dissertation on distributive justice

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Distributive Justice: Investigating the Impact of Resource Focus and Resource Valence

• Original Paper
• Published: 28 March 2020
• Volume 36 , pages 225–252, ( 2021 )

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• Biyun Hu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2012-1913 1 , 2 &
• Soojung Han 3  

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Distributive justice research is inherently concerned with the fairness of resource allocation decisions. We conducted a quantitative review of the literature (study 1) and a policy capturing study (study 2) to advance understanding of the effects of distributive justice across different resource foci. Based on 261 studies (295 independent samples), study 1 suggests that the effects of distributive justice are generally comparable across different exchange resources (e.g., pay, evaluation, job change). However, the number of studies that examined a specific resource focus was very small ( k  ≤ 5 in most cases), and most studies have left the focus of resource allocation decisions unspecified or referred to multiple foci simultaneously. Consequently, the extant literature provides a limited basis to draw strong conclusions regarding the comparability of distributive justice effects across resource foci. In study 2, using a policy capturing approach with 220 individuals, we found that distributive justice involving pay decisions produced stronger effects on workplace reactions than other exchange resources (e.g., work schedule flexibility, recognition, interesting work assignments, and developmental opportunities). Further, the impact of distributive justice varied depending on the personal valence associated with a given resource.

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While we obtained nearly all of the articles include in Rupp et al.’s ( 2014 ) meta-analysis, we were unable to obtain the following sources: Areerat & Phapruke ( 2008 ), Cho & Kessler ( 2008 ), Elicker ( 2000 ), Freshwater ( 2011 ), Hossam ( 2008 ), Johnson ( 2007 ), Jordan ( 2001 ), Pincus ( 2009 ), Robinson ( 2004 ), Shalhoop ( 2003 ), Stein ( 2010 ), and Walker ( 2009 ). Most of these sources were unpublished dissertations.

Following equity theory (Adams, 1965 ), the high distributive justice cues indicated that the target was allocated the same amount of a resource as comparable others in order to appropriately reflect a state of equity. For clarification sake, indicating that a target gets more than comparable others would reflect a state of positive inequity, not greater equity. To avoid fatigue effects associated with rating too many cues, we elected to focus on negative inequity and equity, without examining positive inequity.

We also tested the hypotheses using job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and overall fairness as separate criterion variables. Substantively, the results were nearly identical whether the analyses were conducted using the aggregate scale or the three separate outcomes. For the sake of conciseness, we focus on the results involving an aggregated workplace reactions scale.

We thank anonymous reviewers for suggesting this comparison.

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Hu, B., Han, S. Distributive Justice: Investigating the Impact of Resource Focus and Resource Valence. J Bus Psychol 36 , 225–252 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-019-09668-1

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Article contents

Global (distributive) justice.

• Siba Harb Siba Harb Department of Political Philosophy and Ethics, KU Leuven
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.983
• Published online: 25 March 2021

Most philosophers agree that it is unjust for one’s life prospects to be determined by one’s race, gender, or social class. And most think that there are demanding duties on members of the same political community (co-citizens) to reduce inequalities that track these features of individuals. But philosophers strongly disagree about how to evaluate inequalities that track the country one is born in. Are global inequalities (inequalities among individuals living in different countries) as problematic and for the same reasons as domestic inequalities (inequalities among co-citizens)? The question of whether egalitarian principles of distributive justice extend globally, beyond the domestic sphere, has been the central question in the debate on global distributive justice. Statists argue that there is something normatively significant about the state, but not the global institutional order, which grounds one’s concerns with domestic inequalities, but not global inequalities. Global egalitarians argue that global inequalities are as unjust to the same extent and for the same reasons as domestic inequalities. The disagreement between both camps can be traced back to different normative, empirical, and methodological assumptions. Statists and global egalitarians can, however, converge on a number of important issues, and the debate can be advanced beyond the stalemate it has reached by investigating these issues of convergence. Significantly, statists can agree with global egalitarians that global justice requires equality of concern (the requirement that interests of all individuals have equal weight), and global egalitarians have reasons to take states seriously to the extent that having a world of states (or multiple political communities) can be shown to be compatible with the requirement of equal concern. Thus, it is important to work out whether individuals have a fundamental interest in being members of political communities, how that interest compares to their interests in opportunities, income, and wealth, and which institutional arraignments can advance these interests according to the right balance.

• equality of concern
• global justice
• global egalitarianism
• nationalism
• self-determination
• world government

The wealth gap between White and Black households in the United States is estimated at 7% (a typical Black household has 7% the wealth of a typical White household). In the United Kingdom, social mobility is strikingly low (on one measure, close to 50% of the economic advantage rich fathers have over poor fathers is transmitted to their sons). The gender pay gap averaged around 16% in European Union countries (the percentage by which women’s gross hourly earnings are lower than men’s) (Gender Pay Gap Statistics, 2020 ). Most people would find these figures problematic. They would be particularly concerned to find out that these inequalities track gender, race, and social class (as opposed to individuals’ choices, for instance). For most, these inequalities make the societies that allow them unjust. One would think a range of measures ranging from institutional reforms to redistributive transfers would be justified and required.

Should people be equally worried about inequalities between individuals living in the richest and those living in the poorest countries? The Human Development Index of France is more than twice that of Mali (the HDI is a composite indicator of life expectancy, education, and per capita income). The median per capita income in Denmark is more than 30 times that of Burundi (in 2013 ). Denmark’s was estimated at US$18,262, while Burundi’s was at US$129. Should one worry about inequalities between relatively well-off populations living in different countries, for instance, in Denmark versus Portugal (Denmark’s is more than three times that of Portugal)? 1

One might be inclined to think that worrisome inequalities are intra-state inequalities (henceforth, domestic inequalities). Inequalities among individuals living in different societies (henceforth, global inequalities) might not seem particularly troubling. Perhaps one thinks that what is troubling about some of the statistics on global inequalities in income is not inequality per se but that some individuals live in abject poverty; inequalities in income and opportunities between someone living in Portugal and someone living in Denmark may not seem troubling.

One might be driven to hold such a view because of a belief that there is something special about the state, which makes inequalities among citizens problematic. And one might think that attempts to reduce global inequalities beyond addressing the problem of poverty would be misguided, unfair, potentially dangerous, and at best a waste of time. Global efforts, one might think, ought to be directed toward reducing inequalities domestically and alleviating poverty abroad. Contemporary political philosophers who subscribe to this view are called statists.

Alternatively, one might be of the view that global inequalities are troubling. One might agree with statists that poverty is particularly grievous but think that even if poverty is eliminated, there should still be concern about some inequalities between individuals living in different societies, since, just as one would reject a view that says there is nothing wrong in a society where no one is poor but where the level of income of one’s parents (or one’s gender or race) substantially determines your prospects, one would reject a view that says there is nothing wrong in a world where no one is poor but where the level of wealth of the country one is born into practically determines your prospects (according to a study by The Economist , “the strongest predictor of how much one earns is where one is born.”) 2 Global efforts, one might suggest, ought to be directed at closing the gap between the rich and the poor globally; limiting concerns to domestic inequalities is misguided, unfair, myopic, and dangerously supportive of the status quo. Contemporary political philosophers who subscribe to this view are called global egalitarians.

Which view is the right view? Is it a statist or a global egalitarian view or some other view in between? Thinking through this puzzle about which kind of inequalities matter and about how one should reason toward an answer is thinking about global justice, the subject of this article. The global justice debate is very nascent—the term global justice barely figured in the philosophical and nonphilosophical debate prior to the 1980s, but it has rapidly reached prominence within political philosophy (for a brief historical overview of the debate, see Scheffler, 2014 ), and with good reason; it is hard to deny that in the early 21st century , many of the most pressing moral problems pertain to global injustices.

The philosophical debate on global justice has rapidly grown into a very sophisticated debate; the disagreements between those engaged in it are increasingly technical. This article tries to carve a path for thinking about the justice of global inequalities. It starts with delineating the subject of global distributive justice, then focuses on a defining question of the global justice debate: whether egalitarian principles of distributive justice extend beyond domestic institutions to global institutions (in doing so, the article is limited to egalitarian theories of justice, defined simply as theories in which the value of equality plays a very important part). It presents the statist and global egalitarian answers to the extension question and considers the main challenges each position faces. Next, the article attempts to move beyond the disagreements over the extension question by noting possible convergences between the statist and egalitarian camps (notably over the extension of equality of concern and over theorizing justice for a world of states). Building on the convergences, the article then takes a closer look at how states can be compatible with global egalitarianism and what that means for how one judges inequalities. The article finishes with briefly introducing “new trends” in the global justice debate and highlighting questions that merit further research.

The Subject of Global Justice

The label “global justice” covers many different philosophical inquiries. In general, inquiries within global justice are concerned with what is owed to others with whom one shares a life on this planet. This is in contrast with theories of “domestic justice,” which offer an account of what those living in the same state (or political community) owe to each other by virtue of their comembership.

This article focuses on one particular subject: the global institutional order. This inquiry into the demands of justice with regard to the global institutional order asks two questions:

how should the global institutional order be designed, and

what principles should guide the division of benefits and burdens resulting from that order such that it can be said to be just, given that the reasons are grounded in the interests of individuals.

This section offers a definition of distributive justice, specifies and motivates the institutional focus, and emphasizes and clarifies the choice of taking of individuals as the relevant holders of entitlements.

Distributive Justice

Distributive justice concerns itself with determining individuals’ social and economic entitlements such as opportunities, income, and wealth. Distributive justice is part of social justice, which is seen to be additionally concerned with interpersonal relations and social standing. There is a vibrant debate among egalitarians over whether individuals’ interest in social standing and relational justice can be part of distributive justice—so-called relational or social egalitarians contend that the distributive framework is inadequate to fully account for the concern with equality (Anderson, 2010 ; Axelsen & Bidadanure, 2018 ; Gheaus, 2016 ; Lippert-Rasmussen, 2015 ; Scheffler, 2015 ). This article is primarily interested in distributive justice and will bracket this intra-egalitarian debate between relational and distributive egalitarians. It focuses on accounts that explain how to distribute, among persons, opportunities and all-purpose goods such as income and wealth (noteworthy here is that with very few exceptions [Brock, 2009 ; Nath, 2015 ], relational egalitarians have focused on issues of domestic and not global justice).

It is helpful to further distinguish distributive justice from similar yet different justice-based concerns (similar because of their contemporary relevance and because they also stem from questions about what is owed to individuals with whom we do not share a state). First, there is reparative justice. The world has and continues to be shaped by a long history of international violence. Invasions, wars, and colonial projects have wreaked harm from which some communities have not recovered. It matters that these historical injustices are recognized, but also that thought is given about responsibility for repairing the resulting harms. This raises questions about reparative justice between communities (or states) and justice between generations (Amighetti & Nuti, 2015 ; Butt, 2009 ; Lu, 2011 ; Thompson, 2001 ; Waldron, 1992 ; Ypi, Goodin, & Barry, 2009 ). The world is also marred by the existence of brutal and murderous regimes and by a rising threat of international terrorism. The nature and scale of the violence presses upon everyone questions about the permissibility of international intervention and the duty to protect individuals from severe harm. This raises questions about the justice of war and humanitarian intervention (Cécile Fabre, 2012 ; Frowe & Lang, 2014 ). This article has little to say that directly addresses the subjects of reparative justice or the justice of and in war (although the section “ The Appropriate Response to Injustice ” touches upon questions of resistance to injustice).

Institutional Focus: The Global Institutional Order

This article focuses on what distributive justice demands with regard to the global institutional order. It has an institutional focus and is primarily concerned with the normative assessment of global institutions and their distributive impact. More precisely, it is concerned with the way major global institutional arrangements and rules that regulate interactions across state borders assign and distribute socioeconomic benefits and burdens among individuals.

The significance of institutions is substantiated further as the article proceeds, but it bears noting that the article’s institutional focus follows John Rawls’s in taking institutions to be central to concerns of justice. According to Rawls, for a society to be regarded as just, its major social and economic institutions, what he calls a society’s basic structure, must be just. This is because the institutions of the basic structure, such as the constitution, the laws, and the economy, form an essential part of the background conditions against which individuals interact. When it comes to the global sphere, organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are often first to come to mind as emblematic examples of global institutions. But, alongside these and other regional and international agreements and treaties regulating global trade and financial transactions, there is a global system of private property rights and intellectual property rights and an international legal system (Buchanan, 2000 ). As this article makes clear, however, the most significant institution of the global structure is the system of states.

It is worth noting some initial implications of limiting the question here to institutional distributive justice. First, in asking what justice requires of institutions, the concern is not, at least not directly, the actions and choices of individuals. Rather, the focus is on the way institutions define individual entitlements and regulate the background against which individuals pursue their interests. This does not mean that individuals are not constrained by demands of institutional justice. For one, the way institutions are designed shapes and constrains individual choices and expectations (what benefits and burdens are attached to different social positions is defined by principles of justice, and individuals make their choices in light of these divisions). Additionally, institutions are designed, run, and sustained by individuals. And individuals, both in their private and public functions, are expected to abide by the requirements of justice and to set up just institutions when they are absent. That said, this article leaves it open as to whether principles of justice should apply exclusively to institutions or if they also apply to individuals (or are derived from principles that apply to individuals) (Cohen, 1997 ; Murphy, 1998 ; Shiffrin, 2010 ).

It is, however, crucial not to mistake the institutional focus with views (sometimes also called institutional views) that take justice to be concerned with existing institutions and exclude from the subject of justice the question of whether institutions ought to be set up. To avoid confusion, this article refers to the latter type of view as institutionally conservative (a view that the section “ Statist Accounts and Their Challenges ” suggests there are no good reasons to support).

Global Justice Versus International Justice

This article takes individuals to be the relevant units whose entitlements principles of justice seek to define. It also takes reasons of justice to be grounded in the interests of individuals. These are commitments that distinguish accounts of global justice from accounts of international justice. Inquiries into international justice take states to be the relevant units among whom justice holds and ground reasons of justice in the interests of states. John Rawls’s account in his book, Law of peoples , is one of international justice (Rawls, 2001b ). There, Rawls is interested in how states ought to interact with one another—or more precisely, what liberal states owe to each other and what they owe to nonliberal states.

To be sure, accounts of international justice may be ultimately grounded in interests of individuals to the extent that state interests are reducible to individuals’ interests. And accounts of global justice can include duties among states. There are two ways, however, in which the distinction plays out clearly (and which becomes clearer as the article proceeds). First, accounts of international justice take interaction between states to be the only relevant interaction at the global level. In contrast, accounts of global justice pierce through the black box of the state and start from the interaction among individuals; they also move beyond states and investigate the impact of all supranational institutions. Second, accounts of international justice take states to be a given whereas accounts of global justice ought to include an account of how all global institutions, including, if not especially states, can be justified to all individuals.

The Extension Question

A central and highly divisive question in the global justice debate has been whether the domestic and global spheres ought to be governed by the same set of distributive principles. This can be called the extension question: Does the scope of principles already identified by theories of justice for the domestic sphere extend to the global sphere? Accounts of global distributive justice can be divided into two camps according to how they answer the extension question: (a) statists who answer with a “no” and (b) global egalitarians who answer with a “yes.” This section presents the main positions within each camp and discusses the central challenges they face.

Before proceeding, it is important to note that the accounts examined here, whether statist or global egalitarian, are egalitarian about domestic justice. That is to say, their starting point is that justice at the domestic level requires a baseline of equal distribution of goods among individuals, deviations from which need special justification (see Hirose & Segall, 2016 ). The disagreement between both camps is whether demands of distributive equality extend to the global sphere. Formulated more precisely, the extension question is about whether equality in the distribution of goods among all humans matters to the same extent as that among compatriots.

To be sure, the choice to limit the inquiry to egalitarian accounts should not be taken to reflect a consensus in the debate about the demands of domestic justice. The question of the correct pattern of justice is anything but settled (see “Distributive Justice” by Hirose & Segall, 2016 ). Rather, the choice reflects the egalitarian bias in the global justice debate (but see Nussbaum, 2006 ). This bias is, in addition to the institutional focus discussed, another way in which Rawls’s theory of justice has shaped the philosophical debate on global justice. Indeed, the earliest treatments of principles of global justice were formulated as a response to Rawls’s brief mention of the question of justice beyond the state in his book, A theory of justice (Barry, 1991 ; Beitz, 1999 ; Pogge, 1989 ; Rawls, 1971 , p. 378). Rawls, radically egalitarian when it comes to domestic justice, suggested that egalitarian principles of justice should not be extended to the global sphere—thus outlining the first statist account and his critics offering the first global egalitarian accounts. That said, it is important to note that the extension question is more broadly relevant to any patterned account of distributive justice—for instance, for sufficientarians (i.e., those who take justice to require sufficiency in goods [see Huseby, 2019 ]), the extension question is whether demands of sufficiency and the thresholds they endorse extend beyond the scope of the domestic sphere.

Statist Accounts and Their Challenges

According to statist accounts, different principles of distributive justice should govern the domestic and global spheres. Typically, statists endorse demanding egalitarian principles domestically and advocate weaker sufficiency-based principles globally. In what follows, a number of influential statist arguments are considered.

To start, it is useful to note that statist arguments share a similar structure that is composed of two claims:

Normative claim: G, a feature of states, is what grounds egalitarian principles of justice.

Empirical claim: G is not a feature of the global institutional order.

Conclusion: The scope of egalitarian principles of justice is domestic and not global.

At the same time, statist accounts can be distinguished on the basis of what they take the ground of egalitarian justice (feature G) to be. Three grounds of egalitarian justice can be distinguished in the literature: coercion, authorship, and cooperation. It would be fair to see the different versions as attempts at interpreting Rawls’s (underdeveloped) argument for why the global institutional order does not raise the egalitarian concerns that the domestic basic structure does. Next, each ground is discussed in turn before considering their challenges.

According to Michael Blake ( 2001 ), state coercion is what grounds egalitarian distributive principles. To back this normative claim about the ground of justice, Blake appeals to both the bads and goods of state coercion. Coercion, understood as the use of force (or the threat of it) to limit or shape individuals’ opportunities and options, is prima facie bad because it constitutes a serious violation of individuals’ autonomy. A state’s legal and political system (e.g., criminal law, property law) coerces its citizens and is, therefore, prima facie bad. But Blake points out that state coercion is also necessary because it makes it possible for individuals to pursue their own ends. This means that doing away with state coercion would be neither feasible nor desirable. Instead of doing away with the coercion, a state must render it justifiable. On Blake’s account, egalitarian principles of justice do precisely that: Among the various possible institutional arrangements, egalitarian institutions are the only ones that can be justifiable to members of the political community.

To the normative claim that egalitarian principles are grounded in state coercion, Blake adds the empirical claim that global institutions do not coerce individuals like states do. According to Blake, the coercion by global institutions is neither pervasive nor necessary. He thereby concludes that the scope of egalitarian principles of justice cannot be extended to the global sphere.

Thomas Nagel ( 2005 ), like Blake, thinks that egalitarian principles of justice are the appropriate response to the special demands of justification that being a citizen of a state gives rise to. But for Nagel the coercive nature of state institutions (as underlined by Blake) is only one side of the story of what grounds egalitarian principles of justice at the level of domestic institutions. Nagel explains that citizens are not only subjects of a state’s legal and political system, but also its authors ( 2005 , p. 128). So, unlike Blake on whose account the violation of autonomy is what requires justification, for Nagel it’s being involuntarily assigned the responsibility of being subject and author that gives each citizen a standing to demand that the laws and norms of her society be justified to her: as subjects, citizens are held responsible for acting in accordance with the laws and norms of society; as authors they are held responsible for any inequalities that result from that system.

To this first normative claim, Nagel adds a second empirical claim submitting that the global institutional order does not engage the will of individuals as subjects and authors. Global institutions, he suggests, are the outcome of voluntary agreements between states and do not claim to speak in the name of individuals. He concludes that egalitarian principles of distributive justice do not apply globally.

Cooperation

According to Andrea Sangiovanni ( 2007 ), it is cooperation in the production of a central class of collective goods and not coercion or authorship that grounds egalitarian distributive principles of justice; not all coercion gives rise to demands of distributive justice and in the absence of coercion, demands of distributive justice still arise when collective goods are cooperatively produced. Sangiovanni submits that demands of distributive justice are demands of reciprocity in the distribution of benefits and burdens of a cooperative scheme where demands of reciprocity are to be understood as demands of fair return. States, Sangiovanni points out, are cooperative schemes that provide central collective goods (protection and security, property rights, rule of law, etc.) and in which the cooperative input of members is heavily dependent on the contribution of others. Given the centrality of what states provide and the degree to which individual contributions are interdependent, Sangiovanni concludes that reciprocity in the context of states requires egalitarian distributive principles: A fair return on members’ cooperation is an equal return on the benefits of cooperation.

