This blog is the backburner for my forthcoming book: John Rawls and Planetary Justice: Implementing a Sustainable and Socially Just Future . (Routledge) Once the book is out of the way I can develop these ideas more fully. ©John Töns 29/07/2020 The Covid Response When we compare the way the Marxist government of Kerala responded to Covid19 to those western democracies committed to some form of neo-liberal agenda one is hard pressed to see merit in the neo-liberal ideology. The facts speak for themselves. Canada and Kerala have approximately the same size population 37 and 35 million respectively. Canada has a per capita GDP of about $50,000 contrasted to Kerala with a per capita GDP of $2,700. Based on just those figures one would expect that Canada would have more resources to protect its population than Kerala. However, Canada had 97,114 cases resulted in 7,960 deaths whereas Kerala had a total of 2096 cases resulting in 16 deaths. (data, 2020) When we look at what sets K
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The President and The Teenager In 2019 a Swedish teenager became the catalyst for a global movement. Much has been written about Greta Thunberg’s ‘emotional address’ to the UN but one the most important statements she made was largely ignored. ‘All you can talk about is money and fairy tales about eternal economic growth.’ With that statement Greta, not unlike the little boy who was not fooled by the Emperor’s new clothes, exposed the abject failure of the climate summits to make a significant difference. President Putin seemingly spoke on behalf of all those naked emperors with his response to Thunberg: The fact that young people, teenagers, pay attention to the acute problems of the modern world is right and good and we should support them. But when somebody uses children and teenagers in their own interests it deserves only to be condemned. Nobody explained to Greta that the modern world is complicated and complex it changes fast. People in Africa and in many Asian
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Why Planetary Justice? 2020 was humanity’s Annus Horribilis; the year opened with fierce bush fires in Australia, rapidly followed with a global pandemic that, at the time of writing, is still largely out of control, this in turn was followed by wild-fires in the USA. These events occurred against a global backdrop of disasters – few on the planet were untouched by these forces of nature. On December 20, 2019 I was putting the finishing touches to what was to become Planetary Justice when a bushfire near my home forced us to evacuate. Practice had invaded my theory. As my community recovered from the fire I noted that people instinctively gravitated to the sort of ideals that I had been reading and writing about. Although Planetary Justice is a book of political philosophy targeted at the academic market; I believe it important that the book reaches a wider audience. If there is one thing that Annus Horribilis did far more effectively than any work on political philosophy i