Law Commons^™

Deconstructing International Distributive Justice: Fairness As Insurance, Ilan Benshalom

Ilan Benshalom

A common perception among international relations policymakers and theorists is that states’ primarily self-serving motivations inhibit their participation in promoting international distributive-fairness considerations. This Article asserts that this notion is significantly incomplete and misleading; it results in deficient theories and, more importantly, in sub-optimal international arrangements. The deficiency of current approaches is that they view distributive fairness as only performing a normative wealth redistribution function and fail to recognize its practical insurance function. In a very crude way, “distributive fairness” means that countries should pay for the provision of international public goods (e.g., controlling global warming by reducing emissions) according …