first review www.theglobalsite.ac.uk 2001

Sean Sayers

Unbounded justice

O’Neill, O. Bounds of Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, ISBN 0 521 44744 5, £12.95 paperback.

According to Plato, the true philosopher will take on political power only with great reluctance. Onora O’Neill is a prominent political philosopher: specifically, a latter-day Kantian and a follower of Rawls. She is also Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge and, as Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve, a crossbench Peer in the House of Lords. I have no idea whether she was at all reluctant to take on these positions. Happily, on the evidence of the present book, they do not appear to have compromised her philosophy.

The book is a collection of essays written during the past decade or so, more or less revised for republication. It is divided into two parts. The first deals with abstract and metaphysical themes in Kant’s moral and political philosophy, the second with contemporary applications of this philosophy, focusing particularly on questions of international justice.

O’Neill’s Kantianism is qualified. Like Rawls, she wants to `improve’ Kant in line with modern liberal thinking. That means `correcting’ Kant’s lack of concern for democracy, his exclusion of workers and women from active citizenship, his restriction of economic justice to questions of property, and so on. Also, she wants to develop Kant’s ideas on international justice in the light of the modern world situation.

Again like Rawls, O’Neill comes out of the analytic tradition and her philosophy is broadly empiricist in character. Rawls is particularly uncomfortable with the metaphysical and systematic aspects of Kant’s legacy. He has consistently attempted to domesticate Kant’s Germanic style of philosophizing into a more empiricist and pragmatic outlook, to develop a Kantian account of justice `within the canons of a reasonable empiricism’ as he puts it. O’Neill, by contrast, is more at ease with Kantian metaphysics. She has considerable sympathy for Kant’s views on reason, freedom, action and judgement. The essays in the first part of the book explain and defend Kant’s treatment of these themes in the context of recent philosophical work on these topics. These pieces are written in a clear and pleasant style. They are informative and helpful on some of the central topics in Kant’s ethics and will be useful to students and others wanting to keep abreast with recent work in this area.

The main challenge to the Rawlsian and Kantian approach in recent years has come from communitarianism. O’Neill is aware of this, but unfortunately she is at her weakest when dealing with this school and the issues it raises for the Rawlsian account of justice. Indeed, this turns out to be the Achilles heal of the book. However, this becomes apparent only in part two in which the attention turns to more practical issues. The focus is on questions of international justice in the post cold war world. This area of political philosophy has traditionally been polarised between `realists’ and `cosmopolitans’. The former take nation states as givens of international relations and considerations of justice to apply only within their boundaries. Cosmopolitans by contrast insist that there are universal principles of justice which apply to all human beings just as such, regardless of which state they belong to (for example, the notion of universal human rights, which was used so effectively in criticism of Soviet-style communist regimes in the seventies and eighties). Kant was a qualified cosmopolitan, and Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1972), is the leading modern work of this school.

However, since the fall of communism, communitarianism has been growing in influence. This theory cuts across the division between realism and cosmopolitanism. There are two aspects to the theory. On the one hand, it holds that principles of justice are rooted in the practices and traditions of particular communities, hence they are limited in scope and relative to particular societies and times. Thus, like realism, communitarianism maintains that principles of justice apply only within the boundaries of particular societies. On the other hand, these boundaries are themselves continually being altered and transcended, especially in recent times by the development of global institutions and structures. As the world is brought together through the growth of the world market and other forces of globalization, so principles of justice need to be applied on an increasingly international scale. A more and more globalized world leads inevitably to the development of increasingly cosmopolitan and universal ideas of justice. According to communitarianism, such ideas are not the products of abstract Kantian metaphysics, but of real historical and economic developments.

Rawls has been highly responsive to the first of these strands of communitarian thinking over the years. He has retreated from the abstract universalism of A Theory of Justice towards a `political not metaphysical’ conception of justice which recognises that what is regarded as `just’ and `reasonable’ is subject to social limits. It is not a product of the universal operation of abstract principles, but a matter of what the members of a particular community agree upon, and it is always rooted in particular traditions and practices. However, he has been less aware of the implications of the impact of globalization.

O’Neill’s response has been quite different. On the one hand, she is less open than Rawls to communitarian arguments at a philosophical level, she wants to retain a Kantian cosmopolitan and universalist account of justice. On the other hand, she is more conscious of the impact of the changing world order on modern thinking about justice.

These two aspects of her thought do not sit happily together. O’Neill has not sufficiently understood the significance of the communitarian approach. Although she is aware that thinking about international relations has changed greatly in the last decade, she is puzzled about the reasons for this. She finds it paradoxical that at a time when the forces of globalization have been growing so strongly, there has also been a remarkable growth of particularism and communitarianism which defends the claims of local and national practices and institutions. However, the air of paradox begins to dissolve when one sees that the impact of globalization is contradictory. As Marx long ago understood, at the same time as it undermines and destroys traditional societies and cultures, it also brings even the most remote and isolated areas of the world within the network of global institutions and into the modern world. These developments provoke correspondingly contradictory responses and divergent conceptions of what is right and just, both within and beyond the societies affected: contradictory attitudes to `modernization’ in both the developing and the developed worlds.

In contrast to Rawls, O’Neill rightly argues that thinking about justice can no longer be confined within the boundaries of nation states or traditional communities. Newly emerging global institutions (corporations, banks, international financial and political institutions, developmental agencies, NGOs, etc.) are increasingly the focus for concerns about international justice. This is an important implication of developments during the last decade, and O’Neill is quite correct to insist that philosophy must respond to them. Unfortunately, however, the abstract and metaphysical Kantian notion of justice to which O’Neill commits herself in the first part of the book does not lay down a satisfactory theoretical basis on which to do so. For the universal conception of rationality and justice which it involves provides no grounds on which to take into account the role of particular and changing institutions. Here Rawls’s `political’ account of justice, which has learned some of the lessons of communitarianism, is better placed, though it needs to follow O’Neill’s lead in thinking through the implications for justice of the changing world order. Despite these reservations, however, the great virtue of these essays is that they engage seriously with these issues in a searching and thought-provoking way.