2 Acknowledgments
Firstly and foremost I would like to thank my PhD supervisor, Professor Barbara Henry, for her precious guidance and support. If I look at the research proposal that I submitted three years ago and at the thesis that that has come out of it, I realize that a lot of work has been done, and that her supervision was fundamental for the project to have the structure that it has now. She drove me to think critically about the concepts and the theories I was proposing, she helped me to go beyond the literature I was more familiar with, and at the same time she granted me much freedom in devising what is supposed to be the original contribution of this work. As a tutor, she thought me how to approach the academic world in a more mature way, making a wise use of energies, and also enjoying the beautiful moments that a PhD can offer. I will always be grateful to her for this. Lastly, as a reader of the final draft, she gave me very important advices and indications, continuously helping me to improve the text.
I also want to show my gratitude to the group of political philosophy at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, in Pisa, and in particular to Professor Anna Loretoni and Dr. Alberto Pirni. In the last three years I really had the chance of learning many things through the lectures, the seminars and the initiatives organized in my department’s area. Moreover, I should thank all the other professors, researchers and PhD mates of the PhD course, because with their lectures and talks they opened my mind on new topics and new subjects, and in many cases they were a source of inspiration for my research.
The administrative staff of the Scuola Sant’Anna has been for me of great help during last years, in all the procedures concerning courses, exams, the research period abroad, conferences and the submission of the thesis. So a big thank goes to them all, also for their unfailing kindness.
I am grateful to Dr. Miriam Ronzoni for having welcomed me for a semester at the Department of Politics at Manchester University. She read the first drafts of my thesis giving me attentive feedbacks and observations. Moreover, with our discussions on the concepts of freedom and domination in the labour market first, and of my account of exploitation
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without domination later, she gave a critical and important contribution to my work. Talking about Manchester, I should also thank the members of the Manchester Centre for Political Theory for having invited me to all their internal weekly seminars.
Some parts of this thesis, mainly from chapters IV and V, were presented at the Graduate Conference in Political Theory at London School of Economics (March 17-18, 2016) and at World Congress of the International Associations for Political Science Students (IAPSS) at Humboldt University, Berlin (April 05-09, 2016). Therefore, I want to thank the organizers and the audience for their comments.
Lastly, and most importantly, I have to thank my parents and my grandmother for having always given me unconditional support, for having encouraged me, helped me in the most difficult moments, and in general I thank them for everything.
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Index
General introduction ... 6
The aim ... 6 The contents ...12Section 1
Chapter I - The contemporary debate on global justice ... 21
I – Introduction ...21
II – From Kant to contemporary cosmopolitanism ...31
III – Contractarian cosmopolitanism ...50
IV - The capability approach ...69
Chapter II – Utility, priority and sufficiency ... 92
I – Introduction ...92
II - Cosmopolitan utilitarianism ...93
III - Prioritarianism and sufficientarianism ...105
Chapter III – Property rights and negative duties of justice ... 121
I - Introduction ...121
II - Left-libertarianism ...123
III – Thomas Pogge and the negative duty not to harm the poor ...136
Section 2
Chapter IV - Labour commodification ... 154
I - Introduction ...154
II - Vulnerability, resilience and exposure to risks ...158
III - Income poverty, assets and wellbeing ...166
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V - The incidence of wage money on social income as measure of labour commodification ...175
VI - Marx on the historical origins of labour commodification and the alienation of labour ...177
VII - Karl Polanyi and the fictitious commodities ...195
Chapter V - A minimum de-commodification of labour and global justice ... 217
I - Introduction ...217
II - Debt bondage and contract slavery ...223
III - Labour commodification and alien control ...228
IV - The incompleteness of contract and the benchmark problem ...241
V - Are extremely commodified individuals really imprisoned in the proletarian group? ...245
VI - A minimum de-commodification of labour power ...249
VII - Why labour commodification should be a global concern of justice...258
VIII - A thin approach to domination ...263
IX - The minimum de-commodification of labour power and other theories of global justice ...269
Section 3
Chapter VI – Objections to cosmopolitanism ... 288
I - Introduction ...288
II – The compatriot priority principle ...291
III – The coercion view ...305
IV - Ideal theory and the cosmopolitan avant-garde ...319
V – Levying and spending cosmopolitan taxes ...328
Concluding remarks ... 353
6 General introduction
The aim
The tragic empirical evidence regarding world poverty and inequality, and the revival, after WWII, of the process of economic and social globalisation that had started in the second half of XIX century and that had come to an abrupt interruption with the outbreak of WWI, have fuelled, all over the last fifty years, an intense academic debate between those thinkers who have somehow proposed a shift to a cosmopolitan account of justice and those others who have defended the classic statist approach. Generally speaking, cosmopolitan thinkers about justice1 do oppose the traditional differentiation between special obligations toward compatriots and general obligations toward foreigners, that is to say they maintain that the scope of duties of justice cannot be contained within political borders. While their statist counterparts do reject the existence of global principles of justice and hold that foreigners can only make a claim based on humanitarianism.
Cosmopolitan theories of justice – or theories of global justice, if we prefer – can be distinguished between those that bring forward positive duties of global justice and those that appeal to negative ones. The former hold that we ought to undertake some actions in favour of poor foreigners, basically in order to ameliorate their dire living conditions, while the latter maintain that we have to redistribute something to them as a compensation for the fact that we have somehow caused them harm. This is the same difference that at the domestic level exists between paying a tax on property to guarantee schooling and health care to poor children – a positive duty of distributive justice – and paying some money to a person because you have crashed into her car – a compensation stemming from the negative duty not to cause avoidable harm to others.
My research question is whether in the functioning of global capitalism we can find valid reasons to justify a global redistribution of wealth in virtue of the infringement of the negative duty not pose avoidable and significant constraints to the individual autonomy of others. The hypothesis is that the unequal distribution of global assets is causing a form of
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systemic domination to those individuals who have been deprived of an acceptable alternative to selling their labour performance in the market at exploitative conditions. When the capability of the individual to support her welfare (or even to secure her survival) is made contingent on her participation in the labour market (i.e. wage-income), the individual is experiencing an high level of labour commodification and is victim of a form of economic systemic domination. The restoration of individual autonomy would require what I define as a minimum de-commodification of labour power (MDL), the decoupling of the capacity to sustain a minimum welfare from the participation in the labour market.
