5

Going Global

“IN THEIR LONG-RUN significance,” Brian Barry wrote in 1973, “international relations are far more important than domestic politics.”¹ Contemporary observers of philosophy would have thought otherwise. As liberal philosophers debated egalitarian principles, they initially avoided connecting those principles to a broader geopolitical terrain, except insofar as they could be squeezed into the framework of the morality of war. International politics more broadly—whether the Cold War, the global economic system, or the consequences of decolonization—was left outside the basic structure and the domestic institutions to which Rawls’s principles of justice applied.

The visible symptoms of a strained global system soon made the international realm harder to ignore. The 1971 famine in Bangladesh was followed in 1974 by another. More than a million died. The Bretton Woods system that had underpinned the embedded liberal consensus of the postwar decades was dissolved.² The affluence and growth that enabled Rawls’s domestic focus appeared to be under threat. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo and price spike of 1973 produced turmoil in the United States and Britain.³ In the aftermath of the oil shocks and a global food crisis, many thinkers rushed to make sense of the “great world crisis” and the new “interdependence.”⁴ International crises, whether of energy, food, or currency, became the norm. No country could be entirely insulated. Even the richest appeared vulnerable to actions of distant states seen until so recently as powerless.

While many liberal philosophers were preoccupied with Rawls’s book and its implications for domestic concerns, some began to ask whether and how political philosophy might cope with this changing terrain. As they turned to the international realm, they encountered two rival forms of politics. After the Biafran war of secession and the crisis that followed, humanitarian emergencies gripped the public imagination as hunger became a problem for international humanitarianism rather than state welfare.⁵ On the one hand, international organizations, consumer groups, and transnational corporations became the key actors in a wave of humanitarian politics concerned with human rights.⁶ On the other, anticolonial activists demanding national self-determination, economic sovereignty, and global redistribution seemed after the oil shocks to be poised to win international victories at the UN for postcolonial states.⁷ Could these countervailing tendencies within international politics be accommodated within the architecture of the new liberal philosophy? Instead of judging the morality of the state from below for its encroachment onto associational life or individual liberties, now philosophers made a horizontal move beyond the state. Liberal egalitarianism went international.

Whether the new accounts of obligation, needs, disobedience, or justice made sense beyond the state was an open question. Over the course of the 1970s, moral and political philosophers experimented with accommodating international politics within their theories. Some looked to debates among development economists and their critics and to ideas drawn from theorists of the global South, while others looked to US foreign policy. As many abandoned analytical ethical theory for applied ethics and the philosophy of public affairs, they set up centers, such as the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, founded by Henry Shue, Peter Brown, and Kai Nielsen at the University of Maryland in 1976. These played a central role in facilitating a new “international ethics” that joined problems of individual obligation and duty to policy.⁸ Others looked to the liberal egalitarian distributive theory ready at their disposal. Could Rawls’s rules be stretched to cover the world or to accommodate the reassertion of discourses of state power and control in a new phase of decolonization?

These challenges lie at the origins of global justice theory. They also helped shape the politics of liberal egalitarianism. Internationalizing philosophy required a reckoning with political questions—about collective agency, conflict, and control—that had been submerged. This served to re-entrench divisions between justice and humanity, self-interest and altruism. A number of philosophers—Thomas Nagel, Barry, and a new generation that included Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge—now debated what categories best made sense of the international realm.⁹ In doing so, they shored up a new vision of the relation of theory and practice, and of philosophy and politics, in which the relevance of certain empirical descriptions of the world was downplayed and Rawls’s theory provided a new baseline for international political thought. By bringing political philosophy into new areas, they stretched that theory beyond Rawls’s conception of it. In this context that A Theory of Justice had largely ignored, the liberal egalitarian interpretation of justice theory was consolidated.

The development of an internationalist political philosophy was gradual, and it did not begin with Rawls. The Vietnam War had been the predominant international preoccupation for American philosophers in the late 1960s, and it had pushed philosophers to look beyond the state with just war theory and international law. In the early 1970s, when the countries of the global South came to occupy the political and humanitarian imagination of liberal thinkers, philosophers initially responded in two main ways.

In 1972, during the aftermath of the Bangladesh famine, Peter Singer published “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”—his philosophical call to action. If it is “in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it,” he declared. His thought experiment became as famous and widely replicated as the trolley problem: “If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.”¹⁰ For those in affluent states, donating a significant proportion of their income to help those in need on the other side of the world was the same kind of morally insignificant cost as muddy clothes.

A negative utilitarian principle applied to both the drowning child and international aid: “We ought to be preventing as much suffering as we can without sacrificing something else of comparable moral importance.” Distance was morally irrelevant. Like saving the drowning child, the affluent helping those suffering far away was not an act of charity, a “supererogatory” or saintly act. It was a moral duty that existed whether or not there were other people present who might act on it instead. It was to be discharged by individuals—acting through private organizations, famine relief funds, or whatever institutions were most effective. Governments had duties too, but government inaction could not justify individual inaction.¹¹

A utilitarian who began his career working on the problem of civil disobedience at Oxford with Richard Hare, Singer was the first analytical moral philosopher to address international concerns. He did not see moral principles as tied to institutional relationships. As T. M. Scanlon put it, “the natural tendency of utilitarian theories is to be global in their application.”¹² Singer extended his utilitarianism internationally, not with a demand for institutional reform, but with an exhortation to individual moral action. In the absence of perfect societies regulated by complete principles, he argued that “moral expertise” of the kind possessed by philosophers was required to show individuals their duties and how to discharge them—individually or through associations, the state, civil society, or the market.¹³

Singer suggested the institutional means of discharging individual duties were irrelevant: whether the actions were public and governmental, private, or corporate and philanthropic, what mattered were the consequences. His ideas found a wide audience with new consumer activists.¹⁴ Later, his emphasis on altruism was deployed to advocate private philanthropy and corporate social responsibility and in the “effective altruism” movement.¹⁵ In the early 1970s, however, Singer drew from disparate sources to forge a capacious international ethics. He combined utilitarian impartiality with an anticonsumerism born of his writing on the young Marx.¹⁶ He adapted Richard Titmuss’s ideas about socially recognized needs and voluntary welfare provision independent of and supplementary to the state. He wanted to defend altruism, giving, and “community feeling” from commodification by the market, which generated a form of reciprocity too reliant on self-interest.¹⁷ Yet, like the generation of moral philosophers to which he was heir, he began from individual duty and obligations. In doing so, Singer initiated a new form of international, humanitarian ethical inquiry.

Singer’s contribution came at a moment when many were trying to rethink international politics. US foreign policy intellectuals, development economists, and anticolonial activists and statesmen were all adapting to changing attitudes toward development and decolonization. Old orthodoxies that assumed foreign assistance would “trickle down” and improve poverty without active redistribution were seen as discredited.¹⁸ Attempts to “fix” world poverty had failed to prevent famines. Many challenged modernization theory, embodied by Walt Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), which saw poverty as an initial condition that states could outgrow in evolutionary stages of industrialization, eventually reaching a point of mass consumption, choice, and abundance.¹⁹ A growing number of theorists, from neo-evolutionist anthropologists to economists, contested the Eurocentric bias of these theories.²⁰ For postcolonial states, development doctrines had always posed a double bind: in the postwar years, anticolonial claims of self-determination were tied to national development models that emphasized the use of state power for industrialization, but the pursuit of modernization had not reversed international economic hierarchies and many postcolonial states remained dependent on foreign assistance.²¹ They now looked to alternatives, and American policymakers responded with their own. In 1968, the countries of the global South at the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) had demanded “Trade Not Aid.” The same year the World Bank, under the directorship of Robert McNamara, launched its “Basic Needs” approach to solving international poverty. That placed the satisfaction of basic needs, rather than foreign aid, at the heart of development. It also put the measurement of absolute poverty at the center of debate at organizations like the World Bank and the International Labor Organization for the next decade.²²

Singer offered one response to these arguments. His essay was a call to simplify the moral stakes of relations between global North and South to show the humanitarian emergency in the midst of international politics. Many later followed his humanitarian route. But it was a prompt from the anticolonial left’s debates about trade and international order that pushed liberal philosophers to internationalize discussions of distributive justice. Their disagreements helped refine the particular form that international liberal egalitarianism would take.

