¹ Cf. Ruddick, Sara, ‘Maternal Thinking’ in her Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 1989), pp. 13–27Google Scholar. Her account of women's predicament stresses that it reflects heavy demands as much as meagre resources. It is to be preferred, I think, because it does not take for granted that lack of resources is significant because ‘public’ while the press of others' demands is less so because merely ‘private’.

² See Okin, Susan Moller, Women in Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Charvet, John, Feminism (London: Dent and Sons, 1982)Google Scholar; Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Jaggar, Alison, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1983).Google Scholar

³ Scott, Alison, ‘Industrialization, Gender Segregation and Stratification Theory’, in Crompton, Rosemary and Mann, Michael, eds, Gender and Stratification (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986).Google Scholar

⁴ The differences run the gamut of social indicators. Most dramatically in some Third World countries women and girls do worse on a constellation of very basic social indicators: they die earlier, have worse health, eat less than other family members, earn less and go to school less. See Sen, Amartya K., ‘Gender and Cooperative Conflicts’ (Helsinki: Working Paper of the World Institute for Development Economics Research, WIDER, United Nations University, 1987)Google Scholar; and Harriss, Barbara, ‘Differential Female Mortality and Health Care in South Asia’ (Oxford: Queen Elizabeth House, Working Paper, 1988)Google Scholar and ‘Intrafamily Distribution of Hunger in South Asia’, in Drèze, J. and Sen, Amartya K., eds, Hunger: Economics and Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

⁵ The problem is not merely one of resources. Where funds have been adequate for publicly funded welfare provision, this too has been inadequate to eliminate the differences between the economic and political prospects of men and of women. For example, many women in the socialist countries find that they have secured greater equality in productive labour with no reduction in reproductive tasks. This is a reason for doubting that arguments establishing welfare rights – e.g. a right to food – take a broad enough view of disparities between men's and women's prospects.

⁶ E.g. Pateman, , The Sexual ContractGoogle Scholar; Okin, Susan Miller, ‘Justice and Gender’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 16 (1987), 42–72.Google Scholar

⁷ Gilligan, Carol, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Kittay, Eva Feders and Meyers, Diane T., eds, Women and Moral Theory (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987)Google Scholar; Lloyd, Genevieve, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MacMillan, Carol, Women, Reason and Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982)Google Scholar; Ruddick, Sara, ‘Remarks on the Sexual Politics of Reason’Google Scholar in Kittay, and Meyers, , eds, Women and Moral TheoryGoogle Scholar; Noddings, Nell, Caring (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Chodorow, Nancy, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).Google Scholar

⁸ Many of those who urge respect for the ‘other’ voice insist that they do not reject the demands of justice, and that they see the two ‘voices’ as complementary rather than alternative. The positions taken by different writers, and by the same writers at different times, vary. The protests must be taken in context: those who appeal to ‘women's experience’ or ‘women's thinking’ appeal to a source that mirrors the traditional relegation of women to a ‘private’ sphere, and cannot readily shed those commitments. It is important to remember that those who care have traditionally been thought to have many cares.

⁹ Such approaches can be found in Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983)Google Scholar; Sandel, Michael, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981)Google Scholar and Is Patriotism a Virtue? (Lawrence: Philosophy Department, University of Kansas, 1984)Google Scholar; Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985)Google Scholar and perhaps most surprisingly, Rawls, John, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (1985), 223–51Google Scholar. For some discussion of the implications of these works for international justice, see O'Neill, Onora, ‘Ethical Reasoning and Ideological Pluralism’, Ethics, 98 (1988), 705–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ Walzer acknowledges that this means that he can ‘only begin to address the problems raised by mass poverty in many parts of the globe’, Spheres of Justice, p. 30Google Scholar. Critics may think that his approach in fact pre-empts answers to questions of global justice.

