Cosmopolitanism and inequality

Nearly all modern thinking about justice takes its cue from John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. But Rawls’s first and most important book was an attempt to think through the problem of how to distribute the benefits and burdens of social co-operation for a society that is remarkably unlike the societies we find in the world today. This is because he insisted, partly for methodological reasons, on restricting his focus to a self-contained society without external trade, emigration or immigration. No actual society is selfcontained in this way: all of them are enmeshed in a network of co-operation and a global division of labour that stretches way beyond their borders. And in the real world people move from one country to another to live, to work and to flee from poverty and persecution. So the question has naturally arisen, for Rawls, for his admirers and his critics, of what to say about justice once the artificial and false assumption of self-containment is abandoned. Rawls’s own answer was presented in his Amnesty Lecture on ‘The Law of Peoples’ and, subsequently, in a book of the same title. It is fair to say that many of his admirers and followers were disappointed by Rawls’s own extension of his theory. Rawlsians such as Thomas Pogge and Charles Beitz had earlier argued for a cosmopolitan extension of Rawls’s domestic theory, with highly