The scope of justice

Since antiquity justice has been thought of as a political or civic virtue, more recently as belonging in a ‘bounded society’, and often as a primary task of states. All these views assume that justice requires or presupposes boundaries, which demarcate those who are to render and to receive justice from one another from others who are to be excluded. Yet the view that justice is intrinsically bounded sits ill with the many other claims that it is cosmopolitan, owed to all regardless of location or origin, race or gender, class or citizenship. The tension between moral cosmopolitanism and institutional anti-cosmopolitanism has been widely discussed, but there remains a lot of disagreement about its proper resolution.

Take, for example, the specific version of this thought that views justice as wholly internal to states. If we start with cosmopolitan principles, the justice of states will suffice only if we can show that any system of just states will itself be just. But this claim is highly implausible. We can certainly imagine a system of states that would be just provided that each state was just. For example, a set of just states without mutual influence or effects (imagine that they are located on different continents in a pre-modern world or on different planets today) could be just, provided that each state was just. But the system of states in the various forms in which it has existed in recent centuries is not at all like this. The relations of domination and subordination between states always shape their prospects and powers, and the structures they can establish internally; the exclusions which state boundaries create may themselves be sources of injustice. The same line of thought suggests that it is implausible to think that societies, or cities, or communities, or other bounded entities provide the sole contexts of justice. Boundaries of whatever sorts are not unquestionable presuppositions of thinking about justice, but institutions whose structure raises questions of justice.

Equally, commitment to cosmopolitan principles does not entail – although it also may not rule out – commitment to cosmopolitan political institutions, such as a world state, or a world federation. Principles are intrinsically indeterminate, and can be institutionalised in many distinct ways. In some circumstances the best way to institutionalise a commitment to cosmopolitan justice might be to abolish certain sorts of boundaries; in others it might not.