Global Political Theory by Held David; Maffettone Pietro; & Pietro Maffettone

Author:Held, David; Maffettone, Pietro; & Pietro Maffettone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2016-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

Notes

1 In his piece, to which I am indebted and which has partly inspired my work on this subject, Nardin suggests that designing a general framework for thinking about just war and global justice is an important challenge for political theory, and hypothesizes (drawing on Kant) that focusing on the justifiability of coercion might help us address it. As a first step in building such a framework, Nardin then discusses the ethics of humanitarian intervention. This discussion, though, suggests that Nardin himself has not fully appreciated the implications of his original insight. He argues that humanitarian intervention is grounded in concerns of justice, rather than beneficence. From this, he extrapolates a general duty of justice to protect people from violence. But, he continues, ‘if states have a duty to intervene when people are being massacred, they might also have a duty to act [coercively] when people are dying of starvation or disease’ (2006: 464). Nardin then concludes that ‘a coercive (tax-based) scheme of global poverty relief might be justified’ (2006: 465). The problem with this argument is that it does not show any so-far unappreciated connection between global justice and just war theory. If one's preferred theory of justice says that the current global distribution of entitlements is unjust, then it follows that coercion may be rightfully employed to enforce the correct scheme. The idea that people might be taxed for the sake of justice is one most theorists of justice already accept. The more interesting point, which I try to develop in this chapter, is not that justice-based entitlements may be rightfully enforced, but that war itself (which involves not only the use of coercion, but of lethal coercion) can be seen as a species of enforcement of entitlements. This, in turn, opens up the possibility for mutual testing between theories of the just war (specifically jus ad bellum) and theories of global justice – a possibility Nardin himself does not consider.

2 On reflective equilibrium, see Rawls, 1999a: 18, 43–4.

3 For an overview of that tradition, see Orend, 2008; Lazar, 2013.

4 The extent to which principles of jus post bellum should contribute to the all-things-considered justification of a war (as opposed to the justification of what occurs after a war) is a matter of debate.

5 See Coates, 1997; Caney, 2005: ch. 6; Orend, 2008. What I have offered is only one prominent formulation of the further ad bellum conditions. Other formulations are also available in the literature.

6 As Seth Lazar has pointed out to me, the inclusion of humanitarian interventions under ‘wars that respond to aggression’ is unusual. I am aware of this, but I think considerations of parsimony – at least in the present context – justify the inclusion of humanitarian wars within this broader category.

7 Cf. Walzer's (1977: 58) treatment of what he calls ‘the domestic analogy’. For a discussion and critique of the extent to which war can be seen as an act of collective self-defence analogous to individual self-defence, see Rodin, 2002.

8 Other cosmopolitan treatments of just war can be found in Caney, 2005; Moellendorf, 2002.

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