The Scope of Justice: Global

Abstract

This chapter applies the framework developed in the book to the issue of justice beyond borders. It argues that, thanks to its double focus – on systemic and interactional coercion – this framework steers a coherent middle course between cosmopolitanism and statism, and explains why each seems to get only part of the ‘global justice picture’ right. While statists typically concentrate on the moral evaluation of interactional coercion between states – marking out conditions for domestic sovereignty and international intervention – cosmopolitans are concerned with the justification of global systemic coercion. A closer look at our world reveals that both types of coercion exist at the international level. This means that a good theory of global justice should set the principles for the moral assessment of both. Statist principles of internal legitimacy and just interstate conduct need to be supplemented by cosmopolitan principles of global justice, assessing the justifiability of global systemic coercion. The chapter concludes with the sketch of a theory of this kind.