Volume 5, Number 4

Reconceptualising Global Justice in a Globalised World

  Authors

Tiyana Jovanovic, University of Queensland, Australia

  Abstract

The study of justice is concerned with what obligations we have to treat one another fairly, and is at play in moral, legal and political philosophy. While philosophers have long been concerned with justice in terms of distributive and ethical matters within sovereign states, serious debates about justice beyond the state in the global context are a relatively new feature of political philosophy. Over the years, philosophers began to explore what justice might look like beyond the state, transferring the principles from their domestic justice and applying them to the international and global realms. However, by failing to undertand domestic and global justice as distinct from one another, there is little distinguishing the underlying assumptions between domestic and global theories, having a detrimental impact on contemporary global justice discourse. Because global justice has been conceptualised as an extension of domestic justice, theorists today rarely consider the unique goals, assumptions, and contexts that ought to make an account of global justice different to any other account of justice. Using Rawls’ Law of Peoples as an example, we see how failing to begin with a conception of global justice that is distinct from domestic or international justice means these theories are not fit to draw conclusions about the complexities of global justice for today’s globalised world.

  Keywords

Global justice, international justice, globalisation, political philosophy.