ABSTRACT
The term global justice encompasses debates over human rights, the justification of military intervention, and the international distribution of resources. Interest among political philosophers in global justice is a relatively recent development and has been strongly influenced by work on domestic justice, inspired all by Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. An illustration of local justice is the distribution of resources within a family; other examples include the rules governing voluntary associations, such as clubs or churches. Domestic justice is concerned with the distribution of resources at the level of the nation-state. Cosmopolitans pick up on a point made by Rawls in A Theory of Justice in which he argues that a person’s native endowments – intelligence, physical strength, and good character – are from a moral standpoint arbitrary and should not determine the distribution of natural resources.
