The Idea of JusticeAmartya Sen Cambridge, MA

A Cosmopolitan Account , a monograph by Gillian Brock launched in the summer of 2009, makes a high quality contribution to the body of philosophical work on global justice.As its title suggests, the book offers a vision of global justice from a cosmopolitan perspective.What makes the vision cosmopolitan, of course, is the appeal to the ideal of moral equality of all persons as the starting point of a philosophical inquiry into matters concerning justice on a global scale.With this ideal as its starting point, the author offers a theoretical approach, discusses various substantive issues, and situates both the theory and its implications for substantive issues in relation to the larger literature on the subject.The book is structured in a slightly unusual way.This is, in fact, a feature of the book that makes it very attractive.It has become commonplace in recent years to start a piece of work on global justice with empirical data on global poverty, and then derive an obligation of justice that prescribes economic sacrifi ces to alleviate global poverty to individuals of affl uent (and mostly Western) countries.Sometimes, the justifi cation for this obligation appeals to claims that members of affl uent countries are in fact responsible, one way or another, for global poverty.The book avoids this structure and starts clearly and unapologetically with normative theory itself.The empirical considerations are taken up along the way and substantive issues are discussed after the basic components of the normative theory are articulated.This is followed by a reconsideration of the theoretical normative questions.To refl ect this dialectic, the book is divided into three parts.Part I proposes a theory of cosmopolitan justice.It offers an introduction to the debates and an elucidation of the author's theoretical position on global justice.In doing so, the author articulates an alternative theoretical approach in relation to other positions that have been developed in the literature.Simply called "Theory", this part contains four chapters: an introductory chapter, a chapter devoted exclusively to the debate around Rawls's Law of Peoples , a chapter that articulates the author's proposed theoretical framework, and a

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