When it comes to the global level, Sangiovanni finds that the goods provided through global and international cooperation are of a different nature and that the degree of involvement and interdependency of individual contribution is much less relevant (the argument’s empirical claim). He concludes that a fair return on contribution in the case of the global scheme would be less than egalitarian, sensitive to different considerations.

Challenges to Statist Accounts

Three types of challenges can be distinguished that the statist arguments just presented face. The first targets their empirical premise; the second targets their normative premise; and the third targets an implicit methodological premise. In what follows. each in turn is discussed.

To begin with the empirical critique, statist accounts have been consistently criticized for their erroneous depiction of the global order. In particular, Blake, Nagel, and Sangiovanni have all been criticized for mischaracterizing the kind of cooperation and coercion that take place at the global level and for exaggerating the relevant difference between the domestic and global spheres. For instance, it has been argued that Blake and Nagel are mistaken to think that the global order does not coerce or engage the will of individuals in a relevant manner (Abizadeh, 2007 ; Cohen & Sabel, 2006 ; Julius, 2006 ; Walton, 2009 ); that is, similarly to state institutions, the global order coerces individuals in ways that demand justification. For example, international trade regimes are no more voluntary than state-imposed laws; international trade rules impose requirements on countries which in turn impose them on their citizens. Given the high cost of opting out of international trade agreements, it is injudicious to believe that most states are voluntary participants (in a relevant sense); certainly, individuals are not. Or, and perhaps more importantly, consider the global borders regime. A central feature of the global order is that states have the right to unilaterally control their borders, and border control is a prime example of coercion (Abizadeh, 2007 ). Equally, Sangiovanni’s account has been criticized for wrongly assuming that a state’s central goods are produced solely through cooperation among compatriots (e.g., think of domestic production that relies on international trade and resources) and for neglecting the presence of central collective goods that are produced as a result of cooperation at the global level (e.g., think of environmental goods, or security, and intellectual property rights) (Armstrong, 2009 ).

But this line of criticism, while instructive, risks getting mired in empirical disputes over similarities and differences between the state and global institutions. A more powerful line of critique targets the normative claims in the statists’ argument’. Indeed, even if statists are correct about their empirical premises (i.e., about there being a disanalogy between the domestic and the global spheres when it comes to the grounds they discuss), it is not clear that they have correctly and adequately identified the relevant grounds of egalitarian justice.

Consider Blake’s and Nagel’s arguments: It is striking that they do not offer any reasons for taking state-like coercion or authority to be the only ground for egalitarian justice. What they offer are reasons for taking state-like coercion or authority to be a ground for egalitarian justice. But this is problematic since their arguments can be valid only if their normative premises show that state-like coercion or authority is a necessary condition for concerns of egalitarian justice rather than merely sufficient (Abizadeh, 2007 ; Caney, 2008 ). Without an argument for why only coercion or authority triggers concerns of egalitarian justice, Blake’s and Nagel’s arguments, assuming they make the right empirical assumptions about the features of the global order and assuming they are right that coercion or authority are sufficient conditions, at best show that some of the reasons that make egalitarian justice applicable to states do not extend to the case of global institutions. They do not show that there are no other reasons for thinking that egalitarian justice is required globally. Indeed, it is unclear why less than all-encompassing forms of coercion or authority are not sufficient to trigger concern with justification, and why, once triggered, anything less than an egalitarian global order would be acceptable as justification.

Turning to the argument from cooperation, Sangiovanni submits that distributive justice is exclusively triggered in contexts where central goods are cooperatively produced (cooperation is both necessary and sufficient). As such, he denies that coercion or authority is either necessary or sufficient. But here, there is a legitimate concern that restricting concerns of justice to the fruit of cooperation is narrow and arbitrary. It has been argued that restricting justice to concerns of cooperation or reciprocity can exclude members of society who are unable to cooperate (such as the severely disabled) and can fail to explain the existence of duties of justice to future generations (Barry, 1991 ; Goodin, 1988 ). There are good reasons to think that the evaluation of the justice of institutions should go beyond the evaluation of their impact on individuals’ interests as cooperative agents, or to institutions’ cooperative fairness. While cooperative fairness seems an important part of what justice requires, it seems arbitrary to narrow down reasons of justice to reasons of fairness in cooperation.

Instead, and as discussed in more detail when global egalitarianism and its challenges is examined, it has been argued that the feature of institutions that ought to trigger concern with egalitarian justice is neither cooperation nor coercion but pervasive impact. But if the ground of justice is pervasive impact, then it becomes very hard to conclude that the scope of egalitarian principles is restricted to the domestic sphere. On the one hand, it would be hard to defend an empirical claim that the pervasive impact of domestic institutions is limited to those living within the state (think here of borders). On the other hand, it would be hard to deny that global institutions (increasingly) have pervasive impact (Abizadeh, 2007 ). As Cohen and Sabel note, “[t]he rules made in those [global] settings are consequential for the conduct and welfare of individuals, firms, and states, in part because they provide standards for coordinated action and in part (though not only) because national rule making itself proceeds subject to rules, standards, and principles established beyond the national level” (Cohen & Sabel, 2006 , p. 165). Thus, it suffices that there is a practice of global interaction which, through its institutions, makes some winners and some losers; such an institutional structure, like the domestic institutional structure, stands in need of being justified to each participating individual, seen as an equal (Beitz, 1999 ; Buchanan, 2000 ; Mollendorf, 2002 ; Pogge, 1989 ; Van Parijs, 2008 ).

Still, even if one were to accept that statists have correct normative and empirical premises, the conclusion that egalitarian principles do not extend to the global order would follow only if it were also true that there are no reasons of justice to bring about global institutions with feature G. In other words, for the statist arguments just presented to be valid, they must appeal to the further claim:

Methodological claim: There are no reasons of justice to bring about different institutions than the existing ones.

It is helpful to call this a methodological claim because it highlights that what is at stake here is the role or function that one takes a theory of justice to have.

The methodological claim implicit in the statist arguments suggests institutional conservatism : the view that when thinking about what justice requires, one ought to theorize for existing institutions (Blake, 2013 , p. 47; James, 2005 , 2014a ; Sangiovanni, 2007 , 2008 ). But this, too, is highly controversial, for isn’t justice to be (also) concerned with how institutions should be and which institutions ought to be brought about? Even if feature G (say, coercion or production of central goods) is only a property of states, might there not be reasons to bring about global institutions with feature G and states without feature G? It seems crucial to know whether there are reasons why the global order should (or should not) be coercive in the way states are, or provide the cooperative goods that states provide (perhaps, in lieu of states?). If there are such reasons (i.e., reasons to establish a more coercive global order or a global cooperative scheme that provides central collective goods), then it is no longer clear that the statist, even if correct about the normative and empirical facts about the grounds of justice, can conclude that principles of justice should not extend to the global order.

Institutional conservatism may seem attractive for a number of reasons. Starting from existing institutions seems sensible, for it allows one to identify which alternatives are accessible. Its defenders highlight that it allows principles to be offered that are action guiding and feasible (i.e., stable and accessible), constraints they take to be necessary on principles of justice. The section “ Global Egalitarian Accounts and Their Challenges ” takes a closer look at the question of feasibility. It suffices to mention here that one can recognize that there is some normative significance to existing arrangements without it entailing that they be taken as fixed or as given, which seems to be what institutional conservatives demand. A theory of justice which is silent on the justice of having some institutions in the first place and which refrains from offering reasons to set up new institutions would be status quo biased in favor of arrangements that may be founded on unjust treatment of both participants and nonparticipants (Axelsen, 2019 ; Caney, 2011 ; Reglitz, 2015 ; Valentini, 2011a ).

Global Egalitarian Accounts and Their Challenges

Statists face empirical and normative challenges that seem to undermine their arguments against the extension of egalitarian principles to the global sphere. Are global egalitarians right then in arguing for global egalitarian principles of justice? Let us first consider and compare the positive case for extension made by two influential global egalitarians before turning to a discussion of the challenges global egalitarianism more broadly faces.

Charles Beitz is one of the first contemporary philosophers to offer a global egalitarian account of justice. In a book that has played a major role in defining the terms of the debate, Beitz ( 1979 ) argues that global justice demands a global difference principle for the same reasons that Rawls thought domestic justice demands a difference principle. To recall, according to the difference principle, inequalities are just only when they are to the benefit of the least advantaged. Beitz’s argument for a global difference principle proceeds in two steps. First, he establishes that the global order raises concerns of distributive justice. This he argues via the normative claim that cooperation is what (for Rawls) grounds one’s concern with equality and the empirical claim that there is at the global level a scheme of cooperation that distributes benefits and burdens sufficiently similar to that at the domestic level. Second, Beitz submits that one can derive principles of justice for the global order in the same way Rawls derives them for the domestic sphere. Just as, according to Rawls, the distribution of valuable goods in a society should not mirror or track features of persons such as their social background, gender, race, or natural talent (for these features are morally arbitrary from the perspective of social institutions), the distribution of valuable goods globally should additionally not track an individual’s country of citizenship (for where one is born is equally morally arbitrary from the perspective of global institutions). And just as, according to Rawls, the only justifiable inequalities in income and wealth in a society will be those that are to the benefit of the least advantaged, Beitz concludes that the only justifiable inequalities globally will be those to the benefit of the least advantaged globally, independent of their country of membership (Beitz, 1979 , p. 144; see similar arguments by Mollendorf, 2002 ; Pogge, 1989 ).

Now, as the reader may have noticed, the first part of Beitz’s argument is open to the same challenges raised against Sangiovanni’s in the section “ Statist Accounts and Their Challenges .” Indeed, it is important to note that in a revised edition of his book, Beitz ( 1999 ) revised his position in two ways that fully take the challenges on board. First, he revised his normative claim to emphasize that cooperation is not a necessary ground for concerns of justice to arise and that pervasive and nonvoluntary impact is sufficient. Second, he emphasized that the truth of the empirical claim about the similarity of the global order to the domestic one has no bearing on the argument for a global difference principle because what matters is not what institutions exist, but which ought to exist.

Another influential global egalitarian account is put forth by Simon Caney. Caney, like Beitz, is troubled by the inequalities determined by which country an individual is born in, which he too considers to be morally arbitrary. More particularly, Caney finds it problematic that one’s country of birth does, to a large extent, determine one’s range of opportunities in life. Caney ( 2001 ) defends a principle of global equality of opportunity. Here too, the case for a globalized equality of opportunity principle starts from accepted arguments for equality of opportunity at the domestic level. Caney points out that one does not think an individual’s opportunities should be worse (or less) than those others enjoy due to her gender, race, or even social class; one wants individuals to have equal opportunities, and one wants to structure social and economic institutions such as to limit the impact these factors have on one’s opportunities. By the same token, Caney thinks that one’s opportunities should not be worse than those others enjoy on account of their nationality. Caney, therefore, proposes a (substantive) principle of global equality of opportunity as one standard against which to assess the justice of the global order: global institutions ought to be structured in a way that limits the impact that arbitrary features such as gender, race, social class, and, crucially, nationality have on one’s range of opportunities (Caney, 2001 , 2005 ; for other proposals of global equality of opportunity, see Butt, 2012 ; Loriaux, 2008 ; Moellendorf, 2006 ).

While similar in wanting to limit the impact that one’s place of birth has on one’s opportunities and life prospects, it is worth highlighting that Caney and Beitz start from different normative claims about the ground of justice. For Beitz, what grounds one’s concerns with inequality is that individuals live in a globalized world that has pervasive impact on their lives. The unequal distribution of benefits and burdens requires justification as it should not mirror or reward arbitrary features. For Caney, concern with inequality is not grounded in a particular of institutions or a type of interaction between individuals. What requires justification is not an institutional setup but any state of affairs in which some have less opportunities than others due to arbitrary factors such as their race, gender, social background, and country of birth. In his view, what individuals are entitled to is not by virtue of their membership in a particular state, but also not by virtue of their membership to a global institutional order. Rather, individual entitlements arise by virtue of their membership in the moral community of humans.

It is worth noting here that Caney’s account is what can be called a nonrelational or humanity-based account. And this sets it apart from both Beitz’s and from the statist accounts that have been considered, which can be called relational or association-based accounts. The question of what grounds justice continues to divide philosophers (see Caney [ 2011 ] and Gilabert [ 2012 ] for a defense of humanity-based accounts, and Nagel [ 2005 ], Sangiovanni [ 2007 ], and Valentini [ 2011b ] for defenses of association-based accounts). But for the purposes of this article, we need not ponder the question further, for two reasons. First, as has been repeatedly mentioned, the world already displays a significant level of interaction and is composed of various international institutions, rendering it moot (albeit not theoretically irrelevant) to insist on the irrelevance of interaction. 3 Second, to the extent that what matters is not what institutions exist but which ought to exist (as this article has suggested, and a view which fits naturally with humanity-based accounts, but which Beitz also endorses), then the relevance of whether the ground of justice is associative or humanity-based is further diminished.

Challenges to Global Egalitarian Accounts

Global egalitarian accounts have been subject to a range of criticisms. This article focuses here on two: the charge of infeasibility and the charge of undermining collective responsibility (for further challenges, see C. Barry & Valentini [ 2009 ] and Miller [ 2005 ]).

Infeasibility

The challenge of infeasibility can be seen as the inverse of the challenge facing statists: While statists have been faulted for misconstruing empirical facts about the world and being too concessive to existing institutions, global egalitarian accounts have been criticized for not being sensitive enough to facts about social institutions and about human behavior, rendering their principles infeasible. For one, critics have argued that global egalitarianism ought to be rejected because it requires motivational resources that individuals lack. Institutional theories of justice, critics note, should not make unreasonable demands on individuals. The objection starts with the plausible claim that institutional arrangements can be stable only if they are able to garner the support of individuals subject to them (for a defense of this claim, see Rawls, 1971 , Chapter 8, 1999 ). It then moves on to suggest that individuals can be motivated to support redistributive mechanisms only if they are moved by ties of solidarity to each other, and ties of solidarity can exist only among those sharing a common culture (Miller, 1995 , 2007 ).

But there is reason to doubt the nationalist claim that solidarity requires a common national culture. Multinational states seem to provide a strong counterexample (see Bauböck & Scholten, 2016 ). Furthermore, note that at the heart of the motivational critique is a view about how facts about the world should figure in one’s normative theorizing about justice that echoes the disagreement discussed in the methodological critique of statism. The motivational critique suggests that one ought to take individuals’ motivations as fixed—the fact that individuals are not motivated to act in solidarity with nonmembers ought to be taken as reason for not making demands of solidarity between members and nonmembers. But it is unclear that one should take individuals’ motivations as they are. And it seems a mistake to see ties of solidarity as a prerequisite rather than something that can be fostered through the right kind of institutions. Indeed, as Rawls notes, justice requires institutions that develop individuals’ sense of justice and instil in them the right motivations (see Axelsen [ 2013 ] and Cohen [ 2001 ] for further arguments that human motivation is shaped by institutions; Rawls, 1971 , Chapter 8). Granted, this is how Rawls thought about justice for the domestic sphere, but why shouldn’t the same apply to global institutions? Certainly, one has no reason to assert that state-like institutions are the only entities capable of generating the right kind of motivation.

One worry, however, is that shaping motivation requires institutions to be close to individuals. Indeed, Rawls appeals to this argument to reject a world state. However, global egalitarians are not committed to a world state. For global egalitarians, it remains an open question what shape the institutional order takes, how much of the features of states is left intact, and what alternative supranational institutional arrangements above and beyond states are needed (see the sections “ Beyond the Disagreements ” and “ States and Global Justice ”). Noteworthy here is Lea Ypi’s position. Ypi, like the motivational critics under consideration, thinks motivation and solidarity to be essential for stability and takes state institutions to be particularly well suited to shape motivations and maintain solidarity. However, rather than taking this to be reason to reject global egalitarianism, she argues that global egalitarians ought to think of states as potentially efficient instruments for achieving global solidarity; citizens are to be socialized under state institutions to be global citizens (Ypi, 2012 )

Global egalitarians have been criticized for failing to offer feasible principles in yet another way. It has been argued that in the absence of a global institutional agent, equivalent to states to which principles of justice can apply, and that can coordinate action and act on principles (i.e., the global difference and the global equality of opportunity principles), global egalitarian principles of justice fail to be action-guiding (de Bres, 2013 ; Freeman, 2006 ; Meckled-Garcia, 2008 ). However, while having a world state would solve the problem of agency, it seems to be an infeasible goal (infeasibility here can be understood both as inaccessible and unstable).

Now, it is far from clear that global egalitarianism requires a world state. Indeed, none of the global egalitarians already mentioned advocate having a world state. Moreover, it is not clear that the absence of a global institutional agent to which principles apply and which has the moral authority to coordinate and enforce principles globally undermines the global egalitarian case. For one, it’s not clear that the critics have the right empirical assumptions regarding the need for a singular global agent, since it seems possible for states to achieve coordination and compliance through the setting up and reform of international organizations (Barry & Valentini, 2009 ). But even if the skeptics are right that alternative institutional arrangements will fail (and evidence must be provided), then it would still not follow that global egalitarianism is to be rejected. If the absence of an agent or agents that are capable or willing to act on principles of justice implied no demands of justice can be made, one would have to conclude that no injustice can take place in failed states, or that slavery in a context where there are no agents capable or willing to end it is not unjust. But this is implausible (Abizadeh, 2007 ; Barry & Valentini, 2009 ; Beitz, 1999 , p. 156). To the contrary, the absence of an agent able and willing to realize justice, rather than undermine the case for justice, underscores the duty to create institutions that are capable and willing (Barry & Valentini, 2009 ; Beitz, 1999 ; Gheaus, 2013 ; Gilabert, 2012 ; Gilabert & Lawford-Smith, 2012 ; Lawford-Smith, 2013 ). (It bears noting here that an increasingly sophisticated and insightful debate is being waged on how to understand the concept of feasibility and its relation to justice, but this debate is not discussed in this article.)

National Responsibility

A second objection to global egalitarians emphasizes that the extension of egalitarian distributive principles to the global sphere undermines national responsibility. The objection is often made by appealing to the following hypothetical scenario (found in Miller, 2005 ; Rawls, 2001b , p. 117): Imagine that two societies with well-functioning institutions start out at similar levels of wealth. And suppose that one society, W, makes decisions with the aim of increasing its wealth (e.g., by investing in industrialization), while the other society, L, opts for policies that preserve that society’s leisurely way of life. After some time, W is wealthier than L. The critics argue that faced with the this scenario, global egalitarians would require a transfer from W to L. But such redistribution, critics submit, would be unjust. According to Rawls, for instance, the resulting inequalities between W and L are unproblematic, and any transfers to reduce this inequality would be unfair. After all, the inequalities are the result of the societies’ respective choices and any redistribution would impose an unfair burden on W.

There are two claims being made as part of the objection: (a) that global egalitarian principles would undermine collective responsibility; and (b) that an account that does not capture the value we assign to collective responsibility ought to be rejected. 4 But neither claim withstands closer inspection.

To start, it has been pointed out that not all global egalitarian accounts would undermine collective responsibility, for it is not clear that all global egalitarian accounts would require a transfer from W to L. Whether they do depends on how responsibility-sensitive their principles are. And just as there is a variety of egalitarianisms domestically, there will be, by extension, a variety globally. For example, an egalitarian who thinks that inequalities resulting from an exercise of responsibility are not unjust, could—under certain assumptions about responsibility—consider that citizens of L are worse off through exercise of their (collective) responsibility and hence their being worse off is not unjust (see Amighetti & Harb [ 2019 ] for an account that extends luck egalitarianism to group choice).

That said, it is not obvious that justice requires that national responsibility be taken into account and that the outcomes of W’s and L’s choices be preserved. In other words, global egalitarian accounts that require the transfer may not be wrong to do so. As some have pointed out, just as there may be unfairness in burdening W with the choices of L, there may be unfairness in having current generations bear the consequences of the decisions of past generations (Armstrong, 2010 ; Fabre, 2005 ; for a defense of national responsibility, see Miller, 2007 ).