Among the foremost critiques of modernization theory were dependency theories and theories of unequal exchange. These were associated with the hypothesis, put forward by the German-British economist Hans Singer and the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch in the late 1940s, that the poverty of the developing world was the result of adverse terms of international trade.²³ Responsibility for underdevelopment lay not with characteristics or policies of developing countries but with the workings of the international system, which created poverty in primary commodity-producing countries and worked to the advantage of industrialized nations. In the 1960s and into the 1970s, many anticolonial thinkers diagnosed a condition of economic dependence. When the German-American development economist Andre Gunder Frank brought a Latin American neo-Marxist version of dependency theory to the United States, he described a world capitalist system in which development at the center generated underdevelopment at the peripheries. Causal responsibility for global inequality was ascribed to the development of rich countries. Northern levels of growth were guaranteed only because of the brutal exploitation of the South.²⁴ This and similar diagnoses were widely taken up and joined to international class politics, to critiques of empire as a form of enslavement, and to accounts of structural dependence and “nondomination” in the internationalist socialism of the Black Atlantic.²⁵ After dependency theory’s initial association with the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL), a broader range of Marxist and anticolonial theorists used the analysis to call for a variety of ends: subversions of the international order, strategies of “self-reliance,” and revolutionary arguments for withdrawal and against economic integration. Others used the dependency framework to demand reparations or the rebalancing of terms of global trade.²⁶

Many of these rival ideas of development and dependency passed through the United Nations as part of debates about the 1973 proposals for a New International Economic Order (NIEO).²⁷ It was then that they appeared on the horizons of liberal philosophers. In 1974, at the first special session of the UN General Assembly to deal with economic issues, the G-77 of developing nations, emboldened by the OPEC embargo, attempted to reform the international system by proposing the establishment of an NIEO—a vision for the restructuring of the world economic system based on the assertion of the economic sovereignty of postcolonial states. Prebisch had coined the term “New International Economic Order” in 1963, and the UN proposals had a variety of earlier incarnations.²⁸ Now the proposals were framed within the language of international law, and they prioritized the demand for absolute sovereign control over national resources and for equity to be restored to trade through reforms to raise and stabilize prices for the commodities on which the countries of the global South depended.²⁹ The NIEO aimed to secure “equity, sovereign equality, interdependence, common interest and cooperation among all States, irrespective of their economic and social systems which shall correct inequalities and redress existing injustices.”³⁰ In practice, that meant debt forgiveness, aid increases, credit extensions, regulation of transnational corporations, and technology transfers from rich to poor countries. With the oil crisis raging, the Northern countries paid attention.³¹ Even conservative bodies like the Trilateral Commission looked for redistributive fixes to diffuse anticolonial demands for self-determination.³² To avoid the material implications of the demand for sovereign equality, foreign policy intellectuals—already scrambling to replace outdated realist ideas of international relations, which focused on interstate behavior and could not account for the “thickening” of transnational relations—declared interdependence the new political reality.³³

Ideas that had been ignored or rejected when they surfaced in anticolonial, Marxian, and New Left theories of Third World solidarity were now accommodated within liberal thought.³⁴ The initial supporters of the NIEO proposals had ranged from socialists to reformist welfarists like Gunnar Myrdal, whose ideas represented a departure from radical dependency theories and who saw planning, not revolution or delinking, as a solution to underdevelopment.³⁵ The NIEO demands were antimarket; endorsed the direct allocation of resources by political authorities; advocated full state sovereignty, autonomy, and control; and proposed to limit the property rights of nonstate actors, crucially corporations. “State rights” were to be deployed against international capital.³⁶ Yet the NIEO was also oriented toward the global economy. Where dependency theory implied a conflictual vision of world relations, the NIEO demands were more optimistic about achieving a global consensus on the rules of international order. As such, they paved the way for the consensual vision of the international order put forward by the 1980 Brandt Report on International Development, which saw redistribution as a route to justice within a global economic consensus.³⁷ By the end of the 1970s, the consensual vision had displaced dependency analyses as well as the accompanying ascription of historical and causal responsibility for inequalities to the affluence of rich countries, to imperialism, to colonial exploitation, and to capitalism. To the critics of the NIEO demands, they implied a teleology of capitalist growth—a “socialism among states, capitalism within states.”³⁸

It was precisely because the NIEO proposals did not commit to a conflictual vision of international order and advocated a kind of redistributive institutionalism that some of the new liberal egalitarians began to find them amenable. As American discussion of the NIEO peaked after the oil shocks, Charles Beitz, a graduate student in political science at Princeton, argued that it was time for international ethics to go beyond the Vietnam-era preoccupations with “war and peace” to “international distributive justice.”³⁹ The NIEO demands, he wrote, rested on the assumption that developed countries had an obligation to “radically restructure the world economic system.” Beitz saw an opportunity in Rawls’s theory, which had shown how to judge what redistributive obligations were necessary to the pursuit of just institutions.⁴⁰ He set out to extend Rawls’s account to an institutional international theory, to assess which theory could apply beyond state lines—and to work out how and whether the restructuring of the world system the NIEO demanded could be justified by a theory of justice.⁴¹ Singer’s humanitarian response was soon matched by Beitz’s distributive one.

Beitz was not the first to note that the logic of Rawls’s theory was potentially global. The suggestion that the parties in Rawls’s original position need not respect national boundaries and that the difference principle might extend internationally had already been made. Scanlon had asked why, given that “systematic economic interaction” counted as an institution in Rawls’s sense, considerations of justice did not apply to “the world economic system as a whole as well as to particular societies within it.”⁴² According to Barry, when Rawls limited the scope of the principles so they did not address the bad luck of being born into a poor society, this was not justifiable. If the risk was that you might end up poor in Bangladesh (not just poor in Switzerland), then you would take the precautions necessary, choosing a global difference principle to raise the global minimum standard of living.⁴³

Rawls had anticipated such objections and sought to block these extensions. In notes taken at a SELF meeting in 1969, he wrote that applying principles of justice globally was “psychologically” implausible. A requirement of the principles was that people be realistically able to comply with them. If they were stretched globally, this requirement could not be met.⁴⁴ The principles applied only to cooperative schemes for mutual advantage, the boundaries of which were “given by the notion of a self-contained national community.”⁴⁵ Distributive principles compensated those who were relatively disadvantaged by the cooperative scheme. Where there was no cooperation, there was “no problem of compensation for relative disadvantage.”⁴⁶ In a world of self-sufficient national societies, there could thus be no global difference principle. Beitz set out to show why Rawls was wrong.

That not all moral relationships flowed from institutional membership and from participation in cooperative schemes and practices was a claim Rawls had accepted. That was the point of his account of natural duties and moral relations between persons. His naturalism provided for a universalist moral theory, even as his notion of the basic structure circumscribed his political one.⁴⁷ Beitz used this to say that even if states were self-sufficient, there would be stronger moral ties, duties, and principles than Rawls suggested. Moreover, Rawls left out something crucial: the distribution of natural resources. Rawls’s general moral theory was focused on persons, not things, and pre-institutional property rights—an initial distribution of material goods—were not a key part of his moral theory. Beitz put resources back into that theory.

