(i) Fair reciprocity

Some theorists have conceived of the relevant notion of social cooperation in strongly moralised terms, linking it with Rawls's conception of a society. On this view, social cooperation exists only when a group of people interact guided by the idea of reciprocity and fair terms of cooperation.Footnote ¹⁹ A society is, according to Rawls, ‘a more or less self-sufficient association of persons who in their relations to one another recognise certain rules of conduct as binding and who for the most part act in accordance with them […] ’.Footnote ²⁰ It is ‘a system of cooperation designed to advance the good of those taking part in it’.Footnote ²¹

One can see why those with egalitarian sympathies might maintain that the existence of social cooperation so understood is sufficient for the applicability of egalitarian concern. But the idea that it could also be necessary for the application of principles of egalitarian justice seems rather implausible. To see this, consider the kinds of contexts in which social cooperation of this type would be absent and thus where it would maintain that egalitarian demands would be out of place.

According to this form of cooperation-based egalitarianism, egalitarian demands would not be applicable within any social systems whose rules were not recognised as binding by all participants, or which were not designed for mutual advantage. A social system whose rules were designed by small elites for their own benefit and simply imposed upon others would be of this kind, when it is precisely these types of social systems that give rise to the most morally objectionable inequalities. Viewing social cooperation (understood in this way) as a necessary condition for the applicability of egalitarian demands would have unduly conservative implications, and would restrict implausibly the scope of egalitarian concern.Footnote ²² If their argument is to be tenable, critics of global egalitarianism cannot appeal to social cooperation so understood.

(ii) Interaction against the background of a relatively stable set of common rules

Many who are sympathetic to Rawls's overall account of justice have (for the reasons discussed above) understood the idea of social cooperation more broadly. Thomas Pogge, for example, has argued that social cooperation of the relevant kind exists in any ‘comprehensive and reasonably self-contained system of social interaction’.Footnote ²³ While this understanding of social cooperation is significantly broader than the moralised notion employed by Rawls, it is still much narrower than social interaction.

Not all forms of social interaction rise to the level of social cooperation. Social interaction can take place between agents who do not coexist in a comprehensive and reasonably self-contained system. For example, two agents who occasionally trade with one another, but do not interact against a background of common and reasonably stable terms, are not engaging in social cooperation so understood. Social cooperation exists when the rules and practices that govern interaction are generally known, and sufficiently complied with to enable reasonably settled expectations about agents' behaviour.

It is clear enough that nearly any modern society is a scheme of social cooperation so understood. The terms of such social cooperation consist in laws and other social rules that govern matters such as what kinds of things can be owned (and by whom), how they can be acquired, transferred, relinquished, and forfeited, how markets and the production system are structured, the manner in which political decisions are made, what persons are permitted to and forbidden from doing with their own and one another's bodies, and so on. Notice however that, even a social order that lacks a ‘state’ could count as a scheme of social cooperation thus understood so long as the norms governing the conduct of the agents within it are generally recognised and honoured to a sufficient extent.Footnote ²⁴

It seems fairly obvious that social cooperation of this kind does exist on the global plane. The arrangements constituting the ‘terms’ of social cooperation include global markets in capital and labour, rules governing global trade and monetary arrangements, and indeed constitutive features of the modern state such as its sovereign rights to tax, to bind citizens through agreements, to fix membership, to control the use of natural resources within its territorial domain, to represent its interests in international bargaining and rule setting and so on.Footnote ²⁵ Those who conceive of social cooperation in this broader sense and who see the existence of such cooperation as a necessary condition for the applicability of egalitarian demands, cannot easily deny that this condition is met at the global level.

(iii) Reciprocity in the production of social (public) goods

The discussion in the previous section does not engage with the arguments advanced by a third class of cooperation-based critics of global egalitarianism. These critics do not deny that social cooperation exists on a global plane. Indeed, they sometimes even affirm that there is a great deal of such cooperation. They argue, however, that egalitarian demands apply only within schemes of social cooperation that have particular characteristics which, while present within states, are lacking at the global level. Brian Barry and, more recently, Andrea Sangiovanni, for example, have argued that egalitarian justice is presently applicable only within states because the citizens of those states stand in specific kinds of strong reciprocal relations with one another in virtue of their joint engagement in the production of primary social goods.Footnote ²⁶ In Sangiovanni's words ‘we owe obligations of egalitarian reciprocity to fellow citizens and residents in the state, who provide us with the basic conditions and guarantees necessary to develop and act on a plan of life, but not to noncitizens, who do not’.Footnote ²⁷

Clearly, much depends on exactly what it means for one agent to provide another agent with such basic conditions and guarantees. As reciprocity-based egalitarians recognise, it is not usually the case that fellow citizens and residents in a state directly provide each other with such conditions and guarantees. Rather, citizens and residents provide support for each other indirectly, by upholding the institutional arrangements that govern their mutual relations qua members of society.Footnote ²⁸ The question, then, is what kind of support individuals must provide for them to be justified in making egalitarian demands upon one another?