Additionally, and even if one were to concede that it is fair to let current generations of W retain the benefits of decisions made by past generations, the real world is importantly different from the scenario in question, for while the outcomes in the example are ex hypothesis a result of W’s and L’s decisions, it is far less clear that in a globalized world like this one, the inequalities between different societies can be traced back to the societies’ respective chosen decisions and policies. Indeed, as some have suggested, it is much more probable that what determines a society’s level of wealth is a combination of local and international factors, some of which are chosen, like the policies in the hypothetical example, but others, equally significant, are beyond a society’s (full) control (e.g., a country’s share of natural resources, its geographic location, its competitiveness in the international economy) (Barry & Valentini, 2009 ; for a discussion about the global institutional factors that play their part in determining a country’s wealth, see Casal & Selamé, 2015 ; Pogge, 2005 ; Wenar, 2008 ).

More importantly, even if it were established that there is a strong link between a society’s level of income and wealth and its historical policies, and that it is fair to demand of current generations that they assume the consequences of previous generations’ actions, this does not suffice to establish that it is justifiable to hold a society responsible for its level of wealth. This would be true (i.e., it would be sufficient) only if it is justified for the policies in question to be under the society’s control (Armstrong, 2010 ; Cécile Fabre, 2005 ; Follesdal, 2001 ). That is to say, for the objection from collective responsibility to work, it must be the case that societies can rightfully dispose of their resources in whichever way they wish. But it is precisely what range of decisions and policies should be within a society’s sphere of autonomy that is in question when one investigates demands of global justice. (See Williams [ 2006 ] for a parallel critique of individual entitlements in response to the libertarian’s challenge to egalitarianism. For an insightful parallel between statist and nationalist positions on global justice and the positions of libertarians on domestic justice, see Nili [ 2013 ].) To be sure, this is not to say that no argument can be made for granting states autonomy over major policy areas. Rather, the point here is that such an argument needs to be made, not assumed (see “ States and Global Justice ” for further discussion on inequalities under a just system of states).

Beyond the Disagreements

The debate between statists and global egalitarians is often characterized as having reached a stalemate. Indeed, the discussion so far has highlighted disagreements at the normative, methodological, and empirical levels. And while, as has been shown, there are a number of challenges to statism that considerably weaken its case, the global egalitarian case is incomplete to the extent that it is institutionally underspecified. But before taking a closer look at institutional features of a just global order (in the section “ States and Global Justice ”), it is important to note that statists and global egalitarians can (and do) converge on crucial questions. This section explores three areas of possible convergence over methodological, normative, and institutional design commitments; the latter is introduced here but is the subject of the section “ States and Global Justice .”

Methodological Convergence

Although the statists discussed in section “ Statist Accounts and Their Challenges ” took justice to be concerned with the distributive impact of existing institutions, there is nothing in statist accounts (i.e., accounts that reject the extension of egalitarian principles of justice to the global sphere) that makes such methodological commitment necessary. Statists and global egalitarians can agree that justice is about what institutions ought to exist, not (only) about how existing institutions can be (more) just. Miriam Ronzoni’s ( 2009 ) account of international justice can be seen as an example of an institutionally nonconservative statism. Ronzoni argues that justice requires the creation of international institutions that can maintain a condition of background justice for states—a background against which states can secure egalitarian justice domestically. To be sure, such an account remains partially conservative as long as it does not offer reasons for why we should take states to be the entities tasked with egalitarian justice (see the section “ States and Global Justice ”).

Extension of Equal Concern and Noncomparative Concern

The extension question examined thus far is about whether the reasons for objecting to inequalities among individuals domestically extend to inequalities among individuals globally. And while statists and global egalitarians offer different answers to that debate-defining question, it is important to see that they can converge in their answer to a different but no less crucial extension question: the extension of equal concern.

The requirement of equal concern is at the heart of egalitarian theories of justice for the domestic sphere. It mandates that a society’s institutions be designed in a way that gives interests of citizens equal weight. A global extension of equal concern requires that global institutions be designed in a way that gives the interests of humans worldwide equal weight.

It is obvious how global equality of concern is at the core of global egalitarianism. Global egalitarians require an egalitarian distribution of goods and opportunities because they take an egalitarian distribution to be what a justification of the design and distributive impact of institutions, whether domestic or global, demands—a justification that takes the fundamental interests of each individual subject to them to count equally. For global egalitarians, a global institutional order under which some have more opportunities, income, or wealth because of natural, social, or citizenship lottery cannot be justified.

But statists, too, can endorse the requirement of global equality of concern, even while restricting the scope of egalitarian principles for the distribution of goods and opportunities to the domestic sphere. Indeed, Blake maintains that his statism is grounded in impartiality ( 2001 , p. 261). Put in terms of equal concern, his conclusion can be formulated as follows: In thinking through the design and principles that should apply to state institutions, one shows equal concern by selecting institutions and principles that maximally secure individuals’ autonomy. In thinking through the design and principles that should apply to global institutions, one shows equal concern by selecting institutions and principles that minimally infringe on individuals’ autonomy. Sangiovanni’s ( 2007 ) view, while not explicitly formulated in such terms, can also be seen to be compatible with the imperative of equal concern applied globally: When it comes to its distributive impact, an institutional scheme meets the requirement of equal concern if individuals under it get a fair return on their contribution to the cooperative scheme. And, arguably, it is the commitment to global equality of concern which can explain why those who are statists with regard to the extension of distributive egalitarian principles argue that relations of trade ought to be conducted fairly—in a manner justifiable to all involved (James, 2012 ; Risse, 2012 )

To be sure, institutionally conservative statists (such as Sangiovanni and Blake), by theorizing for existing institutions, that is, a world of states, fall short of thoroughly applying the requirement of global equality of concern, since, in taking a system of states for granted, they do not ask whether such an institution can be justified to all by giving equal weight to their interest. As becomes clear shortly, it may be possible to show that a system of states is compatible with equality of concern, making it also open to global egalitarians to endorse it.

Still, statists who are committed to equal concern for all stand in one way closer to global egalitarians than they stand to statist accounts that reject the extension of equal concern to the global sphere. Arguably, Nagel’s account is an example of the latter and is useful to briefly illustrate the moral cost of rejecting equality of concern, but also, in the spirit of moving beyond disagreements, highlights important convergences with supporters of global equality of concern.

As explained in the section “ Statist Accounts and Their Challenges ,” Nagel ( 2005 ) rejects global egalitarian principles on the grounds that individuals are not the subjects and authors of the global institutional order. But, more radically, Nagel thinks that the absence of this dual relationship between individuals and the global order means that the global order is not bound by equality of concern. In rejecting a global requirement of equal concern, Nagel’s view entails that it is permissible for current global institutions, like the system of states, trade treaties, and global property rights, to partially or arbitrarily assign benefits and burdens among those subject to them. But this seems hard to accept—the global egalitarian arguments previously stated for extending egalitarian distributive principles are even more powerful when applied to the extension of equal concern beyond the domestic sphere.

Nagel’s is an extreme statist position. And, while it is important that critics have focused on demonstrating its implausibility, it is helpful to see that it can, nonetheless, converge with less extreme statists and even global egalitarians on significant duties. In his account, Nagel suggests that instead of the requirement of equal concern, when it comes to the global level, individuals and collectives have basic “duties of humanity” ( 2005 , p. 121). There are a number of ways that duties of humanity (also referred to as duties of beneficence or charity), which are not to be confused with humanity-based accounts of justice (e.g., Caney, 2005 ), can be distinguished from duties of justice (Barry, 1982 ; Buchanan, 1987 ; Valentini, 2013 ; but see Barry & Øverland [ 2016 ] and Singer [ 1972 ] for accounts that collapse justice and charity into general demands of morality). In most accounts, duties of humanity are taken to be less demanding (require less) and less stringent than (take less priority, and on some account are even non-enforceable) than duties of justice.

But it is open for Nagel, who says little about the nature of these duties of humanity, to think that duties of humanity are nonetheless highly demanding and stringent. This could be so for two reasons. First, one should note that for most plausible accounts, duties of justice have greater demandingness and stringency, all things being equal (typically, respecting property rights is a duty of justice, and bystander duties to save someone from harm are duties of humanity—but it would be implausible to think that the duty to give someone back their book is more demanding or more stringent than saving a child from drowning). Second, Nagel could be interpreted as distinguishing humanity from justice along the requirement of equal concern: While justice requires equal concern, duties of humanity require sufficient concern (or noncomparative concern). Interpreted along these lines, duties of humanity can require demanding, stringent, and enforceable duties to ensure that individuals worldwide live decent lives. If so, Nagel can converge with other statists and global egalitarians that there are demands of noncomparative concern with how all individuals fare. Indeed, all the theorists whose accounts have been considered here so far agree that one has duties to ensure that all humans have minimally decent lives. And while statists say little about the stringency of such duties compared to egalitarian duties to co-nationals, it is important to note that their statism does not commit them to assigning greater weight to duties to co-nationals (for an exploration of the spectrum of views on stringency of duties, see Harb & Axelsen [ 2018 ]).

Noting the convergence over global duties to secure minimally decent lives is important, as these duties may go a long way toward addressing much of what is taken to be unjust about the world. What’s more, it raises important and relatively unaddressed questions about the comparative stringency of egalitarian domestic duties to co-nationals versus basic needs global duties (Harb & Axelsen, 2018 ) and about principles for distributing the burden of fulfilling the basic needs duties among the well-off.

Institutional Design

A crucial but underemphasized possible convergence between global egalitarians and statists is over the institutional features of a just world; in particular, over the justice of having a world with a plurality of states. Statists tend to be institutionally conservative and, as such, take a system of states as a given. But the fact that the current global order is state-based does not mean that justice requires that it should be state-based. Global egalitarians submit that state membership is morally arbitrary and, as such, should not influence just entitlements, for to do so would not be giving equal weight to everyone’s interest. But it is important to see that a world order with a plurality of states may be compatible with global egalitarianism. This is because it may be that the imperative of equal concern requires (on a strong version of the claim) or is compatible with (on a weak version of the claim) a global institutional order that is formed by a plurality of states. The next section explores this position—a position that can be seen to take seriously global egalitarian commitments to treating all equally regardless of race, gender, or country of birth, and to viewing global inequalities as problematic, as well as to take seriously the statist intuition of the normative importance of states without assigning undue weight to the status quo.

States and Global Justice

It is safe to say that a system of states stands out as the one feature of the global institutional order having the most pervasive impact on the lives of individuals. Given that, and given the arbitrariness of where one is born, global egalitarians insist that a just distribution of benefits and burdens cannot be one that mirrors the distribution resulting from the current setup of a system of states. This seems to suggest that global egalitarians are anti-states—limiting global inequalities would seem to require abolishing states, or if that is not feasible, then it would require instrumentalizing states to achieve global egalitarian aims (Caney, 2008 ; Van Parijs, 2008 ). But a different position may be open to global egalitarians if there are moral reasons for having states, where those moral reasons give equal weight to the interests of all who are subject to a system of states—if, in other words, having a system of states is compatible with equal concern for all. In the section “ States as Expression of Equal Concern ” two types of reasons that global egalitarians may have for holding that equality of concern for all is compatible, or even requires a world of plurality of states, are considered. The section “ Inequalities Under a State System ” looks at what implications endorsing a system of states bears for the global egalitarian view on inequalities.

States as Expression of Equal Concern

An inquiry into whether and how a system of states can be compatible (or required) by the requirement of global equality of concern merits a dedicated discussion. Here, the discussion is limited to briefly presenting two types of arguments for why states can be compatible with the requirement of global equality of concern and, hence, if correct, why global egalitarians may have reasons to be state enthusiasts. The first is a comparative argument to the effect that states are better than alternative institutional arrangements at protecting fundamental interests of individuals. The second are arguments to the effect that states are necessary to secure fundamental interests of individuals. To be clear, these arguments are meant to speak in favor of having a system of states (i.e., a world composed of a plurality of states, not to speak in favor of the system of states as it exists now).

The Disvalue of a World State

It is common to make the case for states by comparing them to alternative scenarios. The main candidate, when contemplating alternatives to a state-based order, is a world government, which following Rawls can be define as “a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central governments” (Rawls, 2001b , p. 36). There is widespread consensus among philosophers (including the majority of global egalitarians) that there are strong reasons not to establish a world government (compared to a system of states). For one, many believe that establishing a world government would be undesirable and unstable. Rawls, following Kant, summarizes these concerns well: “[. . .] a world government [. . .]—would either be a global despotism or else would rule over a fragile empire torn by frequent civil strife as various regions and peoples tried to gain their political freedom and autonomy” (Rawls, 2001b , p. 36; for a nuanced analysis of Kant’s reasons for rejecting a world government, see Ypi [ 2008 ]; for further discussion of arguments for and against world states, see Nili [ 2015 ]).

It is noteworthy, however, that not everyone finds the aforementioned arguments convincing (see Cabrera, 2004 ; Ulaş, 2016 ). It has been pointed out that concerns for stability and despotism have always applied to states (especially to large and diverse ones). And while these concerns could speak in favor of dismantling large states, there has been a variety of institutional arrangements (notably federal varieties) that aimed at addressing the risks of big government without replacing it. Thomas Pogge ( 2000 ), for instance, has suggested a model of dispersed sovereignty wherein, as he puts it: “persons should be citizens of, and govern themselves through, a number of political units of various sizes, without any one political unit being dominant and thus occupying the traditional role of state.” For some, however, the more imaginative one is in conceiving institutional alternatives to the state, the less reason one has to bring about those arrangements. Mathias Risse ( 2006 ), for instance, argues that given epistemic limitations, there is no way in which one can, with confidence, assess how alternatives to states would fare on stability and on meeting the aims one finds desirable, for “[i]t is difficult to acquire the relevant knowledge to decide whether the state system needs ‘reform’ or ‘revolution,’ since we can only observe this one world” (Risse, 2006 , p. 695).

To be sure, more work is required on how to deal with epistemic constraints and uncertainty when it comes to this issue. But what the negative argument in favor of states does is to put the burden of proof on those who propose alternative arrangements to show that the alternatives are not worse than a system of states at protecting individuals’ interests in global stability and in not living under despotic regimes.

The Value of a System of States

But there may be a stronger argument for why a system of states meets the requirement of equal concern. This argument is that a system of states is justified not merely as a lesser bad but because it advances fundamental interests individuals have. 5

According to Anna Stilz ( 2019 ), states are valuable because they advance individuals’ fundamental interest in political autonomy. Political autonomy can be understood as the collective analogue of individuals’ interest in personal autonomy. Individuals have an interest in leading personal lives according to their own beliefs (personal autonomy), and a corresponding interest in “being authors or makers of their institutions” and in living under a social order that “in some way reflect[s] their judgments and their priorities” ( 2019 , p. 104) (see also Follesdal, 2001 ; for a well-being grounded interest in living in a world from which we are not alientate see Christiano, 2008 , p. 464). Stilz ( 2019 , pp. 104–118) suggests two reasons for why states advance one’s interest in political autonomy: first, states can be the loci of shared intentions, and by cooperating over time and under certain conditions, members shape and see their preferences reflected in their political institutions. Second, to the extent that some individuals will prefer to cooperate and establish separate institutions (that are just), then it would violate their interest in authoring their own institutions to annex them.

Additionally, or alternatively, one might ground a justification of states not in the interest of autonomy, but in individuals’ interest in having a sense of justice, understood as the “capacity to understand, to apply, and to act from the public conception of justice[. . .]” (Rawls, 2005 , p. 19). Arguably, this sense of justice may be better advanced by being a member of a small(ish) political community which allows one to live “closely” to political institutions and one’s co-citizens.

The two lines of argument can be phrased in terms of advancing what according to Rawls are a person’s “two moral powers” (Rawls, 2001a , sec. 10.2): The first account suggests that being a member of a political community advances (is necessary for) one’s interest in being rational; the second suggests that being a member of a political community advances (is necessary for) one’s interest in being reasonable.

It is important to make two qualifications here. First, the two arguments are not meant to be taken as providing decisive reasons in favor of a system of states—not everyone will find them convincing (e.g., one may question whether the interest in political autonomy is indeed fundamental or question whether the interests, even if fundamental, are advanced by states). Instead, the arguments suggest possible avenues for justifying a system of states that are compatible with equality of concern for all and do not appeal to the suspect reasons motivating institutional conservatism.

Second, even if correct, these arguments would establish that individuals have a fundamental interest in being members of a political community in a world of multiple such units. But this leaves open the question of whether our world of states is consistent with that requirement, whether states would have the powers and prerogatives they have today, whether borders and rules for membership would be as they are today. This is because neither argument establishes that each of the core features of states today (e.g., exclusive sovereignty, territoriality, international treaty-making powers) are necessary for a political community to meet the fundamental interests in question; in fact, one has reason to think that some of those features directly contribute to unequally distributing how well peoples’ lives go.

Inequalities Under a State System

Let us suppose that a system of states is compatible with equal concern for all. This, the discussion so far suggests, may give global egalitarians reasons of justice to preserve a world of states (granted that it may look very different than it currently does). But what implications does this have for global egalitarians’ view on global inequality? Does it weaken their reasons to think that egalitarian principles of distributive justice ought to be extended globally?

Global egalitarians can accept that having a world of states is not in itself a violation of equal concern. But this does not mean they should accept the distribution of the benefits and burdens it results in as just. In other words, even if it were established that having a world of states secures fundamental interests of individuals, it would still be crucial to ensure that not only the benefits but also the burdens of such a system are distributed in a just manner. As Follesdal ( 2001 ) points out, one ought to be especially concerned with the lives of the worst-off individuals in states where the decisions of the majority systematically diverge from their interests. But more generally, it would not suffice by way of justification for those who bear a higher burden (e.g., by being worse off than others in terms of opportunities or income) that a system of states secures their fundamental interest; it must also be the case that there is no alternative arrangement under which they would be better off; that is, global justice would require a global difference principle.

A global egalitarian skeptic may object that once global egalitarians acknowledge the legitimacy of a system of states, they become especially vulnerable to the challenge from collective responsibility. To recall, this is the objection that global egalitarianism would demand redistribution between societies, a redistribution which undermines the society’s collective responsibility and autonomy with regard to the choice and impact of policies (see “ Global Egalitarian Accounts and Their Challenges ”). It has been suggested here, in response, that for the objection to have any force, it must be the case that societies have legitimate autonomy over the choices and policies in question. Now, if there are reasons to think that a system of states secures fundamental individual interests, would that not also provide reasons to grant political communities autonomy over the social and economic policies affecting their individual members? In other words, if justice requires (or permits) multiple political communities because of their being uniquely placed to secure fundamental goods for individuals, and if part of these goods is the good of collective decision making, then it would seem that justice would require (or permit) principles that grant communities control over these goods. And if this is true, then it would seem to speak against any redistributive measures demanded by a global difference principle, for those would curtail a state’s autonomy.

But, and to start with, if individuals have an interest in political autonomy, then such interest ought to be protected equally for all individuals. And, to the extent that global inequalities weaken a community’s political autonomy (say, because of the differential international power), one would want to limit those inequalities (see Laborde & Ronzoni [ 2014 ] for an argument for great redistribution among states and stronger international institutions, with the aim of strengthening the ability of states to secure their citizens’ interest in nondomination).

Additionally, it is not clear that autonomy over the full range of social and economic resources and policies is always needed, let alone necessary, for societies to secure the interests of individuals in being part of political communities. Consider, in analogy, the case of the family. Most believe that persons have fundamental interests in being members of families. And yet, many would find inheritance taxation permissible, if not required, by justice. Many, however, would not think that parents’ choices over whether or not to read bedtime stories for their children, for instance, should be up to anyone else but the parents (despite the inequalities that might result for their differential choices) (Brighouse & Swift, 2008 ). The reason for treating inheritance differently from bedtime stories is that while one thinks interfering in parents’ choice on the latter can be heavily disruptive to the parent–child relationship in a way that undermines the interests families serve, one does not think that taxation inheritance undermines that relationship (at least for taxation that isn’t as high as 100%) (see Banai & Kollar [ 2019 ] for a similar argument applied to global equality of opportunity).

It seems, then, that the assumption that justice permits or requires the existence of multiple political communities cannot in itself undermine the case for global egalitarian redistributive institutions, since, to the extent that redistribution does not undermine those features of political communities that make them valuable, it will be required by justice. Complete internal and external self-determination are not only unnecessary but can themselves defeat the purposes for which political communities are considered valuable (Beitz, 1999 , 2005 ). This suggests that the disadvantages and risks of a system of states ought to be limited to those necessary for the system to protect the interests it is intended to protect, since, insofar as the state system generates inequalities whereby some are winners and others are losers merely in virtue of belonging to one community or another, one would have reasons to abandon features of the system that lead to these inequalities but that are not necessary for securing autonomy and a sense of justice.