So far the most influential theories of global justice based on the idea of positive duties have followed three main directions. Global egalitarians have sought to demonstrate, on the wake of Ralwsian contractualism, that the globalisation process has created such a thick web of economic and social interactions among single countries to require the introduction of global principles of distributive justice, in order to fairly regulate the allocation of burdens and benefits stemming from global cooperation. Utilitarians, prioritarians and sufficientarians have based their demands of global justice on the fact that every human being represents a potential agent of maximization of utility or value, regardless of any consideration regarding global cooperation. Lastly, proponents of the capability approach have developed a rights-based account of global justice out of the Aristotelian conception of humans as limited beings who need social intervention to lead a flourishing life.
All these cosmopolitan approaches propose different schemes of redistributions on the basis of different philosophical justifications. But they all agree that the current global distribution of resources should be changed for the consequences it triggers, rather than because of the way we arrived at it. So, global egalitarians criticise global inequality because it falls short of the optimal arrangement free individuals would agree upon in an hypothetical session of the global contract. Utilitarians recommend to the rich to give a considerable part of their wealth to the poor because the latter would yield a bigger utility out it. The capability approach maintains that every human being exerts a moral claim to live a life with dignity, and that a global redistribution of resources should accomplish this goal.
With my research I aim to go beyond the idea of positive duties of global justice. Instead of criticising the current distribution of resources because it falls short of a positive account of
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justice, I shall try to demonstrate that there are serious problems of justice in the forms of economic interactions that brought about this unequal distribution, more precisely in the phenomenon of labour commodification, one of the intrinsic features of market capitalism. In doing this, I shall recur to the idea of negative duties of justice. Other theorists have questioned the procedure that led to global inequality, hence advocating a compensation for the world poor. Left-libertarians have postulated the existence of an initial individual right to an equal share of world resources, that has been continuously violated throughout human history, and that commands a redress. While Thomas Pogge has argued that the current global order is causing avoidable harm to the world poor, and that in providing political support to it, people living in developed countries are violating a negative duty of justice - that is to say a duty not to unduly harm others. So there should be a sort of compensation. Nonetheless, apart from the normative desirability of the latter two negative approaches to global justice, in my view none of them has given the right weight to the forms of injustice that I aim to highlight in this text.
There are two main original arguments in the present work. The first one is a normative account of global justice based on a minimum de-commodification as a compensation for the economic domination to which a large number of people is subject due to the unequal distribution of assets. The second one is an interpretative argument on the implications of the neo-republican idea of freedom as non-domination for the labour market. With regard to this, I shall propose an account of exploitation without domination that does directly challenge the way neo-republicans make use of their own idea of domination when they are called to deal with market interactions. Both these arguments are presented in the second section. In the first one I mainly discuss standard theories of global justice, explaining why we can have reasons for being dissatisfied with the way they deal with problems related to labour commodification. While in the third and last section I discuss how the account of a minimum de-commodification of labour power can resist and in some cases be reconciled with the classic objections usually levelled against any cosmopolitan theory of justice.
More generally, the core idea that subtends the whole work is that we live in an era of huge opportunities and deep vulnerability. As I shall argue in more details in chapter four, before the industrial revolution and the advent of the capitalist mode of production there has been
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almost no economic growth over millennia. Nowadays middle-income people have access to a set of capabilities that were beyond the grasp of pre-industrial monarchs. Just think of how easily now people can buy cheap drugs for treating illnesses that long ago were lethal, or of the fact that the majority of Europeans can afford to buy a flight ticket from a low cost company and travel abroad, or of the huge amount of data that people can get for free from the web. At the same time, the economic globalisation has increased our capacity to yield wealth. Entrepreneurs are relatively free to invest their capital in those places in which it would be more productive and to place their products in foreign markets. The international free competition can drive down, in a few years, the price of technological goods that at the beginning are unapproachable to the most – the clear example being the personal computer.
Obviously, there are serious problems regarding the redistribution of income and the environmental sustainability. But it is undeniable that the market mechanism and its globalisation have allowed us to reach an unparalleled level of absolute wealth. In other words, if we were able to better allocate the economic advantages of global economic cooperation we would probably live in the best epoch of human history. Keeping distinct the issue of how much wealth economic progress can yield and the issue of how we redistribute this wealth, we can appreciate the force of the capitalist mode of production. However, if global capitalism has provided us with the chance of being everyone better-off – regardless of whether and how we profit from this chance -, it has also rendered individuals more vulnerable. For in a market society the great majority of individuals have lost any source of auto-sufficiency. The individual income derives almost entirely from market-related interactions, be they investments, job contracts, sales, and so on. To those who lack any external resource except from their self-ownership, the situation is even more radical because their capability to lead a decent life depends entirely on wage-income. The latter are those persons who experience an extreme level of labour commodification. They can never leave the job market, nor they can ever entertain those activities that would permit them to realise their personality – as for example taking a sabbatical for thinking about their human condition, for writing a book, travelling, and so on. They ought to remain in the job market at any cost, and this is the sources of their deep vulnerability. Hence, these people
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have almost no resilience to economic shocks, that are very likely to occur in a global market.
As we can see, and as we shall see in more details later on, labour commodification is not the same thing as poverty. Two persons can be equally poor but differently commodified. Imagine a person living in a developing country and owning a small field and a cattle that give her enough for feeding her family and for selling something in exchange for money. And imagine another person, living in the same place, but born without property and compelled to work for an employer. The two persons experience exactly the same standards of living, but the welfare, and more generally the survival, of the latter person is completely contingent on someone’s else willingness to let her work. If an economic downturn or a change in consumer preferences determines a shortage of available jobs, this second person would have no other alternative than to desperately look for a new employer willing to hire her. While, even if the first person were no longer able to find customers she would still be minimally resilient to the economic shocks thanks to her market-free assets – in other words she can get some food from her natural assets.
