## 1. Early Cosmopolitanism



We can begin, then, with John Rawls's *A Theory of
Justice*. The influence of this work on modern political
philosophy can hardly be overstated. It shifted the assumptions with
which political philosophers have operated--in part by
resuscitating the social contract tradition, and in part by giving a
sustained and analytically robust argument regarding the injustice of
particular forms of economic inequality. A full analysis of
Rawls's work is beyond the scope of this entry; readers can see
the related entries in this encyclopedia for more detail. Rawls
introduces two principles of justice, which he argues represent the
principles of justice we would accept as governing the "basic
structure" of our society were we to bargain with one another
under fair conditions. These principles of justice include those
addressing political justice, and with what fairness would demand of
the rules allocating persons to positions within the basic structure;
they also include principles designed to evaluate the justice of
particular forms of material inequality. In particular, the only
inequalities of "primary goods" that could be justified
are those that can be shown to be to the advantage of the least
advantaged representative position. This idea--called the
difference principle--represents a significant constraint on the
exercise of the market, in that individuals are no longer entitled to
obtain whatever share of resources their talents might obtain in a
standard capitalist model of the labor market.



It is not part of our current project to criticize or defend the
difference principle. We are, instead, simply going to highlight two
facts about this principle. The first is that the principle does seem
to place a significant constraint on the types and degrees of
inequality that might be justifiable. The difference principle
requires that all such inequalities of social primary goods must be
justifiable to the representative worst-off party within society;
appeals to utility, or to efficiency, or to other forms of social
value simply will not suffice. The second thing to note is that this
principle is taken by its author to apply only within the context of
the domestic state. Rawls is explicit, in his theory, that his
principles should be taken as only describing the nature of justice
within the political society represented by a territorial state. When
Rawls does deal with the issue of international justice, it is in a
manner markedly less reformist than that with which he approaches
domestic justice. Rawls argues that a just international regime would
involve states agreeing to treat one another fairly in their mutual
interaction--but that this fairness would not involve any sort of
distributive consideration, or demand for economic justice. Indeed,
Rawls argues that the principles to which states would agree would
largely resemble those found in contemporary twentieth century
international law. In contrast with the radical (or at least
surprising) conclusions drawn domestically, Rawls argues that in
international justice, there would be "no surprises" in
the principles we ought to select (Rawls 1971: 378).



This difference in treatment between the domestic and the
international context was immediately troubling to many philosophers.
One way of highlighting this is by noting the apparent contradiction
between the universalism of Rawls's moral theory and the
localism of its realm of application. The first argues that what is
morally arbitrary should not be taken as legitimately grounding an
inequality of wealth or income. If liberalism means anything, after
all, it means an aversion to inherited caste privilege and other forms
of feudal birthright privilege (Carens 1992). The second, however,
applies this universal guarantee only within the very local context of
the nation-state, ignoring the fact that membership in that state was,
itself, morally arbitrary. The net result was, for many commentators,
a sort of internal inconsistency in Rawls's theory; if Rawls was
to regard income inequality above that permitted by the difference
principle as unjust, he should do so in a thoroughgoing way, and
condemn the inequalities between the wealthy and the impoverished
internationally (see Pogge 1989, 1992, 1994; Beitz 1979a,b, 1983;
Scanlon 1973).



Rawls can, on this account, be taken as the originator of the modern
dialogue on global distributive justice--not because he was the
first to speak out against international inequality, but because he
did not do so. Many of those who first did speak about international
inequality, though, used Rawlsian ideas and concepts in their
arguments. We can therefore proceed to examine some representative
arguments used by these thinkers, to see how their cases were
constructed.



Many initial commentators on Rawls's work argued that the proper
interpretation of Rawls's principles was one in which the
difference principle was applied at the global level. These authors
are often referred to as "cosmopolitans"; this term,
however, is often less than illuminating (see the accompanying
 entry on cosmopolitanism
 for more detail). We will instead refer to these authors as Left
Institutionalists, for reasons we hope will become clear. Left
Institutionalists agree on the following conclusion: that
Rawls's own limitation of his two principles of justice to the
circumstances of a domestic society was a morally illegitimate
constraint on his theory, so that a consistent liberalism taking off
from Rawls's arguments must apply its liberal principles at the
global level--and, therefore, the well-being of the worst-off
representative member of the global society, rather than the domestic,
ought to be our starting-point for the justification of inequality. In
this way, liberalism is made coherent with its ideals; rather than
seeking some arbitrary fact to serve as a limitation on the liberal
theory of justice, the cosmopolitans argue that we ought to live up to
the globalism inherent in liberalism's self-understanding. See,
for instance, Thomas Pogge's analysis of liberalism's
domestic focus:



> 
> 
> Nationality is just one further deep contingency (like genetic
> endowment, race, gender, and social class), one more potential basis
> of institutional inequalities that are inescapable and present from
> birth. Within Rawls's conception, there is no reason to treat
> this case differently from the others. And so it would seem that we
> can justify our global institutional order only if we can show that
> the institutional inequalities it produces tend to optimize (against
> the backdrop of feasible alternative global regimes) the worst social
> position. (Pogge 1989: 247)
> 
> 
> 



Rawls, of course, had reasons to resist this interpretation of his
work. His own view--made more explicit in his *The Law of
Peoples* (1993), but present even in *A Theory of
Justice*--is that what counts as justice within a given
context must make reference to what that context is, and how we should
understand its function and its rules. Thus, Rawls argues that his
theory does not have application to such private institutions as
churches or universities; it is only to be applied to the basic
structure of a society--which is understood by Rawls as the major
social institutions, and the ways in which they structure the rules of
association and allocate the advantages of cooperation (Rawls 1971:
7). The first task of the cosmopolitan, then, is to analyze the notion
of the basic structure, and demonstrate that such an entity is found
internationally as well as domestically. Charles Beitz and Thomas
Pogge both argue that the modern system of international trade has all
the indicia given by Rawls to explain what makes the basic structure
so central: international institutions allocate the advantages of
trade, and their rules set the basic framework for the specific
interactions taken among international agents. They argue, in short,
that the international institutional set is indeed akin to a basic
structure, in that this set is a site of cooperation, to which the
principles of justice given in *A Theory of Justice* ought to
apply. As Beitz has it:



> 
> 
> [I]f evidence of global economic and political interdependence shows
> the existence of a global scheme of social cooperation, we should not
> view national boundaries as having fundamental moral significance.
> Since boundaries are not coextensive with the scope of social
> cooperation, they do not mark the limits of social obligation. Thus
> the parties to the original position cannot be assumed to know that
> they are members of a particular national society, choosing principles
> of justice primarily for that society. The veil of ignorance must
> extend to all matters of national citizenship, and the principles
> chosen will therefore apply globally. (Beitz 1979b: 151)
> 
> 
> 



Rawlsian principles must therefore apply to the set of persons in the
world as a whole, so that global institutions should be arranged to
maximize the expectations of the globally worst-off representative
individual.



The early Rawlsian cosmopolitans were enormously influential, and can
be credited with forcing the attention of the philosophical community
towards the issue of global underdevelopment and inequality. The
theories, of course, were subject to enormous criticism, and Rawls
himself rejected their conclusions, as we shall see. For the moment,
we might note only that many theorists were skeptical of the
conclusion that Rawls's principles could apply as easily to the
global community as to the domestic community. Two strands of
criticism here deserve note: the first begins with coercion, and the
second with the issue of nationality.



Some thinkers, then, have questioned whether or not the simple act of
exchanging goods--even a great many goods--places people in
a relationship that is morally akin to that shared by people who are
liable to the same territorial state. Something like this point was
noticed early by Brian Barry, who notes that



> 
> 
> [T]rade, however multilateral, does not constitute a cooperative
> scheme of the relevant kind. Trade, if freely undertaken, is
> (presumably) beneficial to the exchanging parties, but it is not, it
> seems to me, the kind of relationship giving rise to duties of fair
> play....Trade in pottery, ornamentation, and weapons can be
> traced back to prehistoric times, but we would hardly feel inclined to
> think of, say, the Beaker Folk as forming a single cooperative
> enterprise with their trading partners. No more did the spice trade
> unite East and West. (Barry 1982: 233)
> 
> 
> 



Barry's intuition, here, is that there seems to be something
normatively distinct between what is shared by trading partners and
what is felt by fellow citizens. One way of noticing this is to notice
that some cosmopolitans sought to sever the distributive component of
Rawls's theory from the other aspects of that theory--in
particular, from the parts of the theory dealing with political rights
and political justification. There is, of course, a reason for this
dismembering: there is, internationally, no polity, and the very
concept of having (for example) democratic rights within that polity
might seem misplaced. But many have thought that something has been
missed that is morally relevant, and that we might better regard
Rawls's distributive conclusions and his political conclusions
as more tightly linked than that. Some thinkers, in particular, have
argued that Rawls's conclusions are best read as principles
intended to justify the coercive acts of a territorial state, rather
than as principles applicable to cooperative ventures more generally
(Blake 2001, 2013; Nagel 2005). These theorists have suggested that
the state stands in need of justification, and that the justification
we offer makes distributive principles applicable here--but not
everywhere.



