The Basic Structure and the Principles of Justice
Abstract
This paper develops an account of how economic and political institutions can limit the applicability of principles of justice even in a non-relational cosmopolitan conception. It shows that fundamental principles of justice underdetermine fair distributive shares as well as justice-based requirements, and it argues that institutions partially constitute the content of justice by specifying these. The argument identifies three important ways economic and political institutions contribute to determining fair distributive shares, and it also explores how political institutions resolve indeterminacies about justice-based requirements flowing from the facts of strategic interaction and disagreement. In the absence of existing institutions principles of justice might not be capable of assessing distributions or guiding individual action and institutional design. Hence, accepting a specific cosmopolitan conception of justice is insufficient to settle global distributive questions. The paper concludes, however, that existing nation-states do not delimit the potential scope of application of principles of justice since the global institutional setup can be reformed so as to become more sensitive to the demands of global justice.