Resolving the Two impasses in the Global Justice Debate through a Reconstruction of David Miller’s Account of Deliberative Democracy on the Basis of Habermas’s Conception of Communicative action

Abstract

There are both substantive and methodological disagreements in the global justice debate between cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and statism and liberal nationalism on the other. The substantive disagreement avers that statists and liberal nationalists restrict the regulation of substantive inequality to the domestic sphere, whereas cosmopolitans extend it to the global level. The methodological disagreement is based on the fact that statists and liberal nationalists ground concern for distributive justice in the institutions of citizenship, whereas cosmopolitans focus on the moral equality of human beings. David Miller’s liberal nationalist account of distributive justice differs from the statist account by drawing on a premise about human nature: that a common nationality is a powerful motivational force in supporting the institutions of citizenship within a nation-state. This provides more ethically acceptable justification for restricting the regulation of substantive inequality in the face of the cosmopolitans’ insistence on respecting the moral equality of human beings. However, Miller’s account is incomplete because it fails to explain why human beings’ common moral intuitions and political emotions would justify restricting the regulation of substantive inequality to the domestic level. In this thesis, I will propose a way of extending Miller’s account based on the idea of deliberative democracy at the global level. I will argue that the regulation of substantive inequality could be grounded in institutions of global citizenship based on public deliberation at the global level that would adjudicate among different distributive principles and that this could help to resolve the two disagreements in the global justice debate.