Cooperation, pervasive impact, and coercion: On the scope (not site) of distributive justice
Cooperation, pervasive impact, and coercion: On the scope (not site) of distributive justice
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DOI:
10.1111/j.1088-4963.2007.00116.x
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发表时间:
2007-09-01
影响因子:
2.2
通讯作者:
Abizadeh, Arash
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Abizadeh, Arash
It is widely known that in A Theory offustice Rawls restricted the scope of distributive justice to the domestic context of a single polity. 1 This restriction implies that citizens have responsibilities of distributive justice to each other that they do not have to foreigners. Rawls's readers widely thought that he had motivated this anticosmopolitan restriction, despite his commitment to the equal moral worth of all, on the basis of two assumptions. First, he assumed that principles of distributive justice come into play only within the context of society's" basic structure." Only persons with a shared basic structure have claims upon and responsibilities to each other arising from considerations of distributive justice. Second, Rawls famously assumed that there is no global basic structure, that the societies whose basic structure is the subject of justice are" more or less self-sufficient association [s]" whose boundaries correspond to those of contemporary polities. This was the argument that Rawls's readers thought was implicitly backing the restriction of justice's scope in his Theory of Justice: since" the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society," and since there is no global basic structure, the scope of justice is domestic. 2For valuable comments, I would like to thank Michael Blake, Pablo Gilabert, Catherine Lu, Don Moon, Alan Patten, Veronica Ponce, Sarah Stroud, Daniel Weinstock, the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs, and participants at a colloquium of the Centre de Recherche en fthique de l'Universite de Montreal, April 16, 2005. This research was supported by a team grant from the Fonds qu b cois de la recherche sur la socidt et la culture. 1. In this article, unless otherwise noted, the term justice refers to distributive justice, and not to what Rawls called natural justice; by cosmopolitan I simply mean the view that the scope of distributive justice is global, by anticosmopolitan the view that it is not. 2. John Rawls, A Theory of justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 4, 96, 7; cf. p. 457: the" boundaries" of" the basic structures of well-ordered societies... are [assumed to be] given by the notion of a self-contained national community."