Collective responsibility and the scope of justice

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Abstract (may include machine translation)

The paper examines Thomas Nagel's 'political conception' of justice that holds that the requirements of socioeconomic justice apply only among those persons who are subject to the authority of the same political institutions. The paper has two aims. The first aim is to clarify the theoretical motivation for Nagel's theory, which it identifies in what it calls the 'responsibility thesis', i.e. that inequalities may be considered as unjust only if some agents are responsible for them, and to reconstruct the account of collective responsibility that, together with the responsibility thesis, may support his substantive conclusions. The second aim is to show that Nagel's conclusions must be rejected even if the account of collective responsibility that may support it is correct. This is so, first, because the responsibility thesis cannot be defended, and second, because even if the thesis is assumed to be correct, it does not succeed in restricting the scope of the requirements of justice to fellow citizens of particular nation states. In light of Nagel's own account of the link between legitimate authority and justice, the standards of the latter ought to apply to the state system as a whole, and not to particular states, taken separately.

Original languageEnglish
Article number30541
JournalEthics and Global Politics
Volume9
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2016

Keywords

  • Global justice
  • Inequality
  • Legitimacy
  • Responsibility
  • State system
  • Thomas Nagel

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