Justice and Global Priorities Research Reading List

The reading list below is based on a reading list originally used for an internal GPI reading group. These reading groups are used as a way of doing an early-stage exploration of new areas that seem promising from an academic global priorities research perspective. Each topic is often used as the theme for one or two weekly discussions, and in most cases those attending the discussion will have read the suggested materials beforehand.

As we thought that it could be a valuable resource for those interested in academic global priorities research, we’re sharing it here, with permission from the authors. All the credit for the list below goes to them.

Motivation

Global Priorities Research (GPR) focuses on issues that arise in response to the question: “What should an actor do with a given amount of limited resources insofar as her aim is to do the most good?” Considerations of justice may be relevant to this question in at least two ways. First, justice may be valuable, and so serve as a goal. Insofar as agents aim to do the most good, they may need to take the promotion of justice (rather than merely, say, the promotion of total welfare) into account. Second, justice might serve as a constraint on the morally permissible pursuit of the good. It may be impermissible for agents to do good in unjust ways, or in cases where they have competing duties of justice of greater moral weight, say, to repair historical injustice or to offset their privilege.

Part I: Justice as a Goal

1. Effective Justice

  • Miller, David (2021) Justice. In Zalta, ed., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

  • Crisp, Roger and Theron Pummer (2020) Effective Justice. Journal of Moral Philosophy 17, 398-415.

2. A Primer on Ideal vs. Nonideal Theory

3. Justice and Beneficence

Part II: Justice as a Constraint

4. Historical Injustice

5. Benefiting from Injustice

Part III: Further reading

6. Distributive Justice and Future People