Corporations and other powerful contemporary institutions take decisions that increasingly impact the possibilities for well-being not only of those who work or live within them and are governed by them but also of distant people who are deeply affected by their functioning. This democratic deficit raises the question of whether the workers and others who are so affected should have a say in the policies that set the basic conditions for their own livelihoods and flourishing. This chapter sketches an understanding of the scope of the All-Affected Principle, taking it as an important addition to the “common activities” principle that requires democratic rights for the members of an institution or community. It proposes that both principles require democratic management (or “workplace democracy”) within firms, and suggests that the All-Affected Principle is especially apt for addressing the exogenous effects of decisions on people beyond the firm, or on distant people impacted by the institutions of global governance. The chapter goes on to consider applications of the All-Affected Principle for other labor rights under capitalism, including the right to form unions, support for care work, and for the unemployed.

Contemporary democracies are facing ever increasing threats of authoritarian rule on the part of their own leaders, along with the emergence of powerful white nationalist social movements. In this difficult political context, those committed to reform have called for a recommitment to democracy, including restoring and expanding voting rights, and limiting the power of money. Yet, several theorists (myself among them), have argued that we need to go beyond this, not only by deepening democracy but also by expanding its domain, extending it to corporations and firms and to social institutions, as has also been proposed by feminist ethics, e.g., as caring democracy.In this paper, I want to argue that a key element is missing in the standard analyses of democracy’s difficulties, one that is at least partly theoretical and normative in nature.I argue that the deeper meaning of freedom has been obscured within the dominant liberal democratic tradition, taking this to include both liberal and libertarian approaches. And although authoritarianism falls outside both of these more mainstream approaches, it benefits from the fecklessness of the traditional understanding of liberty, which also, I believe, enables it to propagate itself in perniciously inegalitarian as well as antidemocratic ways.

Recently, people on both sides of the Atlantic have been wrestling with questions concerning the priority they should give residents of their own country versus distant others. In Europe, the issue of the acceptance and treatment of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa came to prominence. Likewise, in the USA, President Trump attempted to bar Muslims from entering the county, increased the deportation of undocumented migrants fleeing violence and hardship in Latin America and drastically cut the number of admissible refugees. The issue of priority to ‘countrymen’ has also arisen in debates about international trade, as well as in regard to foreign aid and the obligation to maintain regional and global alliances. These practical contexts raise questions of what we owe ‘outsiders’, whether they be distantly situated or attempting to migrate to our own or to a different state, and the conflicting solidarities. Should we always stand in solidarity with fellow citizens or other members of our own political communities, or should we equally prioritize solidarity with oppressed or suffering others outside our borders? In this chapter, I attempt to clarify these issues by analysing two main senses of solidarity and discussing the question of negotiating between them when they conflict.

Introduction

Two features of social interaction that have been proposed as fundamental bases for the achievement of global justice are the recognition of others (including in their differences) and care for the vulnerable. How do these features function within a political theory of transnational democracy, human rights, and justice across borders? Although some attention has been given to care as a relevant disposition or way of acting, care work in international political economy has most often been neglected by current global justice theories. Caring for others and the labor of care pose for us the question of whether changes are required in our political and social norms to support these forms of relationships and to address any oppressive modes that may attach to them. This chapter considers both the question of the types of recognition required for the extension of equal positive freedom, and the place of care in an account that seeks to highlight network solidarities, along with a social – as well as political – interpretation of human rights.

Recognition and care are not entirely separate phenomena; they are interconnected in various ways, especially in distributive justice contexts. Several theorists have called for the recognition of groups, particularly cultural minorities, within a broad justice framework, while care theorists have argued that we need to go beyond that to attend to individuals’ particular needs and vulnerabilities, counting these vulnerabilities among the relevant differences that should be recognized and supported within contemporary societies. In order to bring care into an account of global justice in this way, however, its political rather than purely interpersonal aspects will need to be analyzed. While I have thus far focused on solidarity, including networks among groups, as relevant for transnational politics, it will be seen that care and recognition have import for dealing with differences in those contexts. Care work too requires analysis, along with the development of new policies for facilitating it and for carrying out the responsibilities it entails. Beyond these issues, the question can be posed whether care itself should be recognized as a human right, in addition to the ones currently acknowledged in morality and law.

Introduction

In a provocative article for the journal Foreign Policy some years ago, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris argued that the true “clash of civilizations” between the Muslim world and the West does not concern the status of democracy, as Huntington and others supposed, but rather attitudes toward gender equality, divorce, abortion, gay rights, and so on. On the basis of surveys of values in these different cultural contexts, Inglehart and Norris concluded that there is wide agreement among Muslim and Western populations on the value of democracy. But such agreement is very much missing in regard to women’s equality or what they call other “self-expressive” values such as tolerance for a variety of sexual lifestyles.

