1 - Apologia for Justice

Summary

“Justice” is a big word. One response to such words is to defer to the common-sense wisdom that lies in running together a range of themes and do as good a job as possible of tracing the common concern. Thereby, we would make as much sense as possible of a big word. This approach is what we try to do here for justice. But this is an uphill struggle. The centrality of distributive or social justice to political philosophy is a historical anomaly. It is a challenge to integrate ideas about the global properly with considerations of social justice. To talk about the coloniality of the concept of social justice means to draw attention to the built-in disregard for the concerns of many people on this planet. So, as we make a case for the importance of social justice, we must also integrate ideas of the global in appropriate ways.