Abstract

This article assesses Richard Vernon's attempted reconciliation of compatriot preference with global justice by analyzing the iteration proviso (IP), which says that a group of people can legitimately set out to confer special advantages upon each other if others, outside that group, are free to do the same in their own case. Part I outlines how duties to outsiders are typically characterized in two leading accounts of global justice — moral universalism and associativism. The IP is motivated by Vernon's desire to transcend the binary opposition between, and the limitations of, these two views. Part II sketches the version of contractualism that Vernon deploys to surmount these limitations and explains the role of the IP therein. Part III elucidates two different interpretations of the IP and shows that neither seems plausible.