Faux Cosmopolitanism

If you need more evidence that Americans don't care about all people equally (and of course not just Americans are guilty of this practice), today's New York Times reports that more than 3,000 Iraqi civilians died in the month of June. That number is higher than the number of casualties from 9/11. And the victims are just as innocent. But people aren't glued to their TVs in shock and horror, are they?

I'm about a third of the way through Martha Nussbaum's new book, Frontiers of Justice (reviewed here). She argues that Rawls's social contract theory doesn't provide adequately for justice to the disabled, to non-human animals, and, most importantly for purposes of this post, to people across international borders. The fictitious "original position" assumes that the parties to the social contract are in roughly equal positions of power (after all, the hallmark of a contract is a quid pro quo, and if you don't have anything, you have nothing to trade away). But there are remarkable disparities of power across people in different countries.

I'll post a fuller review of Nussbaum's book shortly.