The other critical strand we wish to highlight began with the notion
of nationality. The idea here is that the relationships that are most
central to human flourishing and human creativity are always specific
relationships, with specific persons and with specific cultural
contexts. As such, the use of abstract principles like Rawls's
to determine what we owe to one another generally is either suspect or
outright self-destructive. This critical posture, of course, can end
up being a criticism of the liberal project itself (see Sandel 1982).
But it can also end up being a simple criticism of the attempt to do
justice without looking at the messiness of nations, of cultures, and
of communities. These latter entities, it might be felt, are in need
of support--and, in particular, are in need of support by
individuals who are taken as duty-bound to prefer the good of that
community to the abstract rights of foreign citizens (D. Miller 1995;
Kymlicka 1995a). What is missed in the cosmopolitan argument, on this
account, is not the presence of the coercive state, but the presence
of the cultural nation. The nationalists, it should be noted, are not
hostile to all notions of global justice; they are, instead, committed
only to the relatively modest conclusion that nationality has some
moral relevance--and that the principles of distributive justice
that are right within the nation may not be right at the global level
(D. Miller 2007).



There are a variety of ways of arguing for such a conclusion. Some
theorists begin with dissatisfaction at the deracinated and abstract
forms of philosophy practiced by cosmopolitans (Walzer 1983). Some
theorists begin with the need for communities to preserve themselves,
if they are to provide individuals with the goods needed to live
decent lives (MacIntyre 1984). More generally, these theorists argue
that the needs of community are such that the cosmopolitan does damage
to what is needed by actual humans, by considering individuals without
considering the communities within which they live:



> 
> 
> [P]atriotism requires me to exhibit peculiar devotion to my nation and
> you to yours. It requires me to regard such contingent social facts as
> where I was born and what government ruled over that place at that
> time, who my parents were, who my great-grandparents were, and so on,
> as deciding for me what the question of virtuous action is--at
> least insofar as it is the virtue of patriotism which is in question.
> Hence the moral standpoint and the patriotic standpoint are
> systematically incompatible. (MacIntyre 1984: 5)
> 
> 
> 



Both of these criticisms seem, to some degree, to be accepted by Rawls
himself, in his fuller explanation of his own international theory in
*The Law of Peoples*. Rawls is more explicit in this
work--as he is in his 1993 volume *Political
Liberalism*--that he takes the political dimension of the
state as of primary importance, and that his principles of justice
apply only within the state for that reason. He is, further, more
explicit about his debt to the liberal nationalist idea in this
volume, writing approvingly that these ideas help guide his vision of
a just international regime. We may, then, proceed to examine
Rawls's *Law of Peoples* directly.


## 2. Justice and Particularity



The trend towards greater and more sophisticated theorizing about
international justice was both exemplified and encouraged by the
publication of Rawls' *The Law of Peoples*. This
work--an extensive elaboration and revision of an earlier essay
(Rawls 1993b)--discusses and, has influenced the subsequent
discussion of, a variety of issues of international and global import,
including and especially the obligations of distributive justice in
the international realm. Before we turn to Rawls's account of
international distributive justice, we should acknowledge some salient
features of how he conceives of his project. Rawls' perspective
is unabashedly *international* rather than *global*.
Unlike the early cosmopolitans who conceive of the world as a single
cooperative unit and seek a single principle of distributive justice
to govern everyone, Rawls explicitly seeks principles that will
regulate the interactions among territorially defined political,
corporate agents that have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force,
called *peoples*--and, only indirectly, govern individuals
(Rawls 1999a: 6).



Second, and partly as a consequence of this conceptualization of
international justice, Rawls does not attempt to derive complete
principles of international and global justice. Rather, he describes
principles that ought to regulate the foreign policy of a liberal
people (Rawls 1999a: 9-10). Thus, when Rawls says, for example,
that some non-democratic peoples are sufficiently well-ordered to be
worthy of full membership in the society of peoples, he is arguing
that democratic peoples may not use political power or pressure to
change them--not that non-democratic but well-ordered peoples are
ideal or beyond moral criticism. Furthermore, he argues that the ideal
case of international justice is a world composed entirely of
well-ordered peoples whose interactions are governed by a set of moral
principles. The account is then extended to cover various non-ideal
cases: societies burdened by poverty and failing institutions or rogue
states that wage aggressive war. What constitutes a minimally just or
well-ordered people is a matter of immense controversy, but the
broader conceptual point is unchanged: Rawls conceives of
international justice as being ideally about the interactions of
morally justified, centralized territorial polities.



Third, his account of the law of peoples is constrained by the need
that it describe a "realistic utopia" (Rawls 1999a:
11-12) that follows Rousseau's dictum to take
"people as they are and laws as they might be". As a
consequence, there are at least three distinct instances where Rawls
appeals to empirical facts as a way of "realistically"
grounding particular normative claims. First, an international system
composed of well-ordered peoples with representative governments will
be peaceful (1999a: 44-54); second, issues beginning with
cultural diversity, geographic distance, and linguistic pluralism
combine to make a world state fundamentally unworkable (1999a: 36);
and, lastly, the primary causal component of national wealth and
prosperity is the political culture and the corresponding
effectiveness of their political institutions (1999a:
108-110).



With the above normative and descriptive picture in view, Rawls
presents a provisional list of principles that peoples could
reasonably endorse:


1. Peoples are free and independent, and their freedom and
independence are to be respected by other peoples.
2. Peoples are to observe treaties and undertakings.
3. Peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind
them.
4. Peoples are to observe a duty of non-intervention.
5. Peoples have the right of self-defense but no right to instigate
war for reasons other than self-defense.
6. Peoples are to honor human rights.
7. Peoples are to observe certain specified restrictions in the
conduct of war.
8. Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under
unfavorable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent
political and social regime. (Rawls 1999a: 37)



Notably absent from this list is the difference principle or anything
like it. When deciding on these principles, peoples do not know how
big, rich, prosperous, or powerful they will be. Yet, unlike
individuals in the first original position, the peoples represented in
this international original position will not demand that material
inequalities among them be justified with reference to the
expectations of the least well-off. The peoples in the second original
position know that they have sufficient resources to be well-ordered,
and they need no more. So, in the ideal case, where international
society is fully composed of well-ordered states that follow the law
of peoples, there are no distributive requirements at all. Some
peoples may be very rich and others quite poor and, correspondingly,
there could be large differences in wealth among individuals of
different countries, but there is no principled reason--on
Rawls' view--to find that objectionable.



The Law of Peoples does include some elements that constrain
inequality--or, at least, poverty. We shall mention three. First,
inequalities that undermine the instantiation, enforcement, and
maintenance of *other* principles will violate the Law of
Peoples:



> 
> 
> The Law of Peoples, on the other hand, holds that inequalities are not
> always unjust, and that when they are, it is because of their unjust
> effects on the basic structure of the Society of Peoples, and on
> relations among peoples and among their members. (Rawls 1999a:
> 113)
> 
> 
> 



Thus, if one could show that a deep material inequality among peoples
undermined their ability to, say, be considered equals in the
negotiation of treaties or tempted peoples to inappropriately
intervene in the domestic affairs of other peoples, then that would be
a reason--from the standpoint of international justice--for
eliminating that inequality. However, this principle must be moderated
in light of Rawls suggestions that both poor and rich well-ordered
peoples will be "satisfied" with their political and
economic position within the Society of Peoples (Rawls 1999a:
27-30), and that the most important determinant of wealth is the
political culture and institutions of a people. Well-ordered
peoples--rich or poor--will generally act according to the
principles that make up the law of peoples and even poor peoples will
have fairly strong political institutions, so Rawls would argue that
it is unlikely that mere inequality will be a problem among
well-ordered states.



Second, all members of the Society of Peoples must respect human
rights that guarantee that every person, regardless of society, a
minimum level of material prosperity and physical security, though
this minimum level will fall far short of distributive equality (Rawls
1999a: 65).



Third, Rawls writes:



> 
> 
> Burdened societies, while they are not expansive or aggressive, lack
> the political and cultural traditions, the human capital and know-how,
> and, often, the material and technological resources needed to be
> well-ordered. The long term goal of (relatively) well-ordered
> societies should be to bring burdened societies, like outlaw states,
> into the Society of well-ordered Peoples. Well-ordered peoples have a
> *duty* to assist burdened societies. (Rawls 1999a: 106)
> 
> 
> 



Some societies are sufficiently poor or have sufficiently weak
institutions that they are unable to become and remain well-ordered on
their own. In those cases, the Society of Peoples must produce the
material, human, and institutional support to help these burdened
societies become minimally just. This could very well include some
wealth transfers from richer nations to burdened ones, but Rawls is
skeptical that this will be the primary tool of assistance.