One might insist, for example, that egalitarian duties are owed to those who provide financial and other active forms of support for these agencies and institutional arrangements. Yet while reciprocity-based egalitarians certainly think that the idea of reciprocity includes this type of support, they do not hold that it is strictly necessary for one to count as deserving of egalitarian concern. And it is obvious enough why, since it would otherwise follow from this position that those who are exempted from paying taxes or do not provide such support within domestic societies would fall outside the scope of egalitarian justice.

Instead, the idea of ‘providing support’ is understood more broadly, including ‘simple compliance’ with ‘the full range of our everyday legally regulated activity’.Footnote ²⁹ The type of contribution which everyone must make to fall within the scope of egalitarian concern is therefore clearly quite minimal, and in fact potentially objectionable in virtue of such minimalism. Even critics with egalitarian sympathies may object that, following this criterion, we would be required to redistribute resources from the capable and hard-working to those who ‘uphold’ state institutions simply by submitting to them and refraining from undermining them.Footnote ³⁰ Such critics will not deny that others are ‘owed a fair return for what they had given you’, but they will deny that such a fair return translates into egalitarian duties.Footnote ³¹

Even if reciprocity-based egalitarians had a convincing reply to this objection,Footnote ³² they would still need to show that, unlike citizens and residents, foreigners have not submitted themselves to a system of laws and social rules that are necessary to sustain our lives as producers and biological beings.Footnote ³³ This would be very difficult for them to show. Foreigners submit themselves to various international norms which in turn considerably influence our access to resources that are central to the lives that we lead. These include countries' right to extract resources at whatever prices they deem fit, regardless of what costs this imposes on their citizens, and their right to control borders.Footnote ³⁴ Wealthy states routinely exclude outsiders who would wish to seek opportunities within their borders, thereby protecting and enhancing the value of insiders' opportunities.Footnote ³⁵ Such exclusion also lowers the prices at which goods can be produced abroad for consumption by the world's privileged. Were outsiders free to move across borders, the cost of labour in poor countries would be significantly higher since there would be many fewer people competing for such employment opportunities as currently exist in production for export.Footnote ³⁶

Consider further the rules which confer rights to trade on countries. At present, any country, regardless of how rich it is and regardless of how much its trade policies might affect others, is legally free to choose autarky – to close itself off from the rest of the world. Moreover, in case it has not chosen to commit itself to the WTO or some other agreement, it can discriminate between its trading partners on whatever grounds it wishes, which in turn dramatically affects the opportunities of people throughout the world. In light of this, there seems to be no grounds on which it can be plausibly claimed that outsiders do not ‘participate’ in the relevant sense to the production of social goods crucial to the design and realisation of our plans of life. From this it follows that they should fall within the scope of egalitarian concern also on this third interpretation of social cooperation.

(i) Coercion and egalitarian justice

To begin with, we need to ask why coercion is thought to stand in need of special justification. One promising line of defence for the coercion view appeals to the importance of respecting persons' capacity to set and pursue ends for themselves – of respecting their autonomy.Footnote ³⁸ On this view, coercion stands in need of special justification because it can undermine autonomy. When I am coerced, I do not act out of my own will but I am instead subject to the will of another.Footnote ³⁹

Coercion, however, need not always be morally objectionable. Indeed, coercion seems often justified precisely because it protects, rather than undermines, persons' autonomy: for instance, when it is employed to uphold contracts, compel employers to respect basic labour standards, provide educational opportunities, secure rights to participate in political activity, and deter criminal conduct.Footnote ⁴⁰ Such protections are arguably among the necessary preconditions for developing and exercising a capacity for autonomy. The autonomy of those constrained by such rules may be undermined, but this can be justified on autonomy-based grounds because their coercive imposition is required to protect their own autonomy as well as that of a great many others.

