Globalising Justice: a Multidimensional Approach. 1. Economics
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12035 |
| Published date | 01 May 2013 |
| Date | 01 May 2013 |
| Author | Valentina Gentile,Marcello Di Paola |
Globalising Justice: a Multidimensional Approach.
1. Economics
Marcello Di Paola and Valentina Gentile
LUISS “Guido Carli”, Libera Universit
a Internazionale degli Studi Sociali, Rome
In the last two decades, the academic debate on justice
has undergone an important change: its scope of appli-
cation has enlarged; from the national to the global level.
Many factors have contributed to this shift: the most
obvious are the growing extent and intensity of eco-
nomic transactions around the world, transnational
migrations and consequent increases in cross-cultural
interaction, and the looming threats posed by planetary
environmental problems.
The notion of ‘globalisation’has imposed itself as a
powerful descriptive and explanatory category for many
of the economic, social and environmental phenomena
that are changing the physiognomy of our world. When
it comes to economics specifically, globalisation has also
acquired some prescriptive force: the idea that globalised
markets could be a source of progress and growth for
less developed countries –which would lift themselves
out of duress and ‘converge’onto North-American and
European living standards –has fired the enthusiasm of
many and established globalisation as ‘the way to go’.
Opening markets to international trade and investments
will stimulate economic growth, and economic growth is
the basic condition of human prosperity. The model
assumed, quite clearly, is that of the Invisible Hand:
Adam Smith’s most enticing promise of widespread
wellbeing as an emergent result of private economic
interactions.
It is as yet unclear whether such promise will be ful-
filled. Undeniably, the pursuit of economic growth has
lifted out of destitution more people in the past 20 years
than in the previous two centuries –and the reason is
that it has been global. However, it is equally undeniable
that globalisation, like any other human phenomenon,
has both winners and losers. With more than 1 billion
people still living on less than $1.25 a day, absolute pov-
erty remains a tragedy (and an epic failure). Relative pov-
erty –that is, global inequality –has also been on the
rise in the past 20 years. Although this fact has been
somewhat obscured in the statistics by the phenomenal
performances of populous countries like China and India,
it is now becoming apparent, with the richest 8 per cent
of the world population commanding over half the
world’s wealth.
The origins of poverty and inequality determine the
eventual appropriateness of talking about global eco-
nomic distributions as just or unjust. Are poverty and
inequality simply unfortunate (and possibly just tempo-
rary) upshots of an otherwise generally fair world sys-
tem, or are there systemic distortions in that system
that breed poverty and inequality, and coincide with or
depend on calcified power structures, geographical loca-
tion, asymmetric access to natural resources, and other
features that are largely arbitrary from a moral point of
view? Are opportunities for prosperous living wide open
to some and inescapably foreclosed to others, regard-
less of their respective potential and merits? If so, then
the issue of ‘moral luck’looms large: individuals seem
to be destined to a certain standard of living not
because of what they choose and do, but on the
grounds of circumstances over which they have no
control –such as their location of birth. Many agree
that justice demands redressing poverty and inequality
whenever these are due –or largely due –to moral
luck. If that is right, then economics and morals would
be linked inextricably, as Adam Smith himself thought
they were. Such linkage warrants a concern for justice
in distribution.
Many theorists have confronted the issue of distribu-
tive justice as applied to national systems, but most of
their conclusions cannot be extended beyond borders.
When we move to a global notion of distributive justice,
we must accept novel theoretical burdens. A first issue
concerns the very meaning of ‘global inequality’. Those
who have looked at the problem of inequality among
nations have often argued for some kind of ‘duty of
assistance’that rich countries have towards poor ones.
Some have gone further and maintained that global
inequality is a more or less direct responsibility of the
rich, and that this establishes a stringent duty to
decrease inequality through systemic reforms. Still,
inequality has consistently been understood in terms of
differences between rich and poor countries –as an
international more than authentically global issue.
Recently, however, many have insisted on the need to
configure a more complex notion of global inequality in
response to the brute fact that the ‘have-less’actually
©2013 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2013) 4:2 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12035
Global Policy Volume 4 . Issue 2 . May 2013
196
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