Pluralism and Global Justice

A central question in the debate surrounding contemporary proposals for a new internationalorder is whether accepting the fact of global pluralism should lead us to lower ourambitions for global justice. Many participants in that debate answer such a question positively.Even authors such as Rawls and Habermas —both prominent defenders of ambitiousconceptions of domestic justice— seem to reach the same pessimistic conclusionwith their respective proposals for a new international order. In this paper, I question theplausibility of such a conclusion on the basis of an analysis of the cosmopolitan projectthat Habermas articulates in recent publications. I argue that his presentation of the projectoscillates between two models. The first is an ambitious model for a future internationalorder geared towards fulfilling the human rights goals of the UN Charter. The secondis a minimalist model, in which the international community’s obligation to protecthuman rights is limited to the negative duty of preventing wars of aggression and massivehuman 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 domesticpolitics, which would have to come about through negotiated compromises amongdomesticated major powers at the transnational level. I defend the ambitious model byarguing that there is no plausible basis for drawing a normatively significant distinctionbetween massive human rights violations stemming from armed conflicts and those stemmingfrom regulations of the global economic order. If this is correct, acceptance of thefact of global pluralism does not offer a plausible justification to exclude economic justicefrom the principles of transnational justice recognized by the international community.