Millions of people live in a state of extreme commodification. Nonetheless, it might be said that these are micro phenomena that should not lead us to question the market mechanism. And I perfectly agree. We cannot renounce modernity just because we miss archaic forms of pre-industrial self-sufficiency. Rather, we can keep all the advantages of global market while offering a minimum protection to those who are at risk of losing too much from market competition. If you look at the issue in a diachronic sense you might say that we can keep the good of global capitalism while providing the most vulnerable people with the safety net they had before market colonized the society in its entirety2. Nonetheless, I will avoid the empirical obstacles involved in a diachronic approach, because I limit my position to the argument that we can continue to enjoy the advantages of market interactions while preserving from the shortfalls of capitalism a minimum set of capabilities for everyone. That is to say, I shall maintain that extremely commodified individuals are dominated with respect to an hypothetical arrangement that we might have within global capitalism, in which every
2
On the difference between a “diachronic” and a subjunctive” conception oh harm see Pogge 2008, pp. 23 - 26. I shall discuss the issue in the fifth chapter.
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individual is provided with the minimum for meeting basic needs regardless of job opportunities - in other words, with the minimum for being free to say “no” to the most exploitative offers.
So far there is nothing particularly new in this idea. Many people do believe that we can and should redistribute something to the worst-off for letting them survive in cases of dire needs. But I do not make it an issue of political economy nor of humanitarianism, rather I shall maintain that a minimum de-commodification of labour power is an issue of justice, more precisely is a compensation that we owe to people in a status of extreme commodification for the violation of a negative duty of justice. And I shall also add that this duty is global in scope, so the compensation ought to be global as well.
The categories of labour commodification and alienation are clearly Marxist in their origin, and I think that they are extremely useful for catching forms of domination that are usually overlooked by liberal thinkers. But the solution that I propose is in line with liberal cosmopolitanism. For I shall never question the division of people into owners of capital and proletarians, nor shall I ever propose the redistribution of the means of production. The minimum de-commodification of labour would only require a redistribution of wealth to be achieved through a global tax. The redistribution I propose is even more modest than the redistributive schemes of many liberal philosophers, and it appeals to the idea of negative duties of justice that joins together all the liberal front, from egalitarians to right-libertarians.
I shall recur to an analytic method of discussion in both the descriptive and the normative parts of this work. I do so because, as already said, my objective is to elaborate and propose a new normative principle of global justice, and in making this I will have to confront my arguments with the “post-Rawlsian political philosophy”3, that is both analytical and normative. Whereas, the employment of the analytical tools in the descriptive part, that revolves mainly around the freedom of the individual in the labour market, might look as something more unusual4. The reason of this choice is that there exists a strong causal link
3
Sangiovanni 2008, p. 220.
4 Even though, obviously, I do not have the merit of proposing something methodologically new because
concepts such as exploitation, proletarian unfreedom and class were already studied in an analytic way by the so called “Analytical Marxists”. See for example Wright 1994, pp. 178 – 198. Whereas, on analytic and normative methodology see Sangiovanni 2008, pp. 219 – 239, and also List and Valentini 2016.
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between the descriptive and the normative parts, because the discourse on labour commodification – and de-commodification – is not only crucial for the implementation of the normative principle I propose, but also for its justification. Therefore, the adoption of the analytical methodology through the whole work can allow me to move the concepts from the evaluative to the prescriptive level more fluidly.
The contents
In the remainder of the general introduction I just want to say something more precise on the structuring that I have given to this text. The whole work consists of three sections. In the first section, that is divided into three chapters, I basically discuss some classic accounts of global justice that might seem as proposing something similar to the minimum de-commodification of labour power. In the first chapter I begin with a definition and a taxonomy of contemporary cosmopolitanism, in which I also explain why moral cosmopolitanism does not necessarily result in a global conception of justice. Then, I discuss why Immanuel Kant is fundamental for understanding the evolution of the ancient cosmopolitan aspiration into contemporary cosmopolitanism. I focus on his philosophy of history and I wonder, more generally, whether by bringing his thought on current international contingencies we might infer some positive duties of global justice.
Afterwards, I get to seven contemporary approaches to global justice. In the first chapter we shall find contractarian cosmopolitanism and the capability approach. I maintain that my work on labour commodification can help clarify why market interactions between international actors can pose problems of justice, because of limited individual autonomy, regardless of whether a global basic structure does actually exist. I argue that the theory of labour de-commodification will employ the notion of capabilities in a different way from Nussbaum, because from a de-commodification prospective it does not really matter whether a person is enjoying a set of basic capabilities at a given moment, but rather whether the enjoyment of that basic set is independent from market participation.
In the second chapter I discuss utilitarianism, prioritarianism and sufficientarianism. Even though prioritarianism and sufficientarianism were originally developed as alternatives to
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egalitarianism, I consider prioritarianism as a form of amended utilitarianism, because it corrects for the utilitarian exposure to mental distortions stemming from adaptive preferences, and I consider sufficientarianism as a form of amended prioritarianism, because it prevents trade-offs between the top and the bottom. At the end, the idea of sufficiency might look as something very similar to the minimum de-commodification, but I shall argue that there are substantial differences both in the justification and in the nature of the redistribution the two accounts advocates.
In the last chapter of the first section I will finally move on to those theories that go beyond the idea of positive duties of global justice. As I said before, I shall consider the left-libertarian discourse on the individual right to an equal share of global natural resources and Pogge’s use of the idea of negative duties of justice in relation to his account of harm. As for the other theories based on positive duties of justice, my aim is to prepare the ground for explaining, at the end of the second section, why the minimum de-commodification of labour power cannot be realized through the left-libertarian redress or Pogge’s Global Resources Dividend (GRD). As you can see, I analyse classic theories of global justice in the opening section, where I also point out, with regard to any of them, why I deem it necessary to develop an account based on labour de-commodification. While at the end of the second section, where I will have presented the minimum de-commodification of labour power in its entirety, I shall discuss in which aspects my account of global justice differs from the ones presented in the first section, what it has to add or how it can be reconciled with any of them.
The second section is divided into two chapters, the fourth and the fifth ones. In the fourth chapter I start with the notions of vulnerability, exposure to risks and resilience, to propose a definition of labour commodification. I want to clarify why the level of labor commodification should not be mistaken with the harshness of the job relation. I explain how the level of commodification of someone’s labour can be concretely measured by looking at the composition of her social income (self-production + wage + community benefits + enterprise benefits + social benefits + private benefits).
Then, I shall discuss Marx’s historical analysis of the process that led individuals to achieve the famous two-fold freedom, freedom to dispose of the labour performance, and freedom
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from the possession of any other productive asset except from labour power. In particular, I shall focus on the two big problems that Marx envisions in the phenomenon of labour commodification. The first one is the huge disparity in bargaining power that renders the commodified individual dependent on the will of the counterpart that controls the means of production, and exposes him to dramatic forms of exploitation. The second one is the compulsion of the wage worker into alienating activities where he is no longer able to objectivise his human nature, but is rather obliged to work for the satisfaction of external needs in exchange for the means to stay alive.
