Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 53, Issue 3, Page 317-333, Fall 2022.

In addition to having an institutional site or scope, a theory of distributive justice might also have an institutional ‘reach’ or currency. It has the first when it applies to only social phenomena. It has the second when it distributes only socially produced goods. One objection to luck egalitarianism is that it has absurd implications. In response, Tan has defended a luck egalitarian account that has a strictly institutional reach. I argue, first, that Tan’s view contains two fatal ambiguities and, (...) second, that, to be sound, it requires an institutional currency. This second argument implies that virtually all extant luck egalitarian currencies are incompatible with his approach. I argue, third, that the alleged absurd implications often have little to do with the extent of luck egalitarianism’s reach. (shrink)

Supporters of open borders sometimes argue that the state has no pro tanto right to restrict immigration, because such a right would also entail a right to exclude existing citizens for whatever reasons justify excluding immigrants. These arguments can be defeated by suggesting that people have a right to stay put. I present a new form of the exclusion argument against closed borders which escapes this “right to stay put” reply. I do this by describing a kind of exclusion that (...) has not been discussed in depth, which I call “territorial exclusion.” Territorial exclusion is the process according to which the group that wishes to exclude current citizens secedes from the territory in which those citizens reside. I argue that the wrongness of territorial exclusion explains why there is no pro tanto right for a state to exclude immigrants, because otherwise there would be a pro tanto right for the state to kick people out by seceding from the territory they inhabit. Because kicking people out like this is typically wrong, borders cannot be closed. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary work on the nature of borders and society has enriched and complicated our understanding of democracy, community, distributive justice, and migration. It reveals the cognitive bias of methodological nationalism, which has distorted normative political thought on these topics, uncritically and often unconsciously adapting and reifying state‐centered conceptions of territory, space, and community. Under methodological nationalism, state territories demarcate the boundaries of the political; society is conceived as composed of immobile, culturally homogenous citizens, each belonging to one and only one (...) state; and the distribution of goods is analyzed according to a stark opposition between the domestic and the international. This article describes how methodological nationalism has shaped central debates in political philosophy and introduces recent work that helps dispel this bias. (shrink)

When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different (...) liberal-democratic states and depends on two underlying considerations: the amount of discretion held by the state's officeholders; the extent to which the democratic procedure is deliberative rather than aggregative. (shrink)

This article argues that a state-centered theory of global justice exhibits an epistemic problem of perspective, and that this worry exhibits a gendered character. Within a liberal domestic theory of justice, the public/private distinction has been repeatedly shown to be bad for women because it creates a domain for injustice that becomes invisible to public policy and the law. This article argues that state-centered theories of global justice create an analogous space that is cut off from questions of global justice. (...) The article therefore suggests that this way of framing questions of global justice is problematic, and is problematic for women in particular. Just as the public/private distinction in liberal domestic justice leaves cases of injustice outside the vision of the law, the hard distinction between the domestic (state) sphere and the international realm of justice leaves cases of injustice invisible to international law. For the question of global justice, the privileging of sovereignty and non-intervention compromises the ability of the theory to achieve its purported goal of universal justice. (shrink)

Clients may feel trapped into sharing their private digital data with insurance companies to get a desired insurance product or premium. However, private insurance must collect some data to offer products and premiums appropriate to the client’s level of risk. This situation creates tension between the value of privacy and common insurance business practice. We argue for three main claims: first, coercion to share private data with insurers is pro tanto wrong because it violates the autonomous choice of a privacy-valuing (...) client. Second, we maintain that irrespective of being coerced, the choice of accepting digital surveillance by insurers makes it harder for the client to protect his or her autonomy. The violation of autonomy also makes coercing customers into digital surveillance pro tanto morally wrong. Third, having identified an economically plausible process involving no direct coercion by insurers, leading to the adoption of digital surveillance, we argue that such an outcome generates further threats against autonomy. This threat provides individuals with a pro tanto reason to prevent this process. We highlight the freedom dilemma faced by regulators who aim to prevent this outcome by constraining market freedoms and argue for the need for further moral and empirical research on this question. (shrink)

