ABSTRACT
This chapter presents and defends a different thesis, referred to as the moderate priority of compatriots, which stands in some contrast to the received opinion, that liberal contractualism justifies a general egalitarian baseline, robust across all distributive domains. It sketches some reasons against inequality and for using equal shares of social primary goods as a baseline. The chapter illustrates how these reasons fail to hold within a system of states enjoying sovereignty, since the impact of international institutional structures on affected parties is relevantly different from the domestic basic structure. It then addresses Brian Barry's criticism of John Rawls' position. Barry has criticized Rawls' approach to international distributive justice since it fails to yield a global difference principle. Rawls is said to waver between two drastically different views of justice: a view of justice as mutual advantage; and the contractualist view of justice as impartiality.
