Foundations for a Contractualist Theory of Global Justice

Abstract

This dissertation is the first step in a larger research project aimed at bridging the gap between Western philosophy and Indigenous thought. Here, I identify a methodological approach to the social contract by analyzing the tradition under an historical lens. I highlight that, along with the justificatory capacities of the social contract, comes a great deal of modelling involved in different versions of the social contract. This modelling comes in the form of four pre-contractual elements that different authors model in different ways. I show how different authors choose different structural problems or injustices that such theories want to address, as well as normative commitments that their theories are committed to, a standard of considerability of interests that identifies whose interests matter for those deliberating the terms of the contract, and a contractual device. I then go on to develop a framework for the development of a theory of global justice. I focus on the first three pre-contractual elements. For the sake of a global theory of justice, I identify four circumstances that need to be the focus of our concerns about global justice: Serious existential uncertainty due to climate change and massive animal extinction; the existence of a shared global institutional framework that forces us to think in terms beyond the state; the disproportionate distribution of the planet’s scarce resources; and the pervasive racial, gender and disabled-bodied-targeted inequalities that are characteristic of today’s world. I then move on to identify the “dignity of being” as a non-anthropocentric, core normative commitment that can be used as the basis for a theory of global justice. I conclude by developing a standard of considerability of interests that can adequately incorporate the interests of diverse beings into the social contract deliberations.