This essay asks what it is about the practice of trade that grounds duties of justice between states as trade partners. The answer advanced is that such duties are grounded in the dependence that trade generates. The essay puts forward four conditions that a plausible account of grounding in trade must meet: it must admit of degrees, explain the distinctly international character of trade justice, ground both procedural and distributive duties, and it must be a necessary feature of all trade (...) relationships which generate duties of justice. A dependence account of grounding meets all four conditions, and does so in an intuitively compelling way. While other accounts of what grounds duties of trade justice can meet some of the conditions, none can meet all of them. Relative to rival candidates, then, the dependence account provides a firmer foundation for the ongoing attempts to develop a comprehensive theory of trade justice. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Reference to the state is ubiquitous in debates about global justice. Some authors see the state as central to the justification of principles of justice, and thereby reject their extension to the international realm. Others emphasize its role in the implementation of those principles. This chapter scrutinizes the variety of ways in which the state figures in the global-justice debate. Our discussion suggests that, although the state should have a prominent role in theorizing about global justice, contrary to what is (...) commonly thought, acknowledging this role does not lead to anti-cosmopolitan conclusions, but to the defense of an “intermediate” position about global justice. From a justificatory perspective, we argue, the state remains a key locus for the application of egalitarian principles of justice, but is not the only one. From the perspective of implementation, we suggest that state institutions are increasingly fragile in a heavily interdependent world, and need to be supplemented—though not supplanted—with supranational authorities. (shrink)

The debate about justice in immigration seems somehow stagnated given that it seems justice requires both further exclusion and more porous borders. In the face of this, I propose to take a step back and to realize that the general problem of borders—to determine what kind of borders liberal democracies ought to have—gives rise to two particular problems: first, to justify exclusive control over the administration of borders (the problem of legitimacy of borders) and, second, to specify how this control (...) ought to be exercised (the problem of justice of borders). The literature has explored the second but ignored the first. Therefore, I propose a different approach to the ethics of immigration by focusing on concerns of legitimacy in a three-step framework: first, identifying the kind of authority or power that immigration controls exercise; second, redefining borders as international and domestic institutions that issue that kind of power; and finally, considering supranational institutions that redistribute the right to exclude among legitimate borders. (shrink)

Paternalism is widely viewed as presumptively justifiable for children but morally problematic for adults. The standard explanation for this distinction is that children lack capacities relevant to the justifiability of paternalism. I argue that this explanation is more difficult to defend than typically assumed. If paternalism is often justified when needed to keep children safe from the negative consequences of their poor choices, then when adults make choices leading to the same negative consequences, what makes paternalism less justified? It seems (...) true that ordinary adults have capacities enabling them to promote their interests in ways most children lack. This can explain why paternalism is more often justified towards children than adults. What is not explained, however, is why paternalism would be justifiable for children, but not adults, when neither possess the relevant interest-promoting capacities—exactly the cases when paternalism towards adults might be considered. I argue that this dilemma undercuts capacities-based explanations for the belief that childhood is distinctively relevant for the permissibility of paternalism. I then address defenses of both consequentialist and deontological versions of the capacities-based explanation. Absent this capacities-based explanation, I argue that the intuition that less demanding justificatory standards apply to paternalism when directed at children than when directed towards adults presents unresolved problems for egalitarians. (shrink)

I examine the main anticosmopolitan Rawslian argument, the ‘basic structure argument.’ It holds that distributive justice only applies to existing basic structures, there are only state basic structures, so distributive justice only applies among compatriots. Proponents of the argument face three challenges: 1) they must explain what type of basic structure relation makes distributive justice relevant only among compatriots, 2) they must explain why distributive justice (as opposed to allocative or retributive) is the relevant regulative concept for basic structures, and (...) 3) they must put forth a plausible concept of distributive justice. I show that Rawlsians support what I will call the ‘division of labor thesis’ to answer the first two challenges. Briefly, the division of labor thesis holds that distributive justice only becomes relevant where members of a division of labor jointly produce some socioeconomic product. To meet the third challenge, Rawlsians seem to accept what Elizabeth Anderson calls the ‘modern systemic concept of distributive justice’ – the idea that distributive justice organizes entire economic systems with respect to their distributive consequences or the relationships they maintain. I argue that if Rawlsians accept the systemic concept, they should reject the anticosmopolitan basic structure argument. (shrink)

