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This introductory chapter outlines the empirical context of the debate over reparations for historic international injustice, with particular reference to colonialism and the slave trade. It characterizes the argument of the book as a specific type of non-ideal theory, and explains the book's commitment to a particular kind of practicality, whereby its arguments can be employed by real world political actors. It outlines an approach to international justice labelled ‘international libertarianism’, advocated by writers including John Rawls, David Miller, Michael Walzer, and Thomas Nagel, which is analogous to domestic libertarianism in terms of its commitment to respect for sovereignty, self-ownership, and the minimal state. This is distinguished from alternative accounts of international justice such as cosmopolitanism and realism. The book's focus on rectificatory duties, rather than rights, is explained, and the terminological relation between terms such as restitution and compensation, and nation and state, is explicated.

This chapter outlines a number of critical responses to the project of seeking to rectify historic injustice, and explains why they largely do not apply to international libertarian accounts of international justice. It distinguishes between backward-looking and forward-looking accounts of distributive justice in both ideal and non-ideal theory, and looks at how both accounts relate to ideas of rectificatory justice. If one advocates a forward-looking account of distributive justice, and so advocates a redistribution of resources with each new generation, then the rectificatory project will seem to be of little importance. However, this nonchalance in the face of historic injustice is unsustainable if one advocates backward-looking principles. Since international libertarians resist cosmopolitan calls for a generational redistribution of resources across political boundaries, they must carefully scrutinize the provenance of modern day distributions.

This chapter presents John Rawls' ideal and non-ideal theory of justice. The ideal theory argues that institutions are well ordered when they are both just and known to be just, and when individuals both accept and comply fully with the requirements these institutions impose on them. This notion suggests two different ways in which circumstances may fail to be ideal. On the one hand, background institutions may not be just; on the other hand, individuals may not fully comply with the standing requirements placed on them. For each kind of defective case, there is a corresponding branch of non-ideal theory—the partial compliance theory and the transitional theory. The former specifies what happens to an individual's obligations when others fail to do their fair share within some distributive scheme, while the latter specifies the obligations that individuals have to bring just institutions into existence.

This chapter discusses non-ideal theory of justice and its significance in bioethics, with special emphasis on distributive justice. The two major branches of this theory are an innovation of John Rawls. The divisions are: the partial compliance theory and the transitional theory. But a discourse into non-ideal theory shouldn't stop there, as one may extend the concepts of the theory beyond the two branches mentioned above. The chapter concludes with an illustrative example of their extension vis-à-vis Rawls' division.

Non-ideal theorists often charge that doing ideal theory involves unacceptable idealizations that make political philosophy’s recommendations inappropriate for real-world injustice. Using the test case of adaptive preferences, the chapter shows that non-ideal theorizing runs the same risk. While work on adaptive preferences obviously belongs in non-ideal theory, proposals for appropriate political responses to adaptive preferences are almost universally taken to be constrained by respect-based requirements to avoid paternalistic intervention, and to defer to individuals’ conceptions of the good. Since both considerations are irrelevant for children, political solutions that focus only on respect fail to provide viable solutions to real-world injustice—at best they benefit children by happy and unintended accident, and at worst they negligently harm them. Political philosophers, then, must ask not simply whether to do both ideal and non-ideal theory, but also which common idealizations are often harmfully and inadvertently employed even in non-ideal theory.

This chapter discusses the crisis of contemporary welfare states and the need for a new non-ideal theory of justice to address it. Many existing welfare policies have fallen out-of-step with the social and economic conditions of post-industrial countries and need to be reformed. Normative political philosophers have largely failed to discuss contemporary welfare state reform, or public policy more generally, due to a fixation on ideal justice theories. This chapter explores the distinction in political philosophy between ideal and non-ideal justice theories and argues for the importance of developing a non-ideal justice theory to help guide contemporary welfare state reform. It further suggests that care ethics represents an especially valuable resource for developing a non-ideal theory of welfare state justice due to the fact that many of the problems facing people in post-industrial societies today are problems relating to care (childcare, care for the elderly, and so forth).

