The value of global justice: Realism and moralism
| Published date | 01 June 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088216628323 |
| Date | 01 June 2016 |
| Author | Matt Sleat |
Journal of International Political Theory
2016, Vol. 12(2) 169 –184
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088216628323
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The value of global justice:
Realism and moralism
Matt Sleat
The University of Sheffield, UK
Abstract
It is a noticeable feature of the contemporary revival of interest in realist political
thought that it has very much hesitated from exploring its implications for international
political theory. This is interesting both because realism is one of the dominant
intellectual traditions in international relations, but also as much of the recent debates
surrounding global justice have engaged with themes that are at least germane to those
of realism. This article will therefore try and extend some of the themes of realist
political thought into the realm of global justice. While there might be several areas
worth exploring, the focus here shall be on the realist emphasis on making sense of
politics as a sphere of activity that has internal sources of normativity which cannot
be reduced to moral first principles, the relationship between politics and legitimacy,
and how these pose fundamental questions for the political nature of global justice. It
ends by arguing that, viewed through the realist lens, the question of the legitimacy of
international institutions should take greater priority in global justice debates insofar as
this is fundamental to enabling us to understand justice in political and not exclusively
moral terms.
Keywords
Global justice, legitimacy, moralism, realism
A realist perspective on global justice might sound like something of a misnomer. Realists,
after all, think that interests, power and conflict characterise international politics. Moral
notions like justice can play no meaningful role in political life: humans are naturally too
aggressive or uncooperative (Zolo, 1998) or the character of the international system is
Corresponding author:
Matt Sleat, Department of Politics, The University of Sheffield, Elmfield, Northumberland Road, Sheffield
S10 2TU, UK.
Email: m.sleat@sheffield.ac.uk
628323IPT0010.1177/1755088216628323Journal of International Political TheorySleat
research-article2016
Article
170 Journal of International Political Theory 12(2)
such that it would be irrational (possibly even wrong) for states to concern themselves with
the welfare of those beyond their borders over their own national security (Art and Waltz,
1983). But as the latest research into realist political thought has demonstrated, this view of
realism as an amoral or normatively neutral theory of politics is significantly impoverished
and obscures a richer and more complex way of thinking about political life. It is interest-
ing, however, that this recent revival of interest in realist political thought has yet to apply
itself to international politics, limiting itself very much to traditional ‘domestic’ theorising.1
This article hopes to make a first attempt to see what, if anything, political realism (prop-
erly understood) might have to say about global justice.
Much of what realism has to say is predictably critical, and in the first part of the arti-
cle, I shall set out how realism challenges the familiar statist and cosmopolitan accounts
of global justice – and in particular, their accounts of the scope and grounds of global
justice – on the basis that they are both forms of political moralism. That realism would
not be too sympathetic especially to some of the more morally ambitious forms of cosmo-
politan accounts of global justice is unlikely to be surprising; the critique of statism may
be a little more unexpected, especially as it is often billed as an explicitly ‘political’ take
on global justice.
The second half of the article attempts to be more constructive insofar as it tries to set
out what it would mean to think about global justice as a political value, which is to say
what role it has or could have in helping us make sense of international politics (with all
that realism takes politics to entail). But this will necessarily be very tentative; it is not for
no reason that realism is intuitively seen as hostile to global justice. I am conscious that
what I shall suggest runs the risk of not saying enough for global justice theorists and pos-
sibly too much for realists. For the latter, it really is far from clear whether realist theory
can be applied to the international sphere at all and maybe especially not in the way I
endeavour to do so here. I offer my suggestions very much in the spirit of experimenta-
tion. If in the end it turns out that this attempt to think about international politics realisti-
cally stretches the concepts of realism too far, then we learn something in the trying.
Though what we learn might tell us more about the limits of realism than it does anything
else, and I for one would be very disappointed if it turned out realist thought has nothing
interesting to say about international politics. And from the other side of the debate, cos-
mopolitans and statists alike are liable to find what I do have to say about how we can
think politically about global justice insufficient, not least because it does not offer the
possibility of a systematic normative theory from which we can develop different concep-
tions of justice. To that, I would stress from the outset that realism asks us to think harder
about the sort of political theory we need, and if realism can be normative – and there are
some who deny that it can (Erman and Möller, 2015) – it will not be normative in the same
way as other positions within this debate. Realism is not to sit alongside existing theories
in offering alternative conceptions of global justice but is better thought of as challenging
a particular way of thinking about the problem that it addresses in the first place.
Statism, cosmopolitanism and the scope of justice
One of the central debates of global justice, and one that has important ramifications
for how we think about justice at the global level, is its scope: to whom do we owe
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