This article identifies value‐satiability sufficientarianism as a distinctive version of the sufficiency view, which has been ignored in the literature on distributive justice. This is unfortunate because value‐satiability sufficientarianism is much better equipped than alternative sufficiency views to cope with the standard objections against sufficiency. Most often, sufficientarianism refers to satiability as a feature of moral principles and reasons. But value‐satiability sufficientarianism also invokes satiability in the space of value‐theory, as it determines the sufficiency threshold at the point where justice‐relevant (...) values have been completely fulfilled. The article gives examples of how this view is widely apparent in the literature, and it provides some reasons in its favour. It then presents the two standard objections against sufficientarianism – the threshold objection and the indifference objection – and argues that these critiques do not apply to value‐satiability sufficientarianism. The general argument of the article therefore proves sufficientarianism more difficult to refute than is commonly credited. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Singer has recently argued that questions related to corporate governance are beyond the reach of Rawls’s political conception of justice. This is because justice applies to the basic structure of society, understood as society’s legally coercive structures, and because corporate governance cannot be considered part of this structure in political liberalism. This commentary challenges the second part of the argument. First, it suggests that the criterion used to exclude corporate governance from the basic structure—whether employees can exit economic organizations—is not (...) conclusive for corporate governance, notably as institutionalized in corporate law. Second, even if the focus were on corporate governance, it would still be possible to argue that it legally coerces citizens, if not employees, in a relevant way. Thus, the argument is not successful in demonstrating that political liberalism goes beyond its legitimate boundaries when considering that aspects of corporate governance may be matters of justice. (shrink)

Democratic institutions and practice depend on trust, in two ways. Citizens must trust each other to abide by shared rules and norms that together govern a political community; it is a feature of democratic states that they direct their resources not to enforcement of rule abidingness, but rather towards providing collective and public goods. Instead, states rely on the semi-voluntary compliance of citizens with these shared norms and laws. Citizens must also trust their political representatives, who via their election are (...) granted discretion to make decisions that will have significant impact on the lives of those they represent. Yet, according to many scholars across many disciplines, this trust is at risk of being undermined, if it hasn’t yet been so. The possible reasons for weakened and broken trust are many, ranging from escalating wealth inequalities, to increasing cultural and ethnic diversity, to political incompetence of both voters and political representatives, to corruption among political representatives. In this article, I examine the trust that underpins the discretion accorded to elected representatives, to identify when the improper use of this discretion may reasonably be thought to be a source of distrust. In particular, I argue that where discretion is used arbitrarily, it may threaten to undermine the trust relations between citizens and their representatives, and therefore the efficient and effective running of democratic states. (shrink)

According to the coercive approach to distributive justice, the coercive nature of the political state requires justification in the form of distributive benefits owed only to members of the state. In this paper I analyze and dismiss traditional objections to the coercive approach, and I proceed to raise two novel objections. First, according to my equivocation objection, I contend that the coercive approach’s leap from coercive burdens to certain distributive benefits is based on an equivocation. When this equivocation is clarified, (...) the conclusion of the coercive approach is undermined. Attempts to circumvent the equivocation inevitably lead to my second objection, the coercion as cooperation objection. Through this objection it becomes clear that the coercive approach collapses into the cooperative approach, an approach to distributive justice that may change the scope of distributional obligations beyond that of the political state. (shrink)

International institutions have become increasingly important not only in the relations between states, but also for individuals. When are these institutions legitimate? The legitimacy standards fo...

The global city is a contested site of economic innovation and cultural production, as well as profound inequalities of wealth and life chances. These cities, and large cities that aspire to ‘global’ status, are often the point of entry for new immigrants. Yet for political theorists (and indeed many scholars of global institutions), these critical sites of global influence and inequality have not been a significant focus of attention. This is curious. Theorists have wrestled with the nature and demands of (...) global justice, but have for the most part supposed that the debate is between statist and cosmopolitan formulations. Questions of redistribution, immigration, humanitarian obligations, coercion at borders, and territorial rights have correspondingly been cast as either the domain of sovereign territorial states, or of the nascent web of supranational institutions that might bind those states and peoples, morally and legally. Examining some of these issues and arguments through the lens of the global city casts them in a new and informative light, and buttresses an associative turn in thinking about global justice. (shrink)

The vast majority of health research resources are used to study conditions that affect a small, advantaged portion of the global population. This distribution has been widely criticized as inequitable and threatens to exacerbate health disparities. However, there has been little systematic work on what individual health research funders ought to do in response. In this article, we analyze the general and special duties of research funders to the different populations that might benefit from health research. We assess how these (...) duties apply to governmental, multilateral, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations. We thereby derive a framework for how different types of funders should take the beneficiaries of research into account when they allocate scarce research resources. (shrink)

