Ten years have passed since the United Nations member states committed themselves to the Millennium Development Goals, central among which are the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger worldwide by 2015. Two recent books, Gillian Brock's Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account and Darrel Moellendorf's Global Inequality Matters, serve as timely reminders that progress toward meeting these morally urgent goals has been minimal. Rich with empirical detail, these books bridge the gap between theory and practice in presenting carefully crafted accounts of the obligations we have to non-compatriots and by offering practical proposals for how we might get closer to meeting these obligations.
Among the host of theoretical questions common to the two books are: What commitments are entailed by a cosmopolitan perspective—one that recognizes the equal moral worth and inherent dignity of all individuals? Can the demands of justice be said to apply outside the state, and if so, why? How should global institutions be designed, and who are the bearers of responsibility for their design? What distributive principles would treat all individuals worldwide justly?
With respect to the long-standing debates on these questions, both authors manage to articulate a fresh perspective. Brock's distinctive contribution is her contention that the demands of cosmopolitanism should be cast in terms of enabling individuals worldwide to protect their basic needs and liberties, and furthermore that these are demands of justice. This approach differs from two prominent views. On the one hand, a number of cosmopolitan authors (Charles Beitz, Thomas Pogge in his earlier work, Simon Caney, Kok-Chor Tan, and Moellendorf) have defended versions of global egalitarianism—that is, the thesis that a just world would instantiate principles seeking to curb inequality. On the other hand, authors dubbed “statists” (John Rawls, Michael Blake, Andrea Sangiovanni, Thomas Nagel, and Mathias Risse) have argued that considerations of distributive justice—which necessarily aim for equality, in their view—apply only within the state, while on a global level the appropriate distributive principles are of a humanitarian variety that aim for sufficiency in meeting basic needs. Brock rejects both of these views, arguing instead that considerations of justice transcend state borders, while eschewing the claim that distributive justice entails distributive egalitarianism.
Does the difference between Brock's justice-based account and that of the statists—who support these same requirements but cast in terms of humanitarian duties—amount to a terminological quibble? Brock provides a convincing case that much rides on this distinction. Indeed, one of the main aims of her book is to show that our duties to non-compatriots are on the same plane as our duties to those near and dear: both are cashed out in terms of justice, and in some cases what we owe to those in other countries will take priority over what we owe to fellow citizens. Throughout the book, Brock does much to map out the main conceptual distinctions among both theorists and skeptics of global justice—including a helpful presentation of different understandings of cosmopolitanism; the intersections between the concepts of needs, capabilities, and human rights; and a presentation of the different principles endorsed by global egalitarians—as well as to situate her own account within this broader scheme.
Moellendorf's views about the requirements of justice place him among the global egalitarians. In greater detail than previously undertaken in the literature, he offers an in-depth answer to the question that is fundamental to the disagreement between global egalitarians and statists: How should facts about global interaction influence our reflections about the potentially unjust nature of the deep inequalities that persist in our world today? He challenges the statist view that there is something special about the state in generating concern for distributive equality by showing how Rawls's insights about the normative justification for the basic structure of the state may usefully be applied to the norms of global interaction. He then takes up various challenges to his interaction-sensitive defense of global egalitarianism and offers a sketch of some feasible policies that would bring us closer to his favored ideal.
Both authors carve out their positions in a broadly Rawlsian tradition, but do so in ways that depart significantly from the views defended by Rawls himself. The most obvious contrast with Rawls (especially his The Law of Peoples) is that Brock and Moellendorf argue that the demands of justice transcend state borders. Two significant points of divergence from Rawls's account of “justice as fairness” receive the bulk of my attention in what follows. The first of these concerns the use of Rawls's well-known “original position” thought experiment to theorize about the demands of global justice. With respect to this issue, I address Brock's novel approach to theorizing about which principles would be chosen in a global version of a Rawlsian-style thought experiment. The second departure from Rawls centers on the relationship between interaction and duties of justice. Do facts about social, political, and economic interdependence on a global level render theorizing about the demands of justice almost exclusively within the context of the state (as much contemporary work in political philosophy does) an increasingly obsolete exercise? Moellendorf's welcome attempt to ground an account of global justice in facts about cross-border interaction will be considered in detail.