Beyond the Extension Question

Earlier it was suggested that the global justice debate can move beyond the stalemate between global egalitarians and statists by focusing on convergences between the two camps. More recently, theorists of global justice have tried to make progress by turning away from the debate between statists and global egalitarians over the extension question. Here, three noteworthy approaches are mentioned.

Concessive Theories

Some global egalitarians have put on hold their arguments with statists over methodological, normative, and empirical commitments and moved toward more concessive and ecumenical theories. In a concession to their opponents, they assume justice to be about existing institutions and allow that global justice may not require egalitarian distribution in goods or even equality of concern, but, nonetheless, they demonstrate deep injustices in the current world order and advocate far-reaching reforms.

According to Thomas Pogge ( 1989 ), who in his early work defended the global extension of egalitarian principles, one need not be a global egalitarian (or indeed an egalitarian) to see that global poverty is the result of injustice. Pogge has argued that demanding and stringent duties to reform (the global institutional order) and compensate (victims of poverty) can be derived from the widely endorsed negative duty not to harm, as opposed to the duty of concern (whether equal or noncomparative) which, as already seen, moves beyond the interests in not being harmed to interests in being benefitted. Pogge suggests that global poverty is (in large part) caused and perpetuated by existing global institutional setups. And, in upholding and maintaining these global institutions, affluent states and their citizens are violating a negative duty to not cause harm. Prime examples of harmful global institutions that Pogge highlights are the international legal norms that grant a country’s de facto government the rights to dispose of the country’s resources and to borrow on the country’s behalf. By importing from nations ruled by corrupt authoritarian regimes, affluent countries perpetuate and incentivize violence and corruption, and by lending to corrupt authoritarian regimes, they fuel authoritarian projects while also burdening poor populations and their future generation with enormous debts. (Pogge, 2002 ; see also Wenar, 2008 ). Changing these laws or abstaining from importing from and lending to authoritarian corrupt countries are feasible changes to the global institutional order that reduce the causes of poverty (for critical discussions of Pogge’s view, see Barry & Øverland [ 2016 ]; Risse [ 2005 ]; Satz [ 2005 ]).

Joseph Carens’s more recent work on immigration can be seen as another example of a shift from focusing on what global egalitarianism demands (namely, open borders [Carens, 1987 ]) to thinking about the ethics of immigration once one has granted the premise that states are morally entitled to control their borders and to discretion over who enters. Carens ( 2013 ) aims to show that even with closed borders granted, many of the existing immigration policies are unjustified. Examples of current widespread state practices that Carens criticizes include the deportation of undocumented migrants, the denial of citizenship rights to authorized and nonauthorized immigrants who have long resided in the society, and immigration admission procedures that select on the basis of identity, be it race, ethnicity, sexual, or ideological, disrupt family reunification, and that have a restrictive understanding of refugeehood.

Disaggregating the Domain

The debate over global justice has more recently moved to a debate about global justices . There is a growing literature on justice in international trade, in migration, in climate change, in natural resources, and in global health as distinct spheres, but also justice in the European Union. This move has been driven by theoretical and practical concerns about the state of the global justice debate.

For Helena de Bres ( 2013 ), in the absence of a global authority that can act on principles of justice, there can be no general theory of global justice. De Bres suggests that the “disaggregation” of global justice into subspheres with existing institutional agents is the sound way forward, seeing that these spheres have institutional agents that can be tasked with pursuing justice (e.g., WTO, EU, WHO). Another drive for disaggregation has come from theorists who have taken the various subspheres to be distinct domains that can be characterized by distinct practices, concerned with different goods, and having different aims and agents, and therefore require different principles (for trade justice, see James [ 2014b ]; for justice in the EU, see Sangiovanni [ 2013 ]; for climate justice, see Meyer & Roser [ 2006 ]). Furthermore, it has been suggested that investigating demands of justice within subdomains not only allows to make progress on the theoretical conundrums but also to translate theories into institutional changes and policies. Agreement, for one, may seem more likely on narrower issues, and targeted institutional changes are more feasible. Finally, global egalitarians like Philippe Van Parijs have theorized for justice in the European Union as a distinct domain, treating it as a testing ground for global egalitarianism, the learnings from which can then be transported to the global level (Van Parijs & Vanderborght, 2015 ).

As suggested in the section “ Challenges to Global Egalitarian Accounts ,” it is not clear that the no-agent argument works to discredit the project of thinking about the global institutional order as a site of justice. However, is the drive for disaggregation for practical reasons going in the right direction? Can one treat issues of justice within these spheres in isolation from each other (what Caney has labeled the isolationist approach), or should the principles of justice for each domain draw and feed into a general theory of global justice (what Caney has labeled the integrationist approach) (Caney, 2012 )? Caney ( 2012 ) has been skeptical about the practical gains from the isolationist approach. First, he suggests it is not clear that agreement is more likely when the domains are treated in isolation. As international negotiations on climate change show, developing countries’ willingness to make progress on reducing emissions has been dependent on rich countries’ meeting their obligations in other domains (e.g., assistance, trade). Second, many of these subdomains overlap and many of the serious harms are jointly produced by several domains such that one is unable to recognize the disadvantage from within a single domain. For example, environmental degradation and food shortages result from a combination of domestic and international policies on climate and trade (see Walton [ 2020 ] for another defense of integrationist approaches applied to trade justice, and Meijers [ 2016 ] for an argument that sustainable procreation rights should not be thought of only from within the domain of environmental justice, but also in light of individuals’ broader entitlements that can only be identified through a theory of global justice).

The Appropriate Response to Injustice

Finally, it is worth mentioning that while philosophers’ contributions to global justice have predominantly been about defining entitlements and about responsibilities of the affluent to bring about just institutions, there is a growing number of philosophers who have taken up the question of the appropriate response to injustice. Building on arguments developed in debates on just war (and self-defense), on civil disobedience, and on resistance to oppression, philosophers have begun to think about what victims of global injustice may do to secure their entitlements in this gravely unjust world and about the implications that the rights of resistance may have for theories of global justice (Barry & Øverland, 2016 ; Caney, 2015 ; Delmas, 2018 ; Deveaux, 2015 ; Jugov & Ypi, 2019 ; Lippert-Rasmussen, 2013 ; Mancilla, 2016 ).

This article presents and discusses central elements of the ongoing debate on global distributive justice. Its subject is the justice of the global institutional order. An institutional account of justice is concerned with the design and impact of institutions given that the reasons for bringing about or reforming institutions are grounded in the interests of individuals. Clearly, however, a complete account of institutional justice requires substantial input from the social sciences. This means that this article, being a philosophical inquiry, has not investigated the full merits of particular institutional arrangements but rather identified central issues that a full account needs to address

That said, note, in conclusion, that making progress on the debate between global egalitarians and statists on the scope of egalitarian justice requires filling the gaps with regard to the question of individuals’ interest in belonging to political communities: whether having political communities is necessary to meet individuals’ fundamental interests, how that interest weighs against other interests, and the degree of autonomy political communities require to secure that interest.

At the same time, it seems important to move beyond the statist and global egalitarian dichotomy and build on convergences between both camps—besides investigating the significance of states, the article suggests that the question of noncomparative concern with basic needs and how that compares to duties of equal concern merits further investigation. It also ends with pointing out ways in which contributors to the debate have already begun to move beyond the disagreements.

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1. Sources for data in introduction are in order of appearance, from Black-white wealth gap in cities, The Atlantic ; Social mobility: The charts that shame Britain, The Guardian ; Human development data (1990–2017) , Human Development Reports ; Worldwide, median household income about $10,000 .

2. See https://www.economist.com/open-future/(2018)/06/06/how-much-you-earn-depends-largely-on-where-you-live.

3. That said, the question of whether the grounds of justice are association-based or not has implications for thinking about intergenerational justice (Gosseries, 2009 ; Harb, 2014 ) and interplanetary or cosmic justice (Fabre, 2005 ; Lippert-Rasmussen, 2016 ).

4. The second part of the objection is a claim about value, but it can be recast as a claim about motivation or feasibility: that an account which doesn’t recognize collective responsibility will not motivate individuals to act on its principles, or that it will create a moral hazard, making the principle unstable.

5. Here one can distinguish between a strong and a weak version of this defense. A strong version suggests that equal concern requires a world of multiple states. Other arrangements would violate that requirement. A weak version suggests that a world of states is one of several arrangements that meet the requirement of equal concern. The weak claim can even allow that other arrangements may approximate the ideal of equal concern better—but that reasons related to transition costs, to legitimate expectations, or even to plain conservative reasons (i.e., reasons of value in preserving existing institutions) speak in favor of states.

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8 Global Distributive Justice: Seven Theses about Facts and Empirical Research

Simon Caney is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick.

• Published: 05 April 2018
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This chapter explores the relevance of facts and empirical enquiry for the normative project of enquiring what principles of distributive justice, if any, apply at the global level. Is empirical research needed for this kind of enquiry? And if so, how? Claims about global distributive justice often rest on factual assumptions. Seven different ways in which facts about national, regional and global politics (and hence empirical research into global politics) might inform accounts of global distributive justice are examined. A deep understanding of the nature of global politics and the world economy (and thus empirical research on it) is needed: to grasp the implications of principles of global distributive justice; to evaluate such principles for their attainability and political feasibility; to assess their desirability; and, first, to conceptualize the subject-matter of global distributive justice and to formulate the questions that accounts of global distributive justice need to answer.

This chapter explores the relevance of facts and empirical enquiry for the normative project of enquiring what principles of distributive justice, if any, apply at the global level. Is empirical research needed for this kind of enquiry? And if so, how? As a starting point we might observe that claims about global distributive justice often rest on factual assumptions. For example, some argue that members of affluent countries have responsibilities to eradicate poverty in developing countries because they caused it ( Pogge 2008 ), whereas others are sceptical of the underlying factual claims ( Risse 2005 ). Some, such as Rawls, think that the extent to which societies succeed in promoting development depends on their culture ( Rawls 1999b ), whereas, again, some may dispute the empirical assumptions.

These examples show some ways in which an understanding of world politics and global political economy might be relevant for the evaluation of competing theories of global distributive justice. They are, however, far from exhaustive. In this chapter I examine seven different ways in which facts about national, regional, and global politics (and hence empirical research into global politics) might inform accounts of global distributive justice. I begin by examining two widely shared normative claims, both of which would require the use of empirical data if they were to be endorsed. However, I raise questions about both of these views (and thus call into question the case for the role of empirical evidence that is grounded in these two views). I then outline five ways in which, I claim, empirical evidence is crucial. A deep understanding of the nature of global politics and the world economy (and thus empirical research on it) is, I submit, needed: to grasp the implications of principles of global distributive justice; to evaluate such principles for their attainability and political feasibility ; to assess their desirability ; and, at a prior level, to conceptualize the subject matter of global distributive justice and to formulate the questions that accounts of global distributive justice need to answer . 1

Thesis I: The Scope of Distributive Justice

1. According to many, one important way in which factual considerations are decisive concerns what is commonly termed the “scope of distributive justice,” where this phrase refers to who is included within a scheme of distributive justice. To illustrate: many people think that principles of distributive justice apply solely within states ( Nagel 2005 ). Others maintain that principles of distributive justice apply within nations ( Miller 1995 ). Still others maintain that some principles of distributive justice apply within transnational systems of cooperation such as the European Union. Finally, some hold that principles of distributive justice apply at the global level ( Beitz 1999 ; Caney 2005 ; Pogge 2008 ; see Chapter 9 ).

How might we determine which of these views is correct? Some hold the following view:

(P1) The Associational Argument: The scope of some, or all, principles of justice depends on the extent to which persons are members of certain social, economic or political relationships.

Now if this is true then it follows that we should accept:

Thesis I: The Scope Claim. Identifying the scope of distributive justice requires empirical evidence to determine which persons are members of the relevant social, economic or political relationships.

To gain a fuller understanding of (P1) (and thus also the Scope Claim) we need to examine what social, economic, or political relationships might be said to be relevant to the scope of distributive justice. I have defined (P1) in a broad and inclusive way because, whilst many political theorists stress the relevance of membership in social, economic, and political relationships to the scope of distributive justice, they employ different concepts—such as the “basic structure” ( Rawls 1999 : 6–10) or “institutional schemes” ( Pogge 1989 : 8)—and they have different kinds of relationships in mind. Different associational theories diverge on the question of which specific kinds of associations determine the scope of distributive justice, and thus would diverge as to what kinds of facts they should think are relevant.

2. Consider, for example, Rawls’s claim that principles of distributive justice apply to a “basic structure,” understood to refer to a system of rules and institutions that have a major effect on people’s lives ( Rawls: 1999a : 6–7). Some who draw on this framework argue that if this assumption is correct, then the scope of distributive justice is global in nature, for there is now a global basic structure ( Beitz 1999 : pt III; Pogge 1989 : pt III, 2008). What is at stake here is the extent to which all persons are members of a common system of interdependence where the fate of everyone is shaped by a common set of rules and institutions. Beitz, for example, draws extensively on the literature about interdependence in Political Theory and International Relations (1999 : pt III). Pogge too is keen to show, in his influential World Poverty and Human Rights (2008) , that the poverty that blights the world stems not from purely local factors but from the policies and practices of affluent countries.

More recently, however, others have argued that other kinds of relationship matter. Some, for example, emphasize the moral significance of coercion . They maintain that the scope of distributive justice is determined by whether persons are subject to a common coercive power ( Valentini 2011 ). Michael Blake, for example, has argued that all persons throughout the world are entitled to attain a certain threshold standard of living. However, he adds that egalitarian principles of distributive justice only apply among those who are subject to a system of coercion, and he further argues that since we lack a world state these egalitarian principles apply within the state but not at the global level ( Blake 2013 ). Nagel has defended a related but more radical view. He holds that principles of distributive justice should operate within the state because the latter is a coercive power that acts “in the name of” its citizens ( Nagel 2005 : 121, 128, 129, 130, 138, 140, 142). Since there is no global analogue, he concludes that there are no global principles of distributive justice, only humanitarian duties. Both views hold, then, that the scope of some (or all) principles of distributive justice depends on who is subject to a system of coercion. Hence both require us to examine the empirical evidence to see whether there is a global coercive order in some sense, and thus whether there are egalitarian principles of global distributive justice or not. Empirical data here is, thus, necessary to determine the scope of distributive justice.

The same conclusion is affirmed by other thinkers who draw attention to other kinds of relationships. For example, Andrea Sangiovanni (2007) holds that egalitarian principles of justice only apply within systems of reciprocity, and since he holds that this applies within the state but not globally, egalitarian principles of justice only apply within the state. Global justice, on this view, does not require equality. However, as this brief summary brings out, his argument against egalitarian principles of global distributive justice rests on the factual assumption that there is not a worldwide scheme of reciprocity in the relevant sense.

On each of these views described so far, then, ascertaining the scope of some or all principles of distributive justice requires an understanding of world politics and the global economy.

3. Should we endorse (P1) and thus the Scope Claim about the relevance about facts to debates about global distributive justice? It is not possible in the space available to do justice to all the reasons that one might have for endorsing (P1). It is, however, worth drawing attention to one widely recognized problem, namely, that none of the arguments that have been presented so far for the various associational theories (whether their emphasis is on coercion or reciprocity or something else) has succeeded in showing that egalitarian or other principles of distributive justice apply only where the relationships already exist.

Consider, for example, Blake’s defence of the coercion view. It is worth unpacking the argument more fully. Blake reasons thus:

The state exercises coercion over its citizens ( Blake 2013 : 91–3).

Since coercion is prima facie wrong, the state has a duty to justify its policies to those subject to its coercive power ( Blake 2013 : 93–4).

The state’s justification of its coercive power requires egalitarian principles of distributive justice ( Blake 2013 : 95–97).

There is no coercive body at the global level ( Blake 2013 : 97–8).

From this, Blake infers that:

(C) Egalitarian principles of distributive justice do not apply at the global level. They only apply at the state level.

However, the relevant point to note here is that, as many have observed, the conclusion does not follow from the premises. 2 At most, this argument shows that one reason one might think that equality is justified does not apply at the global level: it does not show that no reason does. (Pi)–(Piii) give us no reason to think that egalitarian principles of distributive justice only apply between persons who are both subject to coercion; and accordingly (Pi)–(Piv) give us no reason to think that there are no egalitarian principles of global distributive justice.

The same point can be made about other associational theories. Consider Sangiovanni’s argument.

States provide a legal framework and a set of opportunities that enable people to develop ( Sangiovanni 2007 : 25–6).

If persons benefit from others, then they are under a duty of reciprocity to give back to the system that has benefited them: they owe society a “fair return” ( Sangiovanni 2007 : 26–7).

The duty of reciprocity owed to one’s fellow citizens requires an egalitarian principle of justice.

Sangiovanni’s thought is that since citizens receive benefits from their state, then they have a duty of justice to reciprocate and pay back their debts to their co-citizens, and this, he surmises, means sharing out benefits between co-citizens on an equal basis. Since persons are not, so Sangiovanni maintains, part of a global system of reciprocity, then the analogous reason does not apply at the global level. Sangiovanni concludes, on this basis, that global egalitarianism is false, and that equality only applies within the state.

Again, however, it is worth noting that the argument given above does not entail that egalitarian principles of justice cannot apply outside a scheme of reciprocity. All that (Pi)–(Piii) entail is that if there is reciprocity then egalitarian justice applies among the co-operators. It does not show that egalitarian justice applies only if there is reciprocity ( Caney 2011 ).

4. To sum up so far, then: some hold that the scope of principles of distributive justice is determined by the extent to which there are existing social, economic, and political relationships of a certain type, and thus hold that facts about the extent to which these apply at the national or transnational or global level are crucial to determining the scope of justice. I have argued that we lack reason to endorse such strong associational claims about the scope of distributive justice.

Does this show that empirical data is irrelevant for determining the scope of distributive justice? No. That would be a non sequitur. Such data may be relevant if we appeal to the principle that “ought implies can.” The argument would run as follows: Since “ought implies can,” agents can have duties of justice to others only if they can affect them in some way. From the point of view of “ought implies can,” the scope of distributive justice is not determined by whether there are existing social relationships, but by whether it is the case that either there are such relationships or there could be . Suppose that there is a remote island that is cut off from humanity; but suppose further that it is possible to assist the inhabitants of that island. In such a case, according to the “ought implies can” principle, outsiders could be under duties of justice to the inhabitants (even though there are no existing relationships with them) because it is possible for them to assist islanders. Facts, thus, can matter to the question of the scope of justice even if they do not play the central role ascribed to them by theorists like Beitz, Blake, and Sangiovanni.

Thesis II: Facts and the Content and Justification of Principles of Distributive Justice

1. Having discussed the scope of distributive justice, I turn now to a second area in which factual considerations might be thought to be central. Recently some have argued that the content of principles of distributive justice is shaped, at least in part, by the nature of existing social practices ( James 2012 ; Ronzoni 2009 ; Sangiovanni 2008 ). They adhere to what Sangiovanni terms a “practice-dependent” approach to distributive justice, where this holds that “[t]‌he content, scope, and justification of a conception of justice depends on the structure and form of the practices that the conception is intended to govern” ( Sangiovanni 2008 : 138). So, on this view, what principles of global justice apply in any given situation depends on what social practices there are. Thus the principles for international trade will depend on the nature of the social practice of international trade. Similarly, the principles for climate change governance will depend on the existing practices surrounding the protection of the climate system. The general point, then, is that on this approach the content of justice depends on the character of existing social practices. Furthermore, practice-dependent theorists argue, the derivation of these principles requires the interpretation of the nature and point of the social practice ( Sangiovanni 2008 : esp. 142ff.).

Now if the practice-dependent view is correct, then facts about the global economy and international practices have deep moral significance. For to apply this view we have to identify what social practices there are and what their nature and underlying goals are; and this requires empirical research. As Sangiovanni makes clear, the practice-dependent approach requires description and interpretation of social practices—detailing, for example, the rules, conventions, norms, and institutions that constitute the practice, and the underlying values, goals, and normative commitments ( Sangiovanni 2008 , 142–3).

