Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy

Liberalism has difficulty with the fact of state borders. Liberals are, on the one hand, committed to moral equality, so that the simple fact of humanity is sufficient to motivate a demand for equal concern and respect. Liberal principles, on the other hand, are traditionally applied only within the context of the territorial state, which seems to place an arbitrary limit on the range within which liberal guarantees will apply. This difficulty is particularly stark in the context of distributive justice; state boundaries, after all, often divide not simply one jurisdiction from another, but the rich from the poor as well. Allowing these boundaries to determine distributive shares seems to place an almost feudal notion of birthright privilege back into the heart of liberal theory. This difficulty has led many philosophers to argue that some revision of liberal theory is necessary. These proposals frequently involve either the demand that liberalism focus on previously neglected particularistic commitments, or the demand that it abandon such local concerns and endorse a cosmopolitan vision of distributive justice. What I want to do in this article is identify a different way in which liberalism might deal with the worries created by the fact of state borders. My argument is that a globally impartial liberal theory is not in-