¹¹ Communitarians can, however, take lesser loyalties seriously: where a state is divided into distinct national or ethical communities, those distinct traditions may in fact be the widest boundaries within which issues of justice can be debated and determined. They could argue for secession from a multinational state; but they can say nothing about what goes on beyond the boundaries of ‘our’ community. Cf. Walzer, , Spheres of Justice, p. 319.Google Scholar

¹² Rawls, , ‘Justice as Fairness’.Google Scholar

¹³ Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, p. 128.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Cf. Pateman, , The Sexual ContractGoogle Scholar; Nicholson, Linda, ‘Feminism and Marx: Integrating Kinship with the Economic’, in Benhabib, Seyla and Cornell, Drucilla, eds, Feminism as Critique (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).Google Scholar

¹⁶ See Okin, , ‘Justice and Gender’, pp. 46–7Google Scholar. She considers whether the original position abstracts from knowledge of one's sex. Even if she is right in thinking that Rawls relies on a covertly gendered account of the subject, this idealization may have little effect on his theory of justice if the thought experiment of the original position has so relentlessly suppressed difference that the supposed plurality of voices is a fiction. In that case, we should read the work as taking an idealized rather than a merely abstract view of rational choice from the very start and so virtually appealing to a single, ideally informed and dispassionate figure as the generator of the principles of justice.

¹⁷ See Beitz, Charles, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar for an account of debates between realists and idealists.

¹⁸ Keohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph S., eds, Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Luper-Foy, Stephen, ed., Problems of International Justice (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1988).Google Scholar

¹⁹ See Shue, Henry, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and US Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; ‘Exporting Hazards’ in Brown, Peter and Shue, Henry, eds, Food Policy: The Responsibility of the United States in Life and Death Choices (New York: Free Press, 1977)Google Scholar and ‘The Interdependence of Duties’, in Alston, Philip and Tomasevski, K., eds, The Right to Food (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1984)Google Scholar; Luper-Foy, , Problems of International JusticeGoogle Scholar; O'Neill, Onora, Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Justice and Development (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1986).Google Scholar

²⁰ This is the hoary problem of formalism in Kantian ethics. For recent discussions of aspects of the problem see Bittner, R¨diger, ‘Maximen’, in Funke, G., ed., Akten des 4. Internationalen KantKongresses (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974)Google Scholar; Höffe, Otfried, ‘Kants kategorischer Imperativals Kriterium des Sittlichen’, Zeitschrift f¨r Philosophische Forschung, 31 (1977), 354–84Google Scholar, and O'Neill, Onora, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Part II.Google Scholar

²¹ It does not follow that every coercive act is unjust – some coercion, e.g. the use of sanctions to enforce law – may be the condition of any reliable space for uncoerced action. In such cases, the appropriate expression of an underlying principle of rejecting coercion is, surprisingly and crucially for political argument, one that, taken out of context, might express an underlying principle of coercion.

²² I have put these matters briefly. For more extended treatment see the references in fn. 20.

²³ Edelman, Murray, ‘The Political Language of the Helping Professions’, in Shapiro, Michael J., ed., Language and Politics (New York: NYU Press, 1984).Google Scholar

²⁴ Nicholson, , ‘Feminism and Marx’.Google Scholar

²⁵ Scott, , ‘Industrialization, Gender Segregation and Stratification Theory’Google Scholar; Sen, , Gender and Cooperative ConflictsGoogle Scholar; Stiehm, Judith Hicks, ‘The Unit of Political Analysis: Our Aristotelian Hangover’ in Harding, Sandra and Hintikka, Merrill B., eds, Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), 31–43.Google Scholar

²⁶ Hill, Thomas, ‘Servility and Self-Respect’, Monist, 57 (1973), 87–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sen, , Gender and Cooperative ConflictsGoogle Scholar; Pfeffer, Raymond, ‘The Responsibility of Men for the Oppression of Women’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2 (1985), 217–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Postow, B. C., ‘Economic Dependence and Self Respect’, The Philosophical Forum, 10 (1978–1979), 181–201.Google Scholar

²⁷ I focus here on the obligations of the strong rather than the rights of the weak. This is not to deny that agitation and resistance by the weak can help remind and persuade the strong of their obligations and make it more difficult for them to repudiate them. However, to focus primarily on rights falsifies the predicament of the weak, who are in no position to ensure that others meet their obligations.

²⁸ Shue, , ‘The Interdependence of Duties’Google Scholar; Harriss, Barbara, ‘Merchants and Markets of Grain in South Asia’ in Shanin, Teodor, ed., Peasants and Peasant Societies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987)Google Scholar and Differential Female Mortality and Health Care in South Asia, and ‘Intrafamily Distribution of Hunger in South Asia’.

²⁹ See Sen, , Poverty and FaminesGoogle Scholar and Gender and Cooperative Conflicts, for an account of entitlements.