Jan-Christoph Heilinger: Cosmopolitan Responsibility - Global Injustice, Relational Equality, and Individual Agency
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Jan-Christoph Heilinger: Cosmopolitan Responsibility Global Injustice, Relational Equality, and Individual Agency Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2020. Hardcover (ISBN: 9783110600780). € 69.95. 255 + xii pp. Fausto Corvino 1 Accepted: 7 May 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Heilinger’s book addresses the problem of global justice, and more generally cosmopolitan ethics, from a refined and original perspective. Heilinger tries to develop, and in a certain sense also to outline the first foundations of global relational egalitarianism (GRE), which goes against the more known and discussed global luck egalitarianism (GLE). His premise, quite common in the literature on global justice, is that there exist cosmopolitan circumstances of justice, such that individuals living in different countries find themselves involved in cooperative schemes marked by various forms of structural injustice. Therefore, those who start from positions of advantage manage to grab an excessively large share of the product of global cooperation and so doing they replicate patterns of domination and exploitation through seemingly morally neutral individual actions, such as buying a cheap product made for a few dollars by a person living in a developing country, or engaging in an activity involving the emission of greenhouse gases - and here Heilinger relies primarily on the works of Iris Marion Young to underpin his thesis (pp. 5–8). Heilinger’s thesis is that the ‘circumstances of cosmopolitanism’ are sufficient to justify the existence of duties of egalitarian justice between people living in different countries. The originality of his argument, as I mentioned before, is that for Heilinger these duties do not take place in the neutralization of the effects of what luck egalitarians define as brute luck, i.e. being born with a genetic impairment rather than with a marked talent for tennis, or in a family that can enhance your natural gifts instead of discouraging you from developing them, and that the cosmopolitan interpreters of the theory extend to the various advantages of being born in one country rather than another. For Heilinger, global egalitarianism must be understood in a relational sense, that is, it must set the conditions for people belonging to different countries to relate to each other as equals, i.e. (i) to have sufficient resources available to lead a decent
* Fausto Corvino [email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Lungo Dora Siena 100, 10153 Torino, Italy
F. Corvino
existence, (ii) to participate in the global cooperative scheme without being exploited or dominated, (iii) to make their voice heard on issues that transcend national borders (pp. 107–108). Actually, Heilinger does not clarify how his premise, namely his description of the ‘circumstances of cosmopolitanism’, implies the thesis (GRE), rather than a globalized version of Rawls’s difference principle or global luck egalitarianism. Heilinger’s reasoning would seem to proceed in this way: a) the ‘circumstanc
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