“When anyone asked him where he came from, [Diogenes] said, ‘I am a citizen of the world.’”
Diogenes Laertius, On Diogenes the Cynic
Course Description
Over 80% of the world’s wealth belongs to less than 20% of its population. How do we account for this huge inequality? (How) Should we respond to it morally? This class will survey prospects for global justice and their related problems. In particular, we’ll consider the historical and conceptual foundations of global justice, the roles of nations and global organizations in achieving justice, different models of equality and their possible measurements, the nature and scope of human rights, and applied issues of global justice, including citizenship, war and terrorism, and the environment. Our readings will cover the diverse areas of philosophy, political science, economics, and law. My goal is to tie theories of global justice to actual practice as much as possible, so we’ll also examine public documents like United Nations reports and resolutions, as well as psychological work on allocation behavior and judgments of equality and fairness.
Course Objectives
- To introduce students to major topics in and approaches to global justice.
- To apply economic, legal, and psychological considerations to moral–political theories.
- To build skills in critical and analytical writing, as well as oral presentations.
Required Texts
David Johnson, ed., Equality (Hackett, 2000) ISBN 978-0872204805
John Rawls, Law of Peoples (Harvard, 2001) ISBN 978-0674005426
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (Basic Books, 2006) ISBN 978-0465037070
Additional readings—to be distributed
Book for review (choose one of the following):
Hiram Chodosh, Global Justice Reform: A Comparative Methodology (NYU, 2005).
David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford, 2008).
Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Belknap, 2007).
Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, 2005).
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (W W Norton, 2003).
Kok-Chor Tan, Justice without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, Patriotism (Cambridge, 2004).
Course Overview
By the end of this course, you’ll be able to talk and think about issues of global justice in a theoretical and sophisticated way. Ideally, you’ll be able to pick up any recent book or article related to our course topics and make connections to the texts we’ve studied, assess the quality of that book or article, and form a critical and intelligent reaction to it. More importantly, you’ll be able to look at issues in news and politics in a different, philosophically-informed light. This ability can help make you a more careful consumer of information and a better (world) citizen.
To help you achieve these abilities, this course will do two main things. First, it will introduce you to ideas and arguments that are crucial in this discussion. The texts we’ll be reading are all major and historically important papers in these debates. You’ll need to read them slowly and carefully and, in some cases, more than once—say, before and after each class. You’ll also need to attend class regularly. Some of class will be lecture, in which I’ll train you to interpret and respond to the reading assignments. Some of class will be discussion, in which you’ll want to raise questions about the texts, express reactions to them, and try out your own arguments about them.
In addition to readings, a second part of the course will involve assignments of various kinds:
Discussion questions (8 sets of 3 questions each, 20%) will help you to read our major texts closely and carefully. They’ll also give you the opportunity to think more about the issues in them and focus on parts that interest or puzzle you. These questions must be submitted via email by 9p on Tuesday of each week and will be made available for others after class. These questions should not be descriptive textual questions (e.g., “What capabilities does Nussbaum discuss?”) or bio-historiographical questions (e.g., “When did John Rawls write this book?”). They should be complex, analytical questions that reflect parts of our readings that intrigue, puzzle, or disturb you. Which weeks you prepare questions for is your choice; you must prepare 8 by the end of our 11 reading weeks. If you plan ahead, you should be able to skip all weeks when papers are due, and two additional weeks as necessary.
Response papers (3 papers of 1,000 words each, 15% each) will give you the chance to voice your own positions and reactions to the texts we’ve read. Questions for the response papers will be distributed at the end of the last three units and due as indicated in the course schedule. You are allowed a one-week extension on a response paper of your choice. Use this wisely; any subsequent papers submitted after deadline will receive no credit.
The final project, consisting of a critical review (2,000 words, 25%) of a recent book global justice and a group presentation (30 minutes, 10%), will accomplish several goals. First, it will give you a focused experience in some more narrow issue(s) discussed by the book, rather than the more general questions we’ll discuss in class. The review will also serve as a final capstone for the course, in which you’ll make connections between your book and the texts we’ve read. Your presentation will teach others about that issue as well—thereby expanding their knowledge base—and give you practice in group communication, which is increasingly important in nearly every career path.
The class presentation should make the book material accessible to people who have not read the book already. For this reason, your presentation must, above all, stress the main points of the book, explain in detail the author’s claims, and present the arguments and evidence the author marshals.
