Real World Justice: Grounds, Principles, Human Rights, and Social Institutions (Studies in Global Justice)
Language: English
Pages: 408
ISBN: 1402031491
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
1 2 Andreas Follesdal and Thomas Pogge 1 The Norwegian Centre for Human Rights at the Faculty of Law and ARENA Centre for 2 European Studies, University of Oslo; Philosophy, Columbia University, New York, and Oslo University; Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Australian National University, Canberra This volume discusses principles of global justice, their normative grounds, and the social institutions they require. Over the last few decades an increasing number of philosophers and political theorists have attended to these morally urgent, politically confounding and philosophically challenging topics. Many of these scholars came together September 11–13, 2003, for an international symposium where first versions of most of the present chapters were discussed. A few additional chapters were solicited to provide a broad and critical range of perspectives on these issues. The Oslo Symposium took Thomas Pogge’s recent work in this area as its starting point, in recognition of his long-standing academic contributions to this topic and of the seminars on moral and political philosophy he has taught since 1991 under the auspices of the Norwegian Research Council. Pogge’s opening remarks ― “What is Global Justice?” ― follow below, before brief synopses of the various contributions.
code). This is not to say that they tend to freeze the flux of power; rather they try to channel it, to let it flow between dams (the law) in order both to keep it at least under the nominal control of political and legal authority and, above all, to avoid big shifts of power. Law is inherently conservative with a small “c”. Interestingly, we may now see that law has become for many leftist thinkers a barrier against wild predatory capitalism. Such authors stress the democratic character of law
harder than men to move to the locations of new industries. Only the injustice of cultural tradition seems to account for the fact that, within male-headed families, women and girls frequently receive less of such available resources as food and medical care.17 Nevertheless, the above examples do show that the poverty of poor women in poor countries cannot be attributed exclusively to the injustice of their local cultures. To suggest this would be to promote a one-sided analysis that ignored the
flourishing of religious fundamentalisms, defined by Volpp as modern political movements that use religion as a basis for their attempts to win or consolidate power and extend social control (Volpp 2001: 1205n108). Contemporary fundamentalisms all “support the patriarchal family as a central agent of control and see women as embodying the moral and traditional values of the family and the whole community” (Volpp 2001: 1205n108). Western culture is not only a passive stimulus for
partly by invoking feminist opposition to arranged marriage (Amos and Parmar 1984: 11). President G. W. Bush and his wife Laura both rationalized the bombing of Afghanistan by the United States as necessary to save Afghan women from the oppression of the burkha (Bush, G. W. 2002; Bush, L. 2002, cited in Young 2003a: 17f). Philosophers wishing to save Amina and similarly situated women certainly are at liberty to criticize cultural traditions in Nigeria and other countries and such criticisms are
the right, or even the obligation to refuse to participate in that war. The principles of international justice agreed upon in the second initial position are thus not designed for a cosmopolitan order. Theory of Justice rather departs from the world as it exists, namely, as an aggregate of independent unities. A cosmopolitan interpretation of Rawls’s Theory of Justice must also be rejected on the basis of his priority rule. In short, this rule states that 92 International or Global Justice?