Towards a Middle Way Approach to Global Distributive Justice: Defending Rawls against His Cosmopolitan Critics.

Traditionally, there are two approaches to theorizing global justice—one statist and the other cosmopolitan, and scholars debating over this subject often have to choose between the two extreme approaches. In this article, I argue that we need to move beyond the debate by advancing a middle way approach, and Rawls’s the Law of Peoples represents such an alternative. In his theory of global justice, Rawls insists that the Law of Peoples must be worked out by adopting a two-stage approach to the use of original position, and because of this approach, the difference principle that he advances in A Theory of Justice does not apply in global context. Rawls’s approach to global justice has drawn much criticism from scholars who favor a more egalitarian or cosmopolitan approach. From their point of view, Rawls’s Law of Peoples comes close to what Allen Buchanan caricatures “rules for a vanished Westphalian world”. Against these cosmopolitan critics, I argue that Rawls’s two-stage approach better fits the global context for two reason: first, because Rawls’s political liberalism is more reasonable than comprehensive liberalism favored by cosmopolitan liberals; second, the moral standing of the state cannot be easily dismissed as cosmopolitan liberals often do. At the level of substantive issues, cosmopolitan liberals justify applying the difference principle at the global level by employing various arguments, most notable of which are: first, the argument from interdependence and circumstances of justice; and, second, inequality of bargaining power and the erosion of background fairness. Against these arguments, I argue that the difference principle cannot be applied directly to the global context because the global context is qualitatively different from the domestic context in that the international society does not constitute a social union of social unions. In addition, I argue that cosmopolitan liberals must embrace the idea of a world state if they are to realize their ideal. The fact that they are hesitant to embrace such an institutional arrangement gives us one more reason to prefer a middle way approach. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]