International Justice In An Age Of Globalization

Abstract

The topic of international justice has become, in the last two decades, a prominent part of political philosophy and an important subject for political philosophers to address. But there is yet a good deal of disagreement about the role that a conception of international justice should play in regulating the terms of international cooperation. Some argue that international justice has a limited role to play, specifying norms for state conduct for a rather narrow set of issues. Proponents of this limited view do not think that norms of international justice should include principles of distributive justice, which they take to be limited to domestic conceptions of justice. On the other hand, there are those who argue for a very robust conception of international justice, one that essentially replaces the domestic conception and calls for economic redistribution spanning the whole world. In the papers that follow, I engage with each of these positions on international justice, and sketch my own account of the right approach. I contend that it is a mistake to limit the role of justice, including distributive justice, to only the domestic sphere, arguing instead that it should be extended to transnational systems of cooperation. We have, I suggest, vast global economic interdependence as well as international legal coercion, both morally relevant phenomena that require the application of principles of distributive justice; for, as I point out, there is much that takes place on the international stage that eventually makes its way to the level of individual citizens and affects their prospects in a significant way. I do not, however, go so far as to suggest that we simply replace domestic conceptions of justice with an international one. It is my view that both domestic and international conceptions of justice are necessary, each working to address the subject-matter specific to it.