Global Justice and Civilizational Dialogue

Author: Xu Jilin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-11-01
Features: Most of the papers in this issue were submitted to an international academic conference held in Shanghai in January 2004. The theme of the conference was "Global Justice and Cross-Cultural Dialogue," organized by the Institute of Modern Chinese Thought and Culture at East China Normal University, co-organized by the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Relations in the United States and the Center for Theory of Science and Humanities at the University of Bergen in Norway. The conference was originally scheduled for May 2003; however, the outbreak and spread of SARS in the spring and summer of that year forced the conference to be postponed. This also gave the over 20 participants from China, the United States, Norway, Germany, Israel, Australia, and other countries more time to reflect on the Iraq War that broke out around the same time. The issue of war, along with human rights and poverty, formed the main realistic background of this conference—and thus also of this collection of essays. The core concept of the political theory of American philosopher John Rawls is "justice," while the core concept of the political theory of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas is "dialogue." These respectively constitute the two key terms of the theme "Global Justice and Civil Dialogue." We might also say that the international political theories of Rawls and Habermas together form the main theoretical background of the conference—and of this collection of essays. However, "global justice" is not a simple extension of Rawls's "Theory of Justice," and "civil dialogue" has never been the focus of Habermas's "Theory of Communicative Action." Unlike Rawls's own proposal, his student Thomas Pogge, through a breakthrough in the "domestic version" of Rawls's theory of justice, did not arrive at an "international theory of justice" but rather a "global theory of justice." The difference between the two lies in the fact that the former subjects are states, while the latter subjects are individuals. The former treats state sovereignty as a basic fact and an important principle, while the latter, on the one hand, acknowledges that the sovereignty of states is increasingly constrained by globalization trends, and on the other hand, emphasizes that individual rights should become the normative foundation of the basic order of international political economy. Correspondingly, over the years, Quentin Skinner and John Arato, who have been Habermas's "sympathetic critics," one dedicated to using the later Wittgenstein tradition to supplement Habermas's theory and focusing more on specific practices and particular contexts when arguing for global universal principles of justice, and the other dedicated to introducing the perspective and achievements of civilizational analysis and comparison since Weber (including comparisons of Chinese and Western political thought traditions by figures such as Xiao Gongquan, Schwartz, Tu Dawei, and Alvin Y. Lee) into political philosophy, thereby broadening the foundation for civil dialogue on global justice. Of course, "cross-cultural dialogue on global justice" does not mean "dialogue on global justice between representatives of different civilizations (cultures)." From the articles in this issue, it can be seen that the authors have consciously broken through the limitations of their original cultural backgrounds and consciously adopted the perspectives of different dialogue participants. For example, scholars such as He Baogang, Han Shuifa, Xu Jilin, and Wu Jiangong from China, as well as Western scholars, have taken a critical stance toward Western perspectives and Western theories. The American philosopher Allison Jaggar, for instance, uses the 2003 online petition campaign "Save Amira" as an example to argue that the perspectives of the Third World and feminism are necessary in discussions of global justice, serving as a good example of critical reflection on "Western perspectives" from Western scholars. Some authors of the papers included in this issue, though not in attendance, generously agreed to have their papers included in this collection, including the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, the British philosopher David Miller, the Hong Kong philosopher Shi Yuankang, and the Taiwanese philosophers Qian Yongxiang and Chen Yizhong. The issue of global justice is clearly not a purely philosophical one; the "inter-rational judgment" that Skinner refers to should play an important role in the discussion of this issue. Many of the papers in this issue go beyond the scope of philosophy, but the contribution of economist Wei Sen to the interdisciplinary nature of this collection remains irreplaceable.