It was implausible, he argued, that in Rawls’s international original position state representatives would only decide laws of war and peace. Claims over natural resources led to interstate moral conflict, and it was crucial to have rules for dealing with them. The parties should thus view the distribution of resources as arbitrary from a moral point of view, just as the domestic parties viewed the distribution of natural talents. Compared to the murky problem of desert and the question of whether people were entitled to keep the benefits that arose from their talents, the issue of natural resources in the international sphere was clear-cut: their distribution was a purer case of moral arbitrariness. Material resources could be separated from people’s identity in a way that talents might not be. For Beitz, even allowing for national self-sufficiency, Rawls’s theory should give rise to a “resource redistribution principle,” according to which “each person has an equal prima facie claim to a share of the total available resources.”⁴⁸ Departures from this equality could be justified like the difference principle, if the inequalities benefited the least advantaged. This principle provided “assurance to resource-poor nations that their adverse fate will not prevent them from realizing economic conditions sufficient to support just social institutions and to protect human rights guaranteed by the principles for individuals.”⁴⁹

Beitz challenged Rawls’s claim that the social rules were restricted to the institutions of the state. Citizens did not owe a special obligation to those in their own society because local ties were stronger. Only pluralist localists—like Michael Walzer, he suggested—believed that tight-knit local communities had special claims on portions of societies’ wealth. The idea that there was no psychological basis for global principles might equally challenge the existence of obligations in large modern states, where individuals rarely have psychological ties to the state.⁵⁰ No argument against international redistributive obligations could rest on the existence of such ties. Yet Beitz also objected to what followed from Rawls’s restriction of the basic structure to the state. Rawls saw the institutions of the basic structure as nonvoluntary: it was because of their “deep and pervasive effects on the welfare of people to whom they apply regardless of consent” that they needed to be justified.⁵¹ By leaving the international realm out of the picture, Rawls implied that it was in some sense a voluntary sphere. He misunderstood “interdependence” and the extent to which each state was embroiled in nonvoluntary, international economic relations, regardless of the degree of their economic interconnectedness. Just as in the state, special obligations did not arise from how close-knit a community was, so the amount of economic interaction in an international scheme could not provide a “straightforward index” of the strength of the distributive principle appropriate to it.⁵²

Modern interdependence, Beitz wrote, had been created by the removal of restrictions on trade and investment, the rise of an international division of labor, and the financial and monetary institutions of the world economy. Its effects went beyond the communicative transformation of the world into a “global village” in which distance was no longer morally relevant.⁵³ Beitz also implied that interdependence was not a recent phenomenon, but a structural, historical fact with deep roots. He later dated the origins of interdependence to those of the modern state, citing Immanuel Wallerstein’s uptake of Frank’s development of underdevelopment framework in his world-systems theory.⁵⁴ The contemporary situation imposed unavoidable burdens on poor countries: as a result of adverse balances of payments, they were forced to sell resources to wealthy countries they would be better off using to the advantage of their domestic populations. The global monetary system and the power of private foreign investment operating through transnational corporations placed poor countries under pressure and at risk—both materially, from everyday disturbances in the world economic system, and ideologically, from the imposition of external ideas of modernization and development. They were the worse-off participants in a nonvoluntary global scheme. If this reality were acknowledged, Rawls’s principles of justice could not remain domestic. They had to apply to the entire global scheme and required improving the lot of the least well-off on a global scale.⁵⁵ The difference principle would have not only radical domestic implications for redistribution, as its more egalitarian interpreters insisted, but radical global implications too.

Beitz’s diagnosis of what was at stake changed over the course of the 1970s. His ideas mirrored the shift among anticolonial thinkers from theories of dependency to visions of the international realm in which reform was conceived as changing the rules of the international game. As he argued for the international extension of Rawls’s theory, Beitz focused on the rules of trade and the material basis of global inequality in trade, commodities, and natural resources. Against the view of the economic system as a conflictual zero-sum game, for Beitz, economic interdependence meant the global economy should be understood as a “global scheme of cooperation.”⁵⁶ Yet this raised a dilemma. Rawls had externalized conflict beyond the cooperative scheme. Outside the basic structure was a realm of potential war. If the cooperative scheme spanned the world, where would conflict go?

When he introduced his account of international justice in 1975, Beitz tacitly acknowledged the threat that dependency theory’s description of global inequalities posed to the Rawlsian, nonconflictual picture. In a footnote he suggested that Frank’s account of active underdevelopment was “more plausible” than those that explained inequality by arguing that global trade advantaged some countries and merely failed to improve the situation of others (as opposed to the advantage of one directly causing the disadvantage of the other).⁵⁷ But taking Frank’s theory seriously required relaxing one of Rawls’s definitional constraints—the idea that for considerations of justice to apply to a cooperative scheme, it had to work to the “mutual advantage” of its participants. Since development in one part of the system caused underdevelopment in another, the worst off would not be advantaged by their cooperation. The condition that the scheme was nonvoluntary and benefited some participants was thus, Beitz argued, more important than the mutual advantage condition. Since interdependence could not be said to benefit all, the view that the economic system, particularly global trade, caused “harm” and made things worse for poor countries was more realistic. The Rawlsian vision of a cooperative scheme had limits.

Beitz would change his mind. As he took on the NIEO’s focus on resources and trade and hollowed out the Rawlsian vision of reciprocity to a more minimal trading relationship, he also used the Rawlsian tools, honed by the challenge of libertarianism, to domesticate the arguments of the anti-imperialist left. He no longer attempted to squeeze an intellectual paradigm based on conflict into one based on consensus, but chose the latter. Liberal development economists relied more on models of perfect competition and states of equilibrium than historical theories of “dynamic disequilibrium” that deployed ideas of imperialism, neocolonialism, dependence, and unequal exchange, and Beitz made a similar move.⁵⁸ By 1979, he had lost sympathy with these conflictual accounts of dependency. Now he challenged the framing of obligations owed from rich to poor countries as reparations, as well as dependency theory, and other arguments based on the historical fact of colonialism. In Dissent, Beitz wrote that it was not clear why those who inherit colonial wealth have to bear the burden of the wrongs committed by their ancestors. He rejected the idea that obligations were owed because “poor people in poor countries are victims of a double injustice,” both domestic and international, “brought on by participation in a capitalist world economy.”⁵⁹ Theories of economic dependency, which rested on the claim that relations between rich and poor countries are exploitative—“the rich are said to prosper because of their relations with the poor, and the poor to suffer because of their relation with the rich”—were flawed. Rich countries did not always benefit from their relationships, poor countries may be only relatively (not absolutely) disadvantaged by their participation in the capitalist world economy, and dependency did not always correlate with poverty.⁶⁰

History had to be left out of the equation. Beitz wanted to get away from the idea that dependency was the cause of inequality. The point of distributive justice was that it got its “grip on us as people who occupy positions in a social division of labor.” The question was not why certain parties had come to occupy positions in what anticolonial activists called an imperial division of labor, or why they owned more of the global social product, but how it should be shared. The historical aspects of dependency theory could have no normative distributive implications. Where distributive justice theorists at a domestic level had rejected the normative force of historical arguments for reparations for chattel slavery in the United States, Beitz did the same in the context of colonial injustices.⁶¹

The choices Beitz made had further implications for liberal egalitarianism. He loosened the mutual advantage requirement of a cooperative scheme of his early work.⁶² But unlike Singer, who was happy for his theory to operate outside the rules, for Beitz the existence of a practice and a scheme of reciprocity was still fundamental. Nevertheless, making the contract global, and removing time and history, had consequences. It involved making the problem of international justice one of distribution in the present, regardless of what had happened in the past, and rejecting historical injustice claims. It also meant rejecting the normative relevance of states, empires, and their boundaries, in the same way that the elimination of history made personal identities and communal histories irrelevant from the point of view of justice. Downgrading the force of historical accounts of accumulation entailed a displacement of the idea of capitalism, just as timeless ideas of the market were being enshrined.⁶³ At the same time, the removal of history denaturalized states and potentially rendered borders eliminable, opening the door to cosmopolitanism and a borderless politics.

This global institutional egalitarianism, with its vision of trade regulation and its downgrading of borders, served to counter the resurgence of state rights. The economic sovereignty of postcolonial states, the control over their resources and exports, were foundational to the NIEO proposals. Beitz’s theory butted against sovereignty claims, even from the outset. His resource redistribution principle held that each person, not each state, had an equal claim to common resources. With the globalization of the principles of justice and the structural change they implied for the global economic system, “national societies can no longer be viewed as ultimate.”⁶⁴ In his doctoral thesis, Beitz twice referred to his account as a “cosmopolitan” conception—“in the sense that it is concerned with the moral relations of a universal community, in which state boundaries have a merely derivative significance.”⁶⁵ Yet he also conceded that though “the ‘permanent sovereignty’ doctrine may be extreme, sovereignty-for-the-time-being may not be, if it can be shown (as I think it can) that resource-consuming nations have taken more than their fair share without returning adequate compensation.”⁶⁶ Interpersonal ethics thus posed a direct challenge to doctrines of national self-determination. The interpersonal morality at the heart of the Rawlsian system could lead to a robust cosmopolitanism. Where Rawls had drawn a firm line between the moral community of persons and the political community of citizens, Beitz’s theory suggested this was inconsistent. The aim of development and redistribution, whether domestic or global, had to be improving the lot of the least-well-off persons. History was downgraded, persons elevated.

