Global Egalitarianism

This chapter examines global egalitarianism as a free-standing conception of global justice and provides some reasons for rejecting it. It argues that neither equality of resources nor equality of opportunity represents a workable principle of global justice. In neither case can we measure the resources or opportunities available to people in different societies in a way that is neutral as between cultures, and such neutrality seems indispensable in a global principle of justice. The chapter then considers some other reasons for wanting the scale of these inequalities to be reduced — reasons, in other words, that are not directly reasons of justice, even though they may involve seeing inequality, indirectly, as a source of injustice. These are that material inequalities broadly conceived will naturally translate into inequalities of power, which then become a source of ongoing global injustice; that gross inequality between nations makes it difficult if not impossible for those at the bottom end of the inequality to enjoy an adequate measure of self-determination, unless one imagines, counterfactually, that rich nations' interest in self-determination concerns only their own internal affairs, and not what happens in the world outside; and that large inequalities in wealth and power also make it difficult to achieve a so-called ‘fair terms of cooperation’ internationally.