Introduction

Global justice is a philosophical inquiry that is motivated by real world problems. To animate the subject for the reader, thus, I will adopt what we might call a “problemsdriven approach” in this book. Instead of organizing my presentation around different theories of global justice, I will structure our discussion around real world problems or issues of global justice that will be largely familiar to any reader. These problems will motivate our inquiry and provide the access points into the philosophical debate. Some of the topics we will investigate are world poverty and economic inequality, human rights and sovereignty, nationalism and cultural diversity, just war and humanitarian intervention, and boundaries and immigration. Through a discussion of these familiar real world problems and an examination of how the main philosophical positions and arguments attempt to address them, I hope the reader can come to appreciate, in the spirit of John Dewey, that philosophy is not just “a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers”, but is “a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men” (Dewey 1981, p. 95).