This cosmopolitanism flowed from Beitz’s political concerns as much as his philosophical ones. It was also part of his challenge to modernization theory and a political corrective—a critique, in part, of development literatures that neglected domestic distributive justice in developing countries. It put forward an objection to the NIEO that was increasingly common among both liberals and conservatives: that its proposals were not concerned with individual inequality.⁶⁷ But Beitz also took on modernization theorists like Rostow and their conservative critics like Samuel Huntington, who had claimed that at early stages of development the protection of liberties was less important than economic growth or political order, respectively, and Rawls, whose priority of liberty prima facie implied the opposite view.⁶⁸

Brian Barry had taken Rawls to task on grounds that this implied a Cold Warrior vision. If the priority of liberty applied internationally, then on Rawls’s account it would be impossible, for instance, to say there were good things about Yugoslavia (with low inequality) and bad things about Italy (with its corruption and lack of economic and social freedoms). Yugoslavia would be condemned on Rawlsian grounds for the absence of liberal formal freedoms.⁶⁹ Yet, as other critics noted, Rawls also relaxed the priority of liberty in exceptional circumstances: for societies that were at “early stages” of development, where it was necessary to “enhance the quality of civilization”—that is, for postcolonial states, but not for Yugoslavia (an example of a noncapitalist economy increasingly invoked by democratic socialists).⁷⁰ This proviso in the application of Rawls’s theory internationally reflected the priority of growth in modernization theory and a broader civilizational hierarchy oriented to the West.⁷¹ For all his aversion to historical arguments, Rawls relied on an evolutionary and stadial view of growth theory and a faith in linear progress. Despite his insistence on the priority rules of the theory of justice, Rawls was flexible when it came to the question of growth in less developed countries. Civil liberties could be restricted for economic well-being, but only in “early” stages of development.⁷²

By the mid-1970s, it was clear that growth without redistribution had not worked. In an unpublished chapter of his dissertation, Beitz argued that the requirement to uphold personal and political liberties, liberties of expression, and rights of participation could not be relaxed simply because a country was less developed. Rights had to be protected.⁷³ Others agreed. They considered Rawls among those who had fallen for the myth that there was a “trade-off” between rights and development. Writing for a symposium on human rights and development after a 1978 trip by ethical philosophers to the Philippines and Indonesia, organized by Henry Shue through the United States Information Agency, the young political philosopher Robert Goodin challenged the claim that “a nation can stimulate economic growth by restricting rights.” A wide range of political thinkers claimed that too much political, social, and economic liberty could have bad effects on stability and development by leading, indirectly, to too little capital accumulation, population growth, and political instability as labor unrest, electoral cycles, or local political pressures discouraged foreign investment and threatened development. Goodin argued that all these claims were flawed.⁷⁴ In his dissertation, Beitz largely agreed. He conceded that there might well be cases where trade-offs were necessary. (He noted those in which coercive job allocation might be justified and freedom of occupational choice restricted.) But the only justification would be the advancement of social justice—not economic growth or stability.⁷⁵ A country’s path of development should be held to Rawlsian standards of justice, and justice properly prioritized the basic liberties of individual persons.

Beitz framed this cosmopolitan vision as a challenge to the NIEO’s focus on intercountry transfers and economic self-determination, as well as its avoidance of problems of income distribution within poor countries. He saw the NIEO as repeating old development errors and insisted that his egalitarianism, by contrast, aimed “ultimately at improving the conditions of poor people . . . [and] yields a moral case for internal reform as well.”⁷⁶ The imposition of internal distributional conditions might well violate sovereignty claims, but this was what global egalitarianism required: “The justification for direct transfers itself requires that the transfer be used to narrow the global gap between rich and poor persons.”⁷⁷ Considerations about personal liberty might constrain interference and demands for internal redistribution, but arguments from sovereignty should not. The NIEO reforms were therefore necessary, but insufficient. They did not do enough to “challenge the constellation of dependency” or the “extraneous influences” that were “among the main obstacles to egalitarian reform within poor countries.”⁷⁸ Extending Rawls’s theory to the international meant making the liberty of individual persons the normative benchmark of justice.

Beitz’s disillusionment with the NIEO tracked its fate. By the mid-1970s, it was under attack from a rising neoliberal internationalism in the global North that advocated the retreat of the state from social services and the defense of private property, anti-union measures, and the liberalization of trade.⁷⁹ The power of the Southern countries waned. The window in which a rewriting of international rules aimed at global redistribution seemed possible was closing. In this changing international landscape, Beitz’s impact on the future of liberal political philosophy would be significant. But it was deferred. Samuel Scheffler, a graduate student in philosophy at Princeton at the same time as Beitz, recalled that the latter’s ideas seemed “peripheral” to the “cutting-edge” interpretations of Rawls and debates about domestic equality that constructed liberal egalitarianism from within.⁸⁰ Where moral and political philosophers did look beyond the domestic, they were mostly not concerned with how anticolonial demands might be reconceived as cosmopolitan proposals for global redistribution. Instead, many followed Singer and began to extend the framework of individual duties and obligations to ask what was required of individuals living in rich countries.

Turning their attention to aid, famine, and population growth, philosophers extended the debates about duty and humanity in the welfare state to an international setting. They swapped Singer’s utilitarianism for principles more palatable to deontological theorists in order to explore whether aid was a charity or a duty of individuals or states, and to address world hunger. Should individual action take the form of money donations or government lobbying? Should aid or development assistance be conditional, given only to “friendly nations,” or tied to other projects, like population control, as McNamara’s “Basic Needs” approach recommended? A number of philosophers began to explore the issues that arose from debates among development economists about basic needs and the measurement of global poverty. Should poverty be conceptualized as a problem of inequality, of politics and institutions, or of humanitarian emergency? And how were these ideas to be accommodated within the new liberal egalitarianism?⁸¹

The different answers to these questions turned on rival characterizations of the international situation. Should its problems be described as poverty or famine—as a moral crisis or a political one? Was the food crisis a result of food shortages, poverty, distributional failures, or underdevelopment? The politics of food, wrote the historian Emma Rothschild in 1976, was “a politics of trade, not charity.”⁸² Events described as humanitarian crises had to be explored within a political and economic rather than purely ethical framework. Many development economists asked the question that had preoccupied British sociologists of the welfare state a decade earlier: should poverty be measured in terms of “relative deprivation” or “absolute dispossession,” or should it be conceived as an issue of basic needs or of equality? Over the course of the 1970s, the basic needs approach that dealt in terms of absolute poverty became dominant, thanks in large part to its sponsorship by the International Labor Organization.⁸³ It was contested from the anticolonial left for its neglect of the NIEO proposals.⁸⁴ Liberal philosophers also explored its implications and the relationship of egalitarianism to humanitarianism and development politics. Amartya Sen, working at the intersection of philosophy and welfare economics, attempted to shift the emphasis from basic needs to entitlements. He later argued in his influential Poverty and Famines (1981) that famines should not be understood as food shortages but as created by social systems and their distributional implications—the distribution of entitlements, and who commands what. They were not the result of natural disasters but were always political—a function of the distribution of property rights to food. Yet he also insisted that poverty and equality should be viewed differently; understanding poverty as “an issue in equality . . . seems to do little justice to either concept.”⁸⁵

The line between the study and measurement of poverty and of inequality was difficult to draw. How international politics was described was key, as were the abstractions that political philosophers built from those descriptions. In 1977, Thomas Nagel wrote that the food crisis was inseparable from wealth inequality. At the same time, however, it was so basic that it was beyond the scope of everyday politics: it needed to be hived off and protected from the usual controversies that pervaded discussions and conflicts of distribution, since it was “an extreme case, involving extreme needs.” It both exceeded usual considerations of distributive justice and was on a continuum with them, precisely because it was a problem not just of world poverty but of “radical inequality,” the solutions to which were always institutional.⁸⁶ For Nagel, radical inequality was distinguished from both poverty and colonialism. Simple poverty was what Singer addressed when he suggested that the basic needs of the poor were not created by social institutions and therefore could be solved by rectification through charity. Colonialism was at the heart of arguments that identified the roots of global inequality in the colonial exploitation of trade, labor, and development in poor countries and so demanded reparations. In contrast to both, many liberal egalitarians invoked the diagnostic category of inequality.

Nagel objected to “laissez-faire systems” that permitted prosperity to depend on accidents of birth, background, and talent. The appropriate remedy for systemic inequalities was neither charity nor redress for past exploitation, but a revision of the system of property and distribution of wealth.⁸⁷ Nagel followed Scanlon’s response to Nozick’s critique of nonhistorical principles: what mattered was whether a system permitted inequalities, not whether people did bad things to bring about that system.⁸⁸ Even if no one had cheated or exploited anyone else, inequality was still objectionable. At the level of the state, what justice required was “redistributive social welfare.” Institutional mechanisms should counter the influence of morally arbitrary factors—differences in natural endowments or access to resources—and correct for inequality, in a way that private giving, motivated by duty or altruism, did not. At the international level, justice required challenging the “international market economy,” which permitted morally objectionable outcomes—the existing system of property under which claims of right and entitlement, defined by “mechanisms of acquisition, exchange, inheritance and transfer,” were made—as well as reforming the “world economy,” which contributed to the production of “radical inequality.”⁸⁹

When the liberal international theorist Stanley Hoffmann looked back at a decade of debate on international obligations, he saw Nagel’s theory as part of a radical egalitarian “indictment” of the world market economy for disadvantaging the poor.⁹⁰ But Nagel was not optimistic that his solution could be achieved. Decades later, in response to the proliferation of cosmopolitan global justice theories, he doubled down on this early ambivalence, claiming that the basic structure was restricted to the state and theorizing justice beyond it was impossible.⁹¹ Here that idea was only embryonic. Without the coercive mechanisms of the state to redistribute goods, eliminate arbitrary inequalities, and render individual duties of charity irrelevant, equivalent international inequalities could not be solved so easily. Given that absence, Nagel conceded that such an argument about radical inequality simply added “force” to “charitable arguments for foreign aid,” making a stronger case against conditional, preferential aid. Ideally, Nagel wrote, aid would be truly humanitarian and “disregard politics entirely.”⁹² Nagel’s uncertainty indicated how unclear it was to many philosophers how much ethical mileage could be gained from describing problems designated “humanitarian” in political terms.

Aid was, however, inescapably political. As the rich countries blocked international trade reforms, the politics of aid was again at issue. Its role in appeasing Third World demands, as well as the relationship of aid policies to the promotion of human rights by civil society groups, human rights organizations, and the Carter administration, were becoming controversial. Many policymakers advocated withholding aid from countries where governments violated the civil and political rights of the person.⁹³ This political question of the conditionality of aid raised difficulties for philosophers who tied humanitarian duties to an ethics of human rights. With human rights politics on the rise and many philosophers consolidating the conception of human rights as tied to basic humanity rather than citizenship, some defended conditional aid.⁹⁴ In Human Rights and US Foreign Policy (1979), a publication of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, Hugo Bedau provided a civil libertarian defense of human rights defined as the civil and political rights of the person, which argued that discretionary aid policy should be tied to securing those rights.⁹⁵ This kind of argument was also implied by a simple application of Rawls’s priority of liberty into a tool of international politics, in which the liberties of the person were prioritized in a humanitarian liberalism.

The shift to human rights that took place among international ethicists also included a moral minimalism of economic and social rights. Instead of abandoning the economic focus of international development and distributive justice theories for human rights or humanitarian needs, the philosopher Henry Shue gave a different view of what counted as human rights and which rights mattered. Challenging the distinction between rights of the person and economic rights, he advocated a “basic rights” approach that prioritized economic rights of subsistence and survival. This was a minimal economic humanitarianism: basic rights were owed to individuals globally and provided a basis for targeted assistance and the strategic withdrawal of international aid on their violation.⁹⁶

As a theory of the “moral minimum,” this contested both Rawls’s priority of liberty and Beitz’s egalitarianism, arguing for a global subsistence minimum and poverty reduction instead of limiting inequality.⁹⁷ For Shue, basic rights were beyond politics because they were below it: subsistence needs had to be met before democratic welfarist politics could even begin. Singer made a similar move. He gave an account of bare “recipient rights,” which stood outside the market and state and could not be commodified.⁹⁸ If Singer’s humanitarianism was the international heir of British voluntarist schemes for meeting basic needs in the welfare state, Shue’s sufficiency arguments internationalized the idea of constitutional welfare rights to a basic social minimum of welfare provision.⁹⁹ At one level, these arguments signaled the extent to which the Rawlsian focus on the distribution of goods had shaped the philosophical vision of international order. At another, both were a departure from liberal egalitarianism and theories of distributive justice. The force of human rights claims was derived not from state institutions but from their status beyond them.

The appeal to human rights was easy to accommodate within the new liberalism, with its commitment to an idea of equal individual moral persons. Yet the focus on humanitarianism, basic rights, and needs seemed to pull back from the demanding egalitarianism Beitz’s theory represented. If there was a choice between principles of humanity and justice, as many philosophers suggested, humanitarianism seemed to undercut justice, replacing it either with purely moral individual duties or a kind of power politics. Some welcomed this move. For minimalist liberals who had seen Beitz’s international egalitarianism as utopian—a “negation” not just of history, Hoffmann wrote, but of “the political dimension of politics”—human rights were a way of bringing power back into institutional and distributive theories that had lost their grip on political feasibility.¹⁰⁰ For Hoffman, an account of international justice that invoked minimal rights was the “realistic” response to the moralist urge to internationalize justice theory. Hoffman was a critic of liberal egalitarianism: it was not the case that “we have already an obligation to full equality for everybody, everywhere.”¹⁰¹ But he was also explicit about the extent to which human rights were tied to power . In this, he was an outlier: while the international ethicists who made human rights central to their theories were often applied philosophers whose work was closely tied to policy, few worried that doing so involved making the assumptions and tools of US foreign policy part of their premises.¹⁰²

At the close of the 1970s, international ethics was tending in two divergent directions. On the one hand were humanitarian accounts that focused on individual duties and aid but downplayed institutions and inequality. On the other were those that made institutions and inequality central but elevated interpersonal inequality over state autonomy. For Barry, the former dealt with problems of “humanity,” and they were a distraction. What mattered was problems of justice. Humanitarian aid was necessary, but it was not possible to “sensibly talk about humanity unless we have a baseline set by justice.”¹⁰³ Barry was always wary of the depoliticization of liberal theory, and here he objected to the collapse of claims of justice into humanity. In 1979, it was clear to Barry that international politics was undergoing a transformation. The “east-west theme of Cold War confrontation that ran through the third quarter of the century,” he wrote, “is being replaced in the final quarter by the north-south theme of confrontation between rich and poor nations.”¹⁰⁴

Barry was supportive of the NIEO demands. At the start of the 1980s, he became more explicit about what that support entailed.¹⁰⁵ He wrote that he wanted to “domesticate” the idea of world distribution implied by the NIEO by putting its demands in the familiar terms of justice theory.¹⁰⁶ What those demands got right was that they put justice before humanity. Barry reworked this old distinction. For him, humanity was “a question of doing good.” Justice was “a question of power.”¹⁰⁷ Principles of humanity direct us to prevent and relieve suffering. Principles of justice were concerned with “the distribution of control over material resources.” International justice, as the NIEO recognized, was not just an argument against discretionary aid or charity but a fundamentally different worldview. The application of justice to international politics would entail “systematic and automatic transfers on a basis of justice rather than discretionary aid, even if that were purged of its present connection with Cold War politics.”¹⁰⁸

Barry explored what account of justice best fit international realities. Although he was less interested than Beitz in constructing a full theory of justice, he tried to apply the liberal egalitarian idea of justice as reciprocity internationally. Since every society has a notion of a gift, Barry reasoned, reciprocity could stretch to cover all social forms.¹⁰⁹ But what kind of reciprocity? Rawlsian fair play could not make sense of international justice: it required the existence of a practice in which people took part, and the world was not a single practice in the Rawlsian sense. Beitz’s argument that it was merely indicated to Barry that he had gotten carried away with fashionable ideas of interdependence and trade. But trade did not mean reciprocity: “The spice trade,” Barry wrote, did not “unite East and West.” The idea that the cooperative core of liberal egalitarianism could be scaled up was tenuous. Yet other ideas of justice as reciprocity fared no better. Justice as fidelity reduced justice to contract, a move that Barry associated with Nozick. When applied internationally, it was not much use because countries, particularly poor countries, tended to break contracts. (Barry set aside whether this was excusable or not.) Justice as mutual aid, which Singer had implicitly applied in his arguments for famine relief, elided justice with beneficence. If justice was understood as mutual aid, countries that were unlikely to reciprocate could not view the aid they received as justly owed to them. Aid given by the United States to Bangladesh could not be conceived of as in any sense part of a relation of mutuality.¹¹⁰ Justice conceived as mutual aid failed too.

