11 - Global Justice

Summary

Rawls’s conceptualization is the culmination of reflection on the social question over 200 years. The grounds-of-justice approach unifies a broad range of thinking about justice at the global level as it has unfolded over millennia, reflecting the current stage of the great tale of humanity. The animating concern behind human rights is protection of personal inviolability and subsistence from patterns of societal organization that might threaten them. Human rights focus on the status and well-being of any one person rather than an overall distributive picture. The global dimensions of the social question have long gone unappreciated. The global can no longer be an afterthought but is imminent in reflection on justice also in more confined spaces. The default contemporary understanding of justice is global in scope, complex in structure, stringent in demandingness, and extensive in its reach in a manner that is best understood in a public reason sense.