While justice within a state has been a central topic of political philosophy since antiquity, it is only over the last few decades that sustained attention has been given to the topic of global justice. Over this period, several central questions for theories of global justice have arisen. What is the proper scope of justice (‘the scope question’)? Which specific duties towards compatriots and foreigners do we have (‘the duty question’)? How should we measure global justice (‘the measurement question’)? This volume contributes to our understanding of each of these issues.
It opens with Pablo Gilabert’s ‘Justice and Beneficence’. Gilabert explores perhaps the most fundamental aspect of the scope question, namely, the issue of where justice ends and beneficence begins. Advocates of restricting the scope of justice have argued that it is not justice but other values, such as beneficence, that apply across the boundaries of states. In order to appraise such arguments, we must get a clear sense of what justice and beneficence actually are. Gilabert defends a ‘capacious’ understanding of justice that ‘helps us identify stringent demands, enables us to engage in important substantive debates, is tolerably determinate, helps us fulfil the critical role of considerations of justice and makes it possible to clarify the stakes in important contemporary debates about justice (especially about global justice)’.
Saladin Meckled-Garcia contribution, ‘Two Concepts of Justice – and of its Scope’, addresses related issues regarding the definition of justice and that definition’s role in global justice debates. Specially, Meckled-Garcia defends a ‘treatment-focused’ view according to which ‘social distributive justice or fairness is a special form of evaluation in which, only the actions of a certain kind of agent are justice-apt’. This contrasts with an ‘outcome-focused’ view, which does not require the presence of special institutional agents for justice to apply. Meckled-Garcia suggests that arguments against restricting the scope of justice assume the outcome-focused view. This may render these arguments circular, as the dispute between some scope-restricting views and non-scope restricting views (typically strong forms of cosmopolitanism) is precisely whether justice is focused on treatment or outcomes.
Both these disputes about scope and the duty question are handled in Richard Arneson’s ‘Extreme Cosmopolitanisms Defended’. A moderate form of cosmopolitanism, which assumes that we have both general duties founded on our common humanity and special duties grounded in associative relations such as nationality, is widely accepted in the global justice literature. Arneson defends two ‘extreme cosmopolitanisms’ according to which we have no special duties to conationals or even (on the ‘very extreme’ view) to anyone, emphasising that we might recognise the non-instrumental value in a relationship without thereby assigning duties relating to it. In the course of his defence, he resists recent arguments that aim to show that state coercion and social cooperation trigger special duties towards compatriots.
The next two articles, Richard Child’s ‘The Global Justice Gap’ and Zofia Stemplowska’s ‘Doing More Than One’s Fair Share’, address conceptually problematic cases of global justice duties. Child considers the possibility of a ‘global justice gap’, defined as ‘the state of affairs in which the just entitlements of the global poor do not correlate with the justly enforceable duties of the global rich’. He argues that such a gap can arise where two components of justice, relating to fairness and legitimacy, do not align. ‘Basic distributive fairness’ specifies a perfectly fair impartial distribution, but this may be unachievable without violating the ‘principles of justified coercion’, which reflect such considerations as personal prerogatives and associative reasons. Though it may be within the capacity of the rich world to increase global fairness, it may be illegitimate and therefore unjust to bring about the exercise of this capacity through coercion.
Stemplowska considers a different global justice shortfall, brought about where individuals fail to exercise their duties towards the global poor. Her question is what implications this noncompliance has for compliers who are left in a position to do more than their fair share and ‘take up the slack’. Stemplowska maintains that the view that non-compliance does not affect compliers’ duties to aid as these duties are parcelled out in advance ‘is either without foundations or the foundations are normatively unappealing’. Defending the alternative view that compliers are under the duty to take up the slack, she argues that several allegedly counterintuitive implications of this view are, on closer examination, quite acceptable.
The final two papers, Alexander Brown’s ‘Global Equality of Resources and the Problem of Valuation’ and Carl Knight’s ‘Climate Change, Fundamental Interests, and Global Justice’, concern the measurement question. Brown considers how to operationalise the principle of giving each individual an equally valuable share of global natural resources. How exactly is one to decide the comparative value of two bundles of resources? The article puts forward three ‘adequacy constraints’ on a valuation mechanism: it must not ‘assume the existence of some prior distribution or anticipated distribution of natural resources which is itself arbitrary’, it must not make anyone ‘legitimately feel alienated by it’ and it must not involve ‘unfair discrimination against an individual (or individuals)’. Brown argues that his favoured ‘Global Equality of Resources’, which is an extension of Ronald Dworkin’s well known theory, can meet these constraints.
Knight deals with the measurement question in the context of climate change, one of the most pressing practical problems of global justice. Several writers seek to ground human rights against climate change-induced harms in an account of fundamental interests. Finding that this approach has difficulty where fundamental interests conflict, Knight proposes an alternative view that measures global justice according to utilitarian, prioritarian and luck egalitarian principles. Combining this approach with real-world estimates of climate damages, he argues that global justice requires major climate change mitigation efforts.