It is important to see that the duty of assistance to burdened
societies is structurally dissimilar to the difference principle.
First, the difference principle is meant to continuously apply, via
the basic structure, to the flow of social and economic interactions,
but the duty of assistance has a target and a cutoff point: once all
societies are well-ordered, no people has any further obligation to
distribute resources to burdened nations. Second, while the difference
principle is explicitly about the distribution of primary goods, the
duty of assistance might, in the end, have very little to do with
actual wealth; burdened societies might be quite wealthy in terms of
resources, but have failing or deeply embedded non well-ordered
institutions while well-ordered nations may be quite poor.
Furthermore, when confronted with consistently failing institutions,
well-ordered peoples might conceivably discharge their obligations as
much through the provision of technical know-how, information, and
institutional assistance--rather than through than financial
support.



Rawls thus argues for a two-tiered theory of distributive justice. The
respect for the free and equal status of each citizen in domestic
context demands an egalitarian distribution of primary goods, but
equality in the international context requires that each person find
themselves in a well-ordered people and that those peoples are
respected within international society. Economic inequalities are
inherently problematic--and require justification--at the
domestic level but not at the international. In other words, the
distributive outcomes of international trade and the global economy
are only *indirectly* relevant to international justice.



But why this strong distinction between domestic and international?
Rawls's response has several themes. First, Rawls suggests that
limitations on distributive justice are a consequence of tolerating
and respecting the economic decisions of peoples (Rawls 1999a:
117-118). Insofar as peoples are well-ordered, they have made
decisions about savings rates, education, and population policy that
essentially determine national prosperity, and it would be
disrespectful of the decisions made by richer and poorer
nations--who presumably adopted these policies for what they took
to be good reasons--to require one people to compensate another.
This argument is especially controversial because Rawls argues that
non-democratic "decent consultation hierarchies" are
well-ordered and ought to be accepted into the ranks of the Society of
Peoples (Rawls 1999a: 62-78). This leaves open the possibility
that individuals will become impoverished as a consequence of public
policies and choices that they had no hand in deciding. Kok Chor Tan,
for example, has argued that Rawls has improperly stretched his
argument for toleration of reasonable, but illiberal, comprehensive
doctrines within a generally liberal political culture into an
argument for respecting illiberal political cultures (Tan 1998).



Rawls further seems to suggest that the "basic structure"
of international realm is quite different from the basic structure of
the domestic state. In the domestic case, the basic structure is
composed of powerful and effective institutions to which the
principles of justice *apply**.* In the international
case, Rawls suggests that the basic structure simply *is* the
principles by which well-ordered peoples govern themselves--there
are no institutions distinct from the acts and decisions of the
peoples themselves. In other words, the interactions among peoples are
not--and need not be--regulated by a robust set of
political, economic, and social institutions that would constitute an
independent basic structure. As a consequence of this lack of an
international basic structure, Rawls argues that the moral objections
to inequality in the domestic case do not apply (Rawls 1999a:
114-115). Inequality among individuals of different peoples does
not, for example, undermine the fair value of the political liberties
or fair equality of opportunity, since they are not co-members of
economic and political systems, and peoples will treat other peoples
as equals insofar as they are well-ordered and reasonable. Since the
political culture and institutions of a people are primary cause of
wealth and its distribution, the criterion of reciprocity does not
demand equal distributive shares among members of different
polities.



Rawls's arguments should not be taken as a defense of the status
quo in international relations. Many states--especially
authoritarian, weak, and failing ones--are not well-ordered, and
the principles informing current foreign policies are not those
described in the *The Law of Peoples*. Neither Rawls nor his
critics would defend the justice of the world today. The theoretical
difference between these perspectives, though, is profound. The real
point of dispute between them is this: once well-ordered nations have
ensured that every person lives in a well-ordered state and are
thereby guaranteed certain minimum protections against starvation and
poverty, does the international order represent a basic structure of
the right type, and robustness, so that the fact that some peoples are
much wealthier than others ought to be considered an affront to
justice? Rawls himself will answer in the negative, while his critics
will answer in the affirmative.


## 3. Varieties of Institutionalism



Despite the fact that almost no element of *The Law of Peoples*
has escaped controversy, it served as a well-spring of additional
theorizing (see generally Martin & Reidy 2006) and has structured
the subsequent debate concerning international distributive justice.
Rawls's *two-tiered* account strongly influenced those
theorists who were unsatisfied with both cosmopolitan and nationalist
accounts of distributive justice. Much of the ensuing discussion has
pitted two groups of theorists who both purport to be building upon
what they take to be the key insights of Rawls's view. One
group--we will call them *right
institutionalists*--has followed the general contours of
Rawls's two-tiered account, developing more detailed accounts of
why we should sharply distinguish between the international and
domestic. They aim to justify Rawls's fundamental position that
egalitarian distributive justice only operates at the state level,
even if they disagree with Rawls as to the rationale. *Left
institutionalists,* on the other hand, have argued that
international politics is characterized by a sufficiently robust set
of institutions, such that they "trigger" principles of
distributive justice that are more robust and that, *pace* the
duty of assistance, operate directly on the distributive consequences
of international economic regimes. As a consequence, left
institutionalists generally argue for more robust distributive
obligations and more radical institutional changes than right
institutionalists even though the extent and nature of those
obligations varies from thinker to thinker.



Before we go deeper into the divide between left and right
institutionalism, it's important to note what the two sides
agree on and to see where the actual disagreements between the two
sides lie. The important point of agreement lies in their mutual focus
on institutions or rule-governed practices as the trigger of genuinely
egalitarian distributive obligations. Both right and left
institutionalists accept that principles of distributive justice only
apply or are activated in particular institutional contexts or when
people mutually participate in practices that are relevant to
distribution. So, both right and left institutionalists would deny
that we have obligations of distributive justice to, say, the lost
city of Atlantis--should it appear--since Atlanteans have
not participated with us in shared institutions or practices. In other
words, principles of distributive justice apply to, and are activated
by, a basic structure that mostly determines the distributive shares
the participants receive. Right and left institutionalists disagree,
then, concerning *which* institutions activate obligations of
distributive justice among participants.


### 3.1 The Basic Structure as Coercive Legal System



Right institutionalists have generally adopted Rawls's
two-tiered approach, arguing for a sharp distinction between domestic
and international distributive justice. While Rawls himself did not
say much about *why* international politics was so different,
much of the subsequent work by right institutionalists has been to
find some morally salient feature that distinguishes the domestic from
the international which justifies such strong differences in
distributive principles in the face of growing globalization,
increasing economic interdependence, and strengthening international
civil society. In order to do so, right Rawlsians have argued that the
international and domestic realms differ fundamentally in terms of
political structure. Kenneth Waltz describes the difference
nicely:



> 
> 
> The parts of domestic political systems stand in relations of super-
> and subordination. Some are entitled to command; others are required
> to obey. Domestic systems are centralized and hierarchic. The parts of
> the international-political systems stand in relations of cooperation.
> Formally, each is the equal of all the others. None is entitled to
> command; none is required to obey. International structures are
> decentralized and anarchic. (Waltz 1979: 88)
> 
> 
> 



More specifically, domestic politics is characterized by the existence
of a superior political authority that claims--and
possesses--sovereign judicial, legislative, and executive powers.
No such shared, coercive legal system exists in the international
realm. Since the world state is, at best, a distant possibility, this
is unlikely to change. Domestic legal systems define the very terms of
economic activity and represent a kind of fundamental political power
over individuals. Samuel Freeman writes:



> 
> 
> When Rawls says that the political constitution is part of the basic
> structure, he does not just mean the procedures that specify how laws
> are enacted and that define offices and positions of political
> authority. He means more or less the entire legal system, including
> most public and private law, that is the product of the constitution
> in this procedural sense. Modern legal systems, such as the federal
> system of the United States, are made up of countless acts of
> legislation, administration, judicial precedent, and other legal
> rulings that are issued by multiple legal bodies with lawmaking
> authority. An economic system that is regulated by the legal norms
> that are issued by the political constitutions is also part of the
> basic structure. Here, of course, the legal norms of property,
> contract, commercial law, intangibles, and so on that are essential
> for economic production and exchange are to be included in the basic
> structure. What makes possible the incredibly complicated system of
> legal norms that underlie production, exchange, and consumption is a
> unified political system that specifies these norms and revises them
> to meet changing conditions....*Nothing comparable to the
> basic structure of society exists on the global level.* (Freeman
> 2006: 38-39, emphasis added)
> 
> 
> 



A Canadian citizen--no matter how economically and culturally
entwined Canada might with the United States--does not get a vote
in American elections, and the Canadian's economic interactions
and relationships are regulated and governed by Canadian, not
American, law. As a consequence, the American government lacks
"original jurisdiction or effective [or basic] political
power" over Canadians. The Canadian citizen lacks the same
hierarchical relationship with American political authorities that
American citizens have, except under special circumstances are that
are themselves negotiated by Canadian and American legal authorities.
Different right institutionalists emphasize different elements of the
domestic, coercive legal system. Matthias Risse (2006, 2012) and
Michael Blake (2001, 2013), for example, emphasize the
*coercive* nature of domestic legal systems. Risse has argued
that the pervasiveness and immediacy of the coercion in domestic legal
systems makes them fundamentally different from the kinds of
interactions that occur at the international level: even international
laws call on the powers of the state for their enforcement. Michael
Blake, on the other hand, emphasizes how domestic legal systems
structure the most basic of economic interactions, make determinate
individual rights, and enforce them against abuses of private power.
He suggests that egalitarian principles of distributive justice are
what *justifies* the imposition of coercive political authority
on autonomous agents. Samuel Freeman argues therefore that the
international system--because it lacks the features and powers of
a robust legal system--does not constitute "a system of
social cooperation" and, therefore, does not invoke
Rawls's "Criterion of Reciprocity" that underlies
the difference principle.



