Kantian Ethics and Global Justice

Abstract

In this paper, I shall examine whether Kant's moral philosophy is robust enough to ground a comprehensive theory of global justice.By a comprehensive theory of global justice, I mean one that is able to take into account not just negative duties (for example, those of noninterference, nonaggression, and noncoercion) but also positive duties (to provide relief, to provide development aid, to redistribute resources and wealth, and so forth) between differ ent communities and countries of the world.For instance, Kai Nielsen argues: "To overcome the great disparities between North and South . . .there would have to be significant and varied redistribution from North to South."1Likewise, another advocate for global justice, Henry Shue, has persuasively argued that re spect for basic rights entails the recognition that these rights generate corresponding duties to avoid interfering, to protect from deprivation, and to aid the deprived, and these clearly are duties that demand both negative and positive actions.2Also, and very importantly, a comprehensive theory of global justice has to recognize that claimants have a justified demand that these duties be performed.From the moral point of view, when we say that a demand is justified, we accord it considerable significance.We say that certain agents can be (in the normative sense) externally coerced into complying with this demand.This of course does not mean that such coercions need not observe certain constraints.But it does mean that compliance with such a demand can be externally enforced by certain legal or social sanctions.3Examples of specific global policies I have in mind that can be legally or socially enforced would include mandatory contribution to humanitarian relief, mandatory development assistance contribution, a global taxation plan, debt reduction and the like.4In short, a comprehensive theory of global justice (1) calls for certain positive duties, and (2) recognizes that claimants

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 62 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.