With all this in mind, we can now formulate a second thesis. Some hold the following view:

(P1) The Practice-Dependent Argument: The content of some, or all, principles of justice depends on the nature of existing social practices.

Thesis II: The Content Claim. Identifying the content of global principles of distributive justice requires empirical evidence to determine the nature and point of existing international social practices.

2. Given this, it is of paramount significance to know whether we should accept the starting point, namely (P1). Should we attribute normative significance to existing social practices? Such a position is not obviously correct. Why ascribe such moral relevance to the social practices that exist in our world? After all, if we reflect on the genesis of these practices we can see good reason to be sceptical of their normativity. Existing social practices are highly likely to reflect the interests of participants over and above non-participants, and within the category of participants they are surely likely to bear the imprint of the powerful rather than the marginalized. Sangiovanni (2008) and other practice-dependent theorists like James (2012) are keen to argue that there is more to their approach than interpretation. However, to the extent that interpretation plays a role, it will be problematic if the raison d’être of the practice privileges insiders and the powerful.

Those who employ a practice-dependent approach have often not given direct arguments in favour of their approach, preferring to put their theory into practice ( James 2012 ; Ronzoni 2009 ). One exception is Sangiovanni. In his influential paper “Justice and the Priority of Politics to Morality” Sangiovanni appeals to the “priority of politics,” and claims that a practice-dependent approach is superior because it recognizes the importance of politics and the historical processes by which order is secured ( Sangiovanni 2008 ). A practice-independent approach, Sangiovanni maintains, stands free from the contingent “arbitrary historical contingency,” and thus cannot recognize the normative significance of the political process ( Sangiovanni 2008 : 158). What does this mean? Sangiovanni’s reasoning unfolds as follows.

First, he begins by saying that practice-dependent accounts recognize the importance of political “order”:

The first aim of any social or political institution is to secure conditions of order, trust, cooperation, and security among human beings. Political authority is necessary because without it, distrust, insecurity, and the desire for recognition—“you must recognize that our party is justified and therefore submit”—will thwart any possibility of cooperation or render it incredibly fragile. ( Sangiovanni 2008 : 157)

Depending on how we interpret the notion of a “first aim,” there need be nothing here that a practice-independent theorist should disagree with. Assuming that what is meant by these terms is that we need first to secure order and stability (in a chronological or temporal sense) because, and to the extent that, this is needed to realize some further goal, then this claim is uncontroversial. Someone who holds that the content of principles of justice need not be derived from existing practices can accept that it is important to “secure conditions of order, trust, cooperation, and security” ( Sangiovanni 2008 : 157) first.

In the ensuing discussion Sangiovanni then introduces a second, different point. He says that a practice-dependent theorist recognizes the normative significance of the political process, but that

[t]‌he practice-independent theorist, on the other hand, believes that the way in which actual political institutions solve the first political question—and hence how questions of justice emerge within specific institutions—is irrelevant to the justification and formulation of a conception [of— SC ] justice. The task of the theorist of justice is to look beyond arbitrary historical contingency, and seek a general and overreaching view. ( Sangiovanni 2008 : 157–8)

Sangiovanni’s claim here, then, seems to be that practice-independent theorists must dismiss the existing political practices and conventions which are employed to deal with the first political question as not relevant for the nature of justice.

A practice-independent theorist can, however, make two replies. One is to enquire why we should ascribe normative significance to the political process. Sangiovanni writes: “Once we have the circumstances of politics in focus, it becomes clear why it is a mistake to conceive of political and social institutions solely as instruments in the realization of justice” (2008: 158). But it is not at all clear why it is a mistake to conceive of political and social institutions solely as instruments in the realization of justice. Sangiovanni’s argument here rests upon an unargued assumption.

At this point, however, someone might argue that the political process does have normative significance because it reflects the choices and agreements made by different political actors. I think that this is a promising line of argument. However, it is one that a practice-independent theorist can make. Sangiovanni assumes in the above argument that practice-independent approaches are entirely forward-looking and adopt an exclusively “instrumental” approach. However, there is no reason why a practice-independent theorist cannot adopt a voluntarist approach. Consider for example the following principle:

The Consent Principle: Justice requires that people’s contracts should be honored subject to:

conditions that need to be met for contracts to be binding; and

normative constraints on what people can or cannot commit themselves to.

This principle is a practice-independent principle, for it ascribes no deep significance to all existing social practices in and of themselves. It does not instruct us to interpret any or all existing social practices for their telos . It simply holds that, made under certain conditions and hedged in by certain normative constraints , what political actors agree to has normative implications, and can create rights and responsibilities. As such it is a practice-independent principle. With this in mind, there is no reason why a practice-independent theorist cannot attribute moral significance to the political process (and so “the way in which actual political institutions solve the first political question”).

Reflecting on the Consent Principle further brings out the importance of a practice-independent approach. For if we are to ascribe normative significance to what people or governments agree to—the promises they make, and the undertakings they commit themselves to—then, as I have mentioned above, this requires that they have a genuine choice. This, in turn, requires some practice-independent conditions—such as rights of freedom of choice, information, and expression, as well as socioeconomic rights to be met (condition (a) above). Moreover, there are moral limits on what people are empowered to agree to (condition (b) above). They cannot, for example, make political settlements that are committed to acts of aggression against innocent neighbouring peoples or to colonial expansion. The appeal to political process thus brings out the importance of practice-independent principles of justice.

We reach the following conclusion. Sangiovanni maintains that practice-independent principles are flawed, for they do not recognize the normative significance of the political process and the political agreements reached to answer the question of order. I have argued that we have not been given reason to endorse this claim; and, moreover, the best explanation of the normative significance of political processes draws on a practice-independent principle (the Consent Principle) and requires—to be normatively binding—a set of background rights and limits.

The upshot of this, then, is that we have yet to be given a reason to accept the practice-dependent contention that justice requires conforming to the values given by existing social practices. Given this (and without any other further argumentation), we lack reason to accept the second thesis. If Sangiovanni were right, we would have good reason to think that identifying principles of justice requires an empirical and interpretive enquiry into the nature of the social practices that exist at the transnational and global level. However, we have yet to be given compelling reasons to accept the starting point.

Having criticized two accounts of the ways in which an understanding of global political and economic relations bear on our account of global distributive justice, I now wish to draw attention to five ways in which empirical considerations about the nature of global political and economic relations are pivotal for determining the nature of global distributive justice.

Thesis III: Application of Principles of Distributive Justice to the Global Context

First, and least controversially, factual considerations will normally be necessary to gain a full understanding of the practical implications of principles of global distributive justice. Many principles of distributive justice are such that we can only know what they entail in practice if we have a good understanding of the empirics.

To see this, consider one of the leading theories of global justice—Thomas Pogge’s account of global justice and the duty to eradicate global poverty. Pogge’s argument starts from the normative assumption that agents are under a negative duty not to uphold and maintain institutions that harm others. Harm, for Pogge, is defined in terms of causing human rights deficits that are foreseeable and known to be avoidable at reasonable cost ( Pogge 2008 : 26). We might call this his “fundamental moral principle.” He then adds the empirical claim that the citizens and governments of affluent countries systematically violate this negative duty, and that this results in global poverty. On the basis of his fundamental moral principle and his empirical claims, Pogge then reaches what we might term “derivative moral conclusions” concerning who has the duty to eradicate global poverty. Now as this makes clear, Pogge’s conclusion depends on whether his claims about the causes of global poverty are correct or not. If these factual assumptions are incorrect, then his argument does not establish his conclusion.

Given this we have good reason to accept the following:

Thesis III: The Application Thesis. What implications principles of fundamental distributive justice have depends on facts about world politics and the global economy.

To understand what global distributive justice requires in reality at a concrete level thus requires empirical research into the implications of the core fundamental principles of global distributive justice.

Political theorists thus need to consult the work of scholars such as Paul Collier (2007) and John Gallup, Jeff Sachs, and Andrew Mellinger (1999) , who argue that the extent of a country’s development depends on geographical factors (such as whether a country is landlocked and whether its climate leaves it more vulnerable to disease and reduced agricultural productivity). And they need to engage also with the work of Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (2002) on the effects of colonialism on contemporary standards of living in former colonies, as well as with Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson’s argument (2001) that different environmental conditions led colonial powers to adopt different kinds of strategy (essentially creating extractive institutions in hostile climates and inclusive ones in more hospitable climates), and that this has led to differential standards of living today. 3 They need to consider the emphasis on “institutions” given by Dani Rodrik, Arvind Subramanian, and Francesco Trebbi (2004) ; as well as the arguments of Joel Mokyr (2017) (who emphasizes culture as a determinant of development); and the emphasis on geography made by Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) (who argues that the great divergence between China and Europe arose in part because of Europe’s good luck—what Pomeranz calls a “geographic accident” (2000: 62)—in having extensive coal reserves in Britain. 4

Thesis IV: Evaluation for Possibility and Political Feasibility

If we reflect on Thesis III then we are led, I think, to consider two further ways in which factual considerations about the world economy play a crucial role for theorizing about global distributive justice. The first concerns the extent to which given principles are attainable (by which I mean possible to achieve). Suppose that one endorses a certain principle of global distributive justice, P . Suppose further that we then consider what it would take to apply this principle, we might discover that it is impossible to realize P . Suppose, for example, someone holds that all current and future persons are entitled to enjoy the consumption patterns of a contemporary affluent American citizen. And, suppose that that lifestyle is ecologically unsustainable in the sense that, if everyone seeks to enjoy that standard of living now, it will result in such high greenhouse gas emissions, and ecological harm more generally, that many people in the future cannot enjoy the same standard of living. In such a case, the proposed principle of global (and intergenerational) justice asks for what is unattainable. Here factual considerations reveal that what the theorist calls for is impossible, and hence they call for a revision of the initial principle, P ( Caney 2012 ).

Thus far I have been conceiving of “possibility” and “attainability” simply to mean “it could be achieved (even if it is very unlikely).” Suppose, however, that our focus is on campaigning for change in our very non-ideal world. In such circumstances we might think that focusing on what is possible is not that useful: rather our focus should be on what is politically feasible . The concept of political feasibility is complex and needs elucidation (see Chapters 31 and 48 ). I here use it in the following rather rough sense: political proposals are politically feasible to the extent that agents are motivated to bring about the reforms, and if they seek to do so they are likely to succeed. 5 I do not think that it is a necessary condition of a political principle being correct that it is politically feasible. (A practice of killing young women whose conduct departs from communal norms is unjust no matter how politically infeasible it might be to change it.) Nonetheless, one might reasonably hold that if we are to campaign for a specific policy or set of proposals, then we should care, among other things, about which is the most politically feasible.

With these two notions on hand, we can now formulate a fourth thesis,

Thesis IV : The Possibility and Feasibility Claim . The extent to which (a) principles of global distributive justice can be realized and (b) policies that further global distributive justice are politically feasible can only be ascertained on the basis of empirical research.

Again, facts play a crucial role, and empirical political research, on both what is in principle possible and the prospects for reform and change, is essential.

Thesis V: Evaluation for Desirability

If we return now to Thesis III, we can see a further way in which factual considerations about the global economy can play a significant role in theorizing about global distributive justice. For when we analyse the empirical implications of realizing a principle P , we may discover that that principle has, in practice, undesirable side effects that cast doubt on the principle. Suppose, for example, that the only way to secure global equality is to institute a world state, and suppose further that this would be intolerant. We might in light of this revise the initial moral commitment to global equality. I do not endorse the factual assumption made here, but that is not to the point: the point is that if we examine what is required to realize a given principle, then we may learn of harmful side effects which are such that we now have reason to reject or qualify our endorsement of the first principle.

Alternatively, we might find that P has desirable side effects that make aiming for P even more desirable than we thought. To give an example: policies for mitigating dangerous climate change may have co-benefits (such as cleaner air because there are more efficient motor vehicles). In both cases, we can only ascertain this by engaging in an empirical analysis of what realizing P would entail in practice. In the light of this we should endorse:

Thesis V: The Desirability Claim. The extent to which a proposed principle of global distributive justice is desirable can only be ascertained on the basis of empirical research.

Thesis VI: Formulation of Questions

The three preceding theses have focuses on what answers we might arrive at—i.e. the nature, possibility, feasibility, and desirability of proposed principles. However, empirical research is also needed at a prior stage, namely the construction of the questions . The sixth thesis about the role of empirical research that I propose to examine concerns what we might term the “formulation of questions of global distributive justice.” An adequate formulation of the questions that should be at the heart of the study of global distributive justice must, I submit, be informed by empirical research.

To see why, note two problems that may arise if those engaged in international political theory are unaware of the empirical research on the global economy. The first is the problem of badly formulated questions. By this I mean questions that mischaracterize the normative issues and misconceive what is at stake. To give an example, suppose that someone is concerned about the fact that some in the world have dire prospects for leading healthy lives. And suppose that her response to this is to focus on how to distribute health care equitably—her assumption being that this will address the problem. Suppose, however, that, as many argue, the factors that determine people’s level of health are not the amount of health care spent on people but the so-called “social determinants of health” (where these include disparities in power, wealth, and income). 6 In such a case, her question is a badly formulated one because it misunderstands what is at stake. It only makes sense given empirical assumptions that do not in fact hold. Her question tacitly presupposes an understanding of the world that turns out to be inaccurate.

A second problem with conducting research into global distributive justice without a deep grasp of the facts about the global economy is the problem of unasked questions. In particular, emerging problems can be missed without a good grasp of the changing nature of the world economy.

In light of these two arguments, we reach the following conclusion:

Thesis VI: Formulation of questions . The formulation of questions concerning the nature of global distributive justice should be informed by empirical research into the nature of the world economy.

Thesis VII: Conceptualization of the Subject Matter

We can, and should, go further than this. My last thesis concerns the prior question of how we conceptualize the subject matter of global distributive justice. At stake is the question of how we individuate the topics to which principles of global distributive justice apply. Some adopt what I have termed an “integrationist” view which applies principles of global distributive justice to all major socioeconomic burdens and benefits considered together. Others, however, have adopted what I term an “isolationist” approach, and have treated certain topics—like trade or climate or development—in isolation from each other. That is, they maintain that there are principles of justice that apply specifically to climate change, say, and that this should be done by bracketing out other concerns ( Caney 2012 ).

Now what stance one takes on this issue will be guided, at least in part, by empirical factors. This holds for two reasons. First, whether it makes sense to treat a topic (like international trade, say) in isolation depends to some extent on whether it constitutes a relatively autonomous realm of activity. The less it does, the less plausible is the claim that it constitutes a specific domain that should be governed by its own principles. Furthermore, only through empirical enquiry can we determine whether it is relatively freestanding or is simply one part of a wider set of relationships.

Second, some have argued for an isolationist approach on pragmatic grounds. 7 They maintain that there is so much disagreement about what constitutes global justice in general that if we tried to treat an issue (such as trade justice) in conjunction with other issues (such as global poverty, labor rights, gender inequalities, ownership of natural resources, human rights, and climate change), then we would reach deadlock. Treating trade in light of a general theory of global distributive justice, on this argument, would preclude getting anything done at the international level. For this reason we should treat separate issues in isolation.

Now, again, whether this is a good argument or not depends on its empirical premise that treating issues in isolation facilitates securing agreement; and thus determining whether this is true requires looking at the empirical literature on linkages (e.g. Sebenius 1984 : ch. 6; Caney 2012 : 278ff.).

Thesis VII: Conceptualization of the subject matter. The conceptualization of the subject matter of global distributive justice should be informed by empirical research into the nature of the world economy.

Concluding Remarks

In this chapter I have argued against two ways in which one might think that the facts play a central role. I have challenged the assumption that the scope of global distributive justice is defined by social, economic, and political relationships, and hence the claim that empirical research is needed to establish whether these relationships exist at the global level or not (Thesis I). And I have challenged the assumption that which principles of justice are correct should be determined by an empirical investigation into the nature of social practices (Thesis II). I have, however, argued that empirical research is required to ascertain the practical implications of principles of global distributive justice (Thesis III), the possibility and political feasibility of principles of global distributive justice (Thesis IV), as well as their desirability (Thesis V). Furthermore, I have argued that a good empirical grasp of the nature of the global economy is required both to guide the formulation of the questions we ask about the world economy (Thesis VI) and also to enable us to have an adequate conceptualization of the subject matter of global distributive justice (Thesis VII).

It is perhaps worth noting that none of the five theses that I defend is incompatible with G. A. Cohen’s arguments to the effect that there are fact-independent principles ( Cohen 2008 : 6).

This point is one that has often been made against Blake’s earliest work on coercion (2001 : 257–96). See e.g. Abizadeh (2007 : 353–6), Caney (2008 : 502–3), Gilabert (2012 : 172), and Moellendorf (2009 : 25).

More generally, see Acemoglu and Robinson’s work (2012) on the role of “inclusive” and “extractive” institutions.

Philosophical treatments of global distributive justice rarely engage with such sources. One exception is Risse (2005) , which engages with a number of these.

This account is very rough. For a much more developed account see Stemplowska (2016) .

For information see http://www.who.int/social_determinants/en/ .

This argument has been given in the context of climate change by Meyer and Roser (2006 : 239).

Abizadeh, A. ( 2007 ). Cooperation, Pervasive Impact, and Coercion: On the Scope (not Site) of Distributive Justice.   Philosophy & Public Affairs 35(4): 318–58.

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Attitudes and Beliefs about Distributive Justice in China

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This thesis examines the integration of distributive justice into science-based targets (SBTs) for climate change mitigation by businesses, addressing concerns over the burden shift from public authorities to private entities. Through a systematic literature review, interdisciplinary research work addressing relevant contributory debates was thus extracted from Scopus, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar within the scope 2015-2023. The study assesses the state-of-the-art of distributive justice in SBTs, the efficacy of interactions within the knowledge-to-action system and possible improvements for a better inclusion of distributive justice in SBTs. The findings indicate a lack of system-thinking in the research focused on distributive justice within SBTs, despite recognition of its significance for equitable climate action. The thesis reveals a need for enhanced mechanisms in the knowledge-to-action system to ensure equity, transparency, accountability, and inclusivity. Finally, the study calls for a more just and effective approach to corporate climate action, advocating for improvements in the creation and application of SBTs that incorporate distributive justice principles.

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The idea of justice occupies centre stage both in ethics, and in legal and political philosophy. We apply it to individual actions, to laws, and to public policies, and we think in each case that if they are unjust this is a strong, maybe even conclusive, reason to reject them. Classically, justice was counted as one of the four cardinal virtues (and sometimes as the most important of the four); in modern times John Rawls famously described it as ‘the first virtue of social institutions’ (Rawls 1971, p.3; Rawls, 1999, p.3). We might debate which of these realms of practical philosophy has first claim on justice: is it first and foremost a property of the law, for example, and only derivatively a property of individuals and other institutions? But it is probably more enlightening to accept that the idea has over time sunk deep roots in each of these domains, and to try to make sense of such a wide-ranging concept by identifying elements that are present whenever justice is invoked, but also examining the different forms it takes in various practical contexts. This article aims to provide a general map of the ways in which justice has been understood by philosophers, past and present.

We begin by identifying four core features that distinguish justice from other moral and political ideas. We then examine some major conceptual contrasts: between conservative and ideal justice, between corrective and distributive justice, between procedural and substantive justice, and between comparative and non-comparative justice. Next we turn to questions of scope: to who or what do principles of justice apply? We ask whether non-human animals can be subjects of justice, whether justice applies only between people who already stand in a particular kind of relationship to one another, and whether individual people continue to have duties of justice once justice-based institutions have been created. We then examine three overarching theories that might serve to unify the different forms of justice: utilitarianism, contractarianism, and egalitarianism. But it seems, in conclusion, that no such theory is likely be successful.

More detailed discussions of particular forms of justice can be found in other entries: see especially distributive justice , global justice , intergenerational justice , international distributive justice , justice and bad luck , justice as a virtue , and retributive justice .

1.1 Justice and Individual Claims

1.2 justice, charity and enforceable obligation, 1.3 justice and impartiality, 1.4 justice and agency, 2.1 conservative versus ideal justice, 2.2 corrective versus distributive justice, 2.3 procedural versus substantive justice, 2.4 comparative versus non-comparative justice, 3.1 human vs non-human animals, 3.2 relational vs non-relational justice, 3.3 individuals vs institutions, 3.4 recognition vs. redistribution, 4.1 accommodating intuitions about justice, 4.2 utilitarian theories of justice: three problems, 5.1 gauthier, 5.3 scanlon, 6.1 justice as equality, 6.2 responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism, 6.3 relational egalitarianism, 7. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. justice: mapping the concept.

