International social justice

The idea of ‘international social justice’ is problematic in a number of different ways. ¹ As is always the case when justice is under consideration, what ought to be the substantive content of principles of international social justice is contestable and fiercely contested, but what is distinctive about discourse at the level of international relations is that the very idea that there is an international ‘society’ to which principles of social justice might be applied is also contested. To get some idea of what is at stake here, consider the frequently-made distinction between formal or procedural as opposed to social or distributive justice. Within a domestic context it is quite possible to argue that the second category ought to be empty—this, for example, is the position of Oakeshottians who argue that ‘…no performance is “just” or “unjust” in respect of being a wish to achieve an imagined satisfaction or in respect of its actual outcome, but only in respect of its relationship to a moral practice understood as a composition of rules’. ² As will be seen below, some opponents of international distributive justice develop a similar argument, but a more radical position is that of so-called ‘realists’ who argue not that the category should be empty, but that it does not exist in the first place, that there is no social formation at the international level that has the characteristics of a ‘society’. ³ Nor is this simply an argument deployed by moderns—in so far as a continuous tradition of speculation about justice can be said to begin with Plato’s Republic, it is worth noting that in that dialogue there is virtually nothing said that bears directly on ‘international’ relations. What this means is that, in principle, any argument about international social justice has to begin by facing a higher level of incredulity about the very existence of the topic than its domestic equivalents are accustomed to face.