The Scope of Justice and Global Dark Oppression
29 Pages Posted: 5 Oct 2009 Last revised: 21 Mar 2010
Date Written: March 18, 2010
Abstract
According to recent associative accounts of the scope of principles of justice, one owes duties of robust distributive justice to all those, but only those, with whom one is linked in a political association. On the Coercion Account, you owe duties of robust distributive justice only to those people who are under the same coercive authority as you are. On the Cooperation Account, you owe such duties only to those with whom you are cooperating in a joint venture. These accounts are taken to deny that the principles of distributive justice are global in scope. This paper argues that these associative accounts in fact imply that justice is global in scope. I begin by showing that there exists a worldwide political system we may call “global Dark oppression,” a condition in which all people whom global society classes as black, brown, or red are systematically harmed and exploited by the current world order. If so, I argue, then there exists the kind of global political association which the Coercion and Cooperation Accounts claim is necessary for distributive justice to be global in scope. Global racial oppression thus guarantees that justice is global.
Keywords: Global Justice, Political Association, Oppression, Racial Domination, Global Political System
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