Social Justice

Social Justice

Introduction

Until the late 20th century, most philosophical discussions of justice and equality were limited in scope to a single society. Even Rawls’s theory of justice, for example, had nothing to say about the distribution of wealth between societies. In the 1990s philosophers began to think about the moral implications of the vast inequality in wealth between the leading industrialized countries and the countries of the developing world, some of which were afflicted with widespread famine and disease. The German-born philosopher Thomas Pogge argued that affluent countries are responsible for increasing the poverty of developing countries and thus for causing millions of deaths annually.