My proposal for an account of global justice that meets the conditions of Globality, Complexity, Stringency, and Reasonableness is pluralist internationalism. There are several grounds of justice: some are global and some not, some are relational and some not, and one is shared membership in a state; and these grounds are associated with different principles of distributive justice. The grounds discussed are shared membership in a state, common humanity, shared membership in the world society, shared involvement with the global trading system, and collective ownership of the earth. I recognize individuals as human beings, members of states, co-owners of the earth, members of the world society, and subject to a global trading system. An overall theory of global justice arises from exploring these grounds and assessing how they apply to the various agents with responsibility for global justice. This theory spells out a contemporary, global understanding of suum cuique.

Rawls’s conceptualization is the culmination of reflection on the social question over 200 years. The grounds-of-justice approach unifies a broad range of thinking about justice at the global level as it has unfolded over millennia, reflecting the current stage of the great tale of humanity. The animating concern behind human rights is protection of personal inviolability and subsistence from patterns of societal organization that might threaten them. Human rights focus on the status and well-being of any one person rather than an overall distributive picture. The global dimensions of the social question have long gone unappreciated. The global can no longer be an afterthought but is imminent in reflection on justice also in more confined spaces. The default contemporary understanding of justice is global in scope, complex in structure, stringent in demandingness, and extensive in its reach in a manner that is best understood in a public reason sense.