ORIGINAL POSITION THEORIZING AND THE DEMANDS OF GLOBAL JUSTICE
A unique aspect of Brock's approach is her creative use of a Rawlsian normative thought experiment. A number of cosmopolitans before her—including, notably, Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge—have argued that the deployment of Rawls's original position reasoning provides a strong basis for the global application of his principles of justice. (In particular, more attention has been given to the principle of fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle than to the liberty principle.) In addition to this by now familiar challenge to the restricted scope of Rawls's principles of justice, Brock sets out to show also that the content of the demands of justice deriving from a global original position would be markedly different from those endorsed by Rawls in the domestic context.
The original position is a hypothetical thought experiment that seeks to model conditions of impartiality for the purpose of theorizing about the demands of justice. The basic idea is to imagine what idealized rational agents charged with the task of selecting principles of justice to govern the basic institutions of society would choose if they were in a condition of ignorance about their particular traits—such as their gender, ethnicity, and economic class. Using this conceptual device, Rawls defends his two principles of justice. First, each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others (the “liberty principle”). Second, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage (the “difference principle”) and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all (the “principle of fair equality and opportunity”).Footnote 1 Importantly, Rawls argues that parties in the original position would adopt the difference principle, according to which inequalities are to be arranged so as to maximize the position of the least-advantaged members of society.
Brock asks us to imagine a global conference composed of randomly selected delegates whose task is to participate in designing “a fair framework for interactions and relations among the world's inhabitants” (p. 49). Analogous to the veil of ignorance conditions stipulated by Rawls in the domestic original position, in Brock's global version delegates are deprived of knowledge about the country from which they come but have access to information from the social sciences—history, economics, and psychology. In this hypothetical scenario, Brock argues that delegates would opt for a “needs-based minimum floor principle,” which would ensure that “all be adequately positioned to enjoy the prospects for a decent life … and certain protections for basic freedom” (p. 52). In defense of this principle (and in rejection of the more demanding principle of equality of opportunity and the difference principle), she draws upon a body of empirical research in which experiments have been designed and carried out to model a real-life analogue to original position reasoning.
In these experiments, impartiality is modeled by asking individuals to deliberate and select principles of distributive justice prior to knowing which position they will occupy in society. They are given a choice of four distributive principles:
1. maximizing the floor income;
2. maximizing the average income;
3. maximizing the average [income] with a floor constraint stipulated by participants; and
4. maximizing the average [income] with a range constraint also stipulated by the participants (pp. 54–55).
After reaching consensus on one of these principles, participants are then assigned to a particular social position and must reflect on whether they can live with the results—that is, would the chosen distributive principle be socially and politically sustainable over time? Overwhelmingly, the third principle was chosen, while the first principle (which Brock takes to approximate the difference principle) proved unpopular and was chosen in only 1 percent of cases.
What can we conclude from such empirical research? Brock takes the results, which point to the majority of participants favoring a maximal average distribution with a threshold below which no members of society would fall, as support for the idea that meeting basic needs rather than maximizing the position of the worst-off à la Rawls is more crucial to distributive justice. Importantly, she thinks the results show us that “it is strikingly not the case that … people want to arrange things so that they concern themselves only with maximizing the position of the worst-off…. This tells rather dramatically against the difference principle” (p. 57).
