Global justice: Shaped rather than found
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Author | Richard Shapcott |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117817730678 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117817730678
International Relations
2018, Vol. 32(1) 104 –123
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117817730678
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Global justice: Shaped
rather than found
Richard Shapcott
The University of Queensland
Abstract
This article argues that global egalitarian accounts of global justice are insufficient and inappropriate
to the task of thinking globally about justice. This article argues that the most pervasive approaches
to cosmopolitanism, and in particular global egalitarian accounts, are of limited utility because
they assume the existence of suitable preconditions which are absent, in particular the lack of
a global reflective equilibrium. In so doing, they ignore the requisite precondition for their own
thought to be either persuasive or possible as a basis for genuine conduct or institutional reform.
This article argues that the task for cosmopolitan thought is to think about how cosmopolitanism
can in the words of Richard Rorty be ‘shaped rather than found’ and what that would mean for
how we construct accounts of global justice and other pressing cosmopolitan issues. It concludes
that developing a theory of global justice requires at least a theoretical engagement with non-
Western political thought.
Keywords
comparative political theory, cosmopolitanism, global justice, Richard Rorty
Introduction
The main ambition of this article is to set an agenda for an alternative way of thinking
about global justice to those which dominate the field today. It argues that what is needed
is substantive engagement with principles of justice derived from a variety of approaches
beyond the Western canon. In particular, the article aims to set the scene for the incorpo-
ration of comparative political theory (CPT) into thinking about global justice.
Attempts to specify principles of just world order have proliferated over the last dec-
ade or so. While the ensuing discussion has been fertile in terms of the diversity of the
Corresponding author:
Richard Shapcott, School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland,
St. Lucia, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia.
Email: r.shapcott@uq.edu.au
730678IRE0010.1177/0047117817730678International RelationsShapcott
research-article2017
Article
Shapcott 105
content of the proposals and the field now contains a significant diversity of approaches,
it nonetheless remains within a generally constrained horizon of post-Rawlsian liberal
thought. Thus, significantly less diversity is apparent in terms of meta-theoretical start-
ing points and philosophical methods.
More specifically, almost all accounts of global justice are drawn entirely from within
liberal, post-Rawlsian traditions of thought. None of the major accounts of global justice
anywhere draws upon or examines accounts of justice from outside the traditional canon.
For instance, there is no mention of Islamic justice or ‘Confucian’ justice in the works of
Valentini, Hassoune, Pogge, Brock, Caney and Moellendorf.1 This is a troubling ten-
dency for a philosophical/political project that in principle seeks to identify rules that
apply to everyone on the planet. As Simon Caney points out, this epistemic parochialism
amounts to a ‘blind refusal to consider competing approaches (and) is … a form of philo-
sophical arrogance …. Such unthinking and complacent parochialism leaves one epis-
temically handicapped’.2 To assume that the content of a global account of justice can be
developed without the contributions of the cultures and contexts in which it is applied is
epistemic parochialism, ‘it seems odd to arbitrarily privilege ideas drawn from the west-
ern experience, and then claim that they apply elsewhere, with no examination of what
other traditions have to offer’.3 The world we exist in is a world, in Dallmayr’s terms,
‘after Babel’, that is:
after the scattering of languages and peoples. This means that we cannot proceed from a
presumed unity or univocity of humankind but have to take seriously the diversity or multiplicity
of languages, customs, and cultural traditions. Hence, any move or journey in the direction of
cosmopolis today can only occur in the mode of sustained dialogue, the mode of cross-cultural
and interreligious interaction.4
Questions concerning the fairness of international economic order are of concern to
all affected by them. It would seem therefore that a prima facie case exists that any global
account of justice must engage in investigations into the compatibility or incompatibility
of different values and different traditions of ethical and moral and political thought. In
this vein, Farah Godrej has argued that a truly global cosmopolitan theory ‘would be one
in which we might bring the idea of Gandhi or Confucius to bear on our discussion of
freedom or justice, in the same way that we would use Rawls or, Marx or Hobbes’.5
This article begins by arguing that academic theorizing has been dominated by
approaches derived from a very narrow methodological base inappropriate for the cir-
cumstances of global justice. The article argues that this situation has come about because
of the underlying methodological and philosophical starting points of Western liberalism
in enlightenment foundationalism.
For the purposes of argument, it examines the global egalitarian (GE) account of
global justice as exemplary of this tendency in the field more broadly. GE advances the
most ambitious accounts of justice setting ambitious goals for global redistribution.6
While the GE approach has by no means secured universal consent, nonetheless, most
discussions of global justice occur within their shadow and within a general horizon of
post-Rawlsian liberal political thought (with the obvious exception of utilitarians such as
Singer).7 The article argues with particular reference to GE, that developing principles of
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