‘Justice’ has sometimes been used in a way that makes it virtually indistinguishable from rightness in general. Aristotle, for example, distinguished between ‘universal’ justice that corresponded to ‘virtue as a whole’ and ‘particular’ justice which had a narrower scope (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , Book V, chs. 1–2). The wide sense may have been more evident in classical Greek than in modern English. But Aristotle also noted that when justice was identified with ‘complete virtue’, this was always ‘in relation to another person’. In other words, if justice is to be identified with morality as such, it must be morality in the sense of ‘what we owe to each other’ (see Scanlon 1998). But it is anyway questionable whether justice should be understood so widely. At the level of individual ethics, justice is often contrasted with charity on the one hand, and mercy on the other, and these too are other-regarding virtues. At the level of public policy, reasons of justice are distinct from, and often compete with, reasons of other kinds, for example economic efficiency or environmental value.

As this article will endeavour to show, justice takes on different meanings in different practical contexts, and to understand it fully we have to grapple with this diversity. But it is nevertheless worth asking whether we find a core concept that runs through all these various uses, or whether it is better regarded as a family resemblance idea according to which different combinations of features are expected to appear on each occasion of use. The most plausible candidate for a core definition comes from the Institutes of Justinian , a codification of Roman Law from the sixth century AD, where justice is defined as ‘the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due’. This is of course quite abstract until further specified, but it does throw light upon four important aspects of justice.

First, it shows that justice has to do with how individual people are treated (‘to each his due’). Issues of justice arise in circumstances in which people can advance claims – to freedom, opportunities, resources, and so forth – that are potentially conflicting, and we appeal to justice to resolve such conflicts by determining what each person is properly entitled to have. In contrast, where people’s interests converge, and the decision to be taken is about the best way to pursue some common purpose – think of a government official having to decide how much food to stockpile as insurance against some future emergency – justice gives way to other values. In other cases, there may be no reason to appeal to justice because resources are so plentiful that we do not need to worry about allotting shares to individuals. Hume pointed out that in a hypothetical state of abundance where ‘every individual finds himself fully provided with whatever his most voracious appetites can want’, ‘the cautious, jealous virtue of justice would never once have been dreamed of’ (Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals , pp. 183–4). Hume also believed – and philosophical controversy on this point persists until today – that justice has no place in close personal relationships, such as the family, where (it is alleged) each identifies with the others’ interests so strongly that there is no need and no reason for anyone to make claims of personal entitlement. (See Sandel 1982 for a defence of this view; for a critique, see Okin 1989. See also the entry on feminist perspectives on reproduction and the family) .

That justice is a matter of how each separate person is treated appears to create problems for theories such as utilitarianism that judge actions and policies on the basis of their overall consequences aggregated across people – assuming that these theories wish to incorporate rather than discard the idea of justice. In Section 4 below we examine how utilitarians have attempted to respond to this challenge.

Although justice is centrally a matter of how individuals are treated, it is also possible to speak of justice for groups – for example when the state is allocating resources between different categories of citizens. Here each group is being treated as though it were a separate individual for purposes of the allocation.

Second, Justinian’s definition underlines that just treatment is something due to each person, in other words that justice is a matter of claims that can be rightfully made against the agent dispensing justice, whether a person or an institution. Here there is a contrast with other virtues: we demand justice, but we beg for charity or forgiveness. This also means that justice is a matter of obligation for the agent dispensing it, and that the agent wrongs the recipient if the latter is denied what is due to her. It is a characteristic mark of justice that the obligations it creates should be enforceable: we can be made to deliver what is due to others as a matter of justice, either by the recipients themselves or by third parties. However it overstates the position to make the enforceability of its requirements a defining feature of justice (see Buchanan 1987). On the one hand, there are some claims of justice that seem not to be enforceable (by anyone). When we dispense gifts to our children or our friends, we ought to treat each recipient fairly, but neither the beneficiaries themselves nor anyone else can rightfully force the giver to do so. On the other hand, in cases of extreme emergency, it may sometimes be justifiable to force people to do more than justice requires them to do – there may exist enforceable duties of humanity. But these are rare exceptions. The obligatory nature of justice generally goes hand-in-hand with enforceability.

The third aspect of justice to which Justinian’s definition draws our attention is the connection between justice and the impartial and consistent application of rules – that is what the ‘constant and perpetual will’ part of the definition conveys. Justice is the opposite of arbitrariness. It requires that where two cases are relevantly alike, they should be treated in the same way (We discuss below the special case of justice and lotteries). Following a rule that specifies what is due to a person who has features X , Y , Z whenever such a person is encountered ensures this. And although the rule need not be unchangeable – perpetual in the literal sense – it must be relatively stable. This explains why justice is exemplified in the rule of law, where laws are understood as general rules impartially applied over time. Outside of the law itself, individuals and institutions that want to behave justly must mimic the law in certain ways (for instance, gathering reliable information about individual claimants, allowing for appeals against decisions).

Finally, the definition reminds us that justice requires an agent whose will alters the circumstances of its objects. The agent might be an individual person, or it might be a group of people, or an institution such as the state. So we cannot, except metaphorically, describe as unjust states of affairs that no agent has contributed to bringing about – unless we think that there is a Divine Being who has ordered the universe in such a way that every outcome is a manifestation of His will. Admittedly we are tempted to make judgements of what is sometimes called ‘cosmic injustice’ – say when a talented person’s life is cut cruelly short by cancer, or our favourite football team is eliminated from the competition by a freak goal – but this is a temptation we should resist.

This agency condition, however, is less restrictive than it might at first appear. It by no means excludes the possibility that agents can create injustice by omission – for example by failing to create the institutions or to enact the policies that would deliver vital resources to those who need them. Thus it is now common to speak of ‘systemic injustice’ in the case of bad outcomes that no-one intends to occur but that could be prevented by a shift in social norms or institutional practices. The agents in these cases are all those who by acting together to change these things could invert the injustice, but have so far failed to do so.

2. Justice: Four Distinctions

We have so far looked at four elements that are present in every use of the concept of justice. Now it is time to consider some equally important contrasts.

Philosophers writing on justice have observed that it has two different faces, one conservative of existing norms and practices, the other demanding reform of these norms and practices (see Sidgwick 1874/1907, Raphael 2001). Thus on the one hand it is a matter of justice to respect people’s rights under existing law or moral rules, or more generally to fulfil the legitimate expectations they have acquired as a result of past practice, social conventions, and so forth; on the other hand, justice often gives us reason to change laws, practices and conventions quite radically, thereby creating new entitlements and expectations. This exposes an ambiguity in what it means to ‘render each his due’. What is ‘due’ might be what a person can reasonably expect to have given existing law, policy, or social practice, or it might be what the person should get under a regime of ideal justice: this could mean what the person deserves, or needs, or is entitled to on grounds of equality, depending on which ideal principle is being invoked.

Conceptions of justice vary according to the weight they attach to each of these faces. At one extreme, some conceptions interpret justice as wholly concerned with what individuals can claim under existing laws and social conventions: thus for Hume, justice was to be understood as adherence to a set of rules that assign physical objects to individuals (such as being the first possessor of such an object) (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature , Book III, Part II). These rules can be explained by reference to the natural associations that form in people’s minds between persons and external objects, and although the system of justice as a whole can be shown to be socially useful, there are no relevant independent standards by which its principles can be assessed (Hume briskly dismissed equality and merit as principles for allocating property to persons). In similar vein, Hayek argued that justice was a property of individual behaviour, understood as compliance with the ‘rules of just conduct’ that had evolved to enable a market economy to function effectively. For Hayek, to speak of ‘social justice’ as an ideal standard of distribution was as meaningless as to speak of a ‘moral stone’ (Hayek 1976, p. 78)

At the other extreme stand conceptions of justice which posit some ideal principle of distribution such as equality, together with a ‘currency’ specifying the respect in which justice requires people to be made equally well off, and then refuse to acknowledge the justice of any claims that do not arise directly from the application of this principle. Thus claims deriving from existing law or practice are dismissed unless they happen to coincide with what the principle requires. More often, however, ideal justice is seen as proposing principles by which existing institutions and practices can be assessed, with a view to reforming them, or in the extreme case abolishing them entirely, while the claims that people already have under those practices are given some weight. Rawls, for example, whose two principles of justice count as ideal principles for this purpose, is at pains to stress that they are not intended to be applied in a way that disregards people’s existing legitimate expectations. About the ‘difference principle’, which requires social and economic inequalities to be regulated so that they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society, he says:

It applies to the announced system of public law and statutes and not to particular transactions or distributions, nor to the decisions of individuals and associations, but rather to the institutional background against which these transactions and decisions take place. There are no unannounced and unpredictable interferences with citizens’ expectations and acquisitions. Entitlements are earned and honored as the public system of rules declares. (Rawls 1993, p. 283)

Here we see Rawls attempting to reconcile the demands of conservative and ideal justice. Yet he does not directly address the question of what should happen when changing circumstances mean that the difference principle requires new laws or policies to be enacted: do those whose prior entitlements or expectations are no longer met have a claim to be compensated for their loss? We could call this the question of transitional justice (though this phrase is often used now in a more specific sense to refer to the process of reconciliation that may occur following civil war or other armed conflicts: see the entry on transitional justice ).

A second important contrast, whose pedigree reaches back at least as far as Aristotle, is between justice as a principle for assigning distributable goods of various kinds to individual people, and justice as a remedial principle that applies when one person wrongly interferes with another’s legitimate holdings. Thus suppose Bill steals Alice’s computer, or sells Alice faulty goods which he claims to be in perfect order: then Alice suffers a loss, which justice demands that Bill should remedy by returning the computer or fulfilling his contract honestly. Corrective justice, then, essentially concerns a bilateral relationship between a wrongdoer and his victim, and demands that the fault be cancelled by restoring the victim to the position she would have been in had the wrongful behaviour not occurred; it may also require that the wrongdoer not benefit from his faulty behaviour. Distributive justice, on the other hand, is multilateral: it assumes a distributing agent, and a number of persons who have claims on what is being distributed. Justice here requires that the resources available to the distributor be shared according to some relevant criterion, such as equality, desert, or need. In Aristotle’s example, if there are fewer flutes available than people who want to play them, they should be given to the best performers (Aristotle, The Politics , p. 128). In modern debates, principles of distributive justice are applied to social institutions such as property and tax systems, which are understood as producing distributive outcomes across large societies, or even the world as a whole.

The conceptual distinction between distributive and corrective justice seems clear, but their normative relationship is more difficult to pin down (see Perry 2000, Ripstein 2004, Coleman 1992, chs. 16–17). Some have claimed that corrective justice is merely instrumental to distributive justice: its aim is to move from a situation of distributive injustice brought about by the faulty behaviour to one that is more nearly (if not perfectly) distributively just. But this view runs into a number of objections. One is that so long as Alice has a legitimate title to her computer, her claim of corrective justice against Bill does not depend on her having had, prior to the theft, the share of resources that distributive justice ideally demands. She might be richer than she deserves to be, yet corrective justice still require that the computer be returned to her. In other words, corrective justice may serve to promote conservative rather than ideal justice, to use the distinction introduced in 2.1. Another objection is that corrective justice requires the wrongdoer himself to restore or compensate the person he has wronged, even if the cause of distributive justice could be better served by transferring resources from a third party – giving Alice one of even-more-undeservedly-rich Charles’s computers, for example. This underlines the bilateral nature of corrective justice, and also the fact that it comes into play in response to faulty behaviour on someone’s part. Its primary demand is that people should not lose out because others have behaved wrongfully or carelessly, but it also encompasses the idea that ‘no man should profit by his own wrong’. If Alice loses her computer in a boating accident, she might, under an insurance scheme, have a claim of distributive justice to a new machine, but she has no claim of corrective justice.

If corrective justice cannot be subsumed normatively under distributive justice, we need to explain its value. What is achieved when we make Bill return the computer to Alice? Aristotle ( Nicomachean Ethics , Book V, ch. 4) suggested that corrective justice aims to restore the two parties to a position of equality; by returning the computer we cancel both Bill’s unjustified gain and Alice’s unjustified loss. But this assumes that the computer can be returned intact. Corrective justice requires that Alice be made no worse off than she was before the theft, even if that means Bill suffering an absolute loss (e.g. by paying for a new computer if he has damaged Alice’s). Aristotle himself recognized that the idea of evening out gain and loss made no literal sense in a case where one person assaults another and has to compensate him for his injury – there is no ‘gain’ to be redistributed. It seems, then, that the value of corrective justice must lie in the principle that each person must take responsibility for his own conduct, and if he fails to respect the legitimate interests of others by causing injury, he must make good the harm. In that way, each person can plan her life secure in the knowledge that she will be protected against certain kinds of external setbacks. Philosophers and lawyers writing on corrective justice disagree about what standard of responsibility should apply – for example whether compensation is required only when one person wilfully or negligently causes another to suffer loss, or whether it can also be demanded when the perpetrator displays no such fault but is nevertheless causally responsible for the injury.

A third distinction that must be drawn is between the justice of the procedures that might be used to determine how benefits and burdens of various kinds are allocated to people, and the justice of the final allocation itself. It might initially seem as though the justice of a procedure can be reduced to the justice of the results produced by applying it, but this is not so. For one thing, there are cases in which the idea of an independently just outcome makes no sense. A coin toss is a fair way of deciding who starts a game, but neither the Blues nor the Reds have a claim of justice to bat first or kick off. But even where a procedure has been shaped by a concern that it should produce substantively just outcomes, it may still have special properties that make it intrinsically just. In that case, using a different procedure to produce the same result might be objectionable. In an influential discussion, John Rawls contrasted perfect procedural justice , where a procedure is such that if it is followed a just outcome is guaranteed (requiring the person who cuts a cake to take the last slice himself is the illustration Rawls provides), imperfect procedural justice , where the procedure is such that following it is likely, but not certain, to produce the just result, and pure procedural justice , such as the coin-tossing example, where there is no independent way to assess the outcome – if we call it just, it is only on the grounds that it has come about by following the relevant procedure (Rawls 1971, 1999, § 14).

Theories of justice can then be distinguished according to the relative weight they attach to procedures and substantive outcomes. Some theories are purely procedural in form. Robert Nozick distinguished between historical theories of justice, end-state theories, and patterned theories in order to defend the first against the second and third (Nozick 1974). An end-state theory defines justice in terms of some overall property of a distribution (of resources, welfare, etc.) – for example whether it is egalitarian, or whether the lowest position in the distribution is as high as it can be, as Rawls’ difference principle requires. A patterned theory looks at whether what each receives as part of a distribution matches some individual feature such as their desert or their need. By contrast, an historical theory asks about the process by which the final outcome has arisen. In Nozick’s particular case, a distribution of resources is said to be just if everyone within its scope is entitled to what they now own, having acquired it by legitimate means – such as voluntary contract or gift – from someone who was also entitled to have it, leading back eventually to a just act of acquisition – such as labouring on a plot of land – that gave the first owner his valid title. The shape of the final distribution is irrelevant: according to Nozick, justice is entirely a matter of the sequence of prior events that created it (for critical assessments of Nozick’s position, see Paul 1982, Wolff 1991, Cohen 1995, chs. 1–2).

For most philosophers, however, the justice of a procedure is to a large extent a function of the justice of the outcomes that it tends to produce when applied. For instance, the procedures that together make up a fair trial are justified on the grounds that for the most part they produce outcomes in which the guilty are punished and the innocent are acquitted. Yet even in these cases, we should be wary of assuming that the procedure itself has no independent value. We can ask of a procedure whether it treats the people to whom it is applied justly, for example by giving them adequate opportunities to advance their claims, not requiring them to provide personal information that they find humiliating to reveal, and so forth. Studies by social psychologists have shown that in many cases people care more about being treated fairly by the institutions they have to deal with than about how they fare when the procedure’s final result is known (Lind and Tyler 1988).

Justice takes a comparative form when to determine what is due to one person we need to look at what others can also claim: to determine how large a slice of pie is rightfully John’s, we have to know how many others have a claim to the pie, and also what the principle for sharing it should be – equality, or something else. Justice takes a non-comparative form when we can determine what is due to a person merely by knowing relevant facts about that particular person: if John has already been promised the whole of the pie, then that is what he can rightfully claim for himself. Some theories of justice seem to imply that justice is always a comparative notion – for example when it is said that justice consists in the absence of arbitrary inequality – whereas others imply that it is always non-comparative. But conceptually, at least, both forms seem admissible; indeed we can find cases in which it appears we have to choose between doing justice comparatively and doing it non-comparatively (see Feinberg 1974; for a critical response, see Montague 1980). For example, we might have several candidates all of whom are roughly equally deserving of an academic honour, but the number of honours we are permitted to award is smaller than the number of candidates. If we honour some but not others, we perpetrate a comparative injustice, but if to avoid doing so we honour no-one at all, then each is treated less well than they deserve, and so unjustly from a non-comparative perspective.

Theories of justice can then be categorised according to whether they are comparative, non-comparative, or neither. Principles of equality – principles requiring the equal distribution of some kind of benefit – are plainly comparative in form, since what is due to each person is simply an equal share of the benefit in question rather than any fixed amount. In the case of principles of desert, the position is less straightforward. These principles take the form ‘ A deserves X by virtue of P ’, where X is a mode of treatment, and P is a personal characteristic possessed by A (Feinberg 1970). In the case of both X and P , we can ask whether they are to be identified comparatively or non-comparatively. Thus what A deserves might either be an entitlement, or an absolute amount of some benefit – ‘a living wage’, say – or it might be a share of some collective benefit, or a multiple or fraction of what others are receiving – ‘twice what B is getting’, say. Turning to P , or what is often called the desert basis, this may be a feature of A that we can identify without reference to anyone else, or it may be a comparative feature, such as being the best student in a graduating class. So desert-based claims of justice might take one of four different forms depending on whether the basis of desert and/or the deserved mode of treatment is comparative or non-comparative (see Olsaretti 2003 for essays that address this question; for a more advanced treatment, see Kagan 2012, Part III).

Among principles of justice that are straightforwardly non-comparative are ‘sufficiency’ principles which hold that what justice requires is that each person should have ‘enough’, on some dimension or other – for instance, have all of their needs fulfilled, or have a specified set of capabilities that they are able to exercise (for a general defence of sufficiency, though not one that links it specifically to justice, see Frankfurt 2015; for a critique, see Casal 2007). Such principles, however, need to be supplemented by other principles, not only to tell us what to do with the surplus (assuming there is one) once everyone has sufficient resources, but also to guide us in situations where there are too few resources to bring everyone up to the sufficiency threshold. Should we, for example, maximise the number of people who achieve sufficiency, or minimise the aggregate shortfall suffered by those in the relevant group? Unless we are prepared to say that these are not matters of justice, a theory of justice that contains only the sufficiency principle and nothing else looks incomplete.

Some theories of justice cannot readily be classified either as comparative or as non-comparative. Consider one part of Rawls’ theory of social justice, the difference principle, which as noted above requires that social and economic inequalities be arranged to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged (Rawls 1971, 1999, §12–13). Under this principle, ideally just shares are calculated by determining what each person would receive under the set of social institutions whose economic effect is to raise the worst off person to the highest possible level. This is neither a fixed amount, nor one that depends in any direct sense on what other individuals are receiving, or should receive. Applying the difference principle does require making comparisons, but these are comparisons between the effects of different social institutions – say different tax laws, or different ways of defining property rights – not between individual people and the amounts of benefit they are receiving. We might call theories of this kind ‘holistic’ or ‘systemic’.

3. The Scope of Justice

When we raise questions about the scope of justice, we are asking about when principles of justice take effect and among whom . We have already, when discussing Hume, encountered the idea that there might be circumstances in which justice becomes irrelevant – circumstances in which resources are so abundant that it is pointless to allocate individual shares, or, as Hume also believed, in which resources are so scarce that everyone is permitted to grab what he can in the name of self-preservation. But even in circumstances that are less extreme than these, questions about scope arise. Who can make claims of justice, and who might have the corresponding obligation to meet them? Does this depend on the kind of thing that is being claimed? If comparative principles are being applied, who should be counted as part of the comparison group? Do some principles of justice have universal scope – they apply whenever agent A acts towards recipient B , regardless of the relationship between them – while others are contextual in character, applying only within social or political relationships of a certain kind? The present section examines some of these questions in greater detail.

