Global socio-economic inequalities raise important philosophical questions about justice. Are dramatic global inequalities in life prospects unjust, giving residents of affluent countries reasons to reduce them beyond their humanitarian obligations to mitigate suffering and prevent easily preventable deaths? If so, what considerations are these duties of justice based on? Can we apply globally the principles of justice that we accept for the domestic domain? In this book, I have shown that focusing on institutions is helpful for answering these questions.

In particular, to determine whether special relationships that institutions represent are normatively significant, I have analysed the roles that social, economic and political institutions play in conditioning the justification, the scope and the content of principles of distributive justice. I have shown that different understandings of the normative significance of institutions motivate much of the current disagreement about whether or not requirements of justice have a global scope. More specifically, I have described two different normative functions that institutions may have in theories of justice. First, I critically evaluated a number of positions about the role of institutions in generating requirements of distributive justice, and considered their implications for the scope of justice. Second, I defended a position about the role political and economic institutions play in determining the content of requirements of distributive justice, and I showed how they can affect the scope of application of these requirements.