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Reflections on injustice and international politics*†
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2009
Extract
Thinking about justice in international politics is a particularly frustrating activity for a number of reasons. In the first place, there is the problem of demarcating justice from other moral concepts such as benevolence and charity and defining the respective spheres of these concepts. Too narrow a band for justice will tend towards cynicism, too wide a band will tend to equate justice and morality. In the second place, there is an enormous literature from Plato and Aristotle onwards on justice in social and political philosophy which ought to be explored before applying the concept to international politics. Decisions need to be made about which parts of it are relevant to international politics, i.e. what structural features there are in international politics which are analogous to community or society in domestic contexts. Thirdly, there is little evidence that justice actually plays a role in the deliberations of statesmen and political leaders.
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