Blake, Risse, and Freeman all represent--along with Rawls
himself--the moderate wing of right institutionalism. They are
united by three claims. First, the presence of a coercive legal system
leads to more demanding requirements of egalitarian distributive
justice. Second, the international institutions, regimes, and
organizations do not constitute a coercive legal system. However,
moderates are aware of the many ways in which the international order
can make the world hospitable for, or hostile to, well-ordered states.
As a consequence, moderates argue for principles of international
distributive justice that assist and protect legitimate peoples, with
the goal of ensuring that everyone lives within a well-ordered state.
International institutions don't activate principles of justice
that apply directly to distributive outcomes of global trade or
economic activity. Rather, those principles are activated in the event
only insofar as member polities (peoples, states, and the like) fail
in their own distributive requirements (such as when peoples fail to
prevent severe poverty, violating the human rights of their citizens)
or need assistance. *Moderate Right Institutionalists* share,
then, Rawls's indirect account of international distributive
justice, justifying the two-tiered account by appeal to the necessary
relationship between the co-membership in a coercive legal system and
distributive justice.



More extreme right institutionalists*,* most vividly
represented by Thomas Nagel in his article "The Problem of
Global Justice", (2005) argue that the lack of an international
legal system with sovereign coercive authority does not simply
undermine claims of egalitarian distributive justice; it undermines
*all* claims of justice outside the state. So, Nagel accepts
the first two claims of the moderates but suggests that together they
imply that justice is chimerical in the anarchic realm of
international politics. He does accept that we have moral obligations
to prevent people from starving, being assaulted, or murdered, but
these are obligations of a universal "humanitarianism".
*Justice*, for Nagel, is a moral value that is necessarily
indexed to coercive institutions, as coercive institutions are
necessary for large-scale social coordination and cooperation. Claims
of distributive justice only apply to those institutions that engage
in such large-scale economic coordination, do so coercively, and do so
in the name of the individuals coerced. For Nagel, that last part is
essential: the answer to the question, "Why do we owe someone
equal distributive shares (or equal consideration in light of the
difference principle)?" is "We structure their economic
lives through coercive political institutions in their name".
Co-citizens have their wills invoked as shared participants in the
creation of distributively relevant public policy, and this invocation
gives rise to egalitarianism. Since the international realm is
characterized by institutions that do *not* invoke the wills of
those involved as a justification of coercion, justice simply fails to
apply to that realm.



Both the extreme and moderate versions of right institutionalism have
been criticized, broadly, on two fronts. First, some have argued that
the right institutionalist focus on coercion has been misguided. If we
strip away coercive institutions, or were somehow able to make
coercive institutions non-coercive, but retained the various regimes
of economic cooperation, we would still have obligations of
distributive justice. We will turn to these arguments in section 4.1.
The second objection is an internal critique that denies their second
shared claim. On this objection, the *international* realm is a
coercive legal system and thereby activates principles of distributive
justice akin to those in the domestic arena. Right institutionalism
depends on the coercive nature of domestic politics being different
from that of international politics. Those who argue against it
thereby try to close the gap by pointing out the many ways in which
coercion is deployed internationally. Cohen and Sabel (2006) argue
that the collective activities of various states have created an
international organization (the World Trade Organization [WTO]) that
can essentially issue coercive threats: follow WTO or suffer
impoverishment as a consequence of being denied access to global
markets. They write:



> 
> 
> Still, it might be said that any complaint against global rule-making
> bodies should really be directed against the state for accepting their
> [the World Trade Organization] directives...But this point seems
> almost facetious. Opting out is not a real option (the WTO is a
> "take it or leave it" arrangement without even the formal
> option of picking and choosing which parts to comply with), and given
> that it is not, and that everyone knows that it is not, there is a
> direct rule-making relationship between the global bodies and the
> citizens of different states. (Cohen & Sabel 2006: 168)
> 
> 
> 



Eric Cavallero (2010), on the other hand, argues that the
international system is coercive in a much more direct way: Great
Powers (including and especially the United States) coercively enforce
international norms of property by invading or covertly deposing
nations that misbehave. Arash Abizadeh (2007) has emphasized the
coercion inherent in the maintenance of borders and territorial
integrity, especially in response to immigration. If states claim the
right to determine who enters their territory, then they place
themselves in the position of coercing non-citizens in virtue of the
methods they use to prevent those who wish to cross their borders from
doing so. Mirian Ronzoni (2009) argues that the existence of a global
basic structure isn't the right target for our theorizing; we
ought to focus instead on whether such a basic structure should be
brought into being in virtue of how states exercise their power over
each other. Laura Valentini (2011), finally, argues that the distinct
forms of coercion present at the global level give rise to distinct
forms of moral principles; neither statists nor cosmopolitans, she
argues, have been able to look at the global realm as its own site of
coercion, with the result that a "third way" between
statism and cosmopolitanism must be developed. In each case, the
structure of the objection is quite similar: states coerce via
invasion and espionage, via collective action through international
institutions, and via border maintenance, therefore the international
system is coercive in nature and, thus, appropriately calls for
egalitarian distributive justice. 



These objections have forced right institutionalists to become more
attentive to the ways in which coercive contexts can be different. As
a consequence, the responses to these objections will be complex. For
example, it is clear that a state requiring a citizen to purchase
health insurance, stopping a non-citizen at the border, or using a
covert paramilitary organization to topple an unfriendly regime are
all examples of coercion, but are they all the same *type* of
coercion and do they all subsequently demand the *same*
normative response? Furthermore, should we evaluate these coercive
activities in their *current* form--where the
international world is populated by rogue states, failed and failing
states, and burdened societies--or should we evaluate these
coercive activities based on how they would operate with a genuine
Society of Peoples? At any rate, the debate is ongoing as right
institutionalists are pushed by these objections to create more
sophisticated accounts of coercion and to consider coercion is more
specific contexts (see Blake 2011; Valentini, 2011).


### 3.2 The Basic Structure as Cooperative Interdependence



Left institutionalists are distinguished from right institutionalists
in three ways. First, left institutionalists tend to argue for more
robust distributive obligations that operate directly on the
institutions that characterize international politics. Second, they
tend to reject a strongly bifurcated view of the differences between
international and domestic justice, some arguing that there is no
difference, others arguing that there are many institutional contexts
that give rise to distributive obligations, and still others claiming
that domestic and international institutional contexts, and their
corresponding principles of distributive justice, operate on a smooth
continuum. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, left
institutionalists reject the right institutionalist emphasis on
coercion in activating claims of distributive justice. To the
contrary, left institutionalists typically characterize the basic
structure in terms of cooperation, the provision of basic goods, or
economic interdependence (Sangiovanni 2007: 19-20).



We have already examined some early left institutionalist responses
above. We will, here, consider some more recent extensions of the
view. These thinkers generally accept that the state--with its
coercive legal apparatus--gives rise to especially stringent
demands of distributive justice. However, they argue that the nature
of the global economic system *also* gives rise to robust
distributive obligations. These distributive obligations arise
*directly* in virtue of the institutional features of the
global economic system irrespective of their effects on domestic
justice. What differentiates them from the early, more radical left
institutionalist thinkers, is that they recognize and accept that
distinct norms of egalitarian concern might be appropriate in the
domestic and global contexts. Moderate left institutionalists then
accept with Rawls a two-tiered account of global justice; they differ
from right institutionalists (and from Rawls) in arguing that distinct
norms of distributive justice apply to individuals at the global
level.