Since any coercively upheld system of laws will constrain the autonomy of some and promote the autonomy of others, the question is: How should such laws be designed so as to manifest adequate respect for the autonomy of all? Proponents of the coercion view have answered by suggesting that coercively upheld social rules should be designed to ensure distributive equality. When coercively imposed rules generate an egalitarian distribution, all citizens have (roughly) the same opportunities to act in pursuit of their ends and nobody's autonomy is being unduly undermined. Since no one can constrain others' actions any more than others can constrain hers, everyone has reason to consent to the coercive rules in question. In such circumstances, state coercion is thus justified in the eyes of all.

This is the justificatory rationale at the heart of the coercion view. One can of course question such a rationale and the link it establishes between coercion, autonomy and egalitarian justice. Libertarians, for example, have argued that a commitment to autonomy supports nothing more than a minimal state.Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, one could push this argument even further and defend anarchy on the grounds that no form of coercion is compatible with autonomy.Footnote ⁴² Since engaging with these objections would take us too far from the topic of the present discussion, we will grant, for the sake of argument, the central justificatory rationale of the coercion view and turn to the empirical claim that coercion of the requisite kind is absent at the global level. If this claim proves untenable, the coercion view will not have anti-global egalitarian implications.

(ii) Coercion on the global plane

Coercion abounds at the global level and advocates of the coercion view do not deny it.Footnote ⁴³ However, they insist that it is not of the right kind to trigger egalitarian distributive principles. Why is this so? Three reasons are typically invoked by them.

The first asserts that while domestic coercion is systemic and ongoing, international coercion is mostly a matter of one-off interactions – for example, military intervention, economic sanctions, or blatant forms of arm twisting in international negotiations. Domestic coercion materialises in the form of coercively upheld rules having deep distributive effects over a bounded group of people. Accordingly, it is to those people and those people only that such distributive effects need to be justified. Since, it is alleged, no rules of this sort exist at the international level, justification through egalitarian distributive principles is simply out of place.

This empirical claim is implausible. It is perhaps true that some of the most obvious forms of international coercion consist in one-off interactions. But it is certainly true that there also exist international rules which substantially affect individuals' distributive shares world-wide. Some such rules are so deeply entrenched in our understanding of the international arena that we often fail to perceive their existence. Consider, once again, the sovereign state system itself, with all the powers and prerogatives it confers upon states, some of which, such as borders control, clearly involve forms of coercion against individuals with significant distributive effects across human beings.Footnote ⁴⁴ What is more, compliance with such rules is involuntary. Consider again institutions such as global markets in capital and labour, the rules governing global trade and monetary arrangements, and the constitutive features of the modern state. Such institutions are also coercively enforced (partly through the threat of sanctions), and undoubtedly have significant distributive effects. Of course, from a purely formal viewpoint, such institutions are, unlike the state system, voluntarily joined, but given the potentially unbearable costs of exclusion, participation can be described as coercive.Footnote ⁴⁵

Further, the mere fact that states have voluntarily chosen to be governed by such rules does not show that they are not coercively imposed on their people. Many governments are not minimally representative of the people they rule, and many more are merely minimally representative, privileging the protection of the interests of most advantaged citizens and non-citizens who can be expected to confer benefits upon them.

Proponents of the coercion view might reply by acknowledging the existence of coercion of the kinds described above, but nonetheless insist that they do not count as instances of egalitarian-justice-triggering coercion for either of the following two reasons.

First, they might argue, as Thomas Nagel seems to have recently suggested, that for there to be coercion of the right kind, those who exercise it must consider themselves under an obligation to justify their actions to their coercees. Since state representatives and officials take themselves to be under such an obligation towards their citizens, but not towards foreigners, egalitarian justice remains confined within domestic communities.Footnote ⁴⁶ This view is untenable. Requiring coercion to be justified only to those to whom we already think we owe a justification has unduly conservative implications and places some of the most morally questionable forms of coercion beyond scrutiny.Footnote ⁴⁷

Second, advocates of the coercion view might contend that, though people's subjection to international rules is non-voluntary, such rules are not coercive in the requisite way because they are not enforced by a centralised agent such as a state government. This is what makes state coercion special. Absent a coercer enforcing norms by threatening sanctions, egalitarian justice does not apply.Footnote ⁴⁸

