ABSTRACT
For political philosophy, the problem of international justice has been most closely connected with problems of war and peace, national sovereignty and the rights of states. These are themes with origins which can be traced back to the just war theory of the Middle Ages. In the twentieth century, developments in moral philosophy have ensured that human rights have come increasingly to the fore; increasing attention is being paid to the rights of individuals in peace as well as war and to other humanitarian concerns, as thinking about the nature of domestic justice has been extrapolated to a wider international scale. As philosophers have become increasingly interested in the subject of global distributive justice, the real world of international relations has brought to notice problems in the allocation of natural resources and in environmental issues. These are clearly economic matters with major implications for the commercial life of states as well as the well-being of their citizens, but commercial relations proper rarely figure in philosophical thinking. True to form for the intellectual, perhaps, matters of trade are seldom considered.
