As mentioned, the cosmopolitan idea of justice takes individuals to be entitled to equal moral consideration regardless of contingencies like their nationality or citizenship, among other factors. But there are different conceptions of this idea of justice, that is, different understandings of what it means to treat individuals with equal consideration, and I wish to quickly survey some of the more prominent ones in the contemporary literature. This critical survey of the literature will provide us with some useful background material for the rest of the work. Importantly, laying out the different conceptions of cosmopolitan justice will also allow me to identify and clarify the conception that I will adopt and against which we can fix ideas for the chapters to come. The comparative study here will be intentionally general, highlighting only the broad differences in approaches and goals of these theories. But this, I hope, will serve to satisfy my goal of showing how these different theories of cosmopolitan justice connect with the different ways of thinking about justice in current political philosophy.

I first discuss some well-known cosmopolitan approaches to the problem of global poverty: a utilitarian approach (e.g., Singer 1972), a rights-based approach (Shue 1996), and a duty-based approach (O'Neill 1986, 1991). I will suggest that neither the utilitarian nor the duty-based approach necessarily gives us a theory of global justice that is distinct from a rights-based theory of justice.