Achieving Global and Local Justice

Relief and repair, the primary forms of global justice, are never finished, but we can imagine at least a rough agreement on the principles that guide them. And we can imagine a world in which all the existing states are capable of self-help, so that mutual aid and reparative justice are only intermittently required or required only to a modest degree. I say that the imagining is easy, but obviously we are very far from that world, very far from the global justice that people need right now. At the same time, many men and women are already engaged in the pursuit of local justice and in the unending arguments about social goods that it requires. One way of describing the political project that I am advocating here is to say that everyone should have the justice they need right now so that they are able to pursue the justice they will never finally have.