Brock's stated conclusion, however, runs into a few problems. Her focus on what delegates in real-life experiments would choose as principles that they themselves could live with misunderstands Rawls's purpose in using the thought experiment. Certainly stability, measured by those principles that individuals could abide by over time, is of concern to Rawls, but it is not the sole or even arguably the primary purpose of his thought experiment. Rawls is less concerned with identifying what would be chosen as a matter of preference in the original position than he is with articulating what is just under conditions in which parties are modeled as free and equal. Crucial to the original position device is an understanding of what types of considerations can be legitimately advanced among free and equal individuals. As Rawls writes in his A Theory of Justice, the point of the original position exercise is “to make vivid to ourselves the restrictions that it seems reasonable to impose on arguments for principles of justice.”Footnote 2 Essentially, to dispute what would be chosen in the original position by drawing on empirical research is no challenge to Rawls; instead, we require an explanation of why the parties in Rawls's original position and those in the empirical research differ with respect to the principles they select. Since Rawls takes the principles to be determined by the setup of the original position, an objection to the content of his two principles must identify which assumption(s) in his construction of the thought experiment is/are flawed.
A further misunderstanding of how principles of distributive justice are selected via the original position relates to the task with which parties therein are charged. To recall, delegates in the real-life experiments seek consensus on a principle to determine the distribution of income in society. In Rawls's original position, the purpose is not to reflect on what distributive outcome parties could all live with. Rather, he defends the difference principle with reference to the notion that the rationale for the distribution must treat all individuals fairly. Central to this defense is his conjecture that individuals should not be (dis)advantaged on the morally arbitrary basis of natural or social fortune. Inequalities that track these matters need justification. These assumptions about fairness—though they very well might be questioned—are noticeably absent from the research Brock draws upon. The approximation of the difference principle in the experiments makes no explicit reference to inequality, and it only asks participants to think about a society in which those at the bottom have the most they possibly could have.
Even under conditions that model the ideal of impartial reasoning, it is not clear that evidence of which principles would be selected by actual people can refute the validity of Rawls's purely hypothetical thought experiment. Such evidence might, however, lead us to ponder how the reasoning of actual persons versus idealized agents in the hypothetical scenario differ. We can broach a few explanations on Brock's behalf for what might account for this difference. A first and much-discussed candidate is that the flaw lies in Rawls's implicit assumption that the parties in the original position are risk-averse. Perhaps in real life people have a much greater propensity for risk taking.
A second possible explanation of the difference concerns the ability of real persons to behave as idealized reasoning agents. Although these experiments aim for the ideal of impartiality, we may nonetheless be skeptical about the prospects of correcting for the adaptive preferences of individuals, which would lead us to recognize that it is impossible to have a real-life analogue of Rawls's original position in which parties are perfectly free and equal. For instance, a very poor person, when asked what sorts of principles she would select for a society without regard to her own particular circumstances and values, might be expected to emphasize the importance of meeting everyone's basic needs. Yet, that person's preferences do not necessarily tell us anything about the further issue of what she is entitled to, which may go well beyond basic needs and require a sophisticated understanding of fairness—a topic many people have not considered in detail.
A third way Brock may defend the idea that meeting basic needs (rather than reducing the influence of morally arbitrary traits on relative distribution) is central to distributive justice is by arguing that there is nothing inherently problematic with allowing matters of luck to have an impact on individuals' relative shares. However, if this is the case, we are owed some explanation of why Rawls's ideas about the problematic nature of morally arbitrary inequality ought not to play a role in determining what counts as a just share.
A further set of questions that naturally follows from Brock's discussion but is left unaddressed relates to the bearing that her reflections on the selection of global principles of justice could have on the defense of Rawls's two principles within the domestic context. Should his principles have domestic but not global application? If so, what accounts for the difference between the requirements of justice in these domains? And, if not, is the case for egalitarian policies in the domestic context—such as fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle—thereby diminished? Certainly, this lacuna is not a shortcoming of the work, but the curious reader may like to know just how drastic the implications of Brock's project are insofar as they possibly serve to challenge Rawls's domestic theory.
(HOW) DOES GLOBAL INTERACTION CONDITION OUR MORAL DUTIES?
