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Global Egalitarianism

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Encyclopedia of Global Justice

The core claim of Global Egalitarianism is that social justice demands equality of well-being for all human beings on the planet. This claim, as stated, is literally too strong and too simple to capture accurately the more complex claims of the global egalitarian. But it provides the right intuitive starting point for further discussion and clarification.

Global Egalitarianism is often called Cosmopolitanism. It needs to be distinguished from two other main views. In supporting equality worldwide, Cosmopolitanism diminishes the importance of the nation-state as the prime arena to which social justice applies. Justice applies to relations among nations and people across the whole world.

A second view holds that justice demands equality within the bounds of a society or nation-state, but denies that equality is a demand of justice among societies or nations or among people generally. We can call this Social Egalitarianism. It supports equality “domestically,” but not globally. It thus...

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Landesman, B.M. (2011). Global Egalitarianism. In: Chatterjee, D.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_96

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_96

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