Whereas the debate on global distributive justice dominated the field of political theory from the 1990s to the 2010s, it has since considerably lost its vigour. The feeling of moral urgency and the philosophical craze that characterised its origin seem to have given way to some kind of disaffection. The reason is not that the problem of global poverty and inequality would now be solved, far from it. It seems instead that, after two decades of exchanges, all arguments for or against the extension of distributive justice to the global level have been presented by political theorists, and that it is now the responsibility of political practitioners to apply these arguments to the political reality. To this also must be added a growing scepticism as to the motivational force of the various arguments that have been presented. But as this paper will show, while the debate on global distributive justice may somewhat seem outdated, the same is not true for discussions on global economic justice, which remain very lively and which are characterised by a profound dissatisfaction with the way the global distributive justice debate has been conducted, namely, in the wake of John Rawls’s works. More specifically, this paper will identify three major loopholes in this debate — the absence of properly political considerations, the absence of non-Western perspectives, and the absence of historical considerations —, and will then propose four ways of reorienting our reflection on global economic issues in order to address them: a focus on how economic injustices are fuelled by power relationships, a rehabilitation of the poor as agents of justice, a reconceptualisation of our global economic responsibilities in terms of transnational solidarity, and a historical approach to global distributive justice.