Shifting the focus away from Brock's use of contractualist reasoning, we can turn to a different sort of foundational question concerning her account of cosmopolitan justice. Does the mere recognition of the equal moral worth of all individuals suffice to ground the commitments toward non-compatriots that she supports? A different way to approach the question of justification for what is owed to foreigners is to ask which conditions must obtain to render the use of original position reasoning apt in the first place.
Brock does not provide a straightforward answer to these questions, and two different interpretations of her work are possible in this respect. The first view is that our duties to distant others are negative in character—that is, they hinge upon the fact that we are all co-participants in various rule-based global associations and therefore have responsibility for any injustices this participation foreseeably and avoidably perpetuates. Brock discusses at length some of the morally relevant forms of interaction among people worldwide, establishing that there are “some salient connections between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that mean that the responsibilities at issue are ones of justice” (p. 284, emphasis added). The advantages of focusing on negative rather than positive duties are brought out by Thomas Pogge in his World Poverty and Human Rights.Footnote 3 As he forcefully argues, the call to address the plight of the world's poor is of greater moral urgency when it can be shown that duty-bearers are not merely in a position to help but moreover hold responsibility for the dire situation at hand.
An alternative view is that our duties of global justice are positive, which is to say they would obtain in the absence of global interaction—through rule-based associations or otherwise. At some points, Brock appears sympathetic to the following sort of consequentialist line of argument: there are certain things that it would be good for all individuals to have—namely, the protection of some basic liberties and the fulfillment of basic needs—and this generates the demand to set up institutions to bring about these desiderata (or at least places a mandate upon existing institutions to promote these goods). For instance, she writes, “because a cosmopolitan is committed to the equal moral worth of all human beings, she would need to endorse principles of justice that … are concerned with the well-being of every individual person” (p. 45). Although the character of the duties she supports is an interesting conceptual issue, Brock rightly observes that it is somewhat of a moot point in the real world, where we are failing miserably at discharging even our negative duties toward the world's badly off members with whom we interact extensively.
For those who find the conceptual distinction between negative and positive duties an important one, Moellendorf's work has much to offer. Giving due consideration to the issue of why exactly our interaction with non-compatriots is morally relevant is one of the major goals of his latest book. Global Inequality Matters develops further some of the central themes of his Cosmopolitan Justice (2002). In particular, he defends an account of global egalitarian justice premised on the inherent dignity of persons. In contrast to some cosmopolitan theorists, notably Simon Caney, who have defended duties of global distributive justice simply on the basis of what individuals are owed in virtue of their moral status as human beings—that is, independently of their membership in institutions—Moellendorf grounds his account of global duties of justice in this moral status coupled with individuals' membership in global institutions. He writes, “Respect for human dignity … requires a justification of institutional principles that can be reasonably accepted by those who live under them” (p. 11).
A few inquiries follow from this claim: Why do associations matter, and what kinds of associations are significant? What criteria can we draw upon to determine which principles would be reasonably accepted by those subject to the rules of an institution? With respect to the first two questions, Moellendorf thinks that considerations of distributive justice arise specifically in a “common good association,” which “by the joint effort of its members produces goods and powers, useful to the members, to which no person has a pre-associational moral entitlement” (p. 12). These institutions have the ability to confer upon their members various advantages and disadvantages, and so the question of how to fairly distribute those institutional benefits and burdens arises. In terms of which associations are the subject of concern, Moellendorf focuses on those that are “strong, non-voluntary, significant for people's lives, and under the collective control of persons” (p. 12). The key point is that when individuals are unavoidably subject to rules, they are owed a justification for how those rules treat them and their co-associates.
Once we have an association of the outlined kind in place, Moellendorf finds it appropriate to engage in hypothetical contractualist reasoning to consider how its rules should be designed so as to treat members fairly. Given that the global economic order—broadly defined to include formal institutions, such as the World Trade Organization, as well as informal cross-border norms and trends that increase the ability of individuals to affect the lives of non-compatriots—meets the criteria of a common good association, he considers which principles could be reasonably endorsed by parties in a global original position qua joint participants of the global association. Thus, his use of original position reasoning differs from Brock's in his acknowledgment that “reasonable endorsement is not equivalent to actual acceptance” (p. 11).