In fact, the analysis that these authors offer poses troubling issues of research methodology, especially concerning how these culturally defined values are interpreted and more generally constructed, and how the various terms such as equality are used. But I am not concerned here with disputing their empirical results. Rather, granting that there remain significant differences in the valuation of women’s equality and the perception of appropriate gender roles and identities in diverse cultural contexts, I want to consider the normative attitude that one can take to these differences, in light of a commitment to the value of women’s equality.

Introduction

In recent years, we have witnessed significant democratic transformations initiated by people who have been able to mobilize and organize in part through the use of social media and, more generally, ICTs. The two most prominent cases were the revolutionary overthrow of various autocratic governments in the course of the Arab Spring of 2010–11 and its aftermath, and the Occupy Wall Street/99 Percent movement of 2011–12, following on the rebellions and participatory methods initiated by the Indignatos in Spain. Predictably, perhaps, these progressive democratic movements have been followed, in the first case, by instability, renewed repression, and violence in several of the Arab countries, and, in the second, by a decline of interest and participation in Occupy and the 99 Percent movement, marked also by increased dissension about tactics and strategies in both of these contexts.

What can we learn about the democratic potential of the Internet from these two cases? Going beyond online deliberation as discussed in Chapter 11, how can online networking be used to foster participatory democracy at this historical juncture? Given that the Internet in its social and political functions and its underlying technology continues to evolve rapidly, we need to try to avoid the rapid obsolescence that can mark discussions of this type. It would be helpful to keep the analysis at a somewhat general level, and focus on key features of contemporary democracy, online and off, that we want to enhance, and some rough directions for encouraging those enhancements in the future development of ICTs.

Introduction

It should be clear from the foregoing chapters that the fulfillment of global justice and human rights, as well as increases in democracy, cannot be accomplished through political changes alone, or by means of individual acts of humanitarianism or charity. In this part of the book, I want to investigate some of the key social roots of global justice and related norms, and to consider the social dispositions and transformations that their fulfillment requires. In this investigation, the notion of solidarity and the related concept of mutual aid loom large. Later in this part, I take up care and recognition, gender equality in diverse cultures and the issue of interpreting human rights, expression in cross-cultural perspective, and new cooperative notions of power that may help to deal with contemporary violence and the problems it poses for extending democracy and justice transnationally.

This chapter attempts to re-envision solidarity from its primary historical meaning as a relationship binding all the members of a single cohesive group or society toward a conception more suitable for the new forms of transnational interrelationships that mark contemporary globalization. It considers the supportive relations we can come to develop with people at a distance, given the interconnections that are being established through work or other economic ties, through participation in Internet forums and especially through social media, or indirectly through environmental impacts. Solidarity relations are reconceptualized here as potentially contributing to the emergence of more democratic forms of transnational interaction within regional or more fully global frameworks of human rights, for which I have argued earlier in this book and in previous work. Beyond this, I propose that affective relations of solidarity are an essential complement to the recognition of these human rights themselves. This new notion of solidarity is understood here as one of overlapping solidarity networks. It will be seen that this conception also engages the idea of justice, and indeed of global justice, in an important way.

Introduction

Philosophers operating within a cosmopolitan framework have made powerful claims regarding what global justice requires of us. Beginning from the premise of the fundamental equality of persons, whether understood primarily in terms of interests, agency, or dignity, it is argued that there are strong requirements to more equally distribute wealth, resources, or opportunities so as to alleviate poverty, or to meet basic needs, or to develop people’s capabilities so they can be relatively equally agential in the course of their lives. Although drawing on different philosophical frameworks – consequentialist, contractarian or contractualist, capabilities and positive-freedom based – these approaches can be highly demanding in requiring massive aid to the poor, or else comprehensive redistributive schemes at the global level, or at the very least intensified forms of development assistance. They may also call for the introduction of institutional frameworks to effect these distributions and to promote development, and they may contain innovative proposals for changes to the international system.

Among the prominent approaches is Peter Singer’s call for affluent people to donate a substantial percentage of their income to poverty relief, more institutionally oriented calls for the implementation of a global difference principle, as in the early work of Charles Beitz, or Thomas Pogge’s proposals for a global resource dividend. Again, cosmopolitan luck egalitarians concerned with the deep economic inequalities at the global level may propose achieving genuinely equal opportunity by correcting for the unchosen features of people’s circumstances such as the availability of natural resources, since these so affect their life chances. Alternatively, they may focus on the way that existing institutions function to transform natural facts about people or their environment into social disadvantages and on institutional ways of correcting that in the interest of equality.

Introduction

We have described some positive normative directions that are enabled by globalization’s facilitation of communication across borders. But equally striking is its facilitation of transnational forms of violence. Over the past period, we have witnessed salient examples of transnational violent terrorist attacks, as on 9/11, as well as transnational responses to them via the introduction of a coordinated security apparatus and the extension of forms of militarization across borders. Numerous other globalized forms of violence also permeate contemporary politics, including the proliferation of private military firms, transnational criminal and sex trade networks, and new forms of war-making tied to global economic and political processes.