In response to this argument it seems quite natural to ask why, if coercion matters because of its effects on autonomy, just this highly specific form of centralised coercion should make such a moral difference? If coercion is a condition of egalitarian justice because of its effects on autonomy, then there seems to be no plausible reason to claim that autonomy-affecting international rules coercively upheld by a plurality of agents do not require special justification in just the same way as autonomy-affecting rules internally enforced by the state do.Footnote ⁴⁹ Suppose, however, that it could be shown that international rules are not coercively upheld and enforced but are merely non-voluntary.Footnote ⁵⁰ Given that such rules are undeniably autonomy-affecting, it would nevertheless be hard to see why, given the presuppositions of this view, the absence of coercion should make such a decisive moral difference.

(i) Causal vs. moral capacity

Regarding the first question, it seems plausible to claim that, for a normative principle to apply to some domain, there must be agents to whom it is directed who are capable (either alone or jointly with others)Footnote ⁵³ of furthering its demands. Do global egalitarian principles satisfy this requirement? Our answer depends on our estimations of the capabilities of existing agents to further global egalitarian aims, but it seems implausible to suggest that there is nothing that existing agents could do in this regard. To affirm otherwise would require showing that no proposed institutional reforms on the global plane, such as alterations of the rules governing the flow of goods and people, and the extraction and sale of natural resources, could be expected to promote such goals.

Critics might produce, and in fact have produced examples of proposed reforms that, on reflection, would not obviously be of value in promoting global egalitarian justice.Footnote ⁵⁴ For instance, Samuel Freeman raises some worries about the ability of countries, acting independently, to apply egalitarian principles of justice such as Rawls's difference principle. On Freeman's view, ‘this would require that each nation calculate the effects of its many decisions upon the worst off members of the world. This is not feasible, nor would it have the desired (or even desirable) effects’.Footnote ⁵⁵

This may be true, but those who advocate a global difference principle would not need to require countries to act in this way, any more than supporters of a domestic difference principle would require of individual agents (including specific governmental agencies) that they act in this way. Instead, such countries could seek to co-ordinate with each other to reform the rules that govern their productive activities and interactions in such a way as to improve the position of the least advantaged representative group. Such efforts would require complex empirical investigations exploring practically feasible alternative institutional arrangements that would better promote egalitarian goals. Even though such investigations would be subject to uncertainty, there is no reason to assume, a priori, that they would involve impossible informational demands or require unachievable forms of coordination.

To show that global egalitarian principles fail to satisfy the agency requirement (causally understood), one needs to prove a universal claim – that all agents out there fail to possess the requisite causal capabilities to promote global egalitarian aims. Even assuming the critics' worries to be correct, they only support an existential claim: that there are some means by which some agents cannot be expected to promote global egalitarian aims. Demonstrating this does not suffice to show that such aims cannot be promoted, any more than raising concerns about the effects of policies oriented towards promoting domestic equality would show that egalitarian principles are out of place within societies.

It might be argued that, although there are measures that agents could adopt to further global egalitarian goals, they would be unable to meet them completely, or even advance them very significantly. This too is an empirical claim, and it is not clear that it is true. However, even if it were true, it would be implausible to insist that it is a requirement of principles of morally just action that there be agents that are causally capable either of satisfying the principles' demands completely or furthering its demands very significantly in the here and now.Footnote ⁵⁶ Indeed, it is often the case that even the concerted efforts of a great many agents would not suffice to achieve fully the demands of principles of (domestic) justice, at least in the short and medium terms.Footnote ⁵⁷

To fully realise or significantly further a principle's demands, it may well be necessary not only for existing agents to seek to do so directly, but also for them to seek to bring into being other agents (regulatory agencies, judicial organs, etc.) that can do so. This is often the case in weak or failed states, in which, as a result of war, corruption, or misrule, agents with the requisite causal capabilities to further significantly egalitarian goals are often lacking.Footnote ⁵⁸ Of course, one might suggest that egalitarian principles are simply infeasible not only in the here and now, but in relation to the human condition as such. This consideration falls outside the scope of the agency-argument, and will be treated separately, in the final section of this article.