What does a creature have to do, or be like, to be included within the scope of (at least some) principles of justice? Most past philosophers have assumed that the line should be drawn so as to exclude all non-human animals, but more recently some have been prepared to defend ‘justice for animals’ (Nussbaum 2006, ch. 6; Garner 2013). Against this, Rawls asserts that although we have ‘duties of compassion and humanity’ towards animals and should refrain from treating them cruelly, nonetheless they are ‘outside the scope of the theory of justice’ (Rawls 1971, p. 512; Rawls 1999, p. 448). How could this claim be justified?

We can focus our attention either on individual features that humans possess and animals lack, and that might be thought relevant to their inclusion within the scope of justice, or on asymmetries in the relationship between humans and other animals. To begin with the latter, Hume claimed that the domination humans exercised over animals – such that an animal could only possess something by virtue of our permission – meant that we were ‘bound by the laws of humanity to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them’ (Hume, Enquiry , p. 190). For Rawls and those influenced by him, principles of distributive justice apply among agents who are related to one another as participants in a ‘cooperative venture for mutual advantage’, and this might seem to exclude animals from the scope of such principles. Critics of this view have pointed to cases of human-animal co-operation (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, Valentini 2014); however these arguments focus mainly or entirely on the special case of dogs , and it seems implausible to generalise from them in an attempt to show that human-animal relationships generally have a co-operative character.

But the claim that justice only applies to participants in co-operative practices is anyway vulnerable to the objection that it risks excluding seriously disabled people, people living in isolated communities, and future generations from the scope of justice, so it does not seem compelling as a claim about justice in general (see further below). Might there be other reasons why animals cannot make claims of justice on us? Another Rawls-inspired suggestion is that animals lack the necessary moral powers, in particular the capacity to act on principles of justice themselves. They cannot distinguish what is justly owed to them from what is not; and they cannot determine what they owe to others – whether to humans or to other non-human animals – as a matter of justice. This suggestion interprets justice as involving a kind of reciprocity: an agent to whom justice is due must also in principle be an agent who could dispense justice to others, by virtue of having the relevant capacity, even if for physical reasons – such as suffering from severe disability – they cannot do so in practice.

If this suggestion is rejected, and we allow that some animals, at least, should be included within the scope of justice, we can then ask about the form that justice should take in their cases. Using the distinction drawn in 2.4 above, it appears that justice for animals must be non-comparative. For example, we might attribute rights to the animals over whom we exercise power – rights against cruel treatment, and rights to food and shelter, for instance. This would involve using a sufficiency principle to determine what animals are owed as a matter of justice. It is much less plausible to think that comparative principles might apply, such that giving special treats to one cat but not another could count as an injustice.

The Rawlsian view introduced in the previous section, which holds that principles of social justice apply among people who are engaged together in a co-operative practice, is a leading example of a relational theory of justice. Other theories offer different accounts of the relevant justice-generating feature: for example, Nagel has argued that principles of distributive justice apply among people who by virtue of being citizens of the same state are required both to comply with, and accept responsibility for, the coercive laws that govern their lives (Nagel 2005). In both cases, the claim being made is that when people stand in a certain relationship to one another, they become subject to principles of justice whose scope is limited to those within the relationship. In particular, comparative principles apply within the relationship, but not beyond it. If A stands in a relationship (of the right kind) to B , then it becomes a matter of justice how A is treated relative to B , but it does not matter in the same way how A is treated relative to C who stands outside of the relationship. Justice may still require that C be given treatment of a certain kind, but that will be justice in its non-comparative guise.

Whether justice is relational in either of the ways that Rawls and Nagel suggest has large implications for its scope. In particular it bears on the question whether there is such a thing as global distributive justice, or, in contrast, whether distributive principles only apply to people who are related together as members of the same society or citizens of the same state. For example, might the global inequalities that exist between rich and poor in today’s world be unjust simply as inequalities, or are they unjust only insofar as they prevent poor people from living lives that we judge to be acceptable? (see entries on international distributive justice and global justice ) So much hangs on the question whether, and if so in virtue of what, distributive justice has a relational character. What reason can be given for thinking that it does?

Suppose we have two people A and B , of whom one is significantly better off than another – has greater opportunities or a higher income, say. Why should this be a concern of justice? It seems it will not be a concern unless it can be shown that the inequality between A and B can be attributed to the behaviour of some agent, individual or collective, whose actions or omissions have resulted in A being better off than B – in which case we can ask whether the inequality between them is justifiable, say on grounds of their respective deserts. This reiterates the claim in 1.4 above that without an agent to whom the outcome can be attributed there can only be justice or injustice in a metaphorical, ‘cosmic’, sense. Relational theorists claim that when people associate with one another in the relevant way, they become agents of justice. On a small scale they can organize informally to ensure that each receives what is due to him relative to the rest. On a larger scale, distributive justice requires the creation of legal and other institutions to achieve that outcome. Moreover failure to co-ordinate their actions in this way is likely to be a source of injustice by omission.

Debates about the scope of justice then become debates about whether different forms of human association are of the right kind to create agency in the relevant sense. Take the question of whether principles of social justice should apply to market transactions. If we see the market as a neutral arena in which many individual people freely pursue their own purposes, then the answer will be No. The only form of justice that arises will be justice in the conduct of each agent, who must avoid inflicting harm on others, must fulfil her contracts, and so forth. Whereas if we see the market as governed by a humanly-constructed system of rules that the participants collectively have the power to change – by legislation, for example – then we cannot avoid asking whether the outcomes it currently produces meet relevant standards of distributive justice, whatever we take these to be. A similar issue arises in the debate about over principles of global justice referred to above: is the current world order such that it makes sense to regard humanity as a whole as a collective agent responsible for the distributive outcomes it allows to occur?

Once institutions are established for the purpose (among other things) of delivering justice on a large scale, we can ask what duties of justice individual people have in consequence. Is their duty simply to support the institutions, and comply with whatever rules of conduct apply to them personally? Or do they have further duties to promote justice by acting directly on the relevant principles in their daily lives? No one doubts that some duties of justice fall directly on individuals, for example duties not to deceive or defraud when engaging in commercial transactions (and duties of corrective justice where behaviour is faulty), or duties to carry out one’s fair share of an informally organized project from which one expects to benefit, such as cleaning up the neighbourhood park. Others fall on them because they are performing a role within a social institution, for example the duty of an employer not to discriminate on grounds of race or gender when hiring workers, or the duty of a local government officer to assign public housing to those in greatest need. But what is much more in dispute is whether individual people have more extensive duties to promote social justice (for contrasting views, see Cohen 2008, ch. 3, Murphy 1998, Rawls 1993, Lecture VII, Young 2011, ch. 2).

Consider two cases: the first concerns parents who confer advantages on their children in ways that undermine fair equality of opportunity. If the latter principle of justice requires, to cite Rawls, that ‘those who have the same level of talent and ability and the same willingness to use these gifts should have the same prospects of success regardless of their social class of origin’ (Rawls 2001, p. 44) then there are myriad ways in which some parents can bestow advantages on their children that other parents cannot – financial benefits, educational opportunities, social contacts, and so forth – that are likely to bring greater success in later life. Are parents therefore constrained as a matter of justice to avoid conferring at least some of these advantages, or are they free to benefit their children as they choose, leaving the pursuit of equal opportunities entirely in the hands of the state (for a careful analysis, see Brighouse and Swift 2014)?

The second example concerns wage differentials. Might individuals whose talents can bring them high rewards in the labour market have a duty not to make use of their bargaining power, but instead be willing to work for a fair wage – which if fairness is understood in egalitarian terms might mean the same wage as everyone else (perhaps with extra compensation for those whose labour is unusually burdensome)? Rawls, as we saw above, argued that economic justice meant arranging social and economic inequalities to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, and in formulating the principle in this way he assumed that some inequalities might serve as incentives to greater production that would also raise the position of the worst-off group in society. But if individuals were willing to forego incentives, and so economic inequalities served no useful purpose, then the arrangement that worked to the greatest benefit of the (otherwise) least advantaged would be one of strict equality. Cohen (2008) argues that Rawls’ position is internally inconsistent. As citizens designing our institutions we are supposed to be guided by the difference principle, but as private actors in the marketplace, we are permitted to ignore that principle and bargain for higher wages, even though doing so will work to the disadvantage of the worst-off group. Justice, according to Cohen, requires us to embrace an ethos of service that disdains material incentives.

Why might we hesitate before agreeing that in cases such as these, justice requires people to refrain from doing things that they are permitted to do by the public rules of their society (passing on benefits to their children; seeking higher wages)? One reason is that the refraining is only going to have a significant effect if it is practised on a large scale, and individuals have no assurance that others will follow their example; meanwhile they (or their children) will lose out relative to the less scrupulous. A connected reason has to do with publicity: it may be hard to detect whether people are following the required ethos or not (see Williams 1998). Is the person who sends her child to a private school because she claims he has special needs that the local state school cannot meet being sincere, or is she just trying to buy him comparative advantage? How can we tell whether the person who claims more money, but merely, he says, as compensation for the unusual stress that his work involves, is reporting honestly? (for Cohen’s response, see Cohen 2008, ch. 8) It appears, then, that there are principles of justice that apply to what Rawls calls ‘the basic structure of society [as] a public system of rules’ that do not apply in the same way to the personal behaviour of the individuals who live within that structure. Attending to the scope , as well as the content , of justice is important.

Recent philosophical writing on justice has drawn attention to forms of injustice that do not involve the material treatment that people receive, either from other persons or from institutions, but the harms they suffer through failures of recognition. They are impacted by social norms and social practices that diminish their sense of agency and induce them to see themselves as of lesser value than others. Here then justice is understood as being adequately and appropriately recognized, and injustice as involving failures of recognition, or in some cases ‘misrecognition’, when a person is placed in a category or assigned an identity that is not their own. In one influential formulation of this idea, ‘it is unjust that some individuals and groups are denied the status of full partners in social interaction simply as a consequence of institutionalized patterns of cultural value in whose construction they have not equally participated and which disparage their distinctive characteristics or the distinctive characteristics assigned to them’ (Fraser in Fraser and Honneth 2003, p. 29).

What, then, does it mean to be recognized? In general it means to be viewed and treated by others in the way that is appropriate to the features that you possess, but most philosophers regard recognition as multidimensional. In particular, they distinguish between being recognized as an equal, where a person is accorded the kind of standing that gives them an equal status with other members of the relevant group, and being recognized for having characteristics, achievements or an identity that may be uniquely their own. Recognition in this second sense may involve the unequal granting of social esteem. Justice as recognition, therefore, is internally complex. At the social level, Axel Honneth distinguishes ‘three forms of social recognition, based in the sphere-specific principles of love, equal legal treatment, and social esteem’ (Fraser and Honneth 2003 p. 180)

The question that arises is how best to understand the relationship between justice of this kind and distributive justice, involving the allocation of material resources and so forth. For Honneth, justice as recognition is understood expansively so that it can also capture issues of economic justice, the thought being that the harm inflicted when, say, labour is not adequately rewarded can be understood as a failure to offer adequate recognition of the worker’s social contribution. For Nancy Fraser, by contrast, recognition and redistribution are seen as two mutually irreducible but jointly necessary conditions for social justice. Failures of recognition can be experienced by some among the economically privileged – such as ‘the African-American Wall Street banker who cannot get a taxi to pick him up’ (Fraser and Honneth 2003, p. 34). Justice as recognition requires cultural shifts in the way that different forms of identity and different types of achievement are valued that are independent of the institutional changes required to achieve distributive justice.

A particular form of recognitional injustice is epistemic injustice as diagnosed by Miranda Fricker (Fricker 2007). This occurs when someone is wronged in their capacity as a source of knowledge, and it takes two main forms: testimonial injustice and hermeneutic injustice. As Fricker explains ‘testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone as at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences’ (Fricker 2007, p. 1). She argues that testimonial injustice matters for two reasons. First, the person who suffers from it is less able to protect or advance their interests – for example they are less likely to be believed when having to defend themselves in court. Second, since others are unwilling to regard them as competent sources of knowledge, they may lose trust in their own capacity to know, leading in some cases to ‘prolonged self-doubt and loss of intellectual confidence’.

Hermeneutical injustice arises in the context of unequal relationships in which the subordinated party lacks the concept or concepts needed to make sense of their experience (and thereby to challenge their subordination). Fricker uses the example of a woman who suffered sexual harassment at the time before feminists had developed that concept, and so had no adequate word to describe what she was experiencing. Hermeneutical injustice matters most when it is systematic, brought about by power inequalities that leave certain groups ‘hermeneutically marginalised’. However she treats epistemic justice as a virtue that individual hearers can develop, in contrast to recognition theorists like Fraser and Honneth for whom achieving recognitional justice requires collective action to change social and cultural norms on the part of misrecognized groups.

4. Utilitarianism and Justice

Can justice be understood in utilitarian terms? This may in the first place depend on how we interpret utilitarianism. We treat it here as a normative theory whose aim is to supply a criterion – the greatest happiness principle – that can be used, directly or indirectly, both by individuals and by institutions (such as states) in deciding what to do, rather than simply as a tool for evaluating states of affairs. Utilitarianism cannot plausibly provide a theory of justice unless it is interpreted in this action-guiding way, in light of what was said above about justice and agency. We also assume that the most likely candidate will be a rule-utilitarian view that treats principles of justice as belonging to the set of rules which when followed by the relevant agents will tend to produce the greatest total utility (for different ways of formulating this view, see the entry on rule consequentialism) .

Most utilitarians have regarded it as part of their task in defending utilitarianism to show that it can both accommodate and explain much of what we intuitively believe about justice. This is certainly true of two of the greatest among them, John Stuart Mill and Sidgwick, both of whom went to considerable lengths to show that familiar principles of justice could be given a utilitarian rationale (Mill Utilitarianism , ch. 5; Sidgwick 1874/1907, Book III, ch.5). Bentham, in contrast, was more cavalier: ‘justice, in the only sense in which it has a meaning, is an imaginary personage, feigned for the convenience of discourse, whose dictates are the dictates of utility, applied to certain particular cases’ ( The Principles of Morals and Legislation , pp. 125–6). If we follow the lead of Mill and Sidgwick in wishing to take seriously how justice is commonly understood, the utilitarian has two challenges to face. First he or she must show that the demands of justice as commonly understood correspond roughly to the rules that when followed by persons, or implemented by institutions, are most conducive to the greatest happiness. They need not mirror the latter exactly, because utilitarians will argue, as both Mill and Sidgwick did, that our intuitions about justice are often ambiguous or internally inconsistent, but there must be enough overlap to warrant the claim that what the utilitarian theory can accommodate and explain is indeed justice . (As Sidgwick (1874/1907, p. 264) put it, ‘we may, so to speak, clip the ragged edge of common usage, but we must not make excision of any considerable portion’.) Second, some explanation must be given for the distinctiveness of justice. Why do we have a concept that is used to mark off a particular set of requirements and claims if the normative basis for these requirements and claims is nothing other than general utility? What accounts for our intuitive sense of justice? The task confronting the utilitarian, then, is to systematize our understanding of justice without obliterating it.

By way of illustration, both Mill and Sidgwick recognize that desert , of both reward and punishment, is a key component of common understandings of justice, but they argue that if we remain at the level of common sense when we try to analyse it, we run into irresolvable contradictions. For instance, we are inclined to think that a person’s deserts should depend on what they have actually achieved – say the economic value of what they have produced – but also, because achievement will depend on factors for which the person in question can claim no credit, such as inborn talent, that their deserts should depend only on factors for which they are directly responsible, such as the amount of effort they expend. Each of these conceptions, when put into practice, would lead to a quite different schedule of rewards, and the only means to escape the impasse, these utilitarians claim, is to ask which schedule will generate most utility by directing people’s choices and efforts in the most socially productive way. Similar reasoning applies to the principles of punishment: the rules we should follow are the rules that are most conducive to the ends for which punishment is instituted, such as deterring crime.

To explain the distinctiveness of justice, Mill suggests that it designates moral requirements that, because of their very great importance to human well-being, people have a right to have discharged, and are therefore matters of perfect obligation. A person who commits an injustice is always liable to punishment of some kind, he argues. So he explains our sense of justice in terms of the resentment we feel towards someone who breaches these requirements. Sidgwick, who laid greater stress than Mill on the connection between justice and law, also underlined the relationship between justice and gratitude, on one side, and resentment, on the other, in order to capture the way in which our concern for justice seems to differ from our concern for utility in general.

Yet despite these efforts to reconcile justice and utility, three serious obstacles still remain. The first concerns what we might call the currency of justice: justice has to do with the way that tangible benefits and burdens are assigned, and not with the happiness or unhappiness that the assignees experience. It is a matter of justice, for example, that people should be paid the right amount for the jobs that they do, but, special circumstances aside, it is no concern of justice that John derives more satisfaction from his fairly-earned income than Jane does from hers (but see Cohen 1989 for a different view). There is so to speak, a division of labour, under which rights, opportunities, and material benefits of various kinds are allocated by principles of justice, while the conversion of these into units of utility (or disutility) is the responsibility of each individual recipient (see Dworkin 2000, ch. 1). Utilitarians will therefore find it hard to explain what from their point of view seems to be the fetishistic concern of justice over how the means to happiness are distributed, rather than happiness itself.

The second obstacle is that utilitarianism judges outcomes by totalling up utility levels, and has no independent concern for how that utility is distributed between persons. So even if we set aside the currency issue, utilitarian theory seems unable to capture justice’s demand that each should receive what is due to her regardless of the total amount of benefit this generates. Defenders of utilitarianism will argue that when the conduct-guiding rules are being formulated, attention will be paid to distributive questions. In particular, when resources are being distributed among people we know little about individually, there are good reasons to favour equality, since in most cases resources have diminishing marginal utility – the more of them you have, the less satisfaction you derive from additional instalments. Yet this is only a contingent matter. If some people are very adept at turning resources into well-being – they are so-called ‘utility monsters’ – then a utilitarian should support a rule that privileges them. This seems repugnant to justice. As Rawls famously put the general point, ‘each member of society is thought to have an inviolability founded on justice which….even the welfare of every one else cannot override’ (Rawls 1971, p. 28; Rawls 1999, pp. 24–25).

The third and final difficulty stems from utilitarianism’s thoroughgoing consequentialism. Rules are assessed strictly in the light of the consequences of adopting then, not in terms of their intrinsic properties. Of course, when agents follow rules, they are meant to do what the rule requires rather than to calculate consequences directly. But for a utilitarian, it is never going to be a good reason for adopting a rule that it will give people what they deserve or what they are entitled to, when desert or entitlement are created by events in the past, such as a person’s having performed a worthwhile action or entered an agreement. Backward-looking reasons have to be transmuted into forward-looking reasons in order to count. If a rule such as pacta sunt servanda (‘agreements must be kept’) is going to be adopted on utilitarian grounds, this is not because there is any inherent wrongness in defaulting on a compact one has made, but because a rule that compacts must be kept is a useful one, since it allows people to co-ordinate their behaviour knowing that their expectations about the future are likely to be met. But justice, although not always backward-looking in the sense explained, often is. What is due to a person is in many cases what they deserve for what they have done, or what they are entitled to by virtue of past transactions. So even if it were possible to construct a forward-looking rationale for having rules that closely tracked desert or entitlement as these are normally understood, the utilitarian still cannot capture the sense of justice – why it matters that people should get what is due to then – that informs our common-sense judgements.

Utilitarians might reply that their reconstruction preserves what is rationally defensible in common sense beliefs while what it discards are elements that cannot survive sustained critical reflection. But this would bring them closer to Bentham’s view that justice, as commonly understood, is nothing but a ‘phantom’.

5. Contractarianism and Justice

The shortcomings of utilitarianism have prompted several recent philosophers to revive the old idea of the social contract as a better way of bringing coherence to our thinking about justice. The idea here is not that people actually have entered a contract to establish justice, or that they should proceed to do so, but that we can understand justice better by asking the question: what principles to govern their institutions, practices and personal behaviour would people choose to adopt if they all had to agree on them in advance? The contract, in other words, is hypothetical; but the search for agreement is meant to ensure that the principles chosen would, when implemented, not lead to outcomes that people could not accept. Thus whereas a utilitarian might, under some circumstances, be prepared to support slavery – if the misery of the slaves were outweighed by the heightened pleasures of the slave-owners – contractarians claims that no-one could accept a principle permitting slavery, lest they themselves were destined to be slaves when the principle was applied.