In this chapter, I want to consider how our conceptions of power and democracy can be expanded in order to better counter these forms of transnational violence. The empirical democratic peace hypothesis – that democratic states tend not to go to war against each other – is often introduced as evidence to support democratization as a way to mitigate violence between nation-states. But it is not clear whether or how such a hypothesis could apply to more transnational forms of violence, carried out especially by nonstate actors. Moreover, the conceptual interrelations that underlie this peace hypothesis and especially the connections between power, democracy, and violence are not well understood.

Introduction

Free expression has most often been considered as a right or capacity of individuals. Although free expression has been theorized for its political import, the social dimensions of such speech or expression have received less scrutiny. An exception perhaps has been the philosophical reflection on dialogue, though even that has often been viewed through the lens of democratic deliberation. Of course, all speech as communication is social by nature. This chapter attempts to delineate some of the less obvious social dimensions of freedom of expression, both as a phenomenon and, to a degree, as a right. The analysis focuses especially on the exemplary use of speech in the telling of jokes. The connection of jokes to a particular audience that understands them and to which they are directed will be seen to raise interesting questions both of inclusion and exclusion that are especially relevant to the possibilities for cross-cultural speech. Although jokes, and humor more generally, are in some ways idiosyncratic, I think that they may nonetheless help to reveal some of the limitations and possibilities of understanding speech and communication in increasingly dominant transnational contexts.

Taking off from Ted Cohen’s helpful work Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, this chapter first considers what jokes presuppose about the individuals or community that hears them, and some of the problems that can arise when they are taken as derogatory towards another culture. It then looks at some of the ways that jokes can facilitate social and political protest. The chapter goes on to briefly consider other forms of social speech, and especially deliberation, along with its role in the functioning of voluntary associations and social movements. These various analyses provide a basis for some tentative conclusions about the sociality of free speech, about the conditions for avoiding exclusionary or oppressive speech, and concerning whether a global audience for humor and other forms of social expression is possible, or perhaps even desirable. Although the main focus is not on the basic philosophical justification of the right to free expression, these social aspects of speech suggest some additional factors for this justification.

Introduction

In this chapter, I analyze the concept of positive freedom more fully, retrieving it from critics like Berlin and defending its importance. I indicate how it differs from liberal conceptions of choice and autonomy, and indeed goes beyond even feminist reconceptions of autonomy in more social terms as “relational autonomy.” I want to explicate the ways in which positive freedom is a more open and dynamic conception than traditional understandings of liberty or freedom, and suggest that it is better able to take into account the interdependence of persons. When viewed in an intercultural context, moreover, the proposed understanding of freedom has implications for how we understand universality, and requires a norm of concrete universality.

The first part of this chapter takes off from Isaiah Berlin’s critique of positive liberty, which has resonated through decades of liberal theory. Building on criticisms already advanced by C. B. Macpherson, I first indicate how – contrary to Berlin’s allegations – positive freedom does not in fact entail the mastery of the state or of a collectivity over the individuals within it. I then move to further explicate the conception of positive freedom, understanding it as self-developing or self-transformative activity, in a sense that requires the availability of a set of conditions, material and social. The positive freedom conception also presupposes the important notion of negative liberty, but in an interpretation that includes freedom from oppression, domination, or exploitation, as well as the traditional liberties. Yet, the notion of positive freedom points to the importance of economic and social human rights, in addition to civil and political ones (along with the significance of institutional design for fulfilling these human rights). It also gives rise to rights of democratic participation in a range of joint activities and institutional contexts, as discussed in Chapter 4. I focus here on the comparison of positive freedom with the ideas of autonomy and relational autonomy, and consider the implications of these various interpretations of freedom for the possibility of universal or fully global norms.

Introduction

A human right to democracy is controversial, at least among political philosophers, if not on the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and even Iran. Although the UDHR specifies a right to take part in the government of one’s country – including free elections with universal suffrage – in an Article sometimes referred to as specifying a right to democracy, the term democracy is not explicitly mentioned, perhaps because of political concerns at the time of its drafting. Indeed, some philosophers have advanced influential arguments against recognizing such a human right, generally proceeding from within a Rawlsian framework of justice. In this chapter, I begin by considering – and putting aside – some of the objections that have been lodged against recognizing democracy as a human right. Among these objections are:

1. (1) that if democracy were recognized as a human right, that would enable forcible intervention to impose it on countries that lack it, which would in turn involve interference with the internal affairs of the country involved;

2. (2) that requiring democracy would also violate the premier human right of self-determination and would additionally not show an appropriate level of toleration for societies that are not fully liberal though presumably respectful of human rights (what Rawls calls “decent societies”);

3. (3) and relatedly, that it would involve a Western or liberal imposition on societies organized around a common good or social harmony conception; and

4. (4) perhaps most problematically, that democracy requires equality, which is too demanding for some societies, and is not required by a minimal or less demanding list of human rights.