Global Justice as an Empirical Question

T he question of global justice is among the most salient and controversial issues of our day. In the popular press it inspires a constant stream of books, articles, and film documentaries. It serves as the calling card for a major new social movement in rich and poor countries throughout the world ~sometimes referred to as the “anti-globalization” movement!. And it is an increasingly prominent issue in mainstream politics in Europe and the developing world ~though not yet in the United States!. If present trends continue, debates over global justice may become as ubiquitous in the 21st century as debates over socialism were in the previous century. Needless to say, opinions on this feverish topic diverge wildly. Many believe that the contemporary era has been characterized by increasing injustice on a global level. Others contend that justice is winning the day. Disagreement can also be found on all variety of causal questions. Some believe, for example, that globalization is a primary cause of global injustice ~Barber 1995; Kim et al. 2000; Mander and Goldsmith 1996!. Others insist that the process of global inter-connections should be viewed as a cure for global ills ~Bhagwati 2004; Kitching 2003; Larsson 2001; Mandle 2002; Wolf 2004!. Arguably, the most important reason for this profound divergence of views is that there is no generally recognized metric by which advances and declines in global justice might be assessed. Consequently, diverse points of view proliferate, while none can be effectively refuted. People believe what they are pre-disposed to believe. Ships pass in the night. Scholarly progress, like political consensus, is dependent upon reaching agreement on how to conceptualize and measure key concepts. In the absence of such agreement, descriptive, causal, and predictive arguments cannot meet for they are directed at fundamentally different empirical facts. This is precisely the sort of conceptual chaos that characterizes current debates over global justice. The first objective of this article is therefore conceptual. I wish to show that regardless of our moral and theoretical starting-points we may be able to reach agreement on at least one important cross-national indicator of global justice—the infant mortality rate ~IMR!. This does not preclude the use of additional measures, of course; but it does vastly enhance the empirical tractability of a fraught subject. The second objective of the paper is descriptive. With IMR as a metric, I chart the progress of global justice over the past two centuries. I show that global justice, by this measure, has made dramatic advances over the course of the 20th century. I also show that much remains to be accomplished. This short paper thus embraces topics that are normally segregated into “normative” and “empirical” components. It is my view that we can, and should, do more to integrate normative inquiry into social science endeavors, and that we can, and should, address controversial topics of concern to the general public ~Gerring and Yesnowitz 2006!.