Some public reason liberals identify coercive law as the subject matter of public justification, while others claim that the justification of coercion plays no role in motivating public justification requirements. Both of these views are mistaken. I argue that the subject matter of public justification is not coercion or coercive law but political decision-making about the basic institutional structure. At the same time, part of what makes a public justification principle necessary in the first place is the inherent coerciveness of (...) a legally organized basic institutional structure. While most public reason liberals seem to presuppose that the meaning of “coercion” is sufficiently obvious so as not to warrant further analysis, my defense of the essay’s main thesis explicitly draws on an account of coercion as a powerful agent’s employment of enforceable constraints to determine the will of another agent. (shrink)

Risk is a problem for theories of justice and ethics. It seems to be both the case that it is prima facie wrong to cause non-negligible risk for others and that we very often do cause non-negligible risk for others. When others consent to be subjected to the risk, we are arguably justified in causing it. This leaves us with the problem that very few risk-generating actions are actually consented to. Using consent to justify creating risk, then, must make use (...) of a notion of hypothetical consent. I argue that we can infer hypothetical consent in some cases only when we share an adequate basic structure with the people placed at risk. This, however, leaves unresolved the problem of creating risk for people in other countries. We must either cease causing such risk or invite them into a shared basic structure. (shrink)

This paper proposes a problem-based approach to theorizing about global justice as opposed to what I call a paradigm-based approach. The latter confronts questions of global justice from an established ideal of justice normally constructed for the domestic context. The problem-based approach engages global justice issues without the presumption that that they must be accessible from an established (domestic) framework of justice. One advantage of the problem-based approach is that it does not foreclose engagement with practical matters (by defining some (...) issues, such as global equality, as non-problems); another is that it has a more reflective and revisionary approach to theorizing about justice (as when new challenges compel re-examination of our established theories of justice). (shrink)

Do territorial rights include the right to exclude? This claim is often assumed to be true in territorial rights theory. And if this claim is justified, a state may have a prima facie right to unil...

Since G.A. Cohen’s influential criticism, John Rawls’s focus on the basic structure of society has fallen out of favor in moral and political philosophy. The most prominent defenses of this focus has argued from particular conceptions of justice or from a moral division of labor. In this dissertation, I instead argue for the Rawlsian focus from the ways in which social institutions establish new obligations, rights and powers. I argue that full evaluation of individual conduct requires that we evaluate the (...) practices within which an individual’s actions occur. Likewise, full evaluation of practices often requires evaluating the systems within which actions occur. I argue that we should treat the basic structure of society as a moral subject because the full evaluation of the various institutions that constitute the basic structure requires that we evaluate the basic structure as a whole. This argument shows the advantages of the Rawlsian approach even when we do not accept contractualism, constructivism or the two principles of justice. We need only accept the view that the major social institutions establish obligations, rights, and powers for individuals as members of society. (shrink)

Nussbaum’s moral cosmopolitanism informs her capability-based theory of justice, which she uses in order to develop a distinctive model of cosmopolitan democratic education. I characterize Nussbaum’s educational model as a ‘statist model,’ however, because it regards cosmopolitan democratic education as necessary for realizing democratic arrangements at the domestic level. The socio-cultural diversity of virtually every nation, Nussbaum argues, renders it mandatory to educate citizens in a cosmopolitan fashion. Citizens must develop empathy and sympathy towards all co-citizens of their domestic polities (...) and cope effectively with socio-cultural diversity. I criticize Nussbaum’s statist model, because it neglects that due to the ways in which international institutions already constrain national decision-making, citizens will not fully enjoy the human freedom of co-determining the political choices that affect their lives unless international affairs are further democratized. Therefore I suggest extending Nussbaum’s statist model and outline an ‘internationalist model’ of cosmopolitan democratic education. (shrink)

Rising powers are fundamentally shifting the relations of power in the global economic and political landscape. International political theory, however, has so far failed to evaluate this nascent multipolarity. This article fills this lacuna by synthesizing empirical and normative modes of inquiry. It examines the transformation of sovereignty exercised by emerging democracies and focuses especially on the case of Brazil. The paper shows that – in stark contrast to emerging democracies’ foreign policy rhetoric – the ‘softening’ of sovereignty, which means (...) that emerging powers gain as well as lose certain aspects of sovereignty, has become the norm. The paper explores this softening of sovereignty from the perspective of global justice by assessing it on the basis of globalist, statist, and internationalist conceptions of global justice. We find that the emergent multipolarity contributes in various ways to the realization of the distinct socioeconomic and political criteria of these three conceptions of global justice. However, we also point out that the transformation of sovereignty generates particular problems for the realization of all three conceptions. (shrink)

