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’, or as a primary task of states. All such views assume that the context of justice has 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 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 over the last twenty years, but there is still 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 for justice only if we can show that any system of just states will itself be just.

But this claim is 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 premodern world, or on different planets today) could be just provided that each state was just.