Moderate left institutionalists generally present some view as to what
activates these distributive obligations. Darrell Moellendorf (2011),
for example, offers the following, jointly sufficient criteria:



> 
> 
> The version of membership dependence that I affirm is based upon what
> I term *the principle of associational justice*. The idea is
> that duties of social justice exist between persons who have a moral
> duty of equal respect to one another if those persons are co-members
> in an association that is (1) relatively strong, (2) largely
> nonvoluntary, (3) constitutive of a significant part of the background
> rules for the various relationships of their public lives, and (4)
> governed by norms that can be subject to human control. (2011:
> 537)
> 
> 
> 



Cohen and Sabel (2006) have offered three distinct principles by which
these distributive duties might be justified. Andrea Sangiovanni
(2007), despite the fact that his view has much in common with right
institutionalisn, presents a left-oriented view because his account of
international distributive justice is both non-coercive and
direct:



> 
> 
> I will argue that equality is a relational ideal of
> *reciprocity* among those who support and maintain the
> state's capacity to provide the basic collective goods necessary
> to protect us from physical attack and to maintain a stable system of
> property rights and entitlements. (Sangiovanni 2007: 19-20)
> 
> 
> 



These views can all be used to directly evaluate global inequalities.
However, unlike the more extreme left institutionalism of early Beitz
and Pogge, each view produces comparatively less egalitarian results
at the global level. Moellendorf argues that, even though both the
global economic system and the state satisfy all four criteria, the
former activates obligations of "reciprocity" while the
latter activates the obligations of "inclusive and equal
citizenship". Cohen and Sabel argue that the state requires
liberal egalitarianism while international institutions create
obligations of "inclusion". In both cases, the obligations
at the global level are less robust than at the domestic. Similarly,
Sangiovanni argues that the provision of collective goods generates an
obligation of reciprocity, understood as egalitarian shares. The
global economic system gives rise to distributive obligations, but the
scope of the obligation is limited to the public goods produced by the
system itself, in the event it comes to produce them (whether it
currently does so is a matter of controversy). This means that
Sangiovanni's account could be indifferent to considerable
inequality among citizens of different countries as long as
reciprocity held within each country and obtained in the contribution
to a system of physical and economic rights *made by the
international system.* What is important to note about moderate
left institutionalism, and what distinguishes it from the more extreme
version, is that moderates seek robust principles of distributive
justice that apply to the particular domain of the global that are of
a piece with the principles of distributive justice domestically but
are nonetheless sensitive to the differences between the two
domains.



Moderate left institutionalist views are considerably more diverse
when compared to moderate right institutionalists: there is no central
concept--like coercion--that binds them together. And
moderate left institutionalism, as a view that is responsive to the
particular features of international institutions, has much to
recommend it. However, there are some areas of concern. First, one
might worry that many left institutionalist arguments import notions
of coercion into their view. Moellendorf makes
"non-voluntariness" one of the criteria of distributively
relevant institutions, which seems to imply that individuals or states
that don't wish to participate in the global economy will be
coerced into doing so, generally by threat of economic catastrophe.
Similarly, Cohen and Sabel present their three "weak"
non-coercive accounts of when obligations of distributive justice are
activated, but their argument that the WTO should invoke norms of
inclusion is based--at least partly--on the fact that the
WTO can issue coercive threats. Sangiovanni discusses the provision of
public goods, which may seem non-coercive, but if these public goods
are necessary for even minimally decent lives, then it seems that the
threat of their non-provision could very well be a coercive one. To
put it another way, is it really the case that economic cooperation
through trade--even institutionalized in order to solve
coordination problems--is ever enough to invoke norms of
distributive justice if there is no chance that that economic
cooperation, no matter how unequally distributed, will undermine the
possibility of the participants to live decent lives? The worry here
is that left institutionalists might be begging the question by
covertly assuming that the international system is indeed coercive,
will remain coercive even if reformed, and is coercive in precisely
way needed to generate obligations of distributive justice. Left
institutionalists, therefore, are quite adept at identifying
injustices in the international arena, but they are less persuasive at
showing that the appropriate normative response to these wrongs is to
have the international system be governed by principles of
distributive justice. For example, suppose Moellendorf is correct that
the WTO wrongly forces an inappropriate development model on weak and
failing nations that serves the rich and powerful while undermining
the ability of those nations to become democratically well-ordered.
Certainly the right response to recognizing this wrong is to have the
WTO *cease that unjust behavior.* It is hard to see why we
would need the more robust norm of distributive equality to understand
the wrongness of the WTO's behavior.


### 3.3 Neo-Republicanism as an Institutionalist Theory



In recent years, the debate about institutions and justice has
broadened significantly. Some, as we will discuss in section 4, have
begun to question whether institutions are all that significant from
the standpoint of justice. Others, however, have begun to expand the
toolkit with which global institutions are to be judged. The
resurgence of republican thought in recent years has offered an
opportunity for thinkers concerned with domination to examine how
global institutions might be understood from the standpoint of
republican justice. In this section, we will lay out the basic tenets
of neo-republicanism and explain the major positions that have been
staked out in their application to issues of global concern.



Neo-republicanism (see entry)
 is a family of views that emphasizes the close connection between
justice and a particular kind of freedom. Namely, the purpose of
social institutions is to protect us from domination by others and to
ensure we can act independently from the wills of others. Unlike
freedom from interference, freedom from domination is specifically
about the power relation: a slaveowner who could interfere with her
slaves but chooses not is still constraining their freedom. In this
case, slaves are not free from the will of their owner even if they
happen to live their lives mostly without interference. Thus,
domination is a worry whenever one agent has superior power over
another and can asymmetrically influence the choice situation of the
weaker agent. However, it is sometimes, even usually, the case that we
cannot eliminate differentials in social position or power, but one
can be subject to superior power without being dominated if the
exercise of that power is suitably constrained or directed. There is a
fair amount of disagreement over the precise nature of these
constraints, but neo-republicans have converged on a set of
institutional prescriptions that ensure that citizens are not merely
subject to power: the rule of law, constitutional protections,
democracy, due process, and the provision of a social minimum at the
very least. These institutional structures have a two-fold objective.
First, they constrain state power such that there is no public
domination. Second, they direct state power effectively towards its
justificatory purpose: governing the relations between citizens such
that there is no private domination. These purposes can only be
achieved within a republican constitutional order and so freedom is
only possible in the state. This is, perhaps, the key idea behind
republicanism: we do not give up freedom in order to achieve the
security of citizenship in a state, citizenship in a state is a
precondition of freedom.



Given the neo-republican focus on the moral necessity of citizenship
in a constitutional order, it is unsurprising that most
neo-republicans have adopted a view that is functionally similar to
the right institutionalists (Pettit 2010; Laborde & Ronzoni 
2015; Smith forthcoming).
The state is the primary site of distributive justice and the purpose
of international institutions is to ensure that each state has the
ability to ensure non-domination within its borders and to prevent
states from dominating other states. This commitment is driven by
considerations that are primarily non-ideal. Many statist
neo-republicans have no principled objection to a world republic and
may even find that institutional structure preferable under ideal
conditions. Yet, they view a more robustly republican global order as
simply too far away and difficult to achieve for the ideal case to be
action-guiding.



A smaller but growing group of neo-republicans fit more in the mold of
left institutionalists (Laborde 2010; Bohman 2004; Buckinx 2011).
Generally, left institutionalist neo-republicans are impressed by
"expansion" arguments that purport to show that the
considerations that motivate us to be concerned about coercion,
cooperation, or domination at the domestic level apply to issues of
global governance. These left republicans do not expect or want the
state to "wither away" but rather think that direct
protections against domination at the level of regional or global
governance are necessary. In general, left republicans are--at
least on global justice issues--less optimistic about the ability
of even well-ordered states to manage their affairs in the face of
global coordination problems from climate change to immigration and
thus argue that global governance regimes need to be designed with
their own republican principles in mind and not treated as mere
adjuncts to state capacity.



Finally, both left and right neo-republicans are--and need
to--engage with a deeper conceptual issue: the republican world
state. Jacobin republicans, for example, believed that if the civil
condition between citizens was morally necessary, then a civil
condition between states was equally necessary (Kleingeld 2011). This
seems to suggest that the world state is morally necessary. Most
neo-republican objections to the world state concern its lack of
feasibility. This means that left and right republicans are both
allied in suggesting that the improbability of the world republican
state is sufficient to warrant its rejection as an institutional
objective. Yet it is unclear whether these feasibility concerns,
borrowed from Kant, are as quite as substantial as they appear
(Deudney 2006) and it is also unclear why they should be so decisive
in our normative theorizing even if they were (Gilabert 2017). There
is a worrisome asymmetry in the neo-republican discussions of
feasibility in the context of global justice: a modern state with the
rule of law and reliable welfare provision would have been viewed as
quite unfeasible in the early modern period and yet this did not
prevent republicans from pushing for those institutional norms over
time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a key feature of future neo-republican
theorizing about global justice will concern the appropriate mixture
of ideal and non-ideal assumptions and the use of feasibility
judgments when it comes to making normative prescriptions.


## 4. The New Cosmopolitanism and Beyond



As the above discussion demonstrates, much work in global justice
begins with interpretations of--and arguments
about--Rawlsian principles. Some recent work, however, has sought
to break the Rawlsian spell, by demonstrating the plausibility of
principles and theories not foundationally linked to Rawlsian
arguments. This work includes many recent philosophical theories
which--while undoubtedly influenced by Rawls--are less
concerned with applying Rawlsian methods directly to global
institutions (see also R. Miller 2010; Brock 2009; Altman &
Wellman 2009). We will here examine four important recent
contributions to this project. The first, which we might call pure
egalitarianism, argues that egalitarianism applies among persons
considered as human; no institutional framework is needed to give rise
to strong duties of distributive justice. The second, associated with
Thomas Pogge, argues that the global institutional structure we see
today is not merely unjust, but actively violating the negative rights
of the global poor. The third notes that the fact of history--in
particular, the shared experience of colonialism and imperial
exploitation--is a central, and underexplored, part of any
plausible account of global distributive justice. The fourth, finally,
argues that an independent concern with property rights is necessary
for the evaluation of global justice. We will consider these arguments
in turn.