In this article I consider Thomas Pogge’s thesis that affluent countries are violating the human rights of the global poor by contributing support to the current global institutional order. My claim is that affluent countries are not violating the human rights of the global poor in the ways suggested by Pogge. I start by defining a set of conditions that ought to obtain in order to say that a human rights violation has taken place. Then I consider two possible interpretations (...) of Pogge’s thesis and argue that none of them fulfills the conditions required to speak of a human rights violation. On my view, as long as domestic states have the capacity to fulfill the human rights of their own people, poverty constitutes a domestic human rights violation even if the international institutional order somehow contributes to creating this state of affairs. Finally, I examine what transnational duties human rights entail and claim that affluent countries must contribute to the creation of an international order providing domestic states accurate background conditions for the promotion of human rights at the domestic level. (shrink)

Investor-state-dispute-settlement is an arbitration mechanism to settle disputes between foreign investors and host-states. Seemingly a technical issue in private international law, ISDS procedures have recently become a matter of public concern and the target of political resistance, due to the power they grant to foreign investors in matters of public policies in the countries they invest in. This article examines the practice of ISDS through the lenses of liberal-statist theories of international justice, which value self-determination. It argues that the investor-state (...) arbitration system illustrates how liberal-statist theories of international distributive justice ought to care about relative socioeconomic disadvantage, contra the sufficiency principle that they typically defend. The sufficiency principle draws on a questionable conception of the freedom that self-determination consists in. (shrink)

Do the demands of egalitarian justice extend to the international realm? Some believe that a positive answer follows from a simple line of reasoning: where a child happens to be born is a morally arbitrary fact; accordingly, it shouldn’t unduly influence her life prospects, as will inevitably be the case unless economic inequalities between countries are ironed out. I argue that this style of argument overlooks an important problem concerning the extent to which a person can unilaterally impose enforceable obligations (...) on others by choosing to have a child. I maintain that properly egalitarian duties of distributive justice only arise when this problem of unilateral imposition has been solved. I further argue that solving the problem requires robust political institutions that do not exist in the international context—institutions instantiating a version of what John Rawls calls pure procedural justice, to ensure that the aggregate result of individual reproductive choices is acceptable to all. (shrink)

Over the last decade, states have increasingly emphasised the importance of integration, and translated it into legal regulations that demand integration from immigrants. This paper criticises a specific aspect to this development, namely the tendency to make permanent residency dependent on language skills and, as such, seeks to raise doubts as to the moral acceptability of the requirement of linguistic integration. The paper starts by arguing that immigrants after a relatively short period of time acquire a moral claim to permanent (...) residency in their host country. Accordingly, states may not limit residency at their discretion. Nevertheless, three arguments may seem promising for defending the requirement of linguistic integration: that the immigrants’ moral claim conflicts with a stronger moral claim on the part of the larger society, and this makes an infringement of the immigrants’ claim proportionate; that language requirements may be legally demanded as a precondition for permanent residency for the immigrants’ own sake; and that language requirements are defensible, as far as immigrants may be understood to have consented to such regulation upon entry to the country. This paper argues that all three must be rejected. (shrink)

Does the kind of socialist ideal articulated by G. A. Cohen in Why Not Socialism? add anything substantial to the Rawlsian conception of justice? Is it an ideal that Rawlsians should want to take on board, or is it ultimately foreign to their outlook? I defend a mixed answer to these questions. On the one hand, we shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which Rawls's theory already addresses the concerns that motivate Cohen’s appeal to the socialist ideal. Within the bounds of (...) a society living up to Rawls’s two principles of justice, I maintain, there would be little room left for an ideal of social relations to do any independent work. On the other hand, Cohen’s ideal may still have an important role to play within Rawlsian theory – not within the confines of a given society but on the international stage, beyond the liberal state as we know it. This asymmetry between the domestic and the international case stems from the fact that Rawls's principles of justice apply in full strength only at the domestic l... (shrink)

