Disaggregating Global Justice

Abstract

If distributive justice or injustice is to exist, there must be something that is just or unjust: something to which moral assessments at issue attach. I argue in this paper against one popular candidate for that role: global basic structure. I argue that principles of distributive justice that basic structure fail to satisfy a crucial action guidance desideratum and that this problem points to an alternative that philosophers of justice have yet to widely acknowledge. We ought to exclu- sively direct our principles at subspheres of politics: disaggregating justice for a disaggregated world. In order for justice or injustice to exist, there must be something in politics that is just or unjust: something to which moral as- sessments at issue attach. Which thing or things should play that role in our theory? What should be target of principles of justice? One popular answer to this question is the basic structure. In this paper I join those who argue against this answer, but my treatment of issue is distinctive in two ways. First, my reasons for rejecting basic structure as justice's differ from those of most other theorists. While most critics focus on denying that order constitutes a basic structure—in sense of instantiating same forms of association that ground claims of justice in domestic poli- tics—I argue that resolving that dispute is largely beside point. This is because, even if a basic structure in foregoing sense exists, principles that it will fail to satisfy a crucial action guidance de- sideratum for principles of justice. This desideratum imposes two re- quirements that principles pitched at order are not well placed to meet: we must be able to use our principles of justice to generate ade- quately informative answers to well-formed questions of justice in politics, and we must be able to identify agents who could regulate their conduct in accordance with those principles. I argue that a duty to alter basic structure is not a duty with which any agent we currently see, or would want to see, could feasibly comply. And principles target-