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Global Contractarian Justice

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Encyclopedia of Global Justice
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Global contractarian justice is derived from social contract theory. Social contract theory is concerned with justifying institutional arrangements that exercise power over people who hold obligations to one another by virtue of a system of social cooperation. Contemporary social contract theory is used in purely hypothetical terms, regarding the contract not as historical but rather as a thought mechanism for normative justification of the state. It asks us to consider what rights and duties of citizens would rational, self-interested individuals hypothetically consent to in an initial coming together out of the state of nature to form social arrangements.

Global contractarian justice broadens traditional social contract theory beyond persons within and in relation to the state by thinking of contracting parties as humanity writ large. The primary justification for this theoretical expansion is submitted on the basis that under hyper-globalization, the locus of social cooperation is...

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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

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Sieger, L.E. (2011). Global Contractarian Justice. In: Chatterjee, D.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_276

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_276

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-9159-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-9160-5

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