Pluralism and global justice

A central question in the debate surrounding contemporary proposals for a new international order is whether accepting the fact of global pluralism should lead us to lower our ambitions for global justice. Many participants in that debate answer such a question positively. Even authors such as Rawls...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Lafont, Cristina
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2011
País:España
Institución:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:68892
Acceso en línea:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/68892
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.5565/rev/enrahonar/v46.190
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Cosmopolitanisme
Justícia global
Globalització
Drets humans
Consens per solapament
Pluralisme
Cosmopolitanism
Global justice
Globalization
Habermas
Human rights
Overlapping consensos
Pluralism
Rawls
Cosmopolitanismo
Justicia global
Globalización
Derechos humanos
Consenso por solapamiento
Pluralismo
Descripción
Sumario:A central question in the debate surrounding contemporary proposals for a new international order is whether accepting the fact of global pluralism should lead us to lower our ambitions for global justice. Many participants in that debate answer such a question positively. Even authors such as Rawls and Habermas both prominent defenders of ambitious conceptions of domestic justice seem to reach the same pessimistic conclusion with their respective proposals for a new international order. In this paper, I question the plausibility of such a conclusion on the basis of an analysis of the cosmopolitan project that Habermas articulates in recent publications. I argue that his presentation of the project oscillates between two models. The first is an ambitious model for a future international order geared towards fulfilling the human rights goals of the UN Charter. The second is a minimalist model, in which the international community's obligation to protect human rights is limited to the negative duty of preventing wars of aggression and massive human rights violations stemming from armed conflicts such as ethnic cleansing or genocide. According to this model, any more ambitious goals should be left to a global domestic politics, which would have to come about through negotiated compromises among domesticated major powers at the transnational level. I defend the ambitious model by arguing that there is no plausible basis for drawing a normatively significant distinction between massive human rights violations stemming from armed conflicts and those stemming from regulations of the global economic order. If this is correct, acceptance of the fact of global pluralism does not offer a plausible justification to exclude economic justice from the principles of transnational justice recognized by the international community.