Justice and boundaries

David Miller
Additional contact information
David Miller: Nuffield College, Oxford, UK

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2009, vol. 8, issue 3, 291-309

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: boundaries; coercion; cooperation; distributive justice; identity; Nagel; Rawls (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470594X09105390 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:pophec:v:8:y:2009:i:3:p:291-309

DOI: 10.1177/1470594X09105390

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics, Philosophy & Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().