ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some key themes concerning the issues in the domain of global justice. One of the key issues concerns whether membership in a state matters to the principles of distributive justice that people should endorse. One kind emphasizes the fact that states are legally able to coerce whereas the lack of a global legal coercive authority rules out the need for global equality. The chapter focuses on what should the appropriate focus of the obligations of global distributive justice be: global poverty alleviation or addressing global inequality? Should people be concerned with justice among individual human persons or among states? A debate continues to rage between those who believe that full egalitarian justice applies within the state but not outside it, and those who believe the state does not and cannot make this kind of difference to one's commitment to egalitarian distributive justice.