The problem that contractarians face is to show how such an agreement is possible. If we were to ask people, in the real world, what principles they would prefer to live under, they are likely to start from a position of quite radical disagreement, given their interests and their beliefs. Some might even be willing to endorse slavery, if they were fairly certain that they would not end up as slaves themselves, or if they were sado-masochists who viewed the humiliations inflicted on slaves in a positive light. So in order to show how agreement could be achieved, contractarians have to model the contracting parties in a particular way, either by limiting what they are allowed to know about themselves or about the future, or by attributing to them certain motivations while excluding others. Since the modelling can be done differently, we have a family of contractarian theories of justice, three of whose most important members are the theories of Gauthier, Rawls and Scanlon.

Gauthier (1986) presents the social contract as a bargain between rational individuals who can gain through co-operating with one another, but who are competing over the division of the resulting surplus. He assumes that each is interested only in trying to maximise his own welfare, and he also assumes that there is a non-co-operative baseline from which the bargaining begins – so nobody would accept a solution that left her less well off than in the baseline condition. Each person can identify the outcome under which they fare best – their maximum gain – but they have no reason to expect others to accept that. Gauthier argues that rational bargainers will converge on the principle of Minimax Relative Concession , which requires each to concede the same relative proportion of their maximum possible gain relative to the non-co-operative baseline. Thus suppose there is a feasible arrangement whereby each participant can achieve two-thirds of their maximum gain, but no arrangement under which they all do better than that, then this is the arrangement that the principle recommends. Each person has made the same concession relative to the outcome that is best for them personally – not accepting the same absolute loss of welfare, let it be noted, but the same proportionate loss.

There are some internal difficulties with Gauthier’s theory that need to be recorded briefly (for a full discussion, see Barry 1989, esp. Part III). One is whether Minimax Relative Concession is in fact the correct solution to the bargaining problem that Gauthier introduces, as opposed to the standard Nash solution which (in a simple two-person case) selects the outcome in which the product of the two parties’ utilities is maximised (for discussion of different solutions to the bargaining problem, see the entry on contemporary approaches to the social contract , § 3.2). A second is whether Gauthier is able to justify positing a ‘Lockean’ baseline, under which each is assumed to respect the natural rights of the others, as the starting point for bargaining over the surplus – as opposed to a more conflictual ‘Hobbesian’ baseline in which individuals are permitted to use their natural powers to threaten one another in the process of establishing what each could expect to get in the absence of co-operation. But the larger question is whether a contract modelled in this way is an appropriate device for delivering principles of justice. On the one hand, it captures the idea that the practice of justice should work to everyone’s advantage, while requiring all those involved to moderate the demands they make on one another. On the other hand, it prescribes a final distribution of benefit that appears morally arbitrary, in the sense that A ’s bargaining advantage over B – which stems from the fact that his maximum possible gain is greater than hers – allows him to claim a higher level of benefit as a matter of justice . This seems implausible: there may be prudential reasons to recommend a distribution that reflects the outcome that self-interested and rational bargainers would arrive at, but claims of justice need a different basis.

John Rawls’ theory of justice is the most widely-cited example of a contractarian theory, but before outlining it, two words of caution are necessary. First, the shape of the theory has evolved from its first incarnation in Rawls (1958) through his major work A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971) and on to Rawls (1993) and Rawls (2001). Second, although Rawls has consistently claimed that the principles of justice he defends are the principles that would be selected by people in a suitably designed ‘original position’ in which they are asked to choose the social and political institutions they will live under – this is what qualifies his theory as contractarian – it is less clear how important a role the contract itself plays in his thinking. His principles, which are discussed elsewhere (see the entry on John Rawls) , can be defended on their own merits as a theory of social justice for a modern liberal society, even if their contractual grounding proves to be unsound. Rawls presents the contracting parties as seeking to advance their own interests as they decide which principles to favour, but under two informational constraints. First, they are not allowed to know their own ‘conception of the good’ – what ends they personally find it most valuable to pursue – so the principles must be couched in terms of ‘primary goods’, understood as goods that it is better to have more rather than less of whatever conception of the good you favour. Second, they are placed behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that deprives them of any knowledge of personal characteristics, such as their gender, their place in society, or the talents and skills they possess. This means that they have no basis on which to bargain for advantage, and have to consider themselves as generic persons who might be male or female, talented or untalented, and so forth. In consequence, Rawls argues, all will choose to live under impartial principles that work to no-one’s advantage in particular.

The problem for Rawls, however, is to show that the principles that would be selected in such an original position are in fact recognizable as principles of justice . One might expect the parties to calculate how to weigh the primary goods (which Rawls catalogues as ‘rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth’) against each other, and then to choose as their social principle ‘maximise the weighted sum of primary goods, averaged across all persons’. This, however, would bring the theory very close to utilitarianism, since the natural method of weighing primary goods is to ask how much utility having a given quantity of each is likely, on average, to bring (for the claim that utilitarianism would be chosen in a Rawlsian original position, see Harsanyi 1975). Since Rawls wishes to reject utilitarianism, he has to adjust the psychology of the parties in the original position so that they reason differently. Thus he suggests that, at least in developed societies, people have special reason to prioritise liberty over the other goods and to ensure that it is equally distributed: he argues that this is essential to safeguard their self-respect. In later writing his argument is less empirical: now the parties to the contract are endowed with ‘moral powers’ that must be exercised, and it is then fairly easy to show that this requires them to have a set of basic liberties.

When he turns to the distribution of income and wealth, Rawls has to show why his choosers would pick the difference principle, which considers only the position of the worst-off social group, over other principles such as maximising average income across the whole society. In Theory of Justice he does this by attributing special psychological features to the choosers that make it appropriate for them to follow the ‘maximin’ rule for decisions under uncertainty (choose the option whose worst possible outcome is least bad for you). For example, they are said to be much more concerned to achieve the minimum level of income that the difference principle would guarantee them than to enjoy increases above that level. In his later work, he abandons this reliance on maximin reasoning and gives greater prominence to another argument hinted at in Theory . This portrays the contracting parties as starting out from the presumption that income and wealth should be distributed equally, but then recognizing that all can benefit by permitting certain inequalities to arise. When these inequalities are governed by the difference principle, they can be justified to everyone, including the worst off, thus creating the conditions for a more stable society. But we need then to ask why equal distribution should be treated as the benchmark, departures from which require special justification. When Rawls says that it is ‘not reasonable’ for any of the parties initially to expect more than an equal share (Rawls 1971, p. 150; Rawls 1999, p. 130), is this simply a corollary of their position as rational choosers behind a veil of ignorance, or has Rawls in addition endowed them with a substantive sense of justice that includes this presumption of equality?

Although Rawls throughout presents his theory of justice as contractarian, we can now see that the terms of the contract are in part determined by prior normative principles that Rawls engineers the parties to follow. So in contrast to Gauthier, it is no longer simply a case of self-interested contractors negotiating their way to an agreement. Rawls candidly admits that the contractual situation has to be adjusted so that it yields results that match our pre-existing convictions about justice. But then we may ask how much work the contractual apparatus is really doing (see Barry 1989, ch. 9 for a critical appraisal).

Scanlon (1998) does not attempt to deliver a theory of justice in the same sense as Rawls, but his contractarian account of that part of morality that specifies ‘what we owe to each other’ covers much of the same terrain (for an explicit attempt to analyse justice in Scanlonian terms, see Barry 1995). Like Rawls, Scanlon is concerned to develop an alternative to utilitarianism, and he does so by developing a test that any candidate moral principle must pass: it must be such that no-one could reasonably reject it as the basis for informed, unforced general agreement (see the entry on contractualism ). Scanlon’s contractors are not positioned behind a veil of ignorance. They are able to see what effect adopting any proposed principle would have on them personally. If that effect is unacceptable to them, they are permitted to reject it. Each person has, so to speak, a veto on any general principle for regulating conduct. Those that survive this test are defensible as principles of justice – Scanlon concedes that there might be alternative sets of such principles appropriate to different social conditions.

It might seem, however, that giving each person a veto would lead straightforwardly to deadlock, since anyone might reject a principle under which he fared badly relative to some alternative. Here the idea of reasonable rejection becomes important. It would not, Scanlon thinks, be reasonable to reject a principle under which one does badly if the alternatives all involve someone else faring worse still. One needs to take account of other people’s reasons for rejecting these alternatives. It might then appear that Scanlon’s contractualism yields the difference principle, which requires the worst-off group in society to be as well of as they can be. But this is not the conclusion that Scanlon draws (though he acknowledges that there might be special reasons to follow Rawls in requiring basic social institutions to follow the difference principle). The claims of other groups must be considered too. If a policy greatly benefits many others, while slightly worsening the position of a few, though without leaving them very badly off, it may well not be rejectable. Scanlon’s position leaves some room for aggregation – it makes a difference how many people will be benefitted if a principle is followed – though not the simple form of aggregation that utilitarians defend.

Scanlon also says that a person can have a reason for rejecting a principle if it treats them unfairly, say by benefitting some but not others for arbitrary reasons. This presupposes a norm of fairness that the contractarian theory does not itself attempt to explain or justify. So it looks as though the purpose of the theory is to provide a distinctive account of moral reasoning (and moral motivation) but not to defend any substantive principles of distributive justice. In this respect, Scanlon’s contractualism is less ambitious than either Gauthier’s or Rawls’.

6. Egalitarianism and Justice

In the recent past, many philosophers have sought to establish a close connection between justice and equality: they ask the question ‘what kind of equality does justice require?’, and to that several competing answers have been given (see, for example Cohen 1989, Dworkin 2000, Sen 1980). But we should not be too hasty to assume that what justice demands is always equality, whether of treatment or of outcome. Perhaps it does so only in a formal sense. As we saw in sect 1.3, justice requires the impartial and consistent application of rules, from which it follows that when two people are alike in all relevant respects, they must be treated equally. But, as Aristotle among others saw, justice also involves the idea of proportional treatment, which implies recipients getting unequal amounts of whatever good is at issue (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , Book V, ch. 3). If A is twice as deserving or twice as needy as B , justice may require that she receives more than B does. So here formal equality of treatment – the same rule applied to both – leads to an unequal outcome. Again, when justice takes the conservative form of respect for existing entitlements or legitimate expectations (see para 2.1) there is no reason to anticipate that what is due to different people will be substantively the same.

So we need to ask about the circumstances in which justice requires a substantively equal distribution of advantages. One rather obvious case occurs when the members of the group within which the distribution is going to occur have no relevant distinguishing features, so there are no grounds on which some can claim greater shares of benefit than others. Suppose a group experiences a windfall gain for which no-one can claim any credit: a pot of gold somehow appears in their midst. Then unless any member can make a justice-related claim for a larger-than-equal share – say that she has special needs that she lacks sufficient resources to meet – an equal distribution of the gold is what justice demands, since any other distribution would be arbitrary. Equality here is the default principle that applies in the absence of any special claims that can be presented as reasons of justice.

Equality also acts as a default in circumstances where, although people may indeed have unequal claims to whatever good is being distributed, we have no reliable way of identifying and measuring those claims. By sharing the good equally, we can at least ensure that every claim has been partially satisfied. Thus suppose we have limited supplies of a drug that can treat malaria, and a number of patients displaying symptoms of the disease, but lacking specialised medical knowledge we cannot tell whether one person’s condition is more serious than another’s; then by sharing out the drug equally, we can guarantee that each person at least receives the highest fraction of what they really need. Any other distribution must leave at least one person with less (this of course assumes that there is no threshold amount of the drug beneath which it is ineffective; if that assumption is wrong, justice under the stated conditions might require a lottery in which the chosen ones receive threshold-size doses).

If justice requires equality only by default, it might seem to apply only in a narrow range of cases. How could egalitarian justice be made more robust? One approach involves declaring a wider range of factors irrelevant to just distribution. Thus one formulation of the principle holds that no-one should be worse-off than anyone else as a result of their ‘morally arbitrary’ characteristics, where a characteristic is morally arbitrary when its possessor cannot claim credit for having it. This captures a widespread intuition that people should not be advantaged or disadvantaged by virtue of their race or gender, but extends it (more controversially) to all personal features with a genetic basis, such as natural talents and inborn dispositions. In doing so, it discounts most claims of desert, since when people are said to deserve benefits of various kinds, it is usually for performing actions or displaying qualities that depend upon innate characteristics such as strength or intelligence. In the following section, we will see how egalitarian theories of justice have tried to incorporate some desert-like elements by way of response. But otherwise justice as equality and justice as desert appear to be in conflict, and the challenge is to show what can justify equal treatment in the face of inequalities of desert.

A second approach answers this challenge by explaining why it is positively valuable to afford people equal treatment even if they do display features that might appear to justify differential treatment. A prominent advocate of this approach is Dworkin, who argues that fundamental to justice is a principle of equal concern and respect for persons, and what this means in more concrete term is that equal resources should be devoted to the life of each member of society (Dworkin 2000). (The reference to membership here is not redundant, because Dworkin understands egalitarian justice as a principle that must be applied within sovereign states specifically – so in the terms of 3.2, this is a relational view of justice.) The thought is that showing persons equal respect may sometimes require us to afford them equal treatment, even in the face of relevant grounds for discrimination. Thus we insist on political equality – one person, one vote – even though we know that there are quite large differences in people’s competence to make political decisions.

As noted above, justice as simple equality of treatment seems open to the objection that it fails to acknowledge the agency of the recipients, who may have acted in ways that appear to qualify them to receive more (or less) of whatever benefit is being distributed. To answer this objection, several recent philosophers have presented alternative versions of ‘responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism’ – a family of theories of justice that treat equal distribution as a starting point but allow for departures from that baseline when these result from the responsible choices made by individuals (see Knight and Stemplowska 2011 for examples). These theories differ along several dimensions: the ‘currency of justice’ used to define the baseline of equality, the conditions that must be fulfilled for a choice to qualify as responsible, and which among the consequences that follow from a choice should count when the justice of an outcome is being assessed (it may in particular appear unjust to allow people to suffer the full consequences of bad choices that they could not reasonably have anticipated). The label that is often used to describe a sub-class of these theories is ‘luck egalitarianism’. According to luck egalitarians, justice requires that no-one should be disadvantaged relative to others on account of ‘brute’ bad luck, whereas inequalities that arise through the exercise of personal responsibility are permissible (for a full discussion of luck egalitarianism, see the entry on justice and bad luck ). ‘Brute’ luck is interpreted widely to include not only external circumstances such as one person’s initially having access to more resources than another, but also internal factors such as possessing natural abilities or disabilities, or having involuntarily acquired expensive tastes. All such inequalities are to be ironed out by redistribution or compensation, while people’s choices about how to use the assets they are granted should be respected, even if this leads to significant inequality in the long run.

Luck egalitarianism has proved surprisingly influential in recent debates on justice, despite the evident difficulties involved in, for example, quantifying ‘brute luck disadvantage’ in such a way that a compensatory scheme could be established. There are, however, a number of problems it has to face. By giving scope to personal responsibility, it seeks to capture what is perhaps the most attractive part of the conventional idea of desert – that people should be rewarded for making good choices and penalised for making bad ones – while filtering out the effects of having (undeserved) natural talents. But in reality the choices that people make are influenced by the talents and other qualities that they happen to have already. So if we allow someone to reap advantages by, for example, devoting long hours to learning to play the piano at a high level, we must recognize that this is a choice that she would almost certainly not have made unless early experiment showed that she was musically gifted. We cannot say what she would have chosen to do in a counterfactual world in which she was tone deaf. There seems then to be no coherent half-way house between accepting full-blooded desert and denying that people can justly claim relative advantage through the exercise of responsibility and choice (see further Miller 1999, ch. 7) .

A second problem is that one person’s exercise of responsibility may prove advantageous or disadvantageous to others, even though they have done nothing to bring this change about, so from their point of view it must count as ‘brute’ luck. This will be true, for example, in any case in which people are competing to excel in some field, where successful choices made by A will worsen the comparative position of B , C , and D . Or again, if A acts in a way that benefits B , but does nothing comparable to improve the position of C and D , then an inequality is created that counts as ‘brute bad luck’ from the perspective of the latter. One of the most influential exponents of luck egalitarianism seems to have recognized the problem in a late essay: ‘unlike plain egalitarianism, luck egalitarianism is paradoxical, because the use of shares by people is bound to lead to a distribution flecked by luck’ (Cohen 2011, p. 142).

We have seen that equality can sometimes be understood as required by justice; but it can also be valued independently. Indeed there can be circumstances in which the two values collide, because what justice demands is inequality of outcome. The kind of inequality that is independently valuable is social equality, best understood as a property of the relationships that prevail within a society: people regard and treat each other as social equals, and the society’s institutions are designed to foster and reflect such attitudes. A society of equals contrasts with one in which people belong to different ranks in a social hierarchy, and behave towards one another as their relative ranking prescribes. Different reasons can be given for objecting to social inequality, and conversely for valuing social equality (see Scanlon 2003).

Those who find equality valuable for reasons other than reasons of distributive justice are often described as ‘relational egalitarians’ (see Anderson 1999, Wolff 1998, Fourie, Schuppert and Wallimann-Helmer 2015). It is tempting to regard relational egalitarianism as a rival theory of justice to the luck egalitarian theory outlined in §6.2, but it may be more illuminating to see it instead as providing an alternative account of why we should care about limiting material inequality. Thus, faced with a world like the one we currently inhabit in which income differences are very large, justice theorists are likely to criticize these inequalities on grounds that they are not deserved, or arise from brute luck, etc., whereas relational egalitarians will say that they create a divided society in which people are alienated from each other, and cannot interact in a mutually respectful way. Relational equality does not address issues of distribution directly, and so cannot function as a theory of justice itself, but it can provide grounds for preferring one theory of justice to its rivals – namely that implementing that particular theory is more likely to create or sustain a society of equals.

We saw at the beginning of this article that justice can take a number of different forms, depending on the practical context in which it is being applied. Although we found common elements running through this diversity of use – most readily captured in Justinian’s ‘suum cuique ’ formula – these were formal rather than substantive. In these circumstances, it is natural to look for an overarching framework into which the various contextually specific conceptions of justice can all be fitted. Three such frameworks were examined: utilitarianism, contractarianism and egalitarianism. None, however, passed what we might call the ‘Sidgwick/Rawls test’, namely that of incorporating and explaining the majority at least of our considered convictions about justice – beliefs that we feel confident in holding about what justice requires us to do in a wide and varied range of circumstances (for Rawls’ version of the test see the entry on reflective equilibrium ). So unless we are willing to jettison many of these convictions in order to uphold one or other general framework, we will need to accept that no comprehensive theory of justice is available to us; we will have to make do with partial theories – theories about what justice requires in particular domains of human life. Rawls himself, despite the bold title of his first book ( A Theory of Justice ), came to recognize that what he had outlined was at best a theory of social justice applied to the basic institutional structure of a modern liberal state. Other forms of justice – familial, allocative, associational, international – with their associated principles would be applicable in their respective domains (for an even more explicitly pluralist account of justice, see Walzer 1983; for a fuller defence of a contextual approach to justice, see Miller 2013, esp. ch. 2).

One way to loosen up our thinking about justice is by paying greater attention to the history of the concept. We can learn a great deal by reading what Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Hume, has to say about the concept, but as we do so, we also see that elements we would expect to find are missing (there is nothing about rights in Aristotle, for example), while others that we would not anticipate are present. This may in some part be due to the idiosyncrasies of each thinker, but more importantly it reflects differences in the form of social life in which each was embedded – its economic, legal and political structure, especially. Various attempts have been made to write histories of justice that are more than just catalogues of what individual thinkers have said: they aim to trace and explain systematic shifts in the way that justice has been interpreted (for contrasting examples, see MacIntyre 1988, Fleischacker 2004, Johnston 2011). These should not be read as enlightenment stories in which our understanding of justice steadily improves as the centuries roll by. MacIntyre’s view, for example, is that modern liberal societies cannot sustain the practices within which notions of justice find their proper home. We can get a better grasp of what justice means to us by seeing the various conceptions that compete for our attention as tied to aspects of our social world that did not exist in the past, and are equally liable to disappear in the future.

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Aristotle, General Topics: ethics | consequentialism | consequentialism: rule | contractualism | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family | justice: as a virtue | justice: distributive | justice: global | justice: intergenerational | justice: international distributive | justice: retributive | justice: transitional | luck: justice and bad luck | Rawls, John | reflective equilibrium | social contract: contemporary approaches to

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