Nagel could not respond that if people refused to institute the difference principle, they would act unjustly. The entire point of his defense of the principle is that only if people wish to establish certain kinds of social bonds have they a reason to limit inequality. Absent this wish, Nagel offers no grounds at all for people to subject themselves to the difference principle.

If so, why should we allow the content of existing political circumstances to be brought behind the veil? So what if I’m not currently part of a shared system of cooperation with a poor African? That’s not the poor African’s fault. I’m sure both the African and I would prefer a system in which the wealthier one would be coerced into supporting the poorer one were neither of us to know to which position we’d be assigned prior to our birth. So if Rawl’s argument goes through, why shouldn’t it go through for this case as well? It is but an accident of birth that I was born here and not there.

It may have been Will Baude who first brought this to my attention, and I’m sure I’ve blogged about it before, and I’m sure it’s an elementary point made in any discussion about Rawls, but it seems that the main problem with his contractarianism is deciding exactly what knowledge we are allowed to bring behind the veil of ignorance. Some want more, some want less.

Now, most likely the response will be something along the lines of: Rawls is only interested in Constitutional analysis or some such format which limits the contractarian bargain to nation states as they exist today. But shouldn’t justice ultimately be concerned with ideal theory? So why should we care how political entities exist today? We could, if we wanted to, treat the entirety of Africa as if it was the 51st state (or give each country in Africa the status of an additional state). Sure, it would be expensive, and sure, Africans don’t currently pay taxes to the U.S. government for public goods. But that can all change. Surely we can coercively force Africans to pay us tribute – er, taxes just as easily as we force our own.

I’m baffled why she treats this as a throwaway:

“The poverty of the countryside that impels many people in developing countries to seek work in overcrowded cities. The export processing zones many governments have established where some of them find work, for example, are both consequences of a history of structural adjustment programs that many indebted governments have been pressured to implement by international financial institutions. The background conditions of the lives of these young workers today are partly a sedimented consequence of decisions and aggregated economic processes beginning three decades ago.”

What she calls “social structure” is pretty much what the NIE guys call an “institution.” Hers is a better term, I think.

“Critics of the position that limits the scope of
obligations of justice to common political membership, on the other hand, are right to
argue that it is arbitrary to consider nation-state membership as a source of obligations of
justice. Political communities have evolved in contingent and arbitrary ways more
connected to power than moral right. People often stand in dense relationships of
exchange and cooperate with others outside their political communities, and they rightly
expect fair terms in these relationships.”

I think the first world has materially harmed the third world through aid regimes. But this is a problem of the design of political institutions. Politicians in wealthy countries can use support of aid to build domestic support, and because the people who are most harmed by the transfers have no domestic political voice, there is little political feedback for the negative consequences. Similarly, wealthy states use aid as a carrot/stick to get other states to do their bidding. This, too, is largely due to perverse incentives within domestic political institutions, but serves to prop up illegitimate regimes, and perpetuate oppression.

I predict that “sweatshops”, i.e., improved labor opportunities and conditions for the poor through trade, probably aren’t going to be a good example of injustice.

http://psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/marionyoung.pdf

Do you mean something like Hume when you say “Each party has to be in a position to bargain, make agreements, and enforce them.” Do you mean that they must have *moral* standing (be legitimate)? Or be an effective government? Or both?

Finally, what is your notion of interaction or interdependence? I’m not sure what two or three notions you think Pogge is ‘equivocating’ between.
Does any pair of persons within a country have such interaction and interdepedence?

I do think you picking up on a criticism of Kant. Kant says that since the Earth is a bounded and not infinite, we have to comes to terms with each other at some point. But, as you said, that does not entail that each and every person must come to terms with each and every person across the globe.

Did you get that nucleaur explosion I asked Ricky Williams to send you?

Second, I don’t think even mutual “influence” is enough to put us in the circumstances of justice. Each party has to be in a position to bargain, make agreements, and enforce them. Statist bias leads to thinking of Cote D’Ivoire as a party to a social contract. But it’s not. It is quite likely not a legitimate state, just a gang in control of land. That’s why it’s morally illegitimate to send aid to Cote D’Ivoire, the state, since it does not have moral standing. And the rulers of the people of the region stand in the way of those people entering fully into the circumstances of justice with folks outside the borders, by blocking (predating on) trade and reinforcing dependency.

Pogge has to be careful not to equivocate on “global interdependence.” There are relations of interdependence that extend across borders and around the globe. But it is not the case that any two people (or even any two economies) on the globe are in any sense interdependent.

I thought of this because I wonder how much of lot of criticism of Pogge depends on assuming a certain vision of the social contract. Here’s some stuff I’ve been reading in Pogge recently, if anyone is curious and does not have him in front of them.

In Realizing Rawls (1989), pp. 240-1, Pogge surmises that Rawls would agree with Kant’s formulation that there is an obligation to leave a lawless condition and form just institutions “among human beings . . . who cannot avoid mutually influencing one another.” In absence of actual interaction, and if interaction is avoidable, then there is no mandate to interact and thus form a global structure. Pogge says, “I concede that a criterion of justice for domestic institutions would be sufficient if modern states were indeed closed schemes.” Pogge seems to say that there is no clear duty for isolated societies to establish interaction. Pogge says for Rawls, “there are grounds for bringing his contractarian device to bear on the global plane only if there is significant global interdependence.” If there is not global interdependence, and it is possible to avoid mutually influencing each other, our theory can be concerned only with domestic justice.
Pogge notes that other cosmopolitans like Charles Beitz have expressed the fear that this will lead to a status quo bias. If principles of global justice require massive redistribution, but only apply when there is interaction, then states have an incentive to isolate themselves and not establish ties to other societies. Pogge says that he fails “to see this danger, for whether the members of different societies can or cannot avoid mutually influencing one another is, though an empirical matter, surely not up to them. At this stage in world history we cannot realistically avoid international interaction, and so the members of rich societies have no incentive to exploit the fact that the criterion of global justice would not apply if societies were self-contained.” Pogge says that this all is “entirely academic, since all agree that there is and will be extensive global interdependence.”

That’s correct and I see no reason why Blake would disagree. Blake’s claim is simply that fellow citizens have special distributive duties towards one another.

Doesn’t the legitimacy of coercive redistribution depends on the prior legitmacy of state coercion.

That’s right: Blake is assuming that some kinds of coercive redistribution are acceptable. I don’t see that as an especially egregious assumption.

Pogge’s just factually wrong about the harm to the global poor.

Well, maybe. There are several ways in which Western countries might harm the global poor. Pogge specifies several possibilites: (1) Western corporations often bribe the officials of developing countries, contributing to the inferior quality of their legal and political institutions, (2) Western countries buy oil from corrupt and despotic governments, which reinforces the “resource-curse” of those countries, (3) Western governments and creditors provide loans and other forms of financial support to these same corrupt governments. I would throw in as a possibility intellectual property regimes that produce net transfers from poor countries to rich ones. So while I don’t think Pogge has established that either the global “basic structure” or Western countries in particular significantly harm the global poor, I also don’t think we can easily dismiss the possibility.