Thinking About Justice

This paper develops and defends the approach to distributive justice the author presents in his 2012 book On Global Justice. Characteristic of that approach is that the notion of distributive justice is understood as capturing the most stringent moral demands while at the same time being broadly applicable. This is unusual: normally, distributive justice is either understood very stringently, or as broadly applicable, but not both. Immanuel Kant does the former, Ernst Tugendhat does the latter. This paper argues that the author’s approach should be preferred to both of those other approaches. One result of this inquiry is also to display the conceptual unity in the author’s approach to global justice in terms of different grounds of justice.