Global Justice

Axel Gosseries

pp. 85-121

in: Corlett, Race, rights, and justice, Berlin, Springer, 2009

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of philosophical research on global justice. My aim in this chapter is not to canvass it, but to focus on two of the main ways of conceptualizing global justice. One such view is expressed in John Rawls' The Law of Peoples. Another is cosmopolitan liberalism. While there are important variations of each of these respective theories of international justice, I shall focus on their general representative positions. While I find that a certain criticism of Rawls' theory of international justice explicated in this chapter is important and requires his theory to be supplemented by additional principles, I also believe that Rawls' theory is more promising than cosmopolitan liberalism, which suffers not only from the "problem of compensatory justice," but in ways much deeper than Rawls' theory does.