This chapter examines the recent resurgence of interest in realist political theory, discusses the relationship between political realism and classical realism in ideal theory, and the relationship between realism and the ideal/non-ideal theory debate. It concludes by setting out the structure of the argument of the monograph.

This chapter provides an historical overview of the just war tradition and how it has evolved over time, contending that its remarkable longevity should perhaps not be forgotten in any reassessment of its importance and plausibility. It then proceeds to identify some key features and issues in just war theory as a moral theory, in particular what it means to present it as “non-ideal”. It identifies some examples of its misuse which have mistakenly been cited as reasons to reject it. The chapter concludes with a statement of one contemporary version of the theory, with introductory discussion of its elements (in particular the argument for a theory of jus post bellum to supplement the traditional accounts of jus ad bellum and jus in bello) to preface the more detailed analyses to come.

Chapter 12 continues the debate about the moral value of animal lives. Its approach is inherently political, because it invokes the need to take into account non-ideal constraints on ideal theory. Thus, while it might be the case that a valid ideal theory attaches considerable moral value to animal lives (as many other chapters in this book have suggested), the chapter argues that such a step is incompatible with the development of a realizable non-ideal theory of justice or morality for animals. This is partly because the killing of animals is such a central part of modern societies that to prohibit much of it, as the traditional animal rights ethic has sought to do, is politically unrealistic and borders on the utopian.

This introduction starts with an overview of the development of climate justice literature. It juxtaposes this with the extent and kind of climate action that has occurred in recent years. This leads to the conclusion that normative theorizing on climate change should engage more with non-ideal theory which assumes (various types of) failures to comply with the demands of justice, as well as unfavourable circumstances. When it engages with the practical context, it can arrive at action-guidance. The various themes and issues covered by chapters of the volume, and its overall structure, are then described. The first part of the volume reflects on general issues in responding to the shortcomings of climate action whereas the second engages with practical reforms. The third part examines how moral values ought to be brought into the scientific, political, and public debates under non-ideal circumstances.

This chapter argues that the philosophical debate around humanitarian intervention would be improved if it were less ‘ideal-theoretic’. It identifies two ideal-theoretic assumptions. One, in target states where humanitarian intervention is being considered, there are two distinct and easily identified groups: ‘bad guys’ committing serious human rights abuses, and innocent civilians against whom the abuses are being committed. Two, external to the target state in question, there are suitably qualified ‘good guys’—prospective interveners who possess both the requisite military power and moral integrity. If the assumptions hold, the prospects for successful humanitarian intervention are much greater. As a contrast, some possible non-ideal assumptions are that (i) there are many bad guys in a civil war, and (ii) the good guy intervener is itself supporting some of the bad guys. If these non-ideal assumptions hold, prospects for successful humanitarian intervention are small.

Chapter 1 argues that careful diagnosis of injustices is central to understanding what to do about them. This requires differential diagnosis: the comparative assessment of different diagnoses of injustice. Yet present-day political theory treats such diagnostics as only a marginal task, even though past political theory considered it central. Chapter 1 undermines this marginalization, by tracing it to the tradition begun by John Rawls and its faulty practice of non-ideal theory. It argues that by the tradition’s own principles, non-ideal theory cannot succeed without such diagnostics. The chapter then recuperates such diagnostics by describing the leading theories of systematic injustice. These theories constitute the closest thing we have to a nosology (the classification of diseases) and pathology (the study of disease in general) of systematic injustice. If we wish to see political theory once again take seriously the differential diagnosis of injustices, then it will have to take these theories seriously.