A more plausible idea, justice as requital or fair exchange, underpinned accounts of unequal exchange and the anticolonial arguments that saw reparations as owed by rich to poor countries. Barry was sympathetic to reparations claims and the capacity of institutions to determine what counted as an equal exchange. But he ultimately shared the liberal egalitarian skepticism. Citing arguments made in defense of reparations for slavery, he suggested that it was hard to argue that descendants of exploiters had no obligation to atone for the injustice of their ancestors if they were themselves richer as a result of exploitation and the descendants of the exploited were poorer. But the argumentative force of such claims derived from current inequalities, not past injustice. Equality was what mattered, not rectification in itself. Claims of rectification were basically “conservative.”¹¹¹

Justice conceived as requital in exchanges also had limits. Barry contested the viability of accounts of justice as requital like that he saw in the Greek-French Marxian economist Arghiri Emmanuel’s Unequal Exchange (1972), which looked to wage levels rather than prices as crucial to historical underdevelopment, and to explaining the absence of international working-class solidarity. Barry contested Emmanuel’s use of requital arguments to justify shifting the terms of global trade to compensate poor countries for unequal exchanges of commodities. He was skeptical of the applicability of dependency theory and justice as requital. He doubted that proposals for giving Southern countries control of prices, or for cartelization as a means of achieving fair compensation, would make countries more equal. The idea that control of natural resources and equal exchange would lead to justice had been mistakenly generalized from the case of oil. Not all countries were resource-rich or possessed desirable commodities.¹¹² The NIEO proposals were not demanding enough. Something beyond these ideas of justice as reciprocity was needed.

According to Barry, “the glaring limitation of justice as reciprocity is that it can say nothing about the initial control of natural resources.”¹¹³ It did not explore the assignment of ownership rights, only their fair trading. Both the reciprocity theories of justice that dominated liberal philosophy and the institutional practice theories that characterized liberal egalitarianism after Rawls neglected initial ownership. Ideas of justice did not apply in a pre-institutional framework. Barry recognized that such ideas were most common not on the left but on the libertarian right. Always hostile to libertarian politics, Barry thought that Nozick’s influence on liberal egalitarianism was an insidious distraction.¹¹⁴ But here Barry made a conceptual move that would become a common one in subsequent years among left-liberals. He helped himself to a set of ideas familiar to those, from Locke to Buchanan to Nozick, who wanted to place fair exchange at the center of their theories and who recognized the need for an additional argument about the initial control of natural resources—a theory of initial endowments “to get things started.”¹¹⁵ The nonhistorical liberal egalitarianism that began from existing practices and institutional arrangements was silent or agnostic on this question of access to resources. It did not say anything about initial subordination and control, or what Sen called in his entitlement theory of famines the “command” of resources.¹¹⁶ But since Barry agreed with Rawls that the basic structure was not global, an independent argument of this kind, about initial control, was needed to get to an account of international justice. The injustice of the initial allocation of rights had to be addressed.¹¹⁷

This would become a major concern for left-liberal and Marxist philosophers in the 1980s, who would try to make the notion of pre-institutional property rights central to liberal egalitarianism in response to the New Right. Here, Barry insisted on the international relevance of this notion. Many neoliberals had recognized that the great potential of the NIEO had been in its capacity to unsettle global property rights regimes. Faced with this potential disarray, they had looked for new rules to restructure the international order in favor of capital rights.¹¹⁸ Barry was a keen observer of the right, and he may well have noted this response. Unlike them, he did not offer an alternative order based on a system of rules to protect property rights but began from individual rights to equality of opportunity. He later developed this by restating H.L.A. Hart’s distinction between special rights and general rights to argue for a general right to common resources.¹¹⁹

Justice was here conceived as equal access to the world’s natural resources. Equality of opportunity, Barry stressed, was in its true form about equal claims on those resources, not “equal chances to get ahead in a meritocratic rat-race.” This idea Barry thought stood behind Emmanuel’s criticism of international order, which had gone wrong only in its commitment to the reciprocity framework. This commons-style entitlement claim sidestepped historical reparation arguments while acknowledging their force. Yet Barry argued it would have far more radical implications than either reparation or reciprocity. The debt owed by rich countries to poor countries was not a form of compensation for what had been lost, but a transfer of resources that already belonged to one country but were in the possession of another. “The planet,” he wrote, “is the common heritage of all men at all times and any appropriation of its resources must be subject to appraisal from the point of view of justice.”¹²⁰ Countries should have their fair share of the world’s resources. There was a right before and beyond the nationally bound system of rules.

Like Beitz’s “resource redistribution principle,” Barry’s equal right to common resources directly undercut the UN General Assembly’s assertion of countries’ “permanent sovereignty” over natural resources—the absolute right of each country to control natural resources in its territory.¹²¹ Yet Barry’s account solidified rather than undermined state sovereignty. When it came to international politics, “the main dividing line” between humanity and justice, Barry wrote, was “the autonomy of states.”¹²² This was visible in how actions motivated by humanity, exemplified by foreign aid, left discretion to the donor and ignored the autonomy of recipients. The claims of aid recipients were dependent on the use they made of resources. They had to spend “responsibly,” or according to criteria of assistance. With justice, things were different: given the equal right to common resources, countries were simply owed a certain share of those resources. When transfers were made from rich to poor countries, it was up to the country how it would use the resources it already owned. Barry illustrated by analogy: just as the complaint that a woman claiming “family allowances” spends them on cigarettes instead of her children misunderstands how to measure changes in overall patterns of consumption and betrays a pernicious moralism, so did those who worried about how international aid was spent.¹²³

Agents who were the recipients of transfers owed on the basis of justice were autonomous. How they spent what they received was their own business. In the international realm, the recipients were states. International taxation was the essential instrument of this kind of justice. A tax, Barry said, on the basis of GNP—which reflected “the use of irreplaceable natural resources, the burden on the ecosphere, and advantages derived from the efforts of past generations, and past exploitation of other countries”—would be a minimum requirement, distributed directly to poor countries “on a parallel basis of negative income tax.”¹²⁴ Additional transfers on the basis of humanity could be administered by international organizations. But these were not aimed at returning control to recipients, nor would they modify state autonomy, as Barry wished, to include “a redefinition of what justly belongs to a country.”¹²⁵

This argument cut against the subsequent trajectory of liberal egalitarianism in the international sphere, particularly Beitz’s internationalizing interpretation, which relied implicitly on international institutions to achieve justice. Beitz had been accused of disregarding politics: his just international scheme “would still be a world in which power and decisions about international regimes are heavily concentrated in the hands of a few.” This stood “at the root of the demand for power-sharing in international institutions, or of the claim that the poorer states have the right to exercise collectively whatever power they have to change the rules of the game, since those rules are stacked against them.”¹²⁶ Beitz had focused on distribution at the expense of control—a Rawlsian tendency that was more visible in the international context. Barry tried to redress that omission. He stressed the autonomy of states and extended autonomy, the capacity for control and agency, to collectivities in general. That was his way of restoring politics to an international ethics of distribution.

