Vulnerability and Cosmopolitanism

According to cosmopolitan egalitarianism, egalitarian norms of distributive justice apply to all human beings regardless of national boundaries.Many justifications have been offered for this view.There is, however, one possible justification that has been hinted at but not systematically explored.It proposes that egalitarian norms of distributive justice apply whenever people are vulnerable to each other's actions, that is, whenever their interests can be set back by other people's actions.If successful, this justification of cosmopolitan egalitarianism would avoid certain familiar difficulties that other justifications face.However, this paper argues that this possibly promising justification fails.Several hypothetical scenarios in which the existence of considerable vulnerability does not call for egalitarian distributions are introduced.These scenarios not only establish that vulnerability is insufficient for the applicability of egalitarian norms, but also help explain why this is so.