Global Justice, Luck, and Human Needs: Reflections on Gu and Liu

Abstract

In his paper “Nationalism, Egalitarianism and Global Justice”, Su Gu extends luck egalitarianism to the debate on global justice in an unconventional way. He invokes luck egalitarianism not to support global egalitarianism, as is commonly the case, but to push back against it. Qingping Liu’s paper, “Global Justice as the Bottom Line: Equal Needs or Equal Rights?”, is also unorthodox [both papers are published in this journal (forthcoming)]. Running against one current in global justice, Liu argues that there is no duty of global justice to meet basic needs and that, moreover, global redistributive policies for the purpose of satisfying needs are generally unjust. Although Liu and Gu provide different arguments for their conclusions, they both believe that global redistributive demands unfairly impose on those who are expected to contribute. My aim in this brief commentary is to try to situate these papers within the global justice literature and to raise some questions that they provoke.