Justice across boundaries: whose obligations? By Onora O'Neill: Justice at a distance: extending freedom globally. By Loren E. Lomasky and Fernando R. Tesón

Abstract

Justice across boundaries: whose obligations? By Onora O'Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2016. 238pp. £60.00. ISBN 978 1 10711 630 6. Available as e-book. Justice at a distance: extending freedom globally. By Loren E. Lomasky and Fernando R. Tesón. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2016. 277pp. £65.00. ISBN 978 1 10711 586 6. Available as e-book. It is no coincidence that two books with remarkably similar titles should appear within a year of each other (and from the same university press), belonging as they do to what the publisher's blurb to Justice at a distance calls ‘the current global justice literature’. Both deal with justice and so, inevitably, with rights. The Roman lawyers knew that ‘justice is the unswerving and perpetual determination to acknowledge all men's rights’ (Justinian's institutes, Book 1.1, transl. by Peter Birks and Grant Macleod, Duckworth, 1987). But there ends any close resemblance between the books under review. For one thing, Justice across boundaries is a reprint of papers by Baroness O'Neill, dating from the last quarter of the twentieth century to the present day, where necessary ‘lightly edited, mainly by changing some tenses, cutting time sensitive references and minimal updating of terminology’ (p. 29). Justice at a distance, on the other hand, is a self-contained work, although it includes some topics that its authors have pursued elsewhere. O'Neill's style is academic in the best sense of that word, measured while allowing her the occasional sharp jab at confused thinking. The parallels drawn at the outset between Robert Frost's famous poem ‘Mending wall’ and her enterprise whets readers’ appetites. Loren Lomasky and Fernando Tesón are more free and easy, their style often colloquial. Example after example is put before readers to illustrate and test their arguments. But the difference between these books goes deeper than that. The authors’ choice of subtitles (O'Neill, ‘Whose obligations?’, and Lomasky and Tesón, ‘Extending freedom globally’) is the clue.