Cutting Global Justice Down to Size? Rights, Vulnerabilities, Immunities, Communities

This article attempts to expand the scope of the project of global justice on one parameter but to circumscribe that project on three other parameters. It is argued that the difference of level of application as between individuals and collectives should be transcended in a ‘collective turn’. But this inclusiveness must be accompanied by an insistence on the distinction between a generic or intrinsic understanding of vulnerability on the one hand, and a contingent understanding of vulnerability on the other. Another distinction that must be observed is that between private and public entities. On both dimensions the latter option is to be preferred. Only the contingent vulnerabilities of public entities are of relevance to a practical program of global justice. It is also suggested that formal distinctions in entitlements should be observed. Hohfeld’s scheme is called upon in order to distinguish between claim-rights and immunities and to advocate for the latter as better reflecting the desiderata of global justice. Frequently presupposed connections between vulnerability and rights are thus brought into question. Finally, the proposed framework for global justice enables a novel articulation with, and an illumination of, the demands of equality. For that which is private in a legal sense is constituted by the clash of wills of individual legal persons. Public interests are always shared, thus connoting spheres of equality; understood in this way equality is the stuff of global justice.