En este artículo sostengo que ciertos principios igualitaristas de justicia distributiva tienen alcance solo local y no también global. Me baso en la teoría de Michael Blake, quien afirma que el contenido y alcance de los principios de justicia dependen del tipo de coerción que se ejerce en determinado ámbito. A esa teoría se le critica que no es capaz de identificar un tipo de coerción que solo exista en el ámbito local y no también en el global. Me propongo (...) responder a esa objeción mediante una analogía que muestra que solo en el ámbito local el control coercitivo es continuo, mientras que el control coercitivo que existe en el ámbito global es intermitente. (shrink)

Pluralistic theories of global distributive justice aim at justifying a plurality of principles for various subglobal contexts of distributive justice. Helena de Bres has recently proposed the class of disaggregated pluralistic theories, according to which we should refrain from defending principles that apply to the shared background conditions of such subglobal contexts. This article argues that if one does not justify how these background conditions should be regulated by principles of a just global basic structure, then the realization of the (...) principles that are justified for the subglobal contexts of distributive justice can erode and undermine justice over time. For example, the realization of justice in international trade might undermine climate justice, at least if climate justice requires increasing tariffs but justice in international trade calls for reducing tariffs. Principles of a just global basic structure would have to ensure that such justice-eroding spillover effects from one to another context of justice do not occur. Finally, the article responds critically to de Bres’ objections that an account of a just global basic structure is too idealistic, not action guiding, and superfluous. (shrink)

Do states have a right to exclude prospective immigrants as they see fit? According to statists the answer is a qualified yes. For these authors, self-determining political communities have a prima facie right to exclude, which can be overridden by the claims of vulnerable groups such as refugees and children born in the state’s territory. However, there is a concern in the literature that statists have not yet developed a theory that can protect children born in the territory from being (...) excluded from the political community. For if the self-determining political community has the right to decide who should form the self in the first place, then that right should count against both newcomers by immigration and newcomers by birth. Or so the concern goes. In this essay, I defend statism against this line of criticism and provide a liberal justification for the inclusion of children born within the state’s borders. My account leads to some surprising implication for citizenship law, as well as immigration arrangements in the area of asylum and unauthorized immigration. (shrink)

This paper develops a domination-based practice-dependent approach to justice, according to which it is practices of systemic domination which can be said to ground demands from justice. The domination-based approach developed overcomes the two most important objections levelled to alternative practice-dependent approaches. First, it eschews conservative implications and hence is immune to the status quo objection. Second, it is immune to the redundancy objection, which doubts whether empirical facts and practices can really play an irreducible role in grounding justice. In (...) theorising dominating practices in terms of practices of social power, a domination-based approach makes justice dependent on factual information in three ways: First, the principle of non-domination is indeterminate and can only be spelled out by taking into view particular contexts of domination. Second, the principle of non-domination is conditional on the existence of practices of social power. Third, social power possesses a structural ontology – to know whether A has social power over B we need to turn to social rules distributing agents' higher order status of normative authority towards each other. This explains in what way practices of social power – and of domination – are both factual and normative practices and hence how such practices are non-redundant in grounding justice. (shrink)

This paper examines the distinction drawn by Amartya Sen between transcendental and comparative theories of justice, and its application to Rawls' doctrine. It then puts forward three arguments. First, it is argued that Sen offers a limited portrayal of Rawls' doctrine. This is the result of a rhetorical strategy that depicts Rawlsian doctrine as more “transcendental” than it really is. Although Sen deploys numerous quotations in support of his interpretation, it is possible to offer a less transcendental interpretation of Rawls. (...) Second, the dichotomy between transcendental and comparative approaches to questions of justice is partly misleading, insofar as any plausible moral doctrine has both transcendental and comparative elements. Transcendental elements are necessary to avoid the confusion between the general acceptance of a norm, value or principle and its justification. A comparative view highlights the conditions of application of the doctrine to the real world, taking into account the possibility of moral dilemmas, evaluative disagreements and limited resources, while proposing possible provisos and caveats to the risk of the doctrine being self‐defeating. Third, although the transcendental approach is useful, it is argued that in elaborating this dichotomy Sen overlooks the merits of the third way between comparative and transcendental doctrines, what he calls “conglomerate theory,” and also the possibility that his doctrine (the capability approach) might be considered as an example of such a theory. The paper concludes with the argument that conglomerate theory does not aim to produce complete moral orderings, but rather a comparative approach with transcendental elements, as a form of weak transcendentalism. (shrink)

