Institutions in Global Distributive Justice

The first systematic treatment of the role of institutions in cosmopolitan theories of distributive justice

• Connects philosophical argument with concrete issues such as the role of the World Trade Organization, global health inequalities, health worker migration, pharmaceutical patents, states’ rights over natural resources, and immigration control
• Provides an accessible introduction to the main theories of global justice including Rawlsian cosmopolitanism, luck egalitarian cosmopolitanism, relational versus non-relational theories of justice, nationalism, Rawls’ Law of Peoples, and the political conception of justice
• Defends a cosmopolitan conception of distributive justice in which existing institutions do not limit the scope of justice to nation-states

Defining an institution as a public system of rules that sets out positions, rights and duties, Andras Miklos uses a philosophical argument to analyse the roles that social, economic and political institutions play in conditioning the justification, scope and content of principles of justice. He critically evaluates a number of positions about the role of institutions in generating requirements of distributive justice and considers their implications for the scope – global or otherwise – of justice. He then develops a new theory about the role political and economic institutions play in determining the content of requirements of distributive justice and, in a cosmopolitan argument against statist positions, shows how they can affect the scope of application of these requirements.