Non-ideal theory and global justice

We live in a fundamentally unjust world riven by poverty, inequality, and human suffering. Theorists of global justice want to address this. In that sense, it seems intuitive that the global justice debate would be engaged in non-ideal theory. However, this is not always the case. The global justice debate in political philosophy began in the realm of ideal theory, but over time it has evolved into non-ideal theory, and now critical scholars are rejecting this methodological framework altogether. In this chapter, the author outlines the early global justice debate and cosmopolitanism, and emphasises their use of ideal theory. Then she outlines nationalist and statist critiques of cosmopolitanism, which use both ideal and non-ideal theory, and discusses how cosmopolitanism took a non-ideal turn in response, including adopting the statist methodology of 'practice-dependence'. She argues, however, that ideal theory, and the Rawlsian methodological framework more generally in the global justice debate, has functioned as ideology by obscuring the historical injustices that created global inequality and by focusing on distributive justice for individuals, thus obscuring power relations between groups. She describes new methodological developments in the field, including critical theory approaches, structural injustice, Marxist approaches (social reproduction theory and racialized capitalism), and decolonial theory. She argues that we should move on from the ideal/non-ideal paradigm and explore what other methodological frameworks can offer in terms of illuminating global injustice.