This essay reviews G.A. Cohen’s final major work, Rescuing Justice and Equality. In the book, Cohen challenges the Rawlsian account of the content and the concept of justice. This essay offers a summary of Cohen’s main arguments, and develops objections to several of those arguments, particularly Cohen’s claim that his proposed egalitarian ethos is not vulnerable to a well-known trilemma (liberty, equality, efficiency) that might be pressed against it. The essay’s final section offers critical reflections on the important differences between Cohen’s and Rawls’s views about the nature of justice, and suggests that Cohen’s view may not be helpful if we believe justice is a complex value that includes considerations other than distributive equality.

In Globalizing Justice, Richard Miller offers a novel understanding of the grounds and scope of the demands of global justice. Miller argues that our duties to the global poor should be conceived relationally, that is, as deriving from the very complex and substantial relationships that we, members of rich countries, have with members of poor countries. In this review essay, I ask whether a relational approach to justice is necessary for the kinds of global duties Miller wishes to advance (that fall short of an egalitarian distributive duty). Indeed, so I argue, the global relations Miller describes go beyond grounding a duty to assist the needy, but are sufficient to generate more substantial global egalitarian obligations.

Derrick Darby’s Rights, Race, and Recognition and Ronald R. Sundstrom’s The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice are two recent efforts to answer the challenges that race and racism pose to liberal theory. Darby draws upon civil rights and abolitionist discourse to advance an “externalist” account of political rights, while Sundstrom explores the strains placed upon liberalism by recent demographic trends. In this review essay, I provide a brief account of their overall arguments, and offer some further critical considerations.

In On The People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy, Philip Pettit offers a conception of freedom as non-domination that is, he claims, compromised by any regime other than democracy, yet is fully compatible with coercion by a suitably democratic state. However, as I argue, Pettit has difficulty trying to deliver the latter half of this promise. This essay offers an analysis of Pettit’s definition of freedom as non-domination, specifically, his approach to invasion and controlled interference, demonstrating that it is incapable of doing the work he wants it to do. I argue that he ought to surrender not his definition, but rather the claim that a democratic government can avoid compromising the freedom of its citizens.