Lastly in this fourth chapter, I will analyse the interesting interpretation of labour commodification proposed by Karl Polanyi almost one century after Marx. According to the Hungarian thinker labour can only be turned into a fictitious commodity, because if the process were entirely accomplished the human society would run the risk of a dramatic and irreversible dislocation. Therefore, he maintains that as long as the market principle seeks to get hold of the last stronghold of society, labour, people start to resist and ask for political regulation. The result is a sort of elastic equilibrium5 between the market movement and the political countermovement. Paradoxically, the countermovement is also the source of market’s longevity because it constantly prevents it from striking the last bow to human society.
In the fifth chapter I shall propose the normative argument. I start by noticing that Polanyi was too much optimistic about market liberalism, because what he deemed impossible when observing western countries, is now occurring in developing countries. In the second era of globalisation three factors have altered the equilibrium of powers that the double movement guaranteed during the first phase of modernity: capital is relatively global, while work has remained mostly local, single countries are structurally weakened in their capacity to counter the global risks to which a commodified individual is exposed, and they also suffer new limitations in their internal economic leverage.
5
In his introduction to the 2001 edition of Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, Fred Block has used the image of “stretching a giant elastic band” to represent the struggle between market and society described by the Hungarian thinker. Polanyi 2001, p. xxv.
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The consequence is that in many countries the forces behind Polanyi’s double movement are strongly unbalanced. Hence, the commodification of labour is more real than fictitious. Debt-bondage and contract slavery represent the extreme form of labour commodification that Polanyi thought impossible. And I think that the notion of “disposable people”6, recently introduced in the academic debate by Kevin Bales, can give a measure of the last stage of the process of labour commodification.
I maintain that highly commodified individuals are subject to a form of systemic domination, due to their exclusion from the ownership of productive assets. I firstly present the neo-republican account of freedom as non-domination as opposed to the liberal one of freedom as non-interference. I explain why, according to neo-republicans, you can be dominated without being interfered and also interfered without being dominated. I endorse the neo-republican theory of freedom but I argue that the notion of non-domination should be stretched following the intuitions of labour republicans. Philip Pettit has maintained, from a neo-republican position, that an inegalitarian property system is not in itself a source of domination because there is a substantial moral difference between offering a reward – as it happens in market interactions - and making a threat. Labour republicans rebut that the extremely commodified individual undergoing wage slavery is subject to systemic domination, due to an unequal access to productive assets, and that this systemic domination also results in a form of interpersonal domination of the employer over the employee. As I said before, I develop an alternative position. I believe that systemic domination materializes only in exploitation, not in interpersonal domination. That is to say, I explain why, in my view, labour republicans are right when they hold that the extremely commodified individual undergoing wage slavery is subject to systemic domination, due to an unequal access to productive assets, but they are wrong in thinking that this specific individual is also victim of interpersonal domination by the specific employer who hires him.
Then, I defend my account of domination from two objections. The first one is that every time that the employer arbitrarily subtracts something from the hypothetical work relation the employee had imagined at the moment he was made the job offer, the employer performs arbitrary interference over the employee and dominates him. The second one is
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that the dire conditions of commodified individuals could be mitigated through individual effort and industriousness. In response to the first one, I maintain that we cannot hold that systemic domination materializes in interpersonal domination unless we maintain that the employer, for the sole reason of having capital available, has the duty of offering to the employee an ideal contract. I discuss how Philip Pettit has dealt with the issue of the benchmark of options’ payoffs and I conclude that the introduction of the idea of the benchmark in job contracts would lead us to troubling conclusions that we cannot accept. While in response to the second one, I state that if we look today at the global proletariat we do not even have to recognize, as G. A. Cohen does, that extremely commodified persons are individually free to ameliorate their conditions7.
This leads me to present a theory of global justice based on a minimum de-commodification of labour power. I firstly reason about how a completely de-commodified society would look like. I argue that a complete de-commodification of labour power would limit exploitation to rare cases – only those in which a person craves for an extra-good that is non-economic or that is much above the threshold set by de-commodification - and would fully neutralise the structural domination stemming from the unequal distribution of assets. Nonetheless, a complete de-commodification of labour power, I argue, is both economically unsustainable and lacking a normative justification. Therefore, I conclude that we should rather opt for a minimum de-commodification of labour power (MDL), a system that creates a protective sphere around a basic set of capabilities – interpreted basically as a minimum livelihood in terms of health and food - in order to decouple them from voluntary and side effects of capitalist systemic domination.
The MDL should be interpreted as a cosmopolitan principle of justice because the source of capitalist systemic domination is global, and even if single states were able to implement MDL nationally, leaving to them the economic burden of MDL would be unfair. I propose four different arguments to support the global implementation of MDL: labour is much more local than capital, hence those people who control capital are able to move their productive assets out of the reach of proletarians, thus rendering proletarians’ dependence on them extreme; states are limited in their the economic capacity to correct for the negative effects
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of capitalist systemic domination; unregulated movements of capital across borders do contribute to making foreign people more commodified; without a global implementation of MDL individuals living in developed countries would run the serious risk of benefiting from the exploitation of poor workers made possible by capitalist systemic domination.
I maintain that the strategies for countering different forms of domination can be implemented in parallel without hindering any priority. I accept the argument made by Laborde and Ronzoni, according to whom justice only requires states to promote an international basic freedom from domination and the achievement of optimal non-domination should be delegated to single republics8, but I add that the measures for countering capitalist systemic domination cannot be left to the republic because of a misalignment between capital and the state.
After having presented the account of global justice based on MDL, I explain, at the end of the fifth chapter, why I do consider my approach as something new in the cosmopolitan debate and in what respects it differs from the classic approaches to global justice discussed in the first three chapters. Firstly, I explain what MDL can add to the discourse on cosmopolitan contractarianism. I argue that this work on labour commodification can help us understanding why both Rawls and his cosmopolitan colleagues are missing the point when they debate whether we have or do not have a global basic structure, while what is really missing is a global mechanism that protects individual autonomy and restores what the same Rawls has defined as the conditions of “background justice”9. Secondly, I emphasize the important theoretical difference between an approach based on a capability threshold and one based on labour de-commodification. For the de-commodification standard is not simply met when a person enjoys some given capabilities, but when she is sure that she will continue to enjoy those capabilities even in the occurrence of a market’s shock – this is the same difference that exist between the concepts of sustainable human development and human security. Thirdly, I explain why the principle of sufficiency, while being susceptible to the same limits of the capability approach, is based on a positive thesis that is less strong than compensating those excluded from the ownership of the means of
8
Laborde and Ronzoni 2015.
