Chinese Journal of International Law Advance Access originally published online on October 2, 2009
Chinese Journal of International Law 2009 8(3):593-619; doi:10.1093/chinesejil/jmp022
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved
Global Justice and the (Ir)relevance of Indeterminacy
Correspondence: * Professor of International Law, University of Sheffield, UK; co-rapporteur, International Law Association (ILA) International Committee on International Law on Sustainable Development (email: d.french{at}sheffield.ac.uk). Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their comments. As always, all errors and omissions remain mine alone. This paper was completed on 29 August 2009.
Global justice is one of the most indiscriminately used notions in international debate, usually taken to reflect a moral imperative of securing fairness between differently positioned States. As such, global justice might accurately be described as a meta-principle, used here to refer to its universal scope and the overarching conceptual reach of its subject-matter, as well as possessing a high degree of conceptual indeterminacy. It is suggested that there are three levels of uncertainty: indeterminacy of scope (to what is it relevant?), of content (what does it require?) and of application (is justice something that can even be understood at the global level?). In recognizing this uncertainty, the paper nevertheless concludes that while the recourse to principle in political and legal debate can never anticipate the attainment of justice, this should not marginalize the significance—the relevance—of striving for fairness at the global level, particularly between economically divergent States.