Principles of global distributive justice: moving beyond Rawls and Buchanan

If distributive justice or injustice is to exist, there must be something that is just or unjust: something to which moral assessments at issue attach. I argue in this paper against one popular candidate for that role: global basic structure. I argue that principles of distributive justice that basic structure fail to satisfy a crucial action guidance desideratum and that this problem points to an alternative that philosophers of justice have yet to widely acknowledge. We ought to exclu- sively direct our principles at subspheres of politics: disaggregating justice for a disaggregated world. In order for justice or injustice to exist, there must be something in politics that is just or unjust: something to which moral as- sessments at issue attach. Which thing or things should play that role in our theory? What should be target of principles of justice? One popular answer to this question is the basic structure. In this paper I join those who argue against this answer, but my treatment of issue is distinctive in two ways. First, my reasons for rejecting basic structure as justice's differ from those of most other theorists. While most critics focus on denying that order constitutes a basic structure—in sense of instantiating same forms of association that ground claims of justice in domestic poli- tics—I argue that resolving that dispute is largely beside point. This is because, even if a basic structure in foregoing sense exists, principles that it will fail to satisfy a crucial action guidance de- sideratum for principles of justice. This desideratum imposes two re- quirements that principles pitched at order are not well placed to meet: we must be able to use our principles of justice to generate ade- quately informative answers to well-formed questions of justice in politics, and we must be able to identify agents who could regulate their conduct in accordance with those principles. I argue that a duty to alter basic structure is not a duty with which any agent we currently see, or would want to see, could feasibly comply. And principles target-

Cosmopolitans who take principles of distributive justice to apply globally have long struggled with the legacy of Rawls. Some parts of Rawls’s view seem to support cosmopolitanism although he rejects this position himself. Samuel Scheffler and Miriam Ronzoni have each identified resources in Rawls’s work that open the door to cosmopolitan conclusions but differ from those traditionally cited by cosmopolitans. Scheffler and Ronzoni argue that changing social circumstances, like those involved in globalization, may affect the scope of principles of distributive justice. But they also both take it to be an open question whether such principles have global reach presently. I argue that this reticence is not justified. Their arguments suggest that principles of distributive justice have long applied globally. Indeed, the view so strongly favors cosmopolitanism that further argument is needed to secure any room for unique domestic principles of distributive justice. I follow Rawls’s lead and draw on Kant to indicate how such an argument might go. Finally, I argue that although the scope of principles of distributive justice is less historically contingent than Scheffler and Ronzoni suggest, there is still considerable room in this view for the evolution of institutions to shape the content of such principles.

In recent years a large and impressive literature has evolved concerning the principles of distributive justice that should apply at the global level. However, although there is an extensive and sophisticated literature on global distributive justice, there has not been much extended philosophical discussion of the kinds of global principles of justice that should apply to the environment.1 This general neglect is both striking and represents an important omission for there is a great number of pressing environmental issues which have a large impact on people throughout the world. One obvious example of the latter is global climate change. It is now widely recognized that the world’s climate is becoming both warmer and more unpredictable, and that human activity causes these changes. The emission of greenhouse gases and extensive deforestation have contributed to, and continue to contribute to, global climate change. This raises a number of normative questions. As Henry Shue points out, we can identify at least four separate questions: (i) who should shoulder the costs of preventing further global warming?, (ii) who should shoulder the costs of coping with global warming?, (iii) what is a fair background framework within which parties can negotiate?, and (iv) what are fair emissions levels, both in the short term as we move to a fair system and in the long run? (Shue, 1994: 344, 1995: 240).

It is argued that the Nash bargaining solution cannot serve as a principle of distributive justice because (i) it cannot secure stable cooperation in repeated interactions and (ii) it cannot capture our moral intuitions concerning distributive questions. In this article, I propose a solution to the first problem by amending the Nash bargaining solution so that it can maintain stable cooperation among rational bargainers. I call the resulting principle thestabilized Nash bargaining solution. The principle defends justice in the form ‘each according to her basic needs and above this level according to her relative bargaining power’. In response to the second problem, I argue that the stabilized Nash bargaining solution can serve as a principle of distributive justice in certain situations where moral reasoning is reduced to instrumental reasoning. In particular, I argue that rational individuals would choose the stabilized Nash bargaining solution in Rawls’ original position.