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production. Fourthly, I argue why the redistribution of natural resources advocated by Georgist left-libertarians can determine a successful action against capitalist systemic domination but is unable to sustain it over time – in some sense it brings about what I named as a “one-shot” de-commodification of labour. Lastly, I will maintain that even though MDL and Pogge’s Global Resources Dividend (GRD) are similar in their logic, the GRD is much narrower in its scope as a redistributive tool because it is limited to natural resources, hence it is insufficient for making all those supporting and benefiting from capitalist systemic domination responsible for neutralizing its negative effects on extremely commodified individuals.
In the third and final section, I shall deal with four strong objections usually levelled against cosmopolitan justice: the compatriot priority principle, the coercion view10, the allegations of uselessness and infeasibility. With regard to the first objection I maintain that all those theories that resort to property rights or negative duties of justice can hold out against the liberal-nationalist objection enshrined in the compatriot priority principle, according to which national membership is an ethically relevant relation that can – and should – give rise to special duties among fellow-nationals. I demonstrate that given the peculiar justification and the non-comparative nature of MDL it can also be embraced by those who believe in the existence of special duties toward compatriots. While, in responding to the coercion view, which basically maintains that positive duties of justice do only hold among those people who are subject to the exceptional obligations of state’s institutions, I argue that it does not scratch MDL, because the theorists of the coercion view do actually recognize that the respect of negative duties of justice should take global priority over domestic issues of socioeconomic justice triggered by state’s coercion, but then they fail to see that a violation of these negative duties is systemically occurring within the structure of global capitalism. So I explain why it is occurring, recalling some of the arguments put forward in the previous chapters.
The third objection, that I call the allegation of uselessness, hints that investing time and mental energy in developing ambitious normative principles, that will be never fully met, is
10
The expression “coercion view” was used in Valentini 2011, p. 205, and it corresponds to what Thomas Nagel has called the “political conception” of justice, in Nagel 2005, p. 120.
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an idle analytical exercise. I reply that, apart from leading us towards intermediate, and more achievable, moral goals, the objective of a theory of global justice as the one based on a minimum de-commodification of labour power is also to offer new inspiration to the “cosmopolitan avant-garde”11, made up of those persons that are politically active in the transposition of ideal principles of global justice into concrete policies. Moreover, I shall also argue that another important objective of normative theorists interested in global justice should consist in reaching those that I define as second and third lines of the global justice movement, that is to say those persons who are still not part of the avant-garde, but who could potentially take a more active role if properly informed and motivated.
Lastly, I deal with the allegation of infeasibility, according to which even if we overcome all the previous objections we would encounter insurmountable practical obstacles in the implementation of global redistributive mechanisms. As a response, I briefly discuss those that I consider the more relevant proposals and existing practices of global taxes and regulations. With regard to them, I maintain that even though an exclusive focus on something specific as financial transactions, CO2 emissions or flight tickets, is an easy way to build up a global scheme of redistribution, it fails to treat fairly those agents that might be responsible for compensation. In conclusion, I briefly sketch the proposal of a tax on wealth to be independently administered by states as the best solution for funding MDL. Moreover, adjusting the idea of development vouchers12 for the normative purpose of MDL, I will also devise some guiding lines for spending the money collected through this tax in compliance with the cosmopolitan tenet of individualism, in order to directly reach those persons that experience a condition of extreme commodification.
11
The idea of the cosmopolitan avant-garde was discussed in Ypi 2012.
12
The scheme of development vouchers was presented the American economist William Easterly. See Easterly 2006, pp. 330 – 333.
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21 Chapter I - The contemporary debate on global justice
I – Introduction
Cosmopolitanism is an approach to moral and political philosophy. The word “cosmopolitanism” denotes a variety of different philosophical positions that encompass the moral, institutional, political and cultural spheres. As the Greek origin of the word, kosmopolitês (“citizen of the world”), clearly suggests, the basic idea of any cosmopolitan view is that all human beings belong to a sort of worldly community that goes beyond geographical and political borders13. And obviously, claims of any sort can be inferred from this generic assertion, regarding justice, individual identity, universal rights or the necessity of reforming state-centred institutions. The aspiration of transcending local realities and of recognizing a strong feeling of alliance toward a broader community is surely old. Scholars do usually point at the Socratic thinker, Diogenes the Cynic, as the first cosmopolitan philosopher14, and they quote his famous claim, “I am a citizen of the world”15, as a sort of rejection of the moral relevance of local membership and as an opening to a global community of human beings, where national origins, class, rank and suchlike are somehow negligible16.
This cosmopolitan tendency got more articulate in Stoic and Epicurean ethics. The basic concept, common to many Stoic philosophers, is that human beings share a similar capacity for reason, that is where we can find “a portion of the divine in each of us”17. This capacity distinguishes human beings from other living species, represents the source of their moral
13
See also Kleingeld and E. Brown 2014.
14
In an interesting article on Hellenistic cosmopolitanism Eric Brown deals with the question whether Socrates preceded Diogenes in transcending local communal spheres and identifying himself as a citizen of the world. Brown distinguishes between the negative and the positive thesis of cosmopolitanism. The first one consists in the rejection of local affiliations as defining features of personal identity. The second one entails a positive assertion on human beings belonging to a universal community that encompasses local groups. A mature cosmopolitan position needs to rest on both theses. Brown’s conclusion is that Socrates cannot be defined as a cosmopolitan philosopher because he partially embraced the positive thesis but was silent on the negative one. See E. Brown 2006, p. 551.
15
Nussbaum 1997, p. 5.
16
Nussbaum 1997, 6; Kleingeld and E. Brown 2014.
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value and makes them members of a global fraternal community18. On the other hand, tracks of the cosmopolitan commitment can also be found in the Epicurean notion of friendship. Epicureans sought to create a community of friends that could protect its members from the experience of pain. Such a community was open to all human beings, regardless of their origins19.
