Benefiting from Injustice and Global Justice

This thesis argues for a theory of benefiting from injustice and a
principle of global justice, which holds that beneficiaries of certain global
injustices have responsibility to compensate the victims. Global justice and
benefiting from injustice are linked in that responsibility. The thesis consists
of four main parts.

In the first part, I discuss several kinds of theory of benefiting from
injustice, arguing that previous attempts to answer the question whether
beneficiaries of injustice have rectificatory responsibility to the victims are
unsatisfactory. Based on some ideas deriving from previous theories, I
propose a new theory to classify all cases of benefiting from injustice into
three categories, and argue that the moral obligations of beneficiaries in
these categories can be determined in principle. In the second part, I explore
the possibility of global justice. Representative libertarian and cosmopolitan
theories of global justice are carefully analyzed and disputed. Then I
suggest a new complex conception of global justice, contending that global
justice is possible, but only in a particular sense. The third part concerns the
relation between local injustices and global economic interaction, and
argues for a principle of global justice that governs some people’s
benefiting from injustices in other countries through global economic
interaction. I try to figure out how global economic interaction and domestic
injustices have given rise to the particular principle of global justice through
analyzing existing theories on global order, its assessment, global structural
injustices, and so on, and then suggest the proper application of the
principle. The last part is about some possible objections to and doubts
about my ideas, and my responses to them. I argue that premises and
assumptions of my theory are defensible, the principle about benefiting
from global injustice is a legitimate principle of global justice, and my
theories of injustice (rectificatory justice) are sensible in this day and age
and should be applied to the real world.