Abstract

Distributive justice, like every other value, is not suspended in mid-air: its implementation depends on certain conditions, the well-known ‹circumstances of justice›. In this paper, I attempt to spell them out, first for justice proper , then for international justice. Those circumstances relate to the conceptual parts of justice and are four in number: scarcity, needs and merit, social cooperation, and authority of distribution. As far as international justice is concerned, there is a problem with the last circumstance: as yet no international authority of distribution exists. This does not, however, mean that international justice is impossible or undesirable; only that we have the task to create such an authority