In theorizing about what counts as a fair distribution, Moellendorf argues that equality will be the default position: “justificatory respect requires that institutional rules for how to assign benefits and burdens of a common good association be presumptively egalitarian” (p. 34). All else being constant (that is, setting aside considerations of special need, desert, punishment, and efficiency), there is a prima facie claim for equal shares. At the core of this commitment to equality is the insight famously affirmed by Rawls that people are not to be “discriminated against on the basis of morally irrelevant properties” (p. 52), and in the global case one's citizenship exemplifies the form of discrimination to be avoided. In terms of which inequalities are a matter of justice, he writes, “among non-compatriots who are associates in an economic association, the presumption against outcome inequality is directed to inequalities of condition that are material to the goods that that association distributes” (p. 34, emphasis added). The issue raised here, of which inequalities are the subject matter of global justice, is not about the metric of egalitarian justice (that is, whether we should equalize resources, welfare, or capabilities) but rather concerns how an institution is causally related to particular inequalities between individuals so that they take on an unjust character. Precisely what it means for an inequality to be “material to” the goods an association distributes is not immediately clear, and given that the content of egalitarian duties hinges upon this notion, it is worth exploring in greater detail.
Two main interpretations of Moellendorf's account of which sorts of inequalities are material to that which an association distributes, and are thus unjust, present themselves. The first understanding is a subjunctive one, in which the potentially unjust nature of inequalities between members of an association is determined by employing a hypothetical baseline of what constitutes just treatment. In Moellendorf's case, this yields a focus on morally arbitrary inequalities between members that could be prevented by feasible modifications of the institutional rules of the given association. For example, if individuals who happen to be born in Wisconsin have better life prospects than those from Iowa and this inequality is preventable by the U.S. government's adoption of particular redistributive tax policies, then it follows that the persistence of such inequality would be unjust. The current holdings of Iowans are stacked up against a hypothetical baseline on which they would be treated justly—that is, their relative life prospects would not be influenced by morally arbitrary factors such as birthplace—to determine the injustice of this inequality.
In his defense of the principle of global equality of opportunity (GEO), Moellendorf appears to advocate this subjunctive interpretation of which inequalities matter. According to the GEO principle, it must be ensured that “differences in initial condition do not affect the opportunities of persons (of the morally relevant equal endowments) across a range of goods, including income, wealth, meaningful productive activity, leisure time, health, security, housing, education and basic liberties” (p. 75). Fundamentally, the GEO principle requires that individuals worldwide not be disadvantaged by the morally arbitrary traits of their citizenship or social class with respect to their opportunities for the enumerated goods. Under this principle, consequently, it would be an injustice that, say, Turkish workers enjoy less leisure time on average than Swedish workers if the global association could, but currently fails to, implement alternative trade and development policies that would yield greater parity in this measure. Again, the hypothetical baseline we utilize to make this judgment is one in which justice requires that morally arbitrary factors do not affect individuals' relative opportunities.
A difficulty with employing a subjunctive understanding of institutional responsibility in the case of seeking to explain the relevance of global interaction might best be demonstrated by drawing on a hypothetical example. Imagine two distinct societies that do not interact with one another but which become aware of the fact that they both draw water from the same river. Individuals from each society depend vitally on the river for their everyday activities. One day, the two societies decide that they need to reach a mutual agreement to devise a scheme governing equitable use of the river—including rules on pollution, damming, and other limitations on its use. In addition to the rules governing fair use of the river, does the need to equalize opportunities that have nothing directly to do with their use of the river also now obtain? To extrapolate the point from this case to the real world, it seems that as soon as we have any form of global interaction that meets the basic criteria set out by Moellendorf for a common good association, it follows that fairly extensive duties to address inequalities arise—even those that do not have anything to do with the particular form of interaction that obtains, such as leisure time in an economic association. Thus, we might wonder why Moellendorf bothers to discuss in detail the ways in which current global institutions treat individuals—through such examples as the impact of global trade and finance rules as well as that of climate change—when the content of global egalitarian duties is determined with reference to how individuals might potentially be treated by global associations once the mere existence of global interaction has been established.
