| This essay argues that social contract theorizing can play a more specialized and contextual role in the evaluation of global justice than previously thought. This conclusion builds off a comparison of the two leading liberal social contract approaches to global justice, cosmopolitanism, represented by Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge, and 'social liberalism', most prominent in John Rawls's The Law of Peoples. The former uses a once-off global social contract to argue for strong principles of global distributive justice. The latter uses a two-stage social contract, in which 'peoples' agree at the second stage on (conservative) inter-people rules of interaction. The idea of specialized and contextual social contract reasoning shows much potential given the complexities and sensitivities any theory of global justice must include. This essay is an exploration of the basis of and prospects for, specialized and contextual social contract reasoning. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