Barry’s attempt to repoliticize liberal philosophy did not just involve making the state central to international distributive justice theory. He also called into question the place of collective agency in liberal egalitarianism by injecting a focus on collectivities. This flowed from his rejection of the “individualistic ideology” he saw taking over political theory. Its focus on individuals above other units was inaccurate as well as unappealing. In economic theory, Barry wrote, the standard unit remained the family. Like Rawls, Barry accepted this contested claim as fact.¹²⁷ Unlike Rawls, Barry used this fact not to make the family the primary site of moral meaning, but to show that collectivities could have political agency and control. By implicitly assuming that individuals were the basic unit, individualistic liberalism neglected the question of who owned or controlled a resource. What made a distribution just was not its individualist basis but when “the correct people control the correct array of rights and opportunities.”¹²⁸ There was nothing to restrict “the holders of just entitlements to individuals. We may quite comprehensibly speak of a just distribution of rights and opportunities among collectivities—families, communes, firms, or, for that matter, countries.” Moral principles could have collectivities as their subject matter, and they could be the basis for distribution “as much as individual persons”: “rights, powers, or resources may be attributes of collectivities as well as attributes of individuals.”¹²⁹ Echoing the NIEO, he wrote that we should not collapse discussions of justice between collectivities with justice within them. Nor should we

think of distribution between collectivities as morally significant only inasfar as it affects the thing that “really” matters, namely distribution between individuals regardless of their membership in any collectivity. . . . It fails to take account of the significance—for individual human beings—of belonging to collectivities that have the autonomy to take decisions and the resources to carry them out.¹³⁰

This argument did not go beyond states for the sake of an individualist cosmopolitanism or human rights, but pointed to a different kind of collective communality of goods. It gave priority to autonomy and resource control at the state level, for the sake of justice rather than humanity.

Beitz had been criticized not only for separating distribution from politics but also for discarding “the moral dimension of national politics.”¹³¹ Barry made these central just at the moment that the NIEO reforms stalled and efforts to reform international economic governance were in retreat.¹³² He thought Beitz was mistaken to assume that international institutions were “advanced” enough to justify treating the world as a single cooperative scheme. Not only had Beitz focused excessively on trade but his attempt to remedy the silences of Rawls’s theory on the nature of international organizations had gone too far—by suggesting that existing international organizations truly facilitated cooperation and community. These organizations were too underdeveloped to provide the empirical grounds for normative theory, and too unsophisticated to dispense justice in practice.¹³³ What could rise to the challenge? Barry did not look to subnational charitable and human rights organizations but argued that international redistribution should bypass international institutions in the form of intercountry transfers between rich and poor states. His tacit defense of the NIEO came by way of an assertion of state sovereignty and of the identification—common to both critics and supporters of anticolonial politics—of anticolonial politics with nationalism and the state.¹³⁴ Individuals were not the only subjects of international theory, nor were international institutions its key agents. The state was both the first recipient and the agent of justice.

Barry was out of step. He was writing during the decline of Third Worldist optimism: new splits in the Third World coalition were emerging, and the second oil crisis of 1979 halted the move among European countries to establish trading deals with the global South.¹³⁵ In 1980, the Brandt Report had been released. Predicated on cooperation and reciprocity, it advocated a “global social democracy” of international public opinion and a community of nations. For liberal theorists, its vision eclipsed both the sharp edges of dependency theory’s anticolonialism and the NIEO’s focus on state sovereignty. Debates about international inequality now took place alongside competing visions of human rights and basic needs.¹³⁶ Human rights soon became the most prominent language of development and international politics.¹³⁷ Philosophy followed.¹³⁸ Barry’s theory had looked to rights, but he was skeptical of human rights talk. For other liberal egalitarians, the Rawlsian focus on individual persons increasingly found expression in the language of human rights.¹³⁹ When philosophers began to look to the idea of autonomy—often in Kantian mode, and more often as a good to be protected by distributive justice than as part of an account of control over distributive decisions—it was the autonomy of individual moral persons, not the autonomy of states or collectivities, that became key.¹⁴⁰ This was true of liberal philosophy in general, and of international justice in particular. Individuals were elevated as the recipients of goods, as the bearers of human rights, as moral agents.

Liberal egalitarianism, institutionalist by reputation, would now become institutionalist at its core. Yet paradoxically the actual workings of institutions or questions about state autonomy and institutional agency were not its main concern. Institutions and states had been conceived by Rawls primarily as practices, cooperative schemes, and background contexts. They were not the agents or persons of state personality theories that had been constructed to deal with claims about responsibility across time rather than distribution in a static present. For Barry, institutions were agents as much as economic practices, but as the latter became the staple assumption of liberal egalitarianism, even his emphasis on the agency and autonomy of collectivities diminished, as did his resistance to endowing individuals with special status.¹⁴¹ The brief moment when international justice theory tried to integrate the insights of anticolonial theories based on conflictual visions of a state-based international order was over. Instead, a cosmopolitan, cooperative, and humanitarian vision became intertwined with justice. When liberal egalitarianism definitively turned international, the world itself became the relevant practice, the basic structure to which the Rawlsian principles of justice applied. The worry that cosmopolitanism might undermine national self-determination was displaced along with the NIEO. Human rights claims were folded into justice theories. Distributive justice, so it seemed, need not collapse into humanitarianism, but could accommodate it.

Despite their differences, these first theorists of international justice shared something significant: an orientation toward “empirical” politics. Their abstractions were designed to make sense of a changing international realm, just as Rawls’s had been an attempt to capture conceptually the changing realities of the administrative state and American society. But in the late 1970s, a change was under way among liberal egalitarians, both among those theorizing the international and those focused on domestic justice. Their theories were increasingly oriented not to making sense of reality but to refining theories on internalist grounds—to clarifying philosophical arguments and those of Rawls’s system in particular. In the 1970s, Barry and Beitz shared the empirical orientation: their theories were meant to be diagnostic as well as normative, and it was on the basis of their capacity to make sense of the actual workings of the international system that critics to their left, like Kai Nielsen, critiqued them. For Nielsen, Barry’s focus on states made him “apolitical” because it missed the global realities of capitalism. His neglect, like Rawls’s, of productive justice and his interest in Nozick’s ideas about holdings and entitlements were a distraction. Nielsen thought that Beitz, in his internationalism, had done a better job of taking a sufficiently empirical view of systemic global injustice, though he still needed a Marxist sociology if he were to properly name capitalism and modern forms of imperialism.¹⁴² Regardless of whether they were successful, the early liberal egalitarians had tried to make their theories match the world. But the world would slip from their view.

At the turn of the new decade, these earlier theories were challenged for giving away too much to empirical reality, for their focus on “actual reciprocity in the circumstances of justice.”¹⁴³ The moral philosopher David Richards argued that the application of the principles of justice did not depend, as Rawls had argued, on the existence of empirical circumstances of justice—an idea, taken from Hume, that stated the conditions of reciprocity, cooperation, and moderate scarcity that were necessary for fairness. The key idea was instead the Kantian one of treating persons as equals, as a way of demonstrating respect for their dignity. Barry, among others, had distinguished these two opposing tendencies in Rawls’s thought—a Humean, practice-oriented part and a Kantian, ideal, and hypothetical part.¹⁴⁴ Thanks in large part to Rawls’s own Kantian self-interpretation and his new explication of constructivism, the latter tendency was winning out.¹⁴⁵ Liberal philosophers and applied ethicists increasingly adopted Kantian ideas of autonomy and dignity, respect for persons, and hypothetical agreement.¹⁴⁶ For Richards, in order for the principles to apply on a world scale, it was not necessary to make the case that global conditions—whether interdependence, trade, or common markets—constituted circumstances of actual reciprocity.¹⁴⁷ Facts about the world could be false, and the facts could change. What mattered was the hypothetical contract and the moral ideas that guided it.