Moellendorf could interject here that the subjunctive understanding of institutional responsibility is the same one used by Rawls and constitutes one of the latter's major insights into how to conceptualize distributive justice: to determine distributive entitlements we must compare how individuals would fare under different possible ways of structuring the rules, not just whether they would fare better as compared to a historical baseline. So, is this really any greater of a problem for his view than it is for a domestic egalitarian like Rawls? However, in light of the fact that global interaction arguably does not affect the lives of individuals as pervasively as do states (a point of which Moellendorf seems keenly aware; see pp. 64–65 and 88), it seems unlikely, initial appearances notwithstanding, that Moellendorf is inclined to accept a subjunctive understanding of which inequalities are unjust. Moreover, accepting such a subjunctive understanding would make it difficult to distinguish his view from one that rejects the moral relevance of global interaction, such as Caney's.
A different interpretation of which inequalities are material to that which an association distributes, and as such are unjust, is available. Instead of using a hypothetical baseline, we can consider how an institution currently affects its members' lives and address those inequalities that relate to these effects. Moellendorf seems inclined to support this understanding of which inequalities within an institution are apt for assessment through the lens of justice, although he is vague on the details. For this understanding of institutional responsibility to be convincingly employed, we require a fully spelled out account of (a) the specific benefits and burdens distributed by an institution, (b) the goods that count as “material to” those benefits and burdens, and (c) how we are to establish whether “pre-existing institutional inequality confers institutional advantage,” consequently triggering the demands of egalitarian justice (p. 65). The last point concerns how an inequality between persons that is not unjust prior to institutional interaction becomes a matter of injustice within an institutional purview because it relates to the activity of that institution.
In particular, an explanation is required as to how the inequalities in opportunities covered by the GEO principle are causally related or otherwise material to the operations of the global order. For instance, we are owed an explanation of why opportunities for leisure time ought to be equalized for all individuals who interact through the global economic association. That is, what evidence can be cited to make the case that disparities in individuals' leisure time confer advantage upon the better endowed in competing for global economic opportunities? Although not insurmountable, the empirical burden associated with this interpretation of institutional responsibility is a hefty one, and must be taken on if Moellendorf's account of our egalitarian duties is to be compelling. The empirical claims would need to show how differences in leisure time between persons worldwide relate to the distribution of goods produced by the global order, or else how this inequality disadvantages the worse-off with respect to their ability to engage in the activities of the global association. What is crucial, then, is further discussion of the relationship between particular inequalities and the nature and quantity of interaction in the global association.
PROPOSALS FOR A MORE JUST WORLD
Both these books offer much of interest by way of vivid illustrations of the practices that perpetuate global injustice and proposals to remedy them. After laying out the theoretical foundations of a cosmopolitan account of justice, both authors put forward detailed public policy measures that would further the goals of global justice. Both discuss global trade and related issues of labor standards, global taxation mechanisms, and immigration. Brock additionally addresses the permissibility of humanitarian intervention, while Moellendorf discusses climate change.
Especially noteworthy are Brock's reflections on immigration, which contrast with the typical liberal, cosmopolitan endorsement of more open borders. She considers the issue from a number of perspectives, citing evidence concerning the effects of immigration policies and migration patterns on different groups of people—those in home countries who suffer the ill effects of brain drain in losing skilled individuals to host countries, families dependant on remittances, immigrants themselves, and those in host countries who experience the benefits and burdens of an influx of foreigners willing to fill labor needs. On the basis of empirical evidence from a wide range of sources, she concludes that “whatever gains there are from increased immigration may be small compared to decreased emigration coupled with improvements in crucial policies, such as those concerned with trade…. It is not clear that [immigration] does much, or enough, for those remaining in the feeder country, even taking into account the net effects of remittances” (p. 211). As such, we should be wary of immigration policies whose primary beneficiaries are immigrants themselves and citizens of host countries, failing to take into account the effects on populations left behind in the migrants' home countries.
