Globalization, Global Community, and the Possibility of Global Justice

Abstract

In this essay, I suggest five ways in which globalization is changing the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate over justice, by creating, both inter-subjectively and at the regulatory level, the constitutive elements of a limited community. Members of this are increasingly aware of each other's needs and circumstances, increasingly capable of effectively addressing these needs, and increasingly contributing to these circumstances in the first place. They find themselves involved in the same market society, and together these members look to the same organizations, especially those at the meta-state level, to provide regulatory approaches to addressing problems of social policy. Thus in social relations we can begin to see that minimum level of necessary to support relations of justice, at least in certain areas, even if it does not manifest that level of necessary to speak of global community in the fullest communitarian sense.