SEMINAR: 'Does Global Justice Presuppose Global Solidarity'

Recent political philosophy has devoted considerable attention to the elaboration of cosmopolitan theories of justice that argue for the need to redistribute resources and goods globally so as to alleviate extreme poverty or to achieve greater equality worldwide. Less attention has been paid to the notion of solidarity in these global contexts and most of the existing work tends to denigrate the possibility of its universalistic applicability, whether because solidarity is taken to apply primarily within a delimited national community with a shared national identity, or because solidarity is thought to have an inherently particularistic meaning that necessarily involves an antagonistic relation to others; or because notions of general human solidarity are held to be inherently vague and empty. In this paper, I begin by evaluating these various grounds for dismissing the applicability of solidarity globally. I then go on to delineate an important sense in which we can say that global justice does presuppose global solidarity. Specifically, I argue that transnational solidarities, understood in terms of overlapping networks, play an important role not only in motivating people’s commitment to the realization of global justice but contribute to its construction or constitution as well.

Carol C. Gould is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and Professor in the Doctoral Programs in Philosophy and Political Science and Director of the Center for Global Ethics & Politics at the Ralph Bunche Institute at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is also Editor of the Journal of Social Philosophy. Gould is the author of Marx's Social Ontology (MIT, 1978), Rethinking Democracy (Cambridge, 1988), and Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (Cambridge, 2004), which won the 2009 David Easton Award from the American Political Science Association. She has edited or co-edited seven books, and has published numerous articles in social and political philosophy, feminist theory, philosophy of law, and applied ethics. She has received fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the NEH, the NSF, the Fulbright Commission, and the Woodrow Wilson International Centers for Scholars.