Abstract
According to the analytically semantic linkage of “good-right-rights-justice” formed in the real conflicts among goods and especially among people, we should not confuse the global justice principle of “equal respect for everyone’s basic rights” with the global virtue principle of “equal satisfaction of everyone’s basic needs.” Correspondingly, while global virtues and the national interest may and can be reconciled with each other, global justice should not make compromises to the national interest precisely because of its ultimate priority.
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Notes
It is also for this reason that the approach based on rights seems to be the single approach that is substantively relevant and significant in the theoretical context of global justice. Any other approach based on needs, good, or virtue can eventually become the approach truly aimed at global “justice” (rather than at anything else) only in combination with the approach based on rights.
As a matter of fact, many scholars understand or define rights and justice in these specific and strict meanings. For example, David Miller holds that “unjust” or “infringing human rights” means morally “unacceptable” or “intolerable” (2007, pp. 98, 165). Mathias Risse also says, “Distributive justice determines what counts as an acceptable distribution of holdings.” (2012, p. 4).
Shuowen Jiezi (《说文解字》), a famous Chinese dictionary with a history of nearly 2000 years, used the word “right (zheng 正)” to interpret the word “politics (zheng 政 or zhengzhi 政治)”, semantically implying that “politics” is or should be the rule of “right” or “justice (zhengyi 正义)”.
In A Theory of Justice, Rawls mentions both the “negative natural duty” of “not to injure” or “not to harm the innocent” and the “positive natural duty” of “to uphold justice” or “mutual aid”, declaring that “they have no necessary connection with institutions or social practices” and should be settled upon after the just principles of the basic structure of society (see 1971, pp. 108–117). Indulging in his abstract and idealized assumptions of the original position and the veil of ignorance, obviously, he fails to realize that his two principles of justice are virtually his modern philosophical interpretation or construction of these two age-old “natural” duties formed in the concrete interpersonal conflicts of real life. Taking “to uphold justice” and “mutual aid” as equivalently positive, moreover, he also fails to realize that only the negative duty of “not to injure” or “not to harm the innocent” is situated in the dimension of mandatory justice, whereas the positive duty of “mutual aid” is rather situated in the dimension of self-disciplined virtue. It might be argued in this sense that Rawls also misunderstands the concept of justice to some extent in his famous book A Theory of Justice.
In discussing the issue of legitimacy and politics, Jean-Marc Coicaud definitively connects them with justice and rights “as both the result of a conflict and its antidote” on the one hand, and yet still argues that the consent of citizens plays a key role in legitimacy within the positive dimension of “reciprocity and cooperation” as a more preferable goal on the other hand (see 2002, pp. 10–18), without paying enough attention to the intrinsic relationship between the legitimacy of political power and its negative duty to prevent citizens from morally unacceptable interpersonal harm.
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Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to all the participants of the conference “Reconciling two agendas: National interests and global justice” held at the Fudan Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences on May 26–27, 2018 for their insightful comments and criticisms on the draft of this article. Special thanks to Charles Beitz, Jean-Marc Coicaud, Sujian Guo, Baogang He, Nannerl Keohane, Robert Keohane, Darrel Moellendorf, Yannick Glemarec, Kok-Chor Tan, Mathias Risse, Darrel Moellendorf, Ariel Colonomos, and Thomas Hale.
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Liu, Q. Equal Rights Versus Equal Needs: Global Justice or Global Virtues?. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 12, 275–291 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-019-00261-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-019-00261-7