Justice at a Distance Extending Freedom Globally

The current global-justice literature starts from the premise that world poverty is the result of structural injustice mostly attributable to past and present actions of governments and citizens of rich countries. As a result, that literature recommends vast coercive transfers of wealth from rich to poor societies, alongside stronger national and international governance. Justice at a Distance, in contrast, argues that global injustice is largely home-grown and that these native restrictions to freedom lie at the root of poverty and stagnation. The book is the first philosophical work to emphasize free markets in goods, services, and labor as an ethical imperative that allows people to pursue their projects and as the one institutional arrangement capable of alleviating poverty. Supported by a robust economic literature, Justice at a Distance applies the principle of noninterference to the issues of wealth and poverty, immigration, trade, the status of nation-states, war, and aid.

1. The state of the world; 2. What do we owe distant others?; 3. Choosing wealth, choosing poverty; 4. Immigration; 5. Emigration and the brain drain objection; 6. Justice and trade; 7. States; 8. War, self-defense, and humanitarian intervention; 9. Beyond justice at a distance.

Loren Lomasky is Cory Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Virginia. Lomasky is the author of Persons, Rights and the Moral Community (1987) for which he was awarded the 1990 Matchette Foundation Book Prize for best philosophy book published during the preceding two years by an author under the age of forty. He coauthored Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference (Cambridge, 1993) with Geoffrey Brennan. His essay, 'Is There a Duty to Vote?', also coauthored with Brennan, was awarded the 2003 Gregory Kavka/University of California, Irvine Prize in Political Philosophy by the American Philosophical Association.
Fernando R. Tesón is the Tobias Simon Eminent Scholar at Florida State University. He is the author of Humanitarian Intervention: An Inquiry into Law and Morality, 3rd edition and Rational Choice and Democratic Deliberation: A Theory of Discourse Failure (with Guido Pincione). He has written more than fifty articles in journals, including Ethics and International Affairs, the Journal of Philosophy, the American Journal of International Law and Social Philosophy and Policy.