By contrast, the critical review must reflect your overall knowledge of the literature from the course, as well as the skills you have gained. For this purpose, you should (1) briefly summarize the important content of the book (not the whole thing—reviewers focus on certain parts of books that they find original, interesting, or important), (2) situate the book in the rest of the current literature (good reviews compare books to their peers, both in terms of their similarities and differences—this will likely require some addition research), and (3) make some critical commentary of the book (tell me where the book goes right and where it goes wrong—and give an argument for this that would convince other people). It may be helpful to read existing reviews of the book published in major journals. Remember, though, that these reviews are someone else’s thoughts, not your own, and avoid potential plagiarism by developing your own stance on what the book says and what you think about it.
You must participate in the group presentation in order to submit your review. You should select a book for review by the end of February; no more than five students may work on a single book.
Course Schedule
This is a tentative outline of our readings and topics for the course. All readings listed below are available in the course texts (Law of Peoples, LP; Equality, E; or Just and Unjust Wars, JUW) or will be distributed in class (*); these distributed readings and supplementary materials will be available for download on Blackboard. I may, on occasion, add, delete, or substitute readings. Any changes will be announced in class and posted to Blackboard.
GLOBAL POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
In the first unit of the course, we’ll look at a number of fundamental concepts and positions that will guide the rest of the course. In particular, we’ll consider why we should consent to be governed and the dominant historical Western answer to that question: social contract theory. We’ll discuss how that tradition—originally developed nearly 400 years ago for a handful of European nation–states—bears on contemporary issues in our global world. With this background in place, we’ll survey two competing global political philosophies: nationalism, which claims that nations have special duties toward their own citizens that they do not have to other people; and cosmopolitanism, which claims all individuals have a basic moral worth that may require cross-national consideration.
- Week 1 Introduction
Nagel, “Moral Luck” (*); Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, General Introduction (*1–25) - Week 2 Sovereignty
Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, Part 1 (*15–66) - Week 3 Contractualism
Rawls, Law of Peoples §§1–4, 7–9, 11–12 (LP 11–43, 59–70, 82–88) - Week 4 Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism
Miller, On Nationality, Ch. 3 (*49–80); Pogge, “Real World Justice” (*)
EQUALITY
Nearly every author on global justice has argued (or assumed) that equality is somehow central to the moral treatment of individuals and even political legitimacy. But accounts of equality have varied greatly across the literature. In this unit, we’ll consider three dominant approaches to equality: welfarism, which claims that equality is achieved by increasing individuals’ well-being; resourcism, which claims that equality is met by allocating a certain bundle of goods and services to each person, and the capabilities approach, which claims that equality requires that each individual have the opportunity to develop certain capabilities in the course of his or her lifetime. As we consider the merit of these positions, we’ll also discuss how they might work in practice, using background information from economics and psychological studies on the concept of justice.
- Week 5 Measuring Justice
Miller, “Distributive Justice: What People Think” (*)
Paper 1 due (at beginning of class) - Week 6 Welfarism
Dworkin, “What is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare” (*) - Week 7 Resourcism
Dworkin, “What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources” (E 178–207) - Week 8 The Capabilities Approach
Sen, “Equality of What?” (E 160–77)
APPLIED ISSUES IN GLOBAL JUSTICE
In the final unit of the course, we’ll consider four applied areas of global justice. We’ll begin by considering the case for human rights, both individual rights (what is owed to each person and what cannot be done against them) and group rights (what is owed to groups—especially minority groups—and what cannot be done against them). This discussion will be informed by our previous topic of equality, and it will lead in to our second issue: citizenship, in which we will consider whether people have special rights as citizens, whether a standard of global citizenship is possible, and to what extent nations must open their borders and grant noncitizens any special rights. In the third part of this unit, we’ll consider violence, both within and between nations, committed by national and subnational groups. We’ll focus both on just war theory (which articulates standards of justification for entering war, practicing war, and acting responsibly after war) and terrorism. Finally, we’ll focus on the global environment, including resource use and pollution, and the duties of national and international organizations in protecting it.
- Week 9 Human Rights
Beitz, “Human Rights as a Common Concern” (*); Kymlicka, “Justice and Minority Rights” (E 234–242); United Nations, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights (http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html)
Paper 2 due (at beginning of class) - Week 10 Citizenship
Carens, “Aliens and Citizens” (*) - Week 11 Violence, War, and Terrorism
Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, Ch. 4–5, 12, 16 (JUW 51–85, 197–206, 251–268) - Week 12 The Environment
Singer, One World, Ch. 2 (*14–50)
FINAL PRESENTATIONS
- Week 13 Group Meetings
Paper 3 due (at beginning of class) - Week 14 Book Presentations—Chodosh, Slaughter, Stiglitz
- Week 15 Book Presentations—Miller, Nussbaum, Tan
