Session Information
07 SES 13 C JS, Education for Citizenship and Social Justice
Joint Symposium NW07 and NW23
Contribution
Globalisation - in both empirical and normative ways – raises significant issues for how we understand justice. Indeed, since the early 1990s there has been an exponential growth in research and policy literature that has explored different features of globalisation and social justice, including international trade, human rights, development, human trafficking, conflict, the environment, and natural resources. A concern common across this work has been to show that the impacts and benefits of globalisation have not been, and continue not to be, experienced equally. The economic gains made by the few have come at the expense of the many, who have been subjected to neoliberal financial and economic systems shaped by the interests of profit and consumption rather than by wider principals of justice and human wellbeing (Dower, 1991; Pogge, 2002; Caney, 2005). Globalisation raises serious and pressing questions about the ethical nature of our relationship with others as well as how we might act in ethical ways to address globalisation’s discontents. Indeed, to understand global justice we must first understand the basis of one’s ethical relationship to others living in the world. This paper explores global justice in relation to ideas about global ethics, and identifies issues and implications for education for global citizenship in England. It is argued that to understand global justice must necessarily involve a conception of the moral relationship between people living beyond national boundaries, and that in order to be meaningful, such an ethic must include a basis for motivation. In exploring these questions, the focus will be on forms of cosmopolitan moral theory that place importance on the existence of universal human relations and obligations beyond any particular local or national connections, and which seek to locate motivational concern as deriving from these obligations (Dobson, 2006; Dower, 2010, 2014; Drydyk, 2014; Linklater, 2006) Drawing on Fraser’s (2005) three-dimensional understanding of global justice, it is argued that to take political-representational justice seriously we must have an understanding of the ethical relationship between humans. Parekh’s (2005) principle of the ‘globally oriented citizen’ is identified and defended, before some implications of the discussion in relation to the English context for education for global citizenship. While England is used as a contextual case, the arguments made will be of interest across educational jurisdictions.
References
Caney, S. (2005) Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press Dobson, A. (2006) ‘Thick cosmopolitanism’, in Political Studies. 54. 165-184. Dower, N. (1991) ‘World poverty’, in P. Singer (ed.) A Companion to Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dower, N. (2010) ‘Questioning the questioning of cosmopolitanism’, in S. Van Hooft and W. Vandekerckhove. Questioning Cosmopolitanism. London: Springer. pp. 3-20. Dower, N. (2014) ‘Global ethics: dimensions and prospects’, in Journal of Global Ethics. 10 (1). 8-15. Drydyk, J. (2014) ‘Foundational issues: how must global ethics be global?’, in Journal of Global Ethics. 10 (1). 16-25. Fraser, N. (2005) ‘Reframing justice in a globalizing world’, in New Left Review. 36 (Nov/Dec). 1-19. Linklater, A. (2006) ‘Cosmopolitanism’, in A. Dobson and R. Eckersley (eds.) Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parekh, B. (2005) ‘Principles of a global ethic’, in J. Eade and D. O’Byrne (eds.) Global Ethics & Civil Society. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp. 15-33. Pogge, T. (2002) World Poverty and Human Rights. Cambridge: Polity Press.
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