What counts as global ‘harm’? This article explores this question through critical engagement with Thomas Pogge’s conception of negative duties not to harm. My purpose here is to show that while Pogge is right to orient global moral claims around negative duties not to harm, he is mistaken in departing from the standard understanding of these duties. Pogge ties negative duties to global institutions, but I argue that truly negative duties cannot apply to such institutions. In order to retain the (...) global force of negative duties, we need to dissociate these duties from global institutions: each society’s negative duty to stop harming specific other societies ought to be seen as independent of global institutional change. In order to establish this thesis, I criticize both the features and the derivation of Pogge’s variant of negative duties. I conclude that one must see global negative duties as applying to the relations between specific sovereign societies as unitary agents rather than to global institutions. I then show how this view of negative duties can yield significant global reform, based on Pogge’s own accusations concerning democracies’ conferral of trading privileges upon dictators who embezzle state resources. After presenting the normative, empirical, and strategic advantages of such reform, I anticipate Poggean objections. (shrink)

A central theme throughout Thomas Pogge's pathbreakingWorld Poverty and Human Rightsis that the global political and economic orderharmspeople in developing countries, and that our duty toward the global poor is therefore not to assist them but torectify injustice. But does the global orderharmthe poor? I argue elsewhere that there is a sense in which this is indeed so, at least if a certain empirical thesis is accepted. In this essay, however, I seek to show that the global order not only (...) does not harm the poor but can plausibly be credited with the considerable improvements in human well-being that have been achieved over the last 200 years. Much of what Pogge says about our duties toward developing countries is therefore false. (shrink)

I provide an alternative to the two prevailing accounts of justice in immigration policy, the free migration view and the state discretion view. Against the background of an internationalist conception of domestic and global justice that grounds special duties of justice between co-citizens in their shared participation in a distinctive scheme of social cooperation, I defend three principles of justice to guide labor immigration policy: the Difference Principle, the Duty of Beneficence, and the Duty of Assistance. I suggest how these (...) principles are to be applied in both ideal and nonideal circumstances. Finally, I argue that the potential conflict between these principles has often been overstated, and propose priority rules for genuine cases of conflict. (shrink)

Three perspectives on international trade are present in current debates. From the first perspective, trade is regarded as a set of individual transactions among consenting parties and considerations of fairness and justice barely feature, if at all. The second perspective underlines the importance of background structures for trade, maintained by states, which gives rise considerations of fairness and justice. One prominent version of this perspective, for example as defended by Aaron James, views all trading states as having in principle equal (...) claims to the gains from trade. A third perspective puts the focus on exploitation. In this special issue, Mathias Risse and Gabriel Wollner claim that the first perspective should be abandoned and that the type of approach that is instantiated by James fails. This article does not follow them in dismissing the second perspective in its entirety. It suggests that there is a different version of this perspective that is defensible and develops key elements of that version. In a second step, the article seeks to show that, even if there were no plausible account of fairly dividing gains from trade among states, fairness in trade would still generate demanding normative requirements – that can be and should be integrated into a theory of global justice. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that fairness in trade calls for relaxing existing WTO rules to include a greater liberalisation of labour migration. After having addressed several objections to global egalitarianism, it will argue, first, that the world’s rich and the world’s poor participate in a same multilateral trading system whose point is primarily to reduce trade barriers, and hence to establish global economic competitions, in order to raise their standards of living; second, that these competitions are subject to requirements (...) of formal and substantive fairness; and, third, that the substantive fairness of the competitions that are taking place in the field of trade in goods is likely to require a greater liberalisation of labour migration, especially low-skilled labour from developing countries. (shrink)

Are democratic egalitarians bound to endorse statism? It seems so, since they insist on democratic reciprocity, and no such relation exists in the global realm. Would it not, then, be inconsistent to endorse both cosmopolitanism and democratic egalitarianism? Democratic egalitarians seemingly face a dilemma: either they accept statism, or they must explain why not. Luck egalitarianism, by contrast, seemingly grounds more straightforwardly the claim that justice is global in scope. My thesis is twofold: first, I show that democratic egalitarians can (...) escape the dilemma, to the effect that, as such, they need be committed neither to statism nor to cosmopolitanism, and that luck egalitarians are not as shielded from the dilemma as it might seem. Second, I defend the plausibility of global social egalitarianism against both statist variants of democratic egalitarianism and luck egalitarianism, and suggest a form of division of labor between domestic and global justice. (shrink)