| In response to economic, social, and political pressures originating from outside their borders, states have progressively re-negotiated---not always voluntarily---the terms in which they exercise rule-making legal and political authority over their territories. As a result of this process, the exercise of authority is now carried out increasingly at trans-, inter-, and supra-national levels. The emergence of new forms of legal and political authority poses a fundamental question for political thought. Do the new circumstances in which states operate require a reassessment of our understanding of distributive justice? The dissertation defends three interconnected claims. First, I argue that the content and scope of justice depends on the historically contingent, institutionally mediated relations in which we stand. Without such shared institutions, justice has neither an application nor a determinate content. Second, equality as a specific demand of justice only applies among citizens and residents of a state. This is not because citizens and residents share a collective identity, or because they are subject to the same coercive power, but because they share in the mutual provision of the collective goods necessary for a flourishing life. Equality is therefore, I claim, best understood as a demand of reciprocity. Third, I argue that this reciprocity-based conception of distributive justice can be extended to the inter-, trans-, and supra-national level. Despite the fact that equality is a demand of justice only among citizens and residents of a state, this does not imply that we have no obligations of distributive justice beyond the state. It only implies that these will be different in both form and content from those we have at the domestic level. The third claim is developed in the institutional context of the European Union. |