The cosmopolitan view survived in an embryonic form to the eclipse of the Stoic tradition, during the Christianisation of the Roman Empire, and it found a first coherent elaboration in Kant’s philosophy of history20. Kant was the first philosopher to develop the cosmopolitan ethical tradition into a more structured political philosophy. The object of this work, and more specifically of this section, is contemporary cosmopolitanism about justice. As I stated in the general introduction, my aim is to discuss the current literature on global justice and to explain why we have good reasons to look at the problem of global inequality through the lens of labour commodification. This is why I shall start this first section with an analysis of the philosophical arguments that connect Kant’s philosophy to global justice, and in some sense make the former pave the way to the latter.
However, before getting into it, I deem it important to clarify what contemporary cosmopolitanism is, why it should not be simply equated with global justice – in the sense that cosmopolitanism is a broader notion than global justice - and why a thesis on the scope of justice does not need to be connected with a thesis on the process that leads individuals to forge their identity.
The first useful distinction when approaching cosmopolitanism is the one between moral and institutional cosmopolitanism. Moral cosmopolitanism consists in the very generic claim that all human beings have the same moral value regardless of the local community they belong to, while institutional cosmopolitanism demands the creation of global institutions in addition to or in the place of national ones21. Thomas Pogge has summarized the theoretical
18 G. W. Brown and Held 2010, pp. 4 – 5. 19
E. Brown 2006, p. 556.
20
For an historical analysis of the evolution of the cosmopolitan ideal from the late Stoa up to the Enlightenment, and a discussion of Neo-Thomist cosmopolitanism in the XV and XVI Centuries, you can see G. W. Brown and Held 2010, pp. 3 – 8.
21
Some scholars do also refer to it as “political” or “legal” cosmopolitanism. Pogge, for example, calls it “legal cosmopolitanism”, Pogge 2008, p. 175. While Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown name it “political
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core that lies at the basis of moral cosmopolitanism in three words. The first one is individualism. Individuals are the “ultimate units of moral concerns”, instead of families, states, ethnic groups, religious communities, and suchlike. These entities might have moral significance only indirectly, by virtue of the fact that they contain individuals and have an impact on their wellbeing. The second one is universality. Every human being should be considered as an “ultimate unit of moral concern”, regardless of class, origin, gender or ethnicity. The last one is generality. Human beings should be recognized as “ultimate unit of moral concern” by everyone, not just by friends, fellow citizens and so on22.
Cosmopolitan thinkers do usually embrace the three principles listed by Pogge and his definition of moral cosmopolitanism. In some way, individualism, universality and generality do represent the least common denominator among the most disparate cosmopolitan theories of justice – be it utilitarianism, or contractarianism, or left-libertarianism. However, as we can see, the definition of moral cosmopolitanism is rather generic, or even vague. Global justice theorists do usually rely on the moral premises of moral cosmopolitanism to infer a thesis on the scope of the principles of justice. The idea of global justice is based on the assumption that principles of justice are not limited to states, but cross political borders, so that the right scope of distributive justice should be global, and encompass every human being23. In this sense, global justice is different from international justice because it directly addresses individuals rather than enquiring over the principles that should regulate the relations between states24.
Nonetheless, the step from moral cosmopolitanism to a global conception of justice is neither automatic nor taken for granted. For the claim about the equal moral worth of every human being is open to many different interpretations. Someone might accept the basic principles of moral cosmopolitanism and argue, as global justice theorists do, that these principles represent a compelling reason for undertaking positive actions toward foreigners in need. While, some others might recognize every human being as an ultimate unit of moral concern but hold that this is insufficient for triggering duties of socioeconomic justice of the
cosmopolitanism”, Kleingeld and Eric Brown 2014. In this text I shall keep on using the expression “institutional cosmopolitanism”. On this issue see also Brock 2009, p. 12.
22
Pogge 2008, 175.
23
See Caney 2005, p. 103.
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kind that exist among members of the same state. Therefore, a global justice theorist is also committed to moral cosmopolitanism, but a person who accepts moral cosmopolitan will not necessarily agree on the global scope of justice25.
This was to say that theories of global justice should be seen as a sub-group within moral cosmopolitanism, but not as the only one. Remaining in this sub-group, there is also another important distinction to be made between what Samuel Scheffler calls the “extreme” and the “moderate” view of moral cosmopolitanism, and David Miller calls the “strong” and the “weak” version of cosmopolitanism26. In a few words, the weak/moderate version of cosmopolitanism recognizes the existence of general responsibilities of justice toward foreigners in addition to special responsibilities toward fellow-nationals, thus seeking a way to regulate their coexistence, while the “extreme/strong” view denies the normative validity of special responsibilities and justifies the practice of positive actions toward fellow-nationals only when they represent the most efficient way to do good to humanity as a whole27.
Moral cosmopolitanism can result – at least in theory – in a form of institutional cosmopolitanism, that is to say a philosophy committed to drastic changes in the international governance aimed at creating a sort of global authority, or more generally global institutions. But in the majority of cases moral cosmopolitans do reject institutional cosmopolitanism, hence it is fundamental to keep separated the two variants of cosmopolitanism. For you can hold that we can realize the aspirations of moral cosmopolitanism only if we firstly centralize the sovereignty of states at an higher international level, but you can also maintain that principles of global justice can be implemented within the existing global structure, made of independent and sovereign
25
See also Armstrong 2012, p. 66. I shall deal with this issue in the last chapter, when I will discuss the objections to a cosmopolitan conception of justice.
26 Scheffler 2001, pp. 114 – 116, D. Miller 2007, pp. 43 – 44. In the last chapter I shall discuss the implications of
both versions of moral cosmopolitanism for a reconcilement with a liberal-nationalist position.
27
One example of the extreme view, that I will analyse in more details in the last section, is the moral argument made by Nussbaum in her rejoinder in For Love of Country: “Cosmopolitans hold, moreover, that it is right to give the local an additional measure of concern. But the primary reason a cosmopolitan should have for this is not that the local is better per se, but rather that this is the only sensible way to do good”, Nussbaum1996, pp. 135 – 136.
Another example is Singer’s utilitarianism, according to which you are justified in allocating resources to people around you only if this is the best way for maximizing worldly aggregate utility. See Singer 1972, Singer 2010, and see also the following chapter, where I dedicate a specific paragraph to cosmopolitan utilitarianism.