Are negotiators who rely on justice principles in the process of bargaining and drafting agreements more—or rather less—effective than others? This article examines whether adherence to principles of procedural and distributive justice in negotiations contributes to more effective results, with a focus on international environmental negotiations. Effectiveness is defined in terms of the extent of agreement (among parties and on issues), time to reach agreement, and comprehensiveness of the agreement. A set of hypotheses is evaluated on a selection of bilateral and multilateral cases of environmental negotiations, using statistical methods. The analyses reveal that adherence to principles of procedural justice contributes to more effective results in multilateral environmental negotiations. These principles are found to hinder effectiveness in the bilateral cases. On the other hand, adherence to principles of distributive justice is only moderately related to effectiveness in both the bilateral and multilateral cases.

In his famous book on a theory of justice, John Rawls argues that under some special conditions, referred to as an “original position,” people would unanimously choose as a principle of distributive justice, the principle of maximizing the welfare of the worst-off individual in the society. An experiment was conducted under conditions approximating Rawls's “veil of ignorance.” It was a replication of Frohlich, Oppenheimer, and Eavy's experiment, using Polish instead of American students. In accordance with Rawls's prediction, most of experimental groups in both samples reached the consensus. However, the chosen principle was not the Rawlsian principle of maximizing the floor income, but the principle of maximizing the average income with the floor constraint. Moreover, in individual rankings and choices, the principle of maximizing the average income with a floor constraint received the highest ranks, while the Rawlsian principle received the lowest ranks. Our interpretation of these results is that the notion of distributive justice should not be reduced to considering only the welfare of the poorest.

A core question in the contemporary debate on distributive justice is how to understand fairness in situations involving production. Important theories of distributive justice, such as strict egalitarianism, liberal egalitarianism, and libertarianism, provide different answers to this question. This paper presents the results from a dictator game where the distribution phase is preceded by a production phase. Each player's contribution is a result of a freely chosen investment level and an exogenously given rate of return. We estimate simultaneously the prevalence of three principles of distributive justice among the players and the distribution of the weight they attach to fairness. (JEL D63)

As the effects of climate change worsen, poor nations call for climate justice. This Editorial conducts a holistic analysis of this call for climate debt. It examines merit of such calls by applying the three principles of distributive justice. It then demonstrates how international law obligates rich nations to redress poorer nations for climate abuses. Finally, it provides four ways that climate debt can be vindicated. While many developed nations have promised increased climate investment abroad, these are empty promises, plunging poorer nations into debt and insufficiently meeting their demands. This paper offers more comprehensive and justiciable pathway to repay climate debt to poorer nations.

The growing concentration of wealth has acquired a new urgency in recent years. One particular view in this context is developed by Ingrid Robeyns in her ground-breaking work on limitarianism. According to this view, no one should have more than a certain amount of valuable goods, such as income and wealth. The contributors to this symposium, Brian Berkey, David Axelsen and Lasse Nielsen, Jessica Flanigan and Christopher Freiman, and Lena Halldenius, critically examine various aspects of limitarianism. In particular, they examine how limitarianism should be interpreted and developed as a principle of justice, on what reasons speak in favour and against limitarianism, and on how limitarianism relates to other principles of distributive justice. Our hope is that this symposium will contribute to the ongoing debate in political philosophy about the concentration of wealth and economic justice.

In this illuminating, and commendably readable, book Kok-Chor Tan defends global, institutional luck egalitarianism. This view comprises three claims: Global, institutional luck egalitarianism differs: (i) From trans-institutionalist luck egalitarianism, which holds that principles of distributive justice apply to individuals’ actions in the ‘thick of daily life’ also; (ii) from democratic egalitarianism which says the ground of whatever degree of distributive equality justice requires is the ideal of equal, democratic citizenship; and (iii) From statist luck egalitarianism, which implies that the scope of principles of distributive justice stops at state borders. These issues of contention between Tan and other egalitarians are centrally located in the discussion of distributive justice over the last twenty years. The first of the book’s three parts defends institutionalism. According to Tan, it is reasonable given value pluralism. Individuals are committed to ends that are not defined by justice, and the value of their pursuit of these ends is one value along with the value of justice. Institutionalism reconciles these ‘two potentially competing demands … persons have the duty to establish and support just institutions, but within the rules of these institutions persons may freely pursue their ends’ (p. 28). This raises two questions. First, suppose one holds that justice requires that the worst-off be made as well off as possible. Suppose, moreover, that this requires, Cohen-style, that people seek to benefit the worse off in their everyday life. It is unclear why the institutional approach is not then simply a way of weighing justice against a competing, non-justice value, that is, the value of personal pursuit of ends. Admittedly, for Tan, the goal of the institutional approach is not ‘to maximize social equality … Its purpose is to make it possible for persons to live meaningful and worthwhile separate lives consistent with the demands of social justice given the assumption of value pluralism’ (p. 34). However, a response to the present question that appeals to this fact assumes that the substantive demands of social justice cannot be determined independently of which institutions can accommodate individuals’ pursuit of their ends. But some luck egalitarian value pluralists reject this assumption, and it would have been good to know more about Tan’s reasons for rejecting their view.

