Ben Conroy
Everyday Philosophy
In this time of pandemic, we are keenly aware of the global scope of the crisis. We’re glued to the news, comparing different rates of infection and containment measures.
At the same time, our spheres of immediate concern have shrunk. We are stuck in our houses, and our minds are occupied with concern for the safety of those around us and with worry about our jobs and businesses.
The pandemic should, I think, be a reminder to broaden our concern, not just our attention. Covid-19 has thrown certain questions of global justice into sharp relief: and our response to it provides a road map for how we might think about other global justice issues.
First, what, in moral-philosophical terms, is global justice? Questions of global justice are questions about what we owe people in countries other than our own. It’s not just a matter of ‘what would it be good to do’ – nobody opposes charitable giving. Obligations of justice are those that are in some way mandatory: obligations that it would be actively bad, not just ‘less good’, to neglect.
Philosophical discussion of global justice tends to be about just what those obligations actually are. Some philosophers, like Oxford’s Simon Caney, are what’s called global luck egalitarians. They argue that happening to be born in one country rather than another is a pure matter of luck, and that a person shouldn’t be disadvantaged because of things that are outside of their control. As such, they argue that justice demands a more-or-less equal distribution of wealth between all the people of the world. People could lose that wealth if they made bad choices, but they shouldn’t start poor because of where they’re born.
Other thinkers argue that we only have egalitarian obligations of justice to people if we are involved with them in some kind of joint endeavour or community. There are then disputes about whether the current system of international cooperation counts as the sort of joint endeavour that would justify these obligations. Others think that we do not have to equalise wealth, but do have to ensure that everyone has the means of subsistence. Still other philosophers think we only have strict obligations of justice to people outside our national community if we or our country have harmed them in some way. Equalising opportunity for everyone in the world isn’t mandatory, but undoing any ill effects we’re responsible for is.
The thing is that despite these drastic theoretical differences, there is almost universal agreement among philosophers that rich countries are not meeting their global justice obligations. Even the people who are more minimalist about our obligations acknowledge that much of the poverty and destitution present in poorer countries came about as a direct result of the exploitative actions of richer ones.
Covid-19 stands to hit those who are badly off particularly hard. In poorer countries, more jobs tend to be impossible to do from home. If you’re a newspaper columnist, you work in an office, or you’re a teacher with a good internet connection, you can continue to work. Even if you lose your job, most rich states have some kind of Covid-related relief. In poorer countries, more work is manual, and can’t be done remotely. And those same poorer countries can’t afford to support all their citizens who cannot work. It’s hard to impose lockdowns when a sizeable proportion of a county’s population depends on their daily wages for food.
But if the pandemic reminds us how miserably we’re failing to live up to our obligations, it also points a path forward to a more just world. It does this in two main ways.
Firstly, most of the time rhetoric about ‘what hurts one of us, hurts all of us’ is just that: exploitation of other countries can leave us entirely unaffected (in fact, we’re more likely to benefit from it through cheap consumer goods). This time, though, we can’t beat the virus until we beat it everywhere: it will be impossible to lift travel restrictions without risking reinfection.
Secondly, the virus has transformed what we think is possible. Most of our lax response to issues of global justice is not the result of moral disagreement, but a sort of inertia. We have been trapped for a long time by an idea of what is ‘feasible’ or ‘realistic’. Malaria kills 400,000 people every year. Starvation kills somewhere around nine million. But obliterating malaria or world hunger seem to us like long-term goals to be gradually worked towards, ‘ideals’ rather than proximate, urgent aims.
Covid-19 has changed what we consider realistic or possible. We had it in us all along to take drastic action to save lives. We could save even more, and with measures far less drastic than isolation and economic shutdown. We just have to decide to start living up to our responsibilities of justice.