That said, it may still be argued that those agents who have the requisite causal capacities to further global egalitarian demands lack the moral capacities, in the sense that they are unlikely to find these demands compelling and act on them. This may indeed be true. It is implausible, however, to require of a principle of just action that it be very likely that agents who are causally capable of acting effectively on it do so. We would be loath to claim that principles of racial equality did not apply to the US in the early nineteenth century simply because very few people (other than the African slaves themselves) could be expected to adopt and further its demands, at least in the short and medium terms.Footnote ⁵⁹ Establishing a strong link between motivation and the applicability of principles of justice risks limiting moral theorising, as Robert Goodin has nicely put it, to ‘the role of philosophical anthropology – mapping without comment the social practices we find around ourselves’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Let us now turn to the second dimension of agency-requirements. What kind of guidance should principles of just action demand of the agents who are to apply them?

(ii) Perfect vs. imperfect duties

Saladin Meckled-Garcia, a recent proponent of the agency-based critique, claims that principles of justice must:

Following Kant, we can understand the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties as being characterised by the fact that, unlike the former, the latter leave open both how the duty can be discharged, and to whom the duty is owed.Footnote ⁶² In her book Faces of Hunger, for instance, Onora O'Neill gives the example of our duty to help the needy as a paradigmatic case of an imperfect duty.Footnote ⁶³ You must do something for some needy person, but there is no particular needy person for whom you need to do anything. There is also no specific thing you need to do for anyone. Your duty could be discharged by many different kinds of activities (giving aid, volunteering, engaging in political campaigns, etc.), and focused on many different persons.

Many of the duties to address issues that are of concern to global egalitarians would be imperfect in nature, since at present they would seem to require that agents act to bring about institutional reforms, policy changes, and indeed the creation of new agents capable of promoting the values they affirm. But is it plausible that principles of just action be restricted to those areas in which specific moral demands can be clearly parcelled out to specific agents? It would seem not.

Consider, for example, practices that were widespread in the past such as rules that restricted suffrage to men or specific social groups within society. Such practices seem to be paradigmatically unjust, and it is widely affirmed that principles of just action ought to demand that persons living within societies in which they prevailed ought to have reformed them. Yet such demands cannot plausibly be understood in terms of perfect duties allocating specific responsibilities to specific individuals given that the institutional reforms necessary to eradicate such practices can only fall on the group of all persons as a whole.Footnote ⁶⁴

It might of course be argued that, although there were indeed justified moral demands that people living within such societies take action to change their societies' practices, such demands do not amount to principles of just action. However, this would seem to restrict artificially and unduly the scope of principles of just action. When institutional arrangements are unjust, and indeed especially when they are grievously unjust, the moral demands to reform them cannot typically be allocated as perfect duties to specific agents, and yet whatever principles are invoked as the basis of the demand that such agents realise such reforms seem, paradigmatically, to be principles of just action.Footnote ⁶⁵

(i) Unfair burdens

Let us assume that, all things considered, a global egalitarian doctrine – say a globalised version of Rawls's difference principle – would require the transfers imagined in our example. It is not obvious that the burdens imposed by such transfers would be any more objectionable than those imposed by the kinds of domestic institutions advocated by egalitarians, including Rawls. After all, domestic equality-sustaining policies might also involve transferring (through a coercively enforced tax system and other means) resources from the more industrious to the less industrious.

One problem with rejecting even mildly equality-promoting transfer schemes amongst households or countries is that it seems to penalise unduly many people for decisions and conduct in which they took no part. Even if one holds that inequalities amongst persons resulting from their responsible choices are morally unproblematic, it is difficult, from an egalitarian point of view, to argue that inequalities arising from the choice of some set of people should simply be passed on to another set of people – for example, their children or future members of society.

We do not doubt the moral significance of the idea of national responsibility and indeed of one's generation ‘inheriting’ responsibilities from its predecessors.Footnote ⁷³ However, this idea does not require or provide support for the view that the members of one society ought to be made to bear the entire economic costs of the decisions made by themselves or by earlier members, or that familial responsibility entails that nothing should be done to mitigate inequalities amongst children that result from parental decisions.

Rawls, along with most domestic egalitarians, does not consider such inequality-limiting transfers amongst households to be unduly burdensome in the domestic case. Indeed, as discussed by Thomas Pogge, his difference principle would support institutional arrangements that allow children to bear the economic costs of their parents' decisions only insofar as doing so is necessary to provide incentives for decision-making that will tend to raise the worst representative socioeconomic position. Why would this line of reasoning be invalid on the global plane?Footnote ⁷⁴

To justify the disanalogy, critics might want to appeal to the particular co-operative or coercive relations holding between citizens within society or to the lack of appropriate agency. As we have seen, however, cooperation, coercion, and agency-based arguments against global egalitarianism do not succeed.

