ABSTRACT
The concept of justice can be used in evaluating many different things, from the criminal law to the market economy. This chapter concerns socioeconomic justice, and whether anything can be made of it on a world scale. It focuses on the application to the world as a whole of two central issues of traditional political theory: the relation between justice and sovereignty, and the scope and limits of equality as a demand of justice. The two issues are related, and both are of crucial importance in determining whether we can even form an intelligible ideal of global justice. The issue of justice and sovereignty was memorably formulated by Hobbes. If one takes the cosmopolitan view, the existence of separate sovereign states is an unfortunate obstacle, though perhaps for the foreseeable future an insurmountable one, to the establishment or even the pursuit of global justice.