### 4.1 Pure Egalitarianism



The dispute between left and right institutionalism has centered on
how to interpret the institutions found at the global level; both
sides in the debate agreed that the nature of these institutions is of
primary importance in establishing whether or not egalitarian duties
hold globally. Some recent theorists, however, have challenged this
assumption. On this vision, what is relevant from the standpoint of
justice is only whether or not a particular agent is, in fact, a
recognizably human agent--not whether that agent stands in a
particular relationship as regards other humans. Simon Caney is a
chief exponent of this theoretical perspective, and defends it as
follows:



> 
> 
> Consider a world with two separate systems of interaction that have no
> contact but are aware of each other and suppose that one of them is
> prosperous whereas the other is extremely impoverished. Compare, now,
> two individuals--one from the prosperous system and one from the
> impoverished system--who are identical in their abilities and
> needs. The member of the prosperous system receives more. But it is
> difficult to see why--concentrating on any possible and
> reasonable criteria for entitlement--this is fair. *Ex
> hypothesi*, she is not more hard-working or more gifted or more
> needy. In all respects they are identical (bar one, namely that one is
> lucky to live in the prosperous society and one is not) and yet an
> institutionalist approach confers on one many more benefits. Moreover,
> it does so wholly arbitrarily because there is no ground on which the
> member of the prosperous society can claim to be entitled to more.
> (Caney 2005: 111; see also Tan 2004)
> 
> 
> 



Other cosmopolitans have echoed this conclusion, while grounding it in
a broader theory of ethics. Kok-Chor Tan, for instance, argues that
any global order that allows economic inequality to rest upon
arbitrary facts can be rejected as unjust:



> 
> 
> The ideas of state sovereignty and the territorial integrity of states
> presume a global institutional order that grants these ideas a certain
> moral standing, as claims that others should respect. But this respect
> is achievable only if the global order is not one that persons subject
> to it can reasonably reject. My claim is that a global order that
> turns arbitrariness about persons into differential personal
> advantages is one that some can reasonably reject. (Tan 2012: 159)
> 
> 
> 



These conclusions are echoed by Pablo Gilabert, who uses the notion of
reasonable rejection to argue for a "humanist
egalitarianism", on which principles of distributive justice
apply simply in virtue of status as human:



> 
> 
> To say that some but not all humans are entitled to [economic]
> advantages would seem, on the face of it, morally arbitrary. It would
> fail to show equal concern and respect for all... Any conception
> of global distribution that gives some human beings less access to the
> important advantages identified [above] than it gives to others is one
> that the former have reason to reject. (Gilabert 2012:
> 196-97)
> 
> 
> 



This form of egalitarianism has some undisputed attractions. It keeps
the moral attention focused on human persons, which is--we might
agree--right where it ought to be. It is compatible, moreover,
with a variety of different theories of what might be the appropriate
metric with which to demonstrate our egalitarian respect; Caney argues
that a global principle of equality of opportunity is likely superior
to one based upon resources (Caney 2001). It is compatible, moreover,
with the institutions we have developed being relevant from the
standpoint of justice, insofar as they help or hinder efforts to live
up to the demands of global equality. It insists, in the end, only
that such institutions are at most helpful tools, rather than
foundational forms of human relationship that give rise to distinct
moral duties.



The problem with this form of egalitarianism, however, is that
comparatively few of us are prepared to take distributive equality as
a foundational value; most of us believe that distributive equality is
relevant only within certain relational contexts, as a way of
guaranteeing that individuals are not dominated or marginalized within
those relationships (Anderson 1999; Altman & Wellman 2009). To say
that equality is itself a value seems to ascribe a fundamental moral
importance to relative income shares--an importance that seems,
at the very least, somewhat in need of defense . Return once again to
the example of Atlantis. Imagine that the world were made fully just,
according to whatever conception of justice you require, and that the
island of Atlantis then rose into that just world; imagine further
that every Atlantean were possessed of a small quantity of diamonds,
which made them significantly more wealthy than the average person.
Would the Atlanteans have the duty, simply in virtue of common
humanity, to redistribute their diamonds, so as to ensure equality?
The answer, for a pure egalitarian, must be yes; this answer, however,
seems to say that what was a just world has now become unjust, simply
because we are made aware of others doing better for themselves than
we are (Blake 2012). This particular vision of egalitarianism depends
upon an ideal of quality that many people--including both right
and left Rawlsians--have regarded as deeply problematic.


### 4.2 Poverty and Causation



The pure egalitarian impulse begins with the idea that we have duties
of justice towards one another that do not depend upon shared
institutions. Thomas Pogge's recent work, in contrast, argues
that institutions are morally central--but in a manner somewhat
unlike that argued for by the left Rawlsians. (Pogge was, of course,
an early advocate of left institutionalism, but his more recent work
does not depend upon left institutionalism being true.) Pogge's
recent work (see, especially, 2002) has argued that the institutions
we have built in the world are, in fact, directly violating the rights
of the poor. We can start our analysis here by noting the starkness of
Pogge's conclusion: global poverty represents, for Pogge, not
just an unmet humanitarian obligation, but an ongoing human evil,
perhaps the greatest one in history. Pogge's argument insists
that international poverty and underdevelopment--and the death
and wasted potential this entails--find their causal origin in a
set of global institutions created and imposed by the wealthy nations
of the world upon the global poor (Pogge 2002, 2010a). As such, the
poverty of the underdeveloped nations is not simply a fact in the
world, to be dealt with by comparatively weak moral notions of
humanitarian benefit and charity; it is, instead, a violation of the
rights of the poor. It is not simply a violation of their legitimate
expectations; they might expect to be helped, for instance, and we are
not merely refraining from doing that. It is a violation of their
negative rights to be free from harm. The poorer inhabitants of the
world have rights that are being violated, on a massive scale, by the
wealthy states. One significant mechanism for this violation is the
ascription of the resource and borrowing privilege to any organization
able to take effective political control of a territorial
jurisdiction. A group does not have to truly represent the interests
of a place's inhabitants, on the rules set up by international
law, in order to sell that jurisdiction's resources. So long as
an agent is able to effectively control and repress the inhabitants,
it has the ability to speak in their name in international
treaty-making--regardless of how badly it treats these
inhabitants. The result, for Pogge, is that the institutions of global
society have set up incentives by which undemocratic regimes are
rewarded and encouraged in the underdeveloped countries, and in which
resources predictably flow from these countries to those already
blessed with wealth. The shared history of colonial rule, moreover,
has led to the radical underdevelopment experienced by many former
colonies, with the result that these colonies are likely to be
exceptionally vulnerable to the decisions and acts of agents within
former colonial powers. Global institutions are, in the end, developed
and maintained to benefit the wealthier nations that set these
institutions up, and whose participation is necessary for their
survival as institutions. They serve only to impose a set of property
rules upon the poorer nations that guarantee their continued poverty
and underdevelopment.



Pogge's analysis is powerful, and includes a number of valuable
positive suggestions about how we might begin to rectify these
defects--including revisions in how pharmaceutical research is
incentivized, and mechanisms for a global tax on resource use (Pogge
1994 and 2011). For the moment, though, we may examine only the major
critical responses to which Pogge's argument has been subjected.
Most of Pogge's critics agree with his contention that
international poverty is unjust, in addition to being a violation of
humanitarian duties. These critics, though, have frequently questioned
whether or not Pogge has made his case that this poverty is causally
ascribable to the international institutional set--and that
simple revisions in this set could dramatically decrease global
poverty.



The first form of critique begins with an objection to Pogge's
idea that global institutions cause international poverty. The worry
with this idea begins with concerns about the idea that the notion of
a cause can be, without certain controversial assumptions, be easily
ascribed to anything as complex as the global institutional set. In
particular, for an institution to be said to have caused a result,
there must be a comprehensible baseline of expectations to which the
existing result might be compared. Alan Patten and Mathias Risse have
each provided a version of this critique. Patten argues that Pogge
illegitimately smuggles in a moralized baseline of expectations, in
which the inhabitants of the poorer nations obtain the resources and
rights they would have under ideal justice; this baseline is what the
poor deserve, argues Patten, but it is a stretch to say that the
wealthy nations cause the poverty of the poor when they fail to bring
about ideal justice (Patten 2005). Mathias Risse offers an even more
pointed criticism, pointing out that the usual baseline for causation
to be ascribed to an interaction is the expectations that would hold
in the absence of such interaction (Risse 2005). Risse points out that
the statistical baseline for most of humanity throughout history has
been radical poverty and misery. On this analysis, the interaction
between the poor and the rich might be taken to have increased the
wealth of the poor, rather than caused their poverty. This is
compatible, of course, with the existence of duties of justice as
regards the benefits of industrialization and globalization; the poor
may have become slightly better off, but the wealthy have undoubtedly
gotten much, much richer, and we might develop theories that condemn
this gap. Pogge's contention that global poverty is caused by
the wealthy societies of the world, though, seems--to Risse and
Patten--simply incorrect.