(ii) Self-determination

It is not clear how an egalitarian could object to the transfers imagined in the example by appeal to the value of self-determination. After all, nearly every domestic tax system involves the transfer of resources from some households which are wealthier due (at least in part) to their greater industriousness to other households which are significantly less well off due (at least in part) to their lack of industriousness. Of course, not all egalitarians would endorse transfers of this kind even in the domestic case. They may hold that insofar as the different shares of A and B are due to choice and effort rather than circumstances, no equality- promoting redistribution is justified. But, as mentioned above, global egalitarians can also endorse such a view. They may insist that transfers be undertaken only to address inequalities resulting from circumstances for which the agents in question cannot plausibly be held responsible.

Further, global egalitarians can support such transfers on the same grounds that comparable transfers are advocated in the domestic context – as a necessary means to preserving a fair framework in which individuals and communities can truly be said to be self-determining. Rawls's difference principle, for instance, is part of a scheme of social justice which is ultimately meant to mitigate the effects of morally arbitrary factors on people's life-prospects so that they can be meaningfully regarded as autonomous, as authors of their own lives.Footnote ⁷⁵ For this to be the case, the background against which individuals develop their life plans and take responsibility for the consequences of their choices must be a fair one.

The maintenance of such a fair background requires considerable institutional regulation. This is because, as Rawls points out, the fairness of society as a whole does not supervene on the fairness of individual transactions: the cumulative effects of individually fair transactions might still generate unfairness at the macro-level. As he explains, ‘the overall result of separate and independent transactions is away from and not toward background justice’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Absent a system of rules ensuring background justice, the distribution of resources between people might end up creating such wide inequalities and power differentials as to undermine significantly the capacity of many to make genuine choices and thus be meaningfully self- determining.Footnote ⁷⁷

Critics might accept this conclusion, but still insist that if societies were interacting on fair terms, no society would unduly restrict the opportunities faced by others. True, real-world states often take advantage of their superior bargaining power and are insensitive to the demands of fairness.Footnote ⁷⁸ But if they interacted on terms of reciprocity, so the reply goes, these problems would not arise and each society could be taken to be responsible for its fate.

This may be true, but it begs the question. To say that if relations between societies were generally fair, societies could be meaningfully taken to be responsible for their own fate, is to evade the issue, central to the present discussion, of what international fairness consists of.Footnote ⁷⁹ Moreover, if Rawls is right about the potentially perverse cumulative effects of individually fair interactions, it would seem that individually fair international interactions would be unlikely to generate a fair and stable international background.

(iii) Poor incentives

The worry, powerfully articulated by David Miller,Footnote ⁸⁰ that global egalitarian principles generate perverse incentives is a legitimate one. It is certainly possible that a system of transfers from advantaged countries or persons to less advantaged countries or persons could lead to less prudent behaviour generally, and indeed make all (or most) people worse off as a result. This concern is common also in domestic contexts, where it is often feared that redistributive policies will erode people's sense of responsibility as well as their incentives to save and invest. A global egalitarian can, however, incorporate concern with this type of ‘moral hazard’.

Consider, once again, how Rawls addresses this problem in the domestic context. His second principle of justice favours institutional arrangements that improve the lowest socioeconomic position. According to this principle, transfers aimed at eliminating inequalities amongst children resulting from parental choices would have to be rejected insofar as they turned out to erode the incentives for parents to save and work hard to such an extent as to worsen the absolute socioeconomic position of the least advantaged.

This is why the second principle would allow children to bear the burdens of parental decisions insofar as this is necessary to provide adequate incentives for savings and productive work choices. Rawls's solution at the domestic level is thus both egalitarian and sensitive to the potentially damaging incentive effects of some equality-promoting policies.

Similarly, a global egalitarian can attempt to strike a balance by calling for international arrangements ensuring that countries have adequate incentives to save, invest, and make prudent policy choices while at the same time mitigating inequalities to the extent possible. There is certainly truth in the claim that global egalitarians have often neglected issues of implementation, and generally have failed to provide an account of what an incentive-compatible global egalitarian order might look like. By itself, this lacuna does not prove that such an order would be infeasible. Although they do not discredit global egalitarianism, such criticisms thus point to ways in which global egalitarian doctrines need to be further developed.