Radical Philosophy Review

published on February 19, 2019

Justice, Social not Global

In this article, I argue that justice is necessarily inapplicable to the global scale, since there is no such thing as a global society in the proper sense. I examine why this is so, and criticize two types of arguments for global justice—maximalist conceptions (such as those of Charles Beitz and Allen Buchanan) that argue for a robust notion of redistribution on the global scale, and minimalist conceptions (such as those of Thomas Pogge and Iris Young) that argue for a notion of redress or solidarity across borders.