ABSTRACT
We-the residents of earth at this particular point in history-are facing an interrelated set of global problems that relate not only to the issue of world justice but also to the prospect of maintaining the minimum social and material conditions within which principles of justice can sensibly be said to apply. This is not the prediction of a fringe-.dwelling doomsayer but, rather, merely a statement of what has come to be accepted as mainstream thought. For while there has always been human poverty and misery in the world, disease and natural catastrophes, our species has never before been in a position of imminently despoiling the entire planet’s natural environment (for both ourselves and almost all other species). And while the danger of nuclear holocaust seems to be at least temporarily off the agenda, there is still the danger in the foreseeable future of the world’s civilization buckling beneath the combined pressures of poverty, population growth, environmental degradation, the depletion of natural resources, and (quite possibly) catastrophic climate changes.