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states. This means that if you dismiss the idea of a world state as utopic or undesirable, or both things, as I also would do, this does not entail that you are rejecting the whole cosmopolitan philosophy. All the theories of global justice I shall present and discuss in this section should be positioned in the field of moral cosmopolitanism, because they never challenge the idea of states nor do they go so far as to propose drastic changes in the current institutional order. The theory of global justice based on the minimum de-commodification of labour power, that I will present in the next section, will follow on this path. It will work on the assumption that states, and regional political unions, retain sovereignty over their economic policies and it would provide philosophical reasons for these actors to compensate their counterparts in global interactions when the former do cause harm to the latter.
So far I have said that global justice theories represent a sub-group within moral cosmopolitanism - even though not the only one, because also a statist account of justice can be inferred from the principles of individualism, universality and generality – and that moral cosmopolitanism is a different matter from institutional cosmopolitanism, in the sense that they represent two distinct variants of cosmopolitanism. But again, moral and institutional cosmopolitanism do not exhaust the whole discourse on the taxonomy of cosmopolitanism, because there is at least another variant that occupies a prominent role in contemporary political theory, and it is cultural cosmopolitanism28.
Cultural cosmopolitanism is a philosophical view that rejects the exclusive belonging to a local community as an unavoidable condition for an individual to forge her identity and to
28 I said “at least another variant” because some scholars do also add other variants to the cosmopolitan
taxonomy. Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown, for example, do also list “economic cosmopolitanism”, although it is more an economic than a philosophical view. It is based on the idea that we should sustain a global unfettered market. As noted by the same Kleingeld and E. Brown, philosophical cosmopolitans do usually oppose this kind of economic cosmopolitanism, and against it they advocate a deeper political involvement in market dynamics. See Kleingeld and E. Brown 2014.
While David Held and Garret Wallace Brown do also add to the list “legal cosmopolitanism” (the research field interested in studying how the international law could and should be constrained by cosmopolitan principles), and “civic cosmopolitanism” (generally speaking, it can be defined as the branch of cosmopolitan research interested in examining how to create “a sense of cosmopolitan citizenship”), Held and G. W. Brown 2010, pp. 9 – 13. Nonetheless, this categorisation might be a bit misleading because, as I already said, in the literature the term “legal” has sometimes been used to indicate what I have discussed before as “institutional cosmopolitanism”. For example, Pogge 2008, p. 175.
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flourish29. Jeremy Waldron has offered a kind of manifesto of cosmopolitanism as a doctrine about culture in the seminal article “Cosmopolitan Cultures and Cosmopolitan Alternatives”, where he describes the cosmopolitan individual as a “a creature of modernity, conscious of living in a mixed-up world and having a mixed-up self”30. Cultural cosmopolitanism stands in contrast to the claim, made by communitarians, that the individual does necessarily owes her identity to her local community, because, the mere empirical fact that human flourishing is achievable while leading a “freewheeling cosmopolitan life”31 undercuts one of the basic tenets of the “need to belong”32. Therefore, Waldron argues, people can claim that belonging to a specific cultural group is something they extremely crave, but not that it is something they cannot do without, as food, shelter, and suchlike.
On the other hand, cultural cosmopolitanism does not reject the critique that Will Kymlicka moves against liberalism à la Dworking or à la Rawls. Kymlicka maintains that liberal thinkers have usually underestimated the fact that when individuals are called to choose their conception of the good they do not face a set of options that fluctuates in an isolated theoretical sphere. Rather, individuals weight the available options according to the meaning that the cultural structures from where they belong attribute to them. Waldron, arguing from the cosmopolitan prospective, rebuts that Kymlicka is right in holding that “options have culturally defined meanings”, but at the same time he is victim of “something like the fallacy of composition”33. For he identifies cultural structures with “secures” cultural structures. In other words, we need cultural meanings because we are not isolated atoms, but from this truth we cannot infer that the only valid cultural meanings are those we get from local or national communities. Much of the cultural materials we draw upon to construct our identity is nowadays global. So, if we owe a debt to social structures, as we surely do, we owe it, cosmopolitans - about culture - say, to global social structures34.
29
On cultural cosmopolitanism see Scheffler 2001, pp. 111 – 116, and also Kleingeld and E. Brown 2014.
30 Waldron 1995, p. 95. 31 Waldron 1995, p. 99. 32 Waldron 1995, p. 97. 33 Waldron 1995, p. 106.
34 Also within cultural cosmopolitanism we can make a distinction between the moderate and the extreme
view. The first one holds that in the contemporary world individuals can also flourish when drawing on global cultural materials. While the extreme view holds that individuals can only flourish when they raise above their local culture and get absorbed in a global, hybrid, lifestyle. According to Scheffler, for example, Waldron’s
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Cultural cosmopolitanism is a distinct philosophical position from moral cosmopolitanism, in the sense that these two versions of cosmopolitanism are completely independent. You can argue in favour of global principles of justice while holding that local belonging remains essential for the individual to forge her identity, and you can also reject the latter claim while maintaining that duties of socioeconomic justice only hold among fellow-nationals. Kok-Chor Tan makes this point clear when he argues that when we refer to cosmopolitanism as doctrine about justice – in other words, when we are concerned with moral cosmopolitanism – we can remain “agnostic about how individuals are to understand their own conceptions of the good and their special allegiances *… because+ as a doctrine about justice, cosmopolitanism need not deny the normative independence of social attachments; all that it demands is that these attachments and commitments be compatible with the requirements of justice impartially conceived”35.
Some people might be tempted to argue that moral and cultural cosmopolitanism are not simply two distinct positions, but in some cases they also embody aspirations that are at odds, if not in theory, at least in practice. For cultural cosmopolitanism is usually perceived as a cultural worldliness that mainly characterizes a metropolitan elite. Think for example of Waldron, when he says of the cosmopolitan individual that “though he may live in San Francisco and be of Irish ancestry, he does not take his identity to be compromised when he learns Spanish, eats Chinese, wears clothes made in Korea, listens to arias by Verdi sung by a Maori princess on Japanese equipment, follows Ukrainian politics, and practices Buddhist meditation techniques”36. While moral cosmopolitanism is an ethical position that usually requires the wealthy people living in multicultural metropolises to use their money to alleviate the plight of poor foreigners – for different reasons that we will see soon – instead of making exotic trips or enrolling in expensive meditation courses.
