have to expect him to reciprocate? How do I know that my willingness to act justly is not going to be exploited? Of course this does not prevent me from doing what justice requires, but it does make a more costly option.
This problem might be avoided if there were to emerge shared global norms whereby people everywhere recognized certain situations as making demands of justice upon them these have been foreshadowed in a very limited way in the case of large-scale natural disasters, where it has now become the norm to organize an international relief effort to bring help to the victims. So we might move slowly into a world in which certain forms of just behaviour would be reciprocated.
But until that happens, someone setting out to act on cosmopolitan principles of justice in the sense of principles that take no account of national boundaries or other forms of membership is behaving heroically, doing more than she is morally required to do. This does not mean that there is no justice beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. There is such a thing as global justice, and it is an increasingly important factor in world politics, but we should not understand it, as cosmopolitans do, as simply social justice stretched out beyond those boundaries to embrace people everywhere. I want to conclude this chapter, and the book, with brief sketch of this non-cosmopolitan alternative. It has three main elements.