Justice in a Globalized World: A Normative Framework
Laura Valentini - Oxford University Press, 2011
While the lives of millions of people are
overshadowed by poverty and destitution, a relatively small subset of the
world's population enjoys an unprecedented level of wealth. No doubt the world's
rich have duties to address the plight of the global poor. But should we think
of these as duties of egalitarian justice much like those applying domestically,
or as weaker duties of humanitarian assistance? In this book, Laura Valentini
offers an in-depth critique of the two most prominent answers to this question,
cosmopolitanism and statism, and develops a novel normative framework for
addressing it. Central to this framework is the idea that, unlike duties of
assistance - which bind us to help the needy - duties of justice place
constraints on the ways we may legitimately coerce one another. Since coercion
exists domestically as well as internationally, duties of justice apply to both
realms. The forms of coercion characterizing these two realms, however, differ,
and so the content of duties of justice varies across them. Valentini concludes
that given the nature of existing international coercion, global justice
requires more than statist assistance, yet less than full cosmopolitan
equality.
