forms. 36 David Miller argues that it does not commit us to any specific view: we need additional moral arguments to propel us all the way towards egalitarian distributive justice. Miller, National Responsibility, pp. 27-34. Darrel Moellendorf claims that it provides a defeasible presumption in favour of distributive equality, assuming that inequalities must be reasonably acceptable to all. Moellendorf (2006) ‘Equality of Opportunity Globalized?’, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 19(2): 301-318, at 304. 37 Miller does tend to connect arguments about whether global inequalities are unjust with arguments about whether we have an equal responsibility to rectify them; thus he argues that refuting equal responsibilities to respond to inequalities is sufficient to drive a wedge between weak cosmopolitanism (involving the claim about equal concern and respect) and strong cosmopolitanism (involving substantive distributive egalitarianism); National Responsibility, p.28. The present argument keeps the two issues separate: we might consider some inequalities unjust (our third view) without committing ourselves to equal responsibilities to rectify them (our fourth view). On my interpretation Walzer also distinguishes the two arguments. 38 See for instance Darrel Moellendorf, ‘Equality of Opportunity Globalized?’, at 317; Cecile Fabre (2007) ‘Global Distributive Justice: An Egalitarian Perspective’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 31 Supplementary, 139-164. 39 For the view that ‘comparative’ principles such as equality out of place on the global scale, see e.g. David Miller, Principles of Social Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), at p. 19. For the argument about political equality, see Miller (2006) ‘Collective Responsibility and International Inequality in The Law of Peoples’, in Rex Martin and David Reidy (eds) Rawls’s Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia? (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 191-205. 40 Walzer, Thinking Politically, p.254, pp.252-9. 41 Ibid. p.238. 42 Ibid. p.136. 43 Ibid. p.139. 44 Walzer, ‘Response’, p. 293. 45 Thinking Politically, p.308. 46 Rawls suggests that the principles of the duty of assistance and Pogge’s Dividend could end up appearing ‘much the same, with largely practical matters of taxation and administration to distinguish between them,’ Law of Peoples, p. 119. 47 Walzer, Spheres of Justice. 23 22 14 PDF Created with deskPDF PDF Writer - Trial :: http://www.docudesk.com 48 49 Ibid. pp. 26-8. Walzer, Thick and Thin, pp.1-4. 50 Simon Caney (2007) ‘Justice, Borders and the Cosmopolitan Ideal: A Reply to Two Critics’, Journal of Global Ethics 3(2): 269-276, at 271. 51 Walzer, Thinking Politically, p.254. 52 Henry Shue does argue that the cross-cultural consensus within the global human rights culture has noticeably advanced over recent decades. The continuing global conversation over human rights is moving ahead to the extent that ‘Practice is now far ahead of theory’ in some respects. Shue (2004) ‘Thickening Convergence: Human Rights and Cultural Diversity,’ in Deen Chatterjee (ed) The Ethics of Assistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 217-241, at p. 233. 53 Nussbaum thus argues that though her approach is focused on ‘securing the basic goods of life for each, it is respectful of cultural difference in several ways,’ not least ‘in the role carved out for nations in implementing and more concretely specifying the list.’ Martha Nussbaum (2005) ‘Beyond the Social Contract: Capabilities and Global Justice’, in Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse (eds) The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 196-218, at p.211. 54 Walzer, Spheres of Justice, p.20. Adam Swift also mentions this passage, and notes that it appears to reveal Walzer hankering ‘after more equality than he officially permits himself’. Swift (1995) ‘The Sociology of Complex Equality’, in David Miller and Michael Walzer (eds) Pluralism, Justice and Equality (Oxford, Oxford University Press), pp. 253-80, at p. 257. 55 David Miller has suggested that Walzer’s account does rely on an underlying egalitarian principle, that of ‘equality of status.’ See Miller, ‘Complex Equality,’ in Miller and Walzer (eds) Pluralism, Justice and Equality (Oxford, Oxford University Press), pp. 197-225. Without labouring the point, I will assume that recourse to such a principle is unlikely to avoid the problem of global extension I have been describing (is that okay?). 56 It is worth pointing out that we need not assume that goods must be distributed according to shared understandings (at least in Walzer’s sense) in order to argue for a pluralist account of global justice. Though they would reject any argument from shared understandings, Brighouse and Swift have argued that ‘We cannot infer distributive principles for concrete goods of the kind distributed by political policies without knowing how those goods, and, for positional goods, features of their distribution, contribute to the well-being of individuals.’ Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift (2006) ‘Equality, Priority and Positional Goods’, Ethics 116:471-497, at 496. If we add to this the certainty that goods will have different qualities (for instance, they might be either positional or non-positional) in different social settings, we may to be led to the conclusion that, not only should different goods be governed by different distributive principles, but that the appropriate distributive principles for what are ostensibly the same goods might vary across social settings. I thank Adam Swift for discussing this possibility with me. 57 Walzer, Arguing About War, p.188. 15 PDF Created with deskPDF PDF Writer - Trial :: http://www.docudesk.com