 Joshua Cohen offers a more wide-reaching version of these
concerns. He, too, begins with the difficulty of saying that the
poverty of the global poor is caused by the wealth of the global rich
(Cohen 2011). He challenges, that is, the extent to which the global
institutions imposed by the wealthy are actually causally
responsible. His analysis, though, draws more on modern development
economics, and notes that modern theorists have identified various
factors that might determine why some countries are poor and some are
rich: they include the institutions described by Pogge, but they also
include such endogenous factors as geography, resource allocation, and
political culture (Easterly 2006). The precise weighting and power of
these various factors is, of course, a matter of tremendous
disagreement and controversy, and much of the field of development
economics is devoted to developing more complete and powerful analyses
of how the relative wealth and poverty of nations is to be
explained. This is a difficulty for Pogge, argues Cohen, since his
analysis of poverty includes only two possibilities: either the poor
nations of the world are responsible for their own poverty, which is
implausible, or the rich nations of the world are responsible for that
poverty. Cohen's conclusion is that Pogge has not adequately
come to terms with the empirical complexity of how poverty is to be
explained, and that as a result his conclusions about international
culpability for poverty are simply unmotivated.



The debate between Pogge and his critics, of course, continues (see
Pogge 2010b); Pogge is able to offer rejoinders to many of the
objections discussed here. In particular, Pogge has emphasized
recently that the baseline with which his analysis proceeds is one of
a reasonable alternative set of arrangements that would not generate
this massive human rights deficit. Christian Barry and Gerhard
Overland, moreover, have recently provided six distinct ways in
which the global order might be thought to harm the poor, despite the
conceptual worries of figures like Risse and Cohen (Barry &
Overland, 2016). It is important to recognize, though, that
much of this debate turns on a mixture of empirical social science and
political philosophy. This is, we believe, likely to be a territory in
which an increasing amount of work on global justice will have to be
situated in the years to come.


### 4.3 Colonialism



An increasingly important challenge to the institutionalist paradigm
of global justice is the historical legacy and contemporary effects of
colonialism. The idea that our obligations of distributive justice as
determined by our *current* institutions might be undermined by
the idea that the historical relationship of colonialism has
tremendous influence on current distributions of wealth and power. The
focus on colonialism has three aspects though this section will focus
mostly on the second and third. First, there is a growing interest in
whether the early modern progenitors of the social contract tradition
were ideologically complicit in European imperialism. In particular,
there is a lively debate concerning how Kant's account of
hospitality and cosmopolitan right can used to critique colonial and
neo-colonial relations (Flikschuh & Ypi 2014). Second, there is a
significant--and mostly cosmopolitan in orientation--debate
concerning precisely what makes colonialism unjust or wrong. Third,
given the wrong of colonialism and the likely reverberation of its
negative effects onto the present, there is the question
of *rectificatory global justice*. That is, colonial powers
have some distributive duties in virtue of the fact that they must
repair the harm caused by their imperial endeavors.



It is obviously true that the history of colonialism is replete with
an almost unparalleled violence (Fanon 1961; Walter 2017). Yet, it
seems equally clear that a colonial relationship that was essentially
free of this sort of violence--or where the level of violence was
considerably lower than the pre-colonial political
situation--would still be morally unacceptable. The question of
what precisely grounds the wrongness of colonialism is an attempt to
grapple with difficult questions of procedural justice, sovereignty,
and legitimacy--and how these ideas affect our current
understanding of global distributive justice. Lea Ypi, for example,
argues that colonialism is wrong because it represents a wrongfully
unequal political relationship between the ruler and the ruled (Ypi
2013; see also Lu 2017). Thus, the defining feature of colonialism is
set of unequal and non-reciprocal terms of political association. This
feature of colonialism makes it uniquely wrong *even if* the
colonizers refrain from atrocities, the colonized have no strongly
claims--property or otherwise--to the land being taken, or
the colonized lack significant rights to self-determination. This
view, however, does give rise to a serious concern about how we should
understand coercive associative political projects where the terms of
association being offered are comparatively equitable. That is,
imagine some more powerful state that comes to a weaker group of
people and offers them an offer of political association that is both
hard to refuse and, yet, based upon equitable terms. Ypi suggests that
equitable terms of association are decisively undermined if the weaker
party does not consent, so it must be true that the
"colonized" group consents. And yet, it is at least
possible to imagine cases where the weaker party sees the benefit of
association and therefore consents to the association in ways that
give rises to concerns of colonialism. In other words, Ypi's
account may miss a feature of colonialism that gives rise to its
distinctiveness as a wrong (Valentini 2015). In most cases, the
criticism of Ypi's account lies in nature of the entity to which
reciprocal association is owed: the colonized understood as
individuals, as corporate bodies, or as a plurality. This is
especially important because Ypi's account--in order to be
distinct--must not rely upon nationalism or some sort of
corporate ownership of specific territory, and it remains an open
whether her account can effectively avoid so relying. At any rate,
discussions of how to precisely to characterize the wrong of
self-determination are ongoing.



Finally, colonialism gives rise to claims that the distribution of
wealth globally ought to be re-ordered in order to satisfy the demands
of rectificatory global justice. The claim is that rich nations in
general, or colonizing nations in particular, ought to transfer wealth
or other valuable resources to poor nations in general or colonized
nations in particular in virtue of the legacy of colonialism. It is
important to see that these claims to rectification tend to be
predicated upon the idea that there are contemporary effects of
colonial relations. For example, the "new
institutionalists" (Acemoglu & Robinson 2012) suggest that
differences in development are a consequence of geographically driven
differences in colonial history. In some cases, the colonial
powers--often in the context of settler colonialism--set up
relatively effective institutions with the rule of law and strong
property rights. In other contexts, the colonial powers set up
extractive institutions. These extractive institutions set up strong
incentive structures for the "liberated" de-colonized
elites to maintain the extractive nature of these institutions,
inhibiting development. This is often encouraged--through
corruption, military intervention, and less obviously criminal
economic manipulation--by the former colonial powers themselves.
As a consequence, the initial extractive equilibrium is hard to
dispel. This account creates a complication for rectificatory views,
which is that this view relies on the bad actions of local elites to
sustain the equilibrium and so complicates the question of who,
precisely, is responsible for the poor current state of many states
(Lomasky & Teson 2015). Nonetheless, many have argued that
the contemporary effects--whether though the imposition of
institutional forms or debt--of colonialism generates a special
obligation to provide, for example, debt relief (Jaggar 2002), open
borders (Amighetti & Nuti 2016) or additional emissions permits
(Blomfield 2015). Yet, these views face some significant hurdles. They
have difficulty in generating a general obligation by rich nations to
help poor nations; rather, they generate obligations for colonizing
states to help their former colonies. And while it may be true these
relations *mostly* track the needs of the present, there is no
requirement that they do so and, indeed, there seem to be cases where
the requirement to assist needy countries and the requirement to help
nations that have been negatively affected by colonialism conflict.
So, rectificatory views must either accept that sometimes states will
be obligated to rectify in cases where the objects of the obligation
are not particularly needy or need to suggest that a broader
participation in an ongoing system of neo-colonial economic relations
is sufficient to activate the obligations. Yet, if we adopt this
latter interpretation, then it is unclear that this view is truly
different from left institutionalist views described above. If the
former, then the claims of colonialism do not appear to be as urgent
as distributive obligations. Furthermore, the nature of the claim to
compensation depends on characterizing the relevant baseline: are we
comparing the plight of the former colonies to how they would have
been without colonization or a world where the colonizers acted
justly? Each of these answers have their issues, with the former being
too permissive towards colonialism and the latter collapsing into
other views of justice. It is hard to deny that the legacy of
colonialism is significant in a variety of applied issues--from
trade to climate change to humanitarian intervention--and the
growing interest in its effects and normative consequences is a
welcome development; the philosophical difficulties of addressing that
legacy, however, are likely to prove difficult indeed.


### 4.4. Property Rights



We can conclude this discussion of distributive justice by discussing
some recent work on global economic justice that rejects the Rawlsian
legacy in a more thoroughgoing manner. Much of this work begins with a
concern for property rights, understood in terms that make them prior
to--and, thus, constraints upon--principles of distributive
justice. Rawlsian distributive justice, of course, is compatible with
the defense of property rights; but those rights are taken to be
constructed out of the theory of justice--they do not, as it
were, exist before the discussion of economic justice. For many
theorists, however, property rights must be respected as inputs to our
theorizing about global distributive justice--rather than as
outputs of that theorizing. 



Three sorts of theories have recently been put forward into the
debates surrounding global economic justice. The first--which we
will call *right libertarians*--take individual rights to
acquire and trade in property as foundational for any analysis of
global economic justice. The second--who take their inspiration
from the *left libertarian* tradition--take common
property rights in the world as a basis for theorizing about global
distributive justice. The final--who can be termed theorists of
*national property rights*--take the right of a
nation's people to use and exploit its natural resources as
foundational for thinking about global justice. We can discuss these
in turn.


