Der Philosoph als Mediator: Anwendungsbedingungen globaler Gerechtigkeit

Abstract

The purpose of the book is a reshaping of John Rawls’s Justice as Fairness to make it suitable for a theory of a just world order. In laying the foundation for ethics in international relations and law, a multitude of problems arise ranging from foundational problems in meta-ethics to questions of applied ethics in international relations 2710 such as the question of humanitarian intervention and state sovereignty, the universality of human rights, national autonomy and right to secession etc. The book states aporiae and outlines possible solutions, i.e., it states the dilemmas of contract theory and offers a ‘collective hermeneutics’ as an alternative meta-ethical foundation to moral theory; it defends ‘internal universalism’ in moral theory by drawing on similar models from Hilary Putnam’s conception of internal realism. Furthermore, the book attempts a rectification of Rawls’s reception in Germany where Rawls’s ideas on the foundation of moral theory and his conception of public reason have largely been misconstrued or ignored. Major obstacles in any theory of global justice turn out to be objective and subjective circumstances of justice. For the latter, it is demonstrated that the conception of a global original position is contingent on the acceptance of certain elementary humanistic and democratic values failing which the global theory of justice remains internally universal only and cannot claim global validity. Nevertheless, for certain favourable geopolitical areas such as Western Europe and the Balkans the theory has certain valid implications regarding the legitimacy of quests for national sovereignty or autonomy. The implication is that there can be no such thing as a right to national sovereignty unless this idea can be spelt out in the culturally neutral terms of joint security and democratic self-determination. In expanding a global theory of justice beyond the nucleus of Western Europe objective circumstances of justice become equally pertinent: As long as the balance of power tilts towards the side of the superpower, its dominance will prevent a separation of constitutional powers within the United Nations framework and thus subject international law to the caprice of power politics.