Liberal political philosophy began to display signs of a shift that was taking place across many other areas of inquiry—to which liberal philosophers themselves were often hostile. Social and political theorists of various ideological and theoretical stripes were grappling with and responding to contemporary transformations, whether described as postmodernity, neoliberalism, or late capitalism, by reaching for novel forms of abstraction.¹⁴⁸ Among liberal philosophers, the shift to abstraction took a particular form, as hypothetical modes of justification and argument became more central. Circumstances of actual reciprocity were now replaced by the hypothetical idea of moral reciprocity. Ideal theory became detachable from real-world conditions. Beitz, for instance, conceded that his earlier theory had overemphasized the requirement that the world constitute a cooperative scheme. He swapped his account of international justice that depended on the existence of economic independence for a more pronounced moral cosmopolitanism, to which the ideas of moral equality and human rights were key.¹⁴⁹ The first years of reading Rawls led to the entrenchment of his theory’s egalitarianism. Now many emphasized its ideal nature. Not only did justice theories function as regulative ideals and assume full compliance but they also idealized and abstracted from the empirical to the moral. This was accompanied by a shift from the material as philosophers included explicit discussion of a distinctive realm of culture and value. The concern with natural resources, so particular to an era of international politics that was drawing to a close, stretched to include cultural resources, as debates about fixed commodities and material goods were restated in terms of opportunity or gave way to theories of human capital and immaterial labor.¹⁵⁰ By detaching arguments for international justice from their empirical base, ideal theory would be less biased toward the status quo. Yet here was also a double move away from the material and the empirical. Philosophers after Rawls’s Kantian turn were more concerned “to find the real in the rational, rather than the rational in the real.”¹⁵¹

Among liberal egalitarians who remained institutional in focus, this change was embodied by Thomas Pogge. As a student of Rawls’s at Harvard, Pogge taught a course on global justice in 1980 and completed his thesis, “Kant, Rawls, and Global Justice,” in 1983. His Realizing Rawls was published in 1988, after he spent the previous year at Shue’s Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. Like Beitz, Pogge tried to adapt Rawls’s liberal egalitarianism to the globe. For Pogge, Rawls had granted too much to empirical circumstances. He had tended to the parochial. This was encapsulated by the fact that his single political intervention had been his account of civil disobedience during the Vietnam War, and also in his quasi-Hegelian concern for what was already there.¹⁵² Pogge dug down on Rawls’s universalism, making it not merely international but global. The chosen principles must work under ideal conditions and provide the “Archimedian point” to guide the appraisal and reform of unjust institutions. Pogge hardened Rawls’s distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory, but he also stressed a particular version of their codependence, writing that “non-ideal without ideal theory is blind, ideal without non-ideal theory is empty.”¹⁵³ Even so, for Pogge, a theory of global justice had to look to “institutional fixed points” that were “immune” to shifts in power or interest.¹⁵⁴ Ideal theory must not change with the political terrain.

Pogge collapsed Rawls’s distinction between humanitarian international ethics and institutional domestic politics, stretching the universal ethics to cover the politics. In certain respects, he was one of Rawls’s most faithful interpreters. The “individualistic base” of Rawls’s theory was the starting point, and the extension of the principles globally was, Pogge argued, the logical consequence of Rawls’s Kantian conception of human beings “as ultimate units of equal moral concern.” Pogge rejected the idea that the parties might represent associations or states. Justice was the extension of a naturalistic humanitarianism of persons. The parties in the original position would decide on global principles. The institutional production of inequality and “moral concern” for it did not stop at national borders. So the parties would choose to correct for the bad fortune of nationality as well as other morally arbitrary contingencies.¹⁵⁵ The ground rules of the global practice should be assessed, he argued, from the point of view of the globally least advantaged, who lacked fundamental rights and liberties as defined by Rawls’s first principle and also by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.¹⁵⁶

This theory, Pogge argued, could guide a “New Deal” on the “global plane.”¹⁵⁷ Like Rawls, he emphasized that the principles were designed to judge the constitutive ground rules of society that governed the distribution of resources and shaped inequalities in the first place. He prioritized redistributive stabilization over intervention, supplementing Rawls’s principles with an internationalized, quasi-Keynesian set of rights to health care, education, and employment (though not a New Deal–style public works program or transfer system).¹⁵⁸ As interested in the federalism of the European Community as the NIEO, Pogge was less concerned with the politics of North and South than with the idea that the “invisible hand tends to guide things in the wrong direction”: left unregulated, the “laissez-faire market system” would lead to poverty, war, and violence.¹⁵⁹ He was faithful to the egalitarian rejection of historical argument. The legacies of racism and colonialism were acknowledged but deemed normatively irrelevant.¹⁶⁰ It was “enough that the lives of the vast majority of persons are profoundly shaped and affected by events reverberating through an international scheme of trade and diplomacy in which we are highly advantaged participants.”¹⁶¹

Yet Pogge moralized a distinctive political terrain. Amid a new phase of the Cold War, the brewing culture wars, and the ascendant human rights movement, the materialist economic focus of debates about international order gave way to renewed emphasis on a minimal morality and shared values.¹⁶² Intellectual anti-totalitarianism was resurgent in Western Europe and the United States as many liberals complained of the “exhaustion of utopia.” Others defended a vision of social democracy that prioritized human rights and a “lifeworld” where the interpersonal needed to be protected from market and state.¹⁶³ Pogge updated justice theory accordingly, with an eye on worst scenarios. He saw the current global basic structure as a mere “modus vivendi” that enabled a system where “great powers” with repressive domestic politics and spheres of influence prevented international justice. The task was to overcome the “violence and starvation” that characterized that regime.¹⁶⁴

The solution was not for half of the world to submit to the other: one cannot, he wrote, “advocate a capitalist or socialist ideal.” “The horrors of this world” were not tied to either capitalism or socialism per se, but were “the horrors of an inconstant modus vivendi among deeply hostile governments each fearing the eventual destruction of its values.” For the sake of those values, greater tolerance was required, as well as a “shared preference for a heterogeneous world including Capitalist and Socialist societies.”¹⁶⁵ What was needed was a “thin” universalism, grounded in human rights, and a “‘thin’ global set of basic liberties.” This would provide grounds for an international value pluralism—a global value consensus to accommodate the “inter-cultural diversity of convictions even about justice” and tolerate different regimes and ideologies without conceding the grip of universal rights claims.¹⁶⁶ Such a consensus would allow for a new international system to protect the victims of natural and social conditions. Where Rawls had been open to capitalist and socialist regimes because both were vulnerable to the same administrative overreach and markets could work efficiently in either, Pogge redeployed Rawls’s openness as part of the search for neutrality and moral agreement. Yet this accommodation went only so far and had to be in line with a minimal justice. Pogge invoked the threat of totalitarianism to shore up the ideal nature of justice theory. The appeal to “cultural diversity” was too often used to shroud continuing injustice. Normative principles should not be affected by empirical realities: moral standards could not be changed “when a constitutional democracy lapses into totalitarianism or authoritarianism (as Germany did in the 1930s or Chile in the 1970s).”¹⁶⁷

The right rules, Pogge implied, might transcend political divisions in a post-ideological international settlement. As such, he oriented his global justice theory toward humanity. In this vision, worries about political economy and control were downstream from technical distributive questions. Pogge stretched the boundaries of Rawls’s practices across the world to create a philosophy in which individual moral persons inhabited a cosmopolitan moral community that downgraded existing institutional constellations. In this global egalitarianism, the moral and the institutional came together, but the political and the distributional were pulled apart. There was little room for the collective agency and control of the kind demanded by supporters of the NIEO. The agents of justice theory were not states seeking global reform, but international institutions and individuals discharging their moral obligations, acting in civil society by following Rawls’s “natural duty of justice” to uphold just institutions and reform unjust ones. Pogge strengthened the capacity of Rawls’s theory to attribute moral responsibility. He stressed the contribution of individuals to the problem—our complicity in a practice—as grounding that duty. The theory of justice, even philosophy itself, was endowed with agency.

Over the two decades that it took for liberal egalitarians to fully reorient toward international distributive justice, political philosophy was reconceived as part of the shift in value that would bring about global change. The conception of global justice provided standards to specify “our moral task gradually to improve the justice of this order.”¹⁶⁸ Rawls did not merely show us how “to lead irreproachable lives,” Pogge wrote, but confronted us “with our inalienable task in the world, our obligation to minimize injustice and human suffering.”¹⁶⁹ As collaborators in an unjust “institutional scheme” who benefited from its injustice, advantaged individuals had the moral task of taking political action.¹⁷⁰ Duties and responsibilities were straightforwardly actionable; Pogge was not too concerned with the constraints placed on agency by structures, or with patterns of complicity and interests. At the same time, Pogge placed international ethics above politics. His emphasis on value was designed to deal with the excesses of the market, but its neglect of power as a solution to market coercion could in the end do little but sustain it. Global justice theorists would later revisit this divorce of distribution, agency, and political control, but for many years it remained central to international liberal egalitarianism.¹⁷¹ In ideal terms, it was global principles and international institutions that would regulate this community. In the meantime, it fell to individuals to create it.