#### 4.4.1 Right libertarianism



The debate between libertarian and liberal theories of distributive
justice is a long-standing one within analytic political philosophy;
Robert Nozick's *Anarchy, State, and Utopia* offered a
challenge to Rawlsian conceptions of distributive justice (Nozick
1974). Nozick argued that a rightful respect for property rights made
it impossible for a just state to pursue "patterned"
principles of distributive justice. The right to property, if
respected, would make such principles of economic equality chimerical
at best, and totalitarian at worst. 



Ideas such as those of Nozick have only recently been applied to the
global level. Bas van der Vossen and Jason Brennan (2018) have
defended the thought that economic freedom would, if applied at the
global level, lead to greater wealth--and greater human
flourishing--than any attempt to pursue some particular pattern
of wealth and poverty. In particular, they argue, social scientific
data indicate that policy interventions designed to narrow the gap
between the rich and the poor tends to do more harm than good; good
intentions, they note, are inadequate to ensure good results. Loren
Lomasky and Fernando Teson (2015), similarly defend the thought
that individual property rights would, if defended universally, lead
to a significant reduction in global poverty. It is only by
universalizing respect for individual property rights, they argue,
that the global poverty can be reduced. 



These arguments are, of course, intended to undermine global
distributive justice as an independent goal, much as Nozick intended
his work to undermine the Rawlsian belief than the gap between the
rich and the poor was itself a relevant consideration for social
justice. As such, the same arguments that have been made against
Nozick might also hold true for those who defend libertarianism at the
global level. In the first instance, we might note that there is, on
these views, no independent worry about the size of the gap between
the rich and the poor; even if the universalization of property rights
were to produce an increase in overall wealth, there is nothing within
these theories that allows us to regard an increased inequality
between the rich and the poor as problematic in its own right. This,
of course, is not an objection to the libertarian view; it is,
instead, simply evidence that the libertarian and the liberal are
motivated by distinct moral concerns. But it is also worth noting that
some of what the libertarian says here is motivated by predictions
about what the globalization of individual property rights would
*do*. The libertarian is convinced that a global expansion of
those rights would produce a world of flourishing communities and
flourishing individuals. Others, however, would worry that the
universalization of libertarian rights might produce something
entirely different--that a world of unconstrained capitalism
might produce dystopia and rampant inequality, rather than perpetual
peace. The debate between the global liberal and the global
libertarian is, then, going to turn upon both principle and
prediction, in a way that makes this debate unlikely to be resolved
soon.


#### 4.4.2 Left libertarianism and common ownership



If the right-libertarian celebrates individual property rights, the
left-libertarian regards property rights as a collective phenomenon.
Left-libertarian thought is complex, and merits its own examination;
we will not provide an adequate analysis of that thought here. We
mean, instead, to note that one particular left-libertarian
idea--that individual property rights in natural resources and in
territory must acknowledge the symmetrical claims of all human persons
to the use of those goods--has proven to be a fruitful one in
theorizing about global distributive justice.



Hillel Steiner (2005) argues that all individuals are equally entitled
to benefit from the exploitation of natural resources; as such, those
left behind by territorial expropriation have the right to
compensation, through the creation of a proposed Global Fund. Mathias
Risse (2012) has more recently argued in favor of common ownership of
the world's natural resources as an independent ground of
justice. Risse's view is complex and polycentric, and includes
sites on which global justice might be evaluated--including
common humanity, shared subjection to a coercive legal system, and the
fact that humanity shares a limited set of territorial goods. It is
this latter aspect that is most relevant for our present discussion;
Risse argues that the world's natural resources, since they are
not the result of any individual person's agency, must be
regarded as subject to symmetrical claims from all human persons. This
vision of the world as given to mankind in common, of course, is
borrowed from early modern thinkers; Risse vindicates their concern
with natural resources, and argues that conclusions for both migration
and for distributive justice can be derived from this ground.



These ideas are complex, and the debate over their relevance to global
justice is likely to continue. One immediate worry, of course, is how
to understand the relationship between that wealth created by natural
resources, and that wealth created by human agency and ingenuity.
Steiner and Risse both argue that the collective right to use the
earth constrains what distribution of wealth can emerge at the global
level; but both must provide some account of how to figure out what
counts as given to humans by God or by nature, from that which is
created by humans using their brains and their agency. Steiner and
Risse do, of course, engage with exactly that issue; but the precise
cut between what is made by God and what is made by humanity is likely
to be a continuing source of controversy.


#### 4.4.3 National property



We can conclude this section by examining a view on which property
rights in the natural resources of a country are held by that set of
people who live within that particular country. This view is defended
in Wenar (2015), who argues that it would be revolutionary--in
our world, as it emerges from colonialism and imperialism--for us
to regard the inhabitants of a given country as actually owning that
country's national resources. Wenar notes, as does Pogge, that
our current global institutions allow--indeed,
incentivize--bad governance, by encouraging malign agents to gain
control of a coercive state and sell of the natural resources of that
state. Wenar, however, grounds this not in a cosmopolitan vision of
Rawlsian right, but instead upon a view on which the territorial goods
contained within a country are owned by the inhabitants of that
country. Those who would sell those goods without the consent of the
people, then, are best understood as thieves--whether or not
those thieves present themselves as the legitimate government of the
society in question:



If we believe in popular resource sovereignty, there can be no such
thing as a ruler who is benevolent with resource revenues. No one can
be generous by giving someone what they already own. The citizens of a
country are entitled to all the value of their resources; the regime
is entitled to not a penny. All of Saudi Arabia's oil belongs to
the Saudi people, and the royals can only have their super yachts and
palaces--indeed, anything bought with the oil money--at the
people's sufferance. A king's right is not to
"all", it is to "nothing" (Wenar 2015:
241).



Wenar's argument is not directly focused on global distributive
justice, so much as it is focused on the avoidance of Western
complicity in tyranny and dispossession; Wenar defends Western legal
instruments intended to avoid participation in unjustified resource
sales, instead of principles of global distributive justice.
Nevertheless, this vision of collective property rights over natural
goods might be thought to pose an independent check on what sorts of
redistributive policy are available, similar to the libertarian views
discussed above. And, similarly, it is possible to object to
Wenar's view, with reference to whether or not this way of
constructing property rights is morally defensible (see generally
Wenar et al. 2018). In particular, the cosmopolitan might reject the
thought that a Saudi citizen (say) has a greater claim than others to
exploit the Saudi oilfields, simply because of his birth within the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Wenar's view, nonetheless, is an
important recent addition to the philosophical discussion of global
distributive justice, and debate about that view is likely to
continue.


## 5. Future directions



It is rarely a smart move to make predictions within philosophy.
Nevertheless, it is perhaps appropriate to offer a few views about
what we are likely to see in future work about global justice. The
first, following on our discussion of Pogge's work, is an
increased engagement by philosophers with empirical evidence and
empirical methods. Apart from the pure egalitarians, political
philosophers all make assumptions about the nature and powers of
global institutions; these assumptions can be grounded--or
refuted--by engagement with international lawyers, development
economists, and the like. To some extent, this engagement is already
happening (Reddy & Pogge 2010; Hassoun & Subramanian 2012;
Benatar & Brock 2011). More of this engagement is, we believe,
both likely and likely to be beneficial. 


 The second trend we would identify is that there is increasingly
likely a need for political philosophy dealing with specific global
phenomena. Much of what we have dealt with here has looked only at the
macro-level phenomenon of global inequality. A full analysis of global
justice will also look at specific forms of human institution and
agency that are likely to be relevant from the standpoint of justice.
We have already mentioned, if only in passing, the issues of
immigration, fairness in trade, and feminism. We would conclude here
by mentioning some other areas of inquiry that might become
increasingly important. Buchanan (2009) and Pogge (2009) have both
produced recent work on global incentives for pharmaceutical
research. Ypi, Goodin, & Barry (2009) have written on the issue of
global debt relief. Gardiner (2004) and Caney (2008, 2009) have
written on the relationship of global climate change and global
inequality. Increasingly, we believe that these sorts of analyses are
likely to proliferate, and philosophers come to terms not just with
the fact of inequality, but with the plurality of different reasons
for--and solutions to--that inequality. Political
philosophy has only recently turned its attention to questions of
global justice; it is our hope that this attention will deepen in
years to come, as we gain more understanding of the nature and causes
of global underdevelopment and inequality.


 The final trend might be the most important; we are increasingly
willing to move beyond the questions that animated Rawlsian analyses
of global distributive justice, to a broader consideration of the
agents and institutions that might be implicated in our global
processes of production. Iris Marion Young (2011) raises some
important questions about how to begin to understand the various
agents whose acts might be constrained by moral theorizing--and
how to understand the distinct ways in which our identities, as
consumers and as citizens, might be implicated in the replication of
poverty and inequality. Although this entry began with an examination
of the Rawlsian tradition of thinking about distributive justice, it
is an entirely good thing that the philosophical literature is
increasingly willing to move beyond that tradition. As global
relationships become more complicated and more central, we stand in
need of more theorizing about how to understand the relationship
between global wealth and global poverty--and about the moral
principles within which that relationship is to be understood.