This take on immigration stems from Brock's commitment to institutional policies that enable all persons to enjoy decent life prospects. According to Brock, in assessing whether policy x should be adopted we should check, on balance, how it affects the capacity of individuals to meet their basic needs and have their basic liberties protected. One might wonder, however, if there are not other morally pertinent considerations that the participants in Brock's thought experiment would draw upon in debating the merits of a migration policy, such as having greater freedom of movement. Of course, as Brock appreciates, in our current (nonideal) world trade-offs must be made between raising the number of people able to enjoy a decent life and people being able to freely move to a place where they have better opportunities. However, from the perspective of ideal theory, would such restrictions on freedom of movement be ultimately justifiable? In the specific case that Brock considers in depth, of health-care workers who leave their home countries in pursuit of better economic opportunities abroad, the legitimacy of restricting their opportunities for the sake of their compatriots warrants further discussion. While recognizing the broader effects (especially the harms) of immigration policies, we might wonder why potential migrants should be the primary bearers of responsibility for their compatriots' life prospects.
Contra Brock, Moellendorf argues that we ought to aim for equality of opportunity globally, above and beyond ensuring that all have decent opportunities. He speaks to her worry (Brock, pp. 58–63) that the GEO principle would fall prey to one of the following problems: (a) it will aim for equality across opportunities grounded in the values of particular societies and thus be “insufficiently attuned to cultural difference,” or (b) if opportunities for well-being broadly construed are sought, then the account may be “too weak to rule out disadvantage and discrimination on morally arbitrary grounds” (p. 62). For instance, on the basis of adaptive preferences, women may enjoy life satisfaction equal to men despite having drastically lower economic and social opportunities. As such, Brock urges us to focus on ensuring that everyone has the ability to meet their basic needs—that is, goods whose value transcends cultures—such as adequate food and water, education, and health care. But her point that focusing on culturally neutral goods of this kind should lead us to prefer sufficiency rather than equality is unconvincing for reasons raised by Moellendorf. Goods such as income, health, and education, he notes, are valued by different cultures; and beyond being concerned about adequacy in the enjoyment of these goods, we can observe vast inequalities across them that largely stem from the morally arbitrary fact of a person's country of birth (p. 77). Moreover, there is no reason to think that worries about finding a culturally sensitive metric obtain only in the global case, since we find these same concerns within any diverse state (p. 81). He offers two proposals that would make progress toward achieving global equality of opportunity: modest liberalization of immigration policy and “a global educational plan to provide instruction in English” (p. 87).
Further policy proposals are discussed by Moellendorf in chapters five and six. These are less philosophical than the rest of the book but will be welcomed by the reader looking for a short and accessible introduction to some of the normative issues concerning the intersection of international trade, development, and labor, as well as to different ways the concept of fairness has been invoked to deal with climate change. The seventh, and final, chapter explores how the theoretical arguments from earlier chapters can be completed by demonstrating that there are “possible institutional changes to the existing global institutional order that might be appropriate in light of the injustice of global inequality” (p. 133). If the existence of feasible institutional policies that would combat global inequality can be established, then it follows that greater global equality is not merely a morally optional ideal but a demand of justice (pp. 66 and 133). To this end, Moellendorf surveys three proposals for global revenue-raising schemes—Thomas Pogge's “Global Resources Dividend,” James Tobin's “Tobin Tax,” and Branko Milanovic's progressive global income tax—to illustrate how his model can be applied in practice, concluding that we can indeed take action to remedy global inequality.
In sum, both books provide an informative, stimulating, and original read for moral and political philosophers interested in achieving greater clarity on the commitments of cosmopolitanism, and will also appeal to a wider audience reflecting upon what a just world order entails.