In a recent article, McClennen (Synthese 187:65–93, 2012) defends an alternative bargaining theory in response to his criticisms of the standard Nash bargaining solution as a principle of distributive justice in the context of the social contract. McClennen rejects the orthodox concept of expected individual utility maximizing behavior that underlies the Nash bargaining model in favor of what he calls full rationality, and McClennen’s full cooperation bargaining theory demands that agents select the most egalitarian strictly Pareto-optimal distributional outcome that is strictly Pareto-superior to the state of nature. I argue that McClennen’s full cooperators are best described as reasonable agents whose rationality is constrained by moral considerations and that McClennen’s bargaining theory is moralized in this regard. If, by contrast, the orthodox concept of rationality is assumed and plausible assumptions are made about human nature and social cooperation, then a modified version of the standard Nash bargaining solution, which I call the stabilized Nash bargaining solution (Moehler in Utilitas 22:447–473, 2010), is justified. From the perspective of rational agents, the stabilized Nash bargaining solution can accommodate McClennen’s criticisms of the standard Nash bargaining solution in the context of the social contract and, for such agents, it can serve as a principle of distributive justice in deeply morally pluralistic societies.

Research has documented gender inequalities in parental financial gifts, but it is unclear under which conditions these inequalities are socially accepted. We combine distributive justice theory with sociological and economic perspectives on intergenerational transfers to examine perceptions of fair allocations of parental gifts. By manipulating children’s characteristics in a multifactorial vignette experiment, we conducted in Germany in 2020 (N = 4284 observations of 714 respondents), we test the prevalence and gendered application of four justice principles (equality, need, entitlement and equity). While the equality principle was widespread, unequal gifts were legitimized both by children’s financial needs (unemployment) and exchange services (helping in parents’ household). These results indicate that the family is perceived as an agency for economic redistribution, potentially affecting society’s socio-economic structure. Moreover, exchange services weighed more for sons while needs weighed more for daughters, suggesting that gendered fairness perceptions are one possible mechanism explaining gender inequalities in financial gifts.

Michael Walzer has argued that `distributive justice presupposes a bounded world', but what counts as a relevant boundary? The article criticizes two arguments holding that boundaries should not count at all: a negative argument that there is no relevant difference between human relationships within and across state borders and a positive argument that principles of justice must, as a matter of logic, be universal in scope. It then examines three rival accounts of the bounded scope of distributive justice: the cooperative practice view, the political coercion view, and the common identity view. Although each has plausible arguments to support it, none turns out to give necessary and sufficient conditions for principles of distributive justice to apply. Importantly, however, the idea of social justice has emerged within political units (nation-states) that to a large extent combine the three features in question. To the extent that this overlap breaks down, we will need to develop new theories of transnational justice.

Our paper examines the role of distributive justice in the pursuit of sustainable development. One goal of the paper is to challenge the assumption that sustainability is an exclusively forward looking idea. The tool of analysis is a case study of a proposed hydro electric development on the Mattagami River in Northern Ontario. We look at the conflicts the project has generated as arising in large measure from historical injustices inflicted on aboriginal project stakeholders. Two principles of distributive justice are identified and then used to evaluate three proposals for resolving those conflicts advanced by the principal stakeholders, Ontario Hydro, the First Nations affected and the provincial government. We conclude that sustainability has moral structure, and go on to evaluate the distributive justice dimension of that structure and its implications for sustainable resource development.

The concept of distributive justice in Islamic economics presents an alternative to capitalist economic systems that often lead to inequality and social disparity. While capitalism prioritizes profit and market freedom, Islamic economics emphasizes equitable wealth distribution grounded in the values of tauhid (oneness of God), khilafah (stewardship), and maslahah (public interest). This study aims to critically analyze how the principles of distributive justice in Islamic economics can address contemporary issues of economic inequality and social injustice. Employing a descriptive qualitative method through an integrative literature review, this research examines classical Islamic economic texts and contemporary scholarly works, focusing on themes of justice, wealth redistribution, and ethical governance. The findings indicate that Islamic economic justice requires not only the prohibition of exploitative practices such as riba and monopoly but also active state involvement in regulating distribution and promoting social welfare. The integration of moral values such as justice, amanah (trust), and social responsibility into policy-making is essential for achieving sustainable and inclusive economic development. The study concludes that the framework of Islamic distributive justice offers a holistic and value-driven approach to economic policymaking, with potential applications in addressing structural poverty and fostering a just society.