Christine Sypnowich raises a similar point when she maintains that cosmopolitan aesthetic and cosmopolitan ethics hold a different position in relation to inequality, because “the [cultural] cosmopolitan is typically a privileged person, who has access to foreign travel,
cultural cosmopolitanism oscillates between the moderate and the extreme view. Scheffler 2001, pp. 116 – 117.
35
Tan 2005, p. 177.
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some knowledge of art and the means for enjoying it, who possesses sophisticated tastes and a cultivated, open mind *…+ and those who express mistrust of cosmopolitanism, however bigoted and pernicious their views, might well be giving expression to a resentment of cultural inequality that is spawned by material inequality”37. Nonetheless, I believe that the representation of the culturally cosmopolitan individual as a champagne socialist who spends his wealth for getting satisfaction from his refined hobbies instead of giving a concrete help to the worst-off, as opposed to the ethically cosmopolitan individual who is suspicious of cultural worldliness, is at least partial. For it is evident that a person who has discharged her duties of global justice is ethically free, from the prospective of moral cosmopolitanism, to spend her money in whatever way she fancies. So nothing prevents a cultural cosmopolitan from being a cosmopolitan about justice as well. On the other hand, there are also many people who have come to experience cultural cosmopolitanism precisely because of global inequality. The biggest example being economic migrants, who have left their homelands in search of better opportunities of life elsewhere. Several of these persons live in a mixture of different cultures and at the same time it is reasonable to expect that they would be willing to question the way global wealth is allocated, or at least that they would be sympathetic to the argument put forward by cosmopolitans about justice.
In sum, I think that we should not generalize too much on the alleged tension between moral and cultural cosmopolitanism. But it is also important to keep in mind the taxonomy of cosmopolitanism because you might have reasons for rejecting one variant of it, while at the same time not dismissing all other cosmopolitan theses. My focus in this section, and more generally in this work, is on global justice as a subgroup of theories within moral cosmopolitanism, that is to say on the claims about the scope of justice that stem from the embracement of the basic principles of moral cosmopolitanism (individualism, generality, universality).
The present and the following two chapters will be dedicated to seven different approaches to global justice. In this first chapter I start by discussing why Kant’s works was fundamental for the re-elaboration of the historical tradition of cosmopolitanism into a political
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philosophy that paved the way to contemporary cosmopolitanism, and I also wonder whether we have sufficient elements for glimpsing claims of global justice in Kant’s philosophy. Then, I move on to contractarian cosmopolitanism, mainly based on the universalization of John Rawls’s principles of justice, and to the capability approach, as developed by Martha Nussbaum in parallel with Amartya Sen’s economic work on development and the measurement of wellbeing. The second chapter shall be dedicated to utilitarianism, prioritarianism and sufficientarianism, three doctrines that hold up global positive duties of socioeconomic justice, for reasons that are different from the ones that we shall soon encounter in this first chapter. While, the last chapter of this section will deal with a different approach to global justice, according to which we ought to redistribute to poor foreigners not in virtue of an extensive interpretation of the scope of socioeconomic justice, but rather because we have contributed to wrong these people. With regard to this approach, I shall discuss both the left-libertarian position on individual property rights and Pogge’s account of harm and negative duties of justice.
It is important to note that a theory of global justice is usually the global extension of a pre-existent approach to domestic justice. Principles of global justice do vindicate, in the majority of cases, a coherence with principles of national justice. So, for example, a person who is committed to an ideal of fair social contract at the national level has no reasons to consider utilitarianism as the right doctrine for the global realm. In the same way, a person who thinks that what really matters is that everyone has enough rather than equal wealth, and supports sufficientarianism38 at the national level, would be incoherent in embracing global egalitarianism.
This is to say that we should not consider theories of global justice as interchangeable tools to be valued in virtue of their effectiveness. Hence, in presenting and discussing these theories I simply aim to depict a clear picture of what we have in the literature. To make an example, when I will discuss the priority principle I will in no way try to convince a global
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Sufficientarianism maintains that justice is realized when every individual meets a basic threshold – or more thresholds - of wellbeing, resources, satisfaction, and so on, depending on the different sufficientarian theories. While, whatever happens above sufficiency is out of the scope of justice.
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egalitarian of the merits of prioritarianism39, because a global egalitarian is first of all an egalitarian, a person who believes that socioeconomic justice consists in equalizing levels of welfare rather than maximizing “compound states of affairs”40. I will simply aim to explain what prioritarianism is, in what it differs from others approaches to global justice – that, as we have seen, are a reflection of the national account of justice – and what limits it have.
My purpose in this section is twofold. Firstly, I want to sketch a brief state of the art about global justice in order to have a clear picture of the debate in which the principle of the minimum de-commodification of labour (MDL) will be introduced. Moreover, this introductory discussion will provide us with the theoretical elements for explaining in what MDL differs from other theories of global justice and what it can add to them. Secondly, there are some accounts of global justice that are not strictly coupled with a specific approach to domestic justice. This happens when the redistributive demand stems from the violation of a negative duty of justice, whose existence is generally recognized.
For example, Pogge’s idea that individuals living in developed countries have to redistribute towards foreigners because they are responsible for sustaining a global order that is harming the global poor, does not depend on any specific account of domestic socioeconomic justice. Every liberal person would agree that if you cause some harm to another person you have to compensate her. In this case, the point to be demonstrated is completely empirical – that is to say, Pogge has to support the claim that the global order is actually harming the global poor. But any person committed to a liberal account of domestic justice can – and I would add, should – recognize as valid Pogge’s negative duty. While the negative duty left-libertarians appeal to, that the current unequal distribution of assets violates the initially equal distribution of resources, is open to theoretical discussion. An utilitarian or a contractarian would have good reasons – differently from a libertarian – to reject it.
MDL, as Pogge’s theory, refers to a negative duty – the duty not to arbitrary interfere with others – that is compatible with any liberal account of socioeconomic justice. There is no reason why an egalitarian, a sufficientarian or a libertarian should reject it in principle. The
39 Prioritarianism is the view that what really matters from the prospective of justice is not equality in itself but
rather that the worst-off are given priority. This is so because prioritarians weight benefits accruing to individuals on a scale that is inversely proportional to the welfare of the recipients.
