Social Philosophy Today

Volume 27, 2011

Poverty, Justice, and Markets

Deen Chatterjee
Pages 199-215

Reciprocity, Closed-Impartiality, and National Borders
Framing (and Extending) the Debate on Global Justice

Liberal nationalists have been hard pressed to respond to the normative demands of human rights and global impartiality in justifying special redistributive requirements for fellow citizens in a democratic polity. In general, they tend to support disparate standards of distributive justice for insiders and outsiders by favoring a relational approach to justice that affirms co-national preferences while not denying the importance of global impartiality. Following Sen and critiquing Rawls, I re-frame the debate by re-configuring the notion of relationality with a globalist tilt, with the hope of rescuing the discourse on global justice from its current stalemate.