Globalism

Abstract

This chapter assesses the ‘globalist’ conception of global justice, which holds that egalitarian principles of distributive justice are globally valid among individuals. Globalists defend individualistically conceived egalitarian principles of distributive justice that are characterized either by the endorsement of a presumption of equality or by their socio-comparative nature (Gosepath, 2004, pp. 200–11). By measuring global distributive injustice with regard to how individuals are faring relative to each other, most theorists who adopt this conception take positions that deem the high degree of global interpersonal socioeconomic inequality1 prevalent today to be extremely unjust.2 Moreover, many globalists either assume (for example, Gosepath, 2001, p. 154) that questions of social justice always involve separate questions of distributive justice that can or must be answered on their own, or largely bracket (for example Tan, 2004, p. 6) the questions of political justice, or even hold (for example Gosepath, 2004, pp. 84–91, 2011) that non-distributive, political questions of justice are ancillary to the distributive ones. Hence many subscribe to the so-called ‘distributive paradigm’3 that neglects or attributes a secondary importance to those questions of political justice that have to do with the appropriate shape of political decisionmaking structures or with the assignment of civil and political rights and liberties — for example, the rights of political participation, freedom of opinion, and freedom of conscience.KeywordsMoral JudgmentDistributive JusticeDifference PrincipleWorld StateReflective EquilibriumThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.