“Global Social Justice: The Possibility of Social Justice beyond States in a World of Overlapping Practices”..
with Ayelet Banai and Miriam Ronzoni, in: Ayelet Banai, Miriam Ronzoni, and Christian Schemmel (eds.), Social Justice, Global Dynamics: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 46-60.
Positions in the current debate on global justice range from the view that principles of social justice apply exclusively within states to the altogether opposite argument that rejecting the global application of domestic principles of social justice means rejecting the fundamental moral axiom that all human beings have equal worth.
In this chapter, we defend a particular approach to this debate, namely the practice-dependent method – which takes existing social and institutional practices to be constitutive of principles of justice – and explore some of its implications for social justice beyond state borders. We begin by locating a methodological problem within the global justice debate. We then explore the advantages of the practice-dependent approach over its practice-independent rival. Finally, we argue that the practice-dependent approach, properly understood, yields a nuanced intermediate position between statism and global egalitarianism.