The first part of this chapter addresses Amartya Sen’s argument against Rawls’s reliance on ideal theory and “a perfectly just society.” I argue that Rawls’s ideal theory and principles of justice are not as redundant or irrelevant as Sen contends. The principles of justice that would be agreed to for an ideal society are necessary to determine a just distribution of income and wealth in our own non-ideal society. In the second part of the chapter, I discuss Sen’s rejection of Rawls’s “institutional approach” in favor of an account of “consequence-sensitive” evaluation of “comprehensive outcomes.” I argue that Rawls’s institutional approach, without being consequentialist, is also consequence-sensitive. I discuss some potential problems with a consequentialist interpretation of Sen’s comparative method and suggest that a pluralist interpretation of his account (one that combines deontological with consequentialist principles) is not as different from Rawls’s approach as Sen intends it to be.

Feminist philosophy—such as in the work of Onora O’Neill—has played a crucial role in the critique of “ideal theory,” Rawlsian and otherwise. This chapter seeks to build on O’Neill’s insights by making a case that ideal theory is in part ideological, serving the group interests of the socially privileged. It begins by differentiating the diverse senses of “ideal” and then laying out the main features of ideal theory in the sense under examination. It then argues that ideal theory has no adequate rationale and that its hegemony in mainstream ethico-political theory must therefore be sought elsewhere. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the virtues of non-ideal theory—for example, its superior capacity to generate descriptive and normative mapping concepts appropriate to the existing non-ideal world, and its greater realism about the obstacles to the realization of a more just society.

How should liberals interested in the issue of racial justice relate to John Rawls’s work? Some, such as Elizabeth Anderson, have rejected a Rawlsian approach altogether, while others, such as Tommie Shelby, have contended that it can indeed be used as is. Shelby argues that Rawls’s fair equality of opportunity principle (FEO) can be extended to deal with racial inequality. In this critique of Shelby, the chapter raises five objections to this line of argument: Rawls’s own non-endorsement, the ideal theory/non-ideal theory distinction, the lexically subordinate positioning of FEO, non-controversiality and public reason, and the difference between class and racial injustice. The conclusion is that what is needed instead is a Rawlsian apparatus modified to deal with corrective justice.

The urgent need for a comprehensive climate change mitigation treaty affects the kinds of reasons for mitigation that we should expect and can reasonably propose to others. Insofar as non-ideal theory is dependent on an account of ideal theory which it serves, this chapter argues that non-ideal theory is ill suited to offer practical moral guidance in light of the urgency and alternatively that there are compelling normative reasons for taking the United Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) seriously. These include the promissory obligation that a state assumes by ratifying the convention, the duty of fairness in an international system of energy use and climate change mitigation expressed by commitment to the right to sustainable development, and the good of having a normative background to treaty negotiations. Additionally, given the likely costs of weakening the background norms, most states also have prudential reasons for seeking to maintain UNFCCC norms.

There are cases in which, intuitively, an agent’s action is both morally right in one sense and morally wrong in another sense. Such cases (along with other intuitions about blameless wrongdoing and action-guidance) support distinguishing between the objective moral ‘ought’ and the subjective moral ‘ought.’ This chapter argues against drawing this distinction on the grounds that the prescriptions delivered by an adequate objective moral theory must be sensitive to the mental states of agents. Specifically, an adequate theory of the objective moral ‘ought’ must respect a strong ought-implies-can principle—morally ought implies agentially can—in order to prescribe actions to real-life agents. An agent’s mental states determine what is agentially possible for that agent; thus, what an agent objectively morally ought to do is in part determined by the agent’s mental states. This chapter describes the structure of a compelling non-ideal moral theory that is both objective and mental state-sensitive. This non-ideal theory illuminates the shortcomings of extant objectivist and subjectivist moral theories and illustrates how we can dispense with the subjective moral ‘ought.’

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to offer a new approach to global justice that integrates the work and insights of international law and ethics. The book analyses the international legal order for its contribution to global justice. It demonstrates that to build a more just world order, one must understand what has been achieved in international law and institutions. The chapter then explains how the appraisal of the law and legal institutions is a project of non-ideal theory in the philosophical sense. It highlights the fact that while non-ideal theories of global justice are not new, the non-ideal theory offered in this book is particular in one important sense: it is grounded in international law. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.