This essay reviews G.A. Cohen’s final major work, Rescuing Justice and Equality. In the book, Cohen challenges the Rawlsian account of the content and the concept of justice. This essay offers a summary of Cohen’s main arguments, and develops objections to several of those arguments, particularly Cohen’s claim that his proposed egalitarian ethos is not vulnerable to a well-known trilemma (liberty, equality, efficiency) that might be pressed against it. The essay’s final section offers critical reflections on the important differences between Cohen’s and Rawls’s views about the nature of justice, and suggests that Cohen’s view may not be helpful if we believe justice is a complex value that includes considerations other than distributive equality.

In Globalizing Justice, Richard Miller offers a novel understanding of the grounds and scope of the demands of global justice. Miller argues that our duties to the global poor should be conceived relationally, that is, as deriving from the very complex and substantial relationships that we, members of rich countries, have with members of poor countries. In this review essay, I ask whether a relational approach to justice is necessary for the kinds of global duties Miller wishes to advance (that fall short of an egalitarian distributive duty). Indeed, so I argue, the global relations Miller describes go beyond grounding a duty to assist the needy, but are sufficient to generate more substantial global egalitarian obligations.