Understanding Justice

To understand the true extent of injustice in the world, and the ways in which it is perpetrated by every nation against their citizens, we must ask ourselves a fundamental question: what is justice? Of course, Amartya Sen would point out that theorizing about justice is much less useful than studying its practical applicability. Therefore, we ought to work toward justice by first identifying those things about China’s rise, and nationalism in general, that are not just.

It is not just for one national government to control the resources of an entire region composed of several nations to leverage a disproportionate advantage for their people. It is not just for a national government to deprive their citizens, and the citizens of other nations of their basic human rights.

Any regime that is dependent on controlling its citizens’ ideology with nationalist propaganda through state controlled media and heavy censorship of free speech is clearly not just. China may have lifted more people out of poverty in the past half century than any nation on Earth, but they are also the world capitol of censorship.

Additionally, the extent to which China’s authoritarian government, from Mao to Xi, practically define the “deference” their people must exchange for “prosperity” includes the deaths of millions in mass famines, the extrajudicial killing of millions, the arrest of political dissidents, and the slaughter of hundreds of protestors who exercised their freedom of speech in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

This degree of “deference,” on behalf of a people towards their government clearly infringes on their basic human rights to live happy, free, dignified lives, and seriously undermines any attempt by China’s government to claim it seeks economic justice, which is dependent on personal freedom, for its people.

Of course, China is hardly the only international actor denying justice to people. Other authoritarian nations adopt similar tactics, and the citizens of democratic nations around the world seem to be electing leaders with more authoritarian, nationalist agendas.

Ultimately, the fundamental problem with this system is that it’s dependent on a flawed way of understanding the world — lifeboat ethics.

Lifeboat ethics is an analogy for the international order put forward by Garrett Hardin that asks us to imagine each nation as an individual lifeboat, floating in a vast ocean. In this analogy, the occupants of each lifeboat have a vested self-interest in maintaining the sovereignty of their lifeboat.

Though there are people swimming in the ocean with no boat and asking to come aboard, Hardin argues that the citizens of the lifeboats must make a rational calculation as to whether they can afford the extra weight of these people without sinking.

The analogy, reasonably enough, appears to assume a limited amount of resources and wealth exist in the world, and are distributed amongst nations. Through this paradigm, it makes sense that citizens and leaders should value their own national interests over the interests of the citizens and leaders of other nations, or the interests of refugees with no nation to call home.

Hardin’s lifeboat ethics also seem to explain why poor whites in the US will choose a billionaire nationalist to represent them instead of a genuine economic populist. In his novel, Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance describes the harsh reality of the cycle of poverty in the bible and rust belts, “the statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future — that if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose, as happened to dozens in my small home-town just last year.”

Yet, despite the depth of their despair, many communities continue to see themselves as involved in an inherent conflict with outsiders for jobs, wealth, and security. Instead of focusing their ire at the multi-billion dollar corporations that automated and outsourced the jobs on which their communities depended, disaffected citizens instead cling ever-tighter to their identity as hardworking, white, Americans.

Because they think they are inherently more deserving of economic opportunity based on their national identity, they limit themselves to leaders who use lifeboat ethics to distract from the class-struggle that lies at the heart of inequality from Rwanda to Ohio, and everywhere in between.

Essentially, a primarily nationalist perspective inhibits justice by elevating an identity based, us-versus-them narrative that distracts from the reality of the situation. Rather than seeing ourselves as floating in separate lifeboats that are steered by our political leaders who have our best interests in mind, we must realize that the decision makers of the world are not in our boat with us.

As long as we stay focused on the boat we’ve been told is ours and the conflicts between boats, we will fail to notice the political elites and profiteers of multinational corporations who float by on a luxury cruise liner, drawing the lines that divide us.

Simply put, we are living with an arcane system designed for a different world. Billions of people think about humanity through a broken paradigm of insiders and outsiders that is fundamentally incompatible with reality. As Kwame Anhthony Appiah describes in his book, Cosmopolitanism, there is a certain way we have been conditioned to think as a result of, “the world that shaped us, the world in which our nature was formed.”

Until very recently, it has made sense for people to think of ourselves as defined by the distinct groups into which we were born and with which we identify. For almost all of the history of human civilization, communication and cooperation on a global scale hasn’t just been unnecessary, it’s been impossible.

Now, the world works differently. With the rapid proliferation of information through the internet and the globalization of finance, manufacturing, and trade, the citizens of the world truly do work together aboard “spaceship Earth,” as Hardin called it — though we don’t all realize it.

Regardless of where we’re born, we share resources, global commons, and a common desire for freedom. As Appiah describes it, “the worldwide web of information — radio, television, telephones, the Internet — means not only that we can affect lives everywhere but that we can learn about life anywhere, too. Each person you know about and can affect is someone to whom you have responsibilities: to say this is to affirm the very idea of morality.”

Though national borders have become effectively obsolete in a globalized economy, we now see aggressively nationalist political ideologies gaining momentum around the world. With every great tectonic shift in the human story, there is bound to be a counter-reaction.

The question then becomes whether the citizens of the world can shake off this phase of nationalism and adopt a new allegiance to their global community that supersedes their national identity. If there is a greater good to be achieved through a shift from global domination to global cooperation, it must begin with the people of the world taking hold of the unjust institutions that prevent us from guaranteeing global justice to all humans.