Justice, Gender and International Boundaries

Abstract

principles with consideration of human differences in the application of principles. The case of poor women in impoverished economies a hard case both for gender and for international justice illustrates how universal, abstract principles of justice may not only permit but mandate differentiated application. 1. JUSTICE FOR IMPOVERISHED PROVIDERS Questions about justice to women and about international justice are often raised in discussions of development. Yet many influential theories of justice have difficulty in handling either topic. I shall first compare some theoretical difficulties that have arisen in these two domains and then sketch an account of justice that may be better suited to handling questions both of gender and of international justice. I begin by distinguishing idealized from relativized theories of justice. Idealized accounts of justice stress the need to abstract from the particularities of persons. They paint justice as blind to gender and nationality. Its principles are those that would regulate the action of idealized 'abstract individuals', hence take no account of differences between men and women and transcend international boundaries. Relativized accounts of justice not only acknowledge the variety and differences among humankind but ground principles of justice in the discourse and traditions of actual communities. Since nearly all of these relegate (varying portions of) women's lives to a 'private' sphere, within which the political virtue of justice has no place, and see national boundaries as limits of justice, appeals to actual traditions tend both to endorse institutions that exclude women from * Department of Philosophy, University of Essex. This article is a revised version of a working paper originally prepared for the Quality of Life conference of the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) of the United Nations University held in July 1988 and is published with the kind permission of its Director. It will appear in a collection of papers published as The Quality of Life edited by M. Nussbaum and A. K. Sen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, forthcoming). I would particularly like to thank Deborah Fitzmaurice, James Griffin, Barbara Harriss, Martha Nussbaum and Sara Ruddick for help in writing this article. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.113 on Wed, 05 Oct 2016 04:43:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms