Cosmopolitanism, Distributive Justice and International Political Morality [SIMON CANEY] The aim of the author in this paper is to provide an account of the cosmopolitan approach to distributive justice and to defend it against some of its detractors.
To do this the paper runs as follows: section I defines cosmopolitanism and draws attention to different types of cosmopolitan theory. Section II gives a justification of the cosmopolitan conception of distributive justice. The paper then examines and criticises three objections levelled against the cosmopolitan approach (section III). The next two sections, sections IV and V, consider some alternative ethical perspectives arguing that in many cases they into cosmopolitanism or are compatible with the cosmopolitan ideal. Challenges to cosmopolitanism are, thus, either unpersuasive (section III) or are consistent with cosmopolitanism (sections IV and V). In neither case do they give us reason to reject the cosmopolitan ideal.