Abstract (eng)
In a globalised and interdependent world, questions of how the benefits and burdens of our collective endeavours ought to be distributed arise inevitably. The thesis at hand follows recent developments in philosophical theorising about these questions of global distributive justice. It develops, defends and completes a pluralist framework for global distributive justice.
Following an introductory chapter on contemporary theories of global distributive justice in the philosophical literature, in chapter 2 the notion, concept and advocates of pluralism in moral and political theory are discussed and its central tenets developed. In chapter 3, four arguments against the pluralist outlook from rival approaches are considered but eventually refuted. The discussion of these objections results in three thematic issues that represent crucial questions any convincing approach towards global distributive justice has to answer. These questions concern: 1) the role of factual knowledge for moral assessment, 2) the justification of normative principles for global political and economic affairs, and 3) the understanding of ideal and non-ideal theory for an account of global justice. While the outcome of the discussion in chapter 3 suggests that the pluralist approach is better suited to deal with these challenges, in chapter 4 explicit accounts of all three topics are given. This thesis defends a substantive role of empirical data for pluralistic accounts, a constructivist method of normative justification and argues for a restricted purpose of ideal theory for a pluralist framework on global justice. Having established a complete, systematic pluralist approach, in chapter 5 this framework is subsequently applied to a case study of global trade. The derived, genuine account of distributive justice in megaregional trade agreements demonstrates the desirability of the pluralist approach for questions of global distributive justice. At last, concluding remarks on the main findings of this thesis are drawn and an outlook for further research in this area of philosophical scholarship is provided.