My proposal for an account of global justice that meets the conditions of Globality, Complexity, Stringency, and Reasonableness is pluralist internationalism. There are several grounds of justice: some are global and some not, some are relational and some not, and one is shared membership in a state; and these grounds are associated with different principles of distributive justice. The grounds discussed are shared membership in a state, common humanity, shared membership in the world society, shared involvement with the global trading system, and collective ownership of the earth. I recognize individuals as human beings, members of states, co-owners of the earth, members of the world society, and subject to a global trading system. An overall theory of global justice arises from exploring these grounds and assessing how they apply to the various agents with responsibility for global justice. This theory spells out a contemporary, global understanding of suum cuique.

The proposal I make in this book is that the perennial quest for justice is about making sure each individual has an appropriate place in what our uniquely human capacities permit us to build, produce, and maintain, and that each individual is respected appropriately for their capacities to hold such a place to begin with. Following a distinction that goes back to Aristotle, under this umbrella we later distinguish commutative from distributive justice. The former maintains and restores an earlier status quo that set the stage for the interaction or otherwise responds to violations. The latter is concerned with sharing out whatever a community holds in common.

This chapter elaborates on the notion of a ground of justice, more specifically its ontology. We explore in what sense different principles or grounds of justice may be of the same rank even though they capture rather different domains. (One might say that something like trade justice is not as important as human rights protection.) While these concerns may well not be equally important, they are on a par from the standpoint of the universe. Moreover, we deal with the overall untidy ontological picture generated by the grounds-of-justice view and explore some features of the interconnectedness among them. We supplement that picture by exploring in historical perspective how different grounds have become instantiated. We can then also put the grounds-of-justice approach to work in engagements with other thinkers, in this chapter especially Rainer Forst.