Sovereignty and global justice

A normative account of global political organization must address three fundamental questions. One concerns the way in which political jurisdictions are to be delimited and their territorial boundaries drawn; another concerns the allocation of powers of sovereignty to those jurisdictions; the third concerns the principles for the distribution of economic benefits and burdens worldwide. The aim of my dissertation is to defend an account of global justice that extends to each of these questions. In doing so, I reject the answers embodied in the prevailing international states system.; In Chapter One, I consider one of the most sophisticated attempts to defend the states system on grounds of political morality—John Rawls's “The Law of Peoples.” I argue that Rawls's defense fails because it is not adequately responsive to its own animating moral ideal, namely the ideal of popular sovereignty. Properly understood, popular sovereignty imposes on global political institutions constraints that are inconsistent with the features of the states system that Rawls defends. These constraints are expressed in two conditions: a deliberativeness condition, which ensures the integrity of the communicative structures required for rational collective will formation; and a pre-commitment condition, which ensures the willing acceptance by individuals of membership in the same polity. Together, these conditions entail a set of political human rights for individuals, and a set of self-determination rights for groups.; Thomas Pogge has proposed a federative model of global political organization that, suitably modified, is responsive to these rights. His account calls for a federative dispersion of sovereign powers among nested jurisdictions, and incorporates a voluntaristic principle for the demarcation of borders. However, Pogge's defense is incomplete. In Chapter Two, I argue that the ideal of popular sovereignty provides the necessary foundation for his model. The same ideal leads us to reject Pogge's assertion of a universal right to democratic governance.; In Chapter Three I articulate and defend a conception of global distributive justice that mandates transfers of wealth from more- to less-affluent societies with the disjunctive target of either immigration-pressure equilibrium—roughly, the point at which (given certain specified background circumstances) all economically motivated applications for immigration are granted—or maximal human development rates for the worst-off societies worldwide.