1.1 The Conception of Justice

Our conception of justice is mainly based on social justice. As Rawls points out: “For us the primary subject is the basic structure of society, or more exactly, the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation.” (Rawls 1999, p. 6) The study of justice has been concerned with what we owe one another, and what obligations we might have to treat each other fairly in a range of domains, including over distributive and recognitional matters. Classical and contemporary political philosophers have focused their theorizing on justice almost exclusively within the state, but the last 20 years or so have seen a marked extension to the global sphere, with a huge expansion in the array of topics covered.

The quest for justice happens in a social context, and its objective is to ensure that the interests of actors are made compatible. This amounts to at the same time limiting and socializing these interests by embedding them into a logic and dynamic of rights and duties of actors toward one another. The rights of actors are secured to the extent that they acknowledge having duties and responsibilities toward others. The recognition by an actor of the rights of other actors secures some sense of order, creating the preconditions in which justice is possible. This is to say, justice enables the possibility of relations of reciprocity and cooperation among actors.

The most important rights and associated duties and responsibilities at the core of a theory of justice tend to have two main features. 1. They concern the rights without which people cannot sustain themselves, and the absence of which also places the stability of the polity or community at risk. 2. They concern the core values on which the identity of a society and its members is structured and organized. From this perspective, a significant aspect of a theory of justice amounts to theorizing and evaluating how these two features come together in a society.

On these most important rights, justice is in principle uncompromising. Actors have equal rights, such as the right of equal respect and treatment, as John Rawls expounds on the two principles of justice: “First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all” (Rawls 1999, p. 53). These principles primarily apply to basic structure of society. They are to govern the assignment of rights and duties and to regulate the distribution of social and economic advantages. These principles are to be arranged in a serial order with the first principle prior to the second. Thus, what makes just arrangements so important is that the rights they protect are uncompromising, which is in the first order.^Footnote1 And, according to Rawls, one of the important principles of equality for distributive justice is equality of opportunity, which means that everyone is equal in her chances of receiving education, getting a position in public office, etc., irrespective of her race, nationality, family background, and so on.

In addition to the most important or core (or primary) rights and duties and responsibilities, there are also rights that are far from peripheral. Incidentally, as societies develop and acquire more resources, it seems that more and more rights have been recognized as primary rights.^Footnote2 To some extent this phenomenon suggests that justice is not an absolute, fixed and unyielding concept but rather a concept that is somewhat fluid and that grows organically as societies grow richer in access to resources and start to recognize rights that were hitherto marginal as basic rights, for example, the right to clean water or clean air, the right to privacy, etc.

The principal responsibility of political institutions, such as the state, is to ensure the respect of what actors see as their rights and duties, especially those at the core of their sense of justice. The possibility and enjoyment of rights (and duties) is a key aspect of the function and responsibility of political institutions, especially if they aspire to be viewed as legitimate. One of the ways in which political institutions can achieve such outcomes is to produce and nurture public goods in the fields of security, economics, health, education, etc.

The protection of the rights of every person is a duty for any political institution. Human rights belong to all individuals regardless of their citizenship, nationality, culture and other forms of associative membership. Article 2 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights reiterates this universality and individuality of human rights as follows:

“Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty”.

As a universal ideal, the protection and securing of the human rights of individuals is not solely the purview of their respective states. States may well be the primary moral agents tasked with securing and protecting the human rights of their own citizens, but human rights are ultimately a matter of international concern. When a state fails to live up to its human rights duties, the international community has the responsibility to respond appropriately. The universality of human rights, therefore, has important practical implications (Tan 2017, p. 60).

In recent years, in addition to rights or the institutionalist approach to justice, some other approaches have been developed, including the capability approach put forward by Amartya Sen and others. According to this approach, individual advantage is judged by a person’s capability to do things she or he has reason to value. Its focus is on the freedom that a person actually has to do this or be that. Obviously, the things we value most are particularly important for us to be able to achieve. The concept of capability is thus linked closely with the opportunity aspect of freedom, seen in terms of “comprehensive” opportunities. Consequently, the capability approach aims at equality of opportunity, but focuses on information in judging and comparing overall individual advantages. A number of distinguished contributions have been made by Martha Nussbaum and others on matters of social assessment and policy through powerful use of the capability approach (Sen 2009, pp. 231–232; Nussbaum 2006). The realization of justice depends not only on defending individual rights to freedom, but also on developing a person’s capability or social functions to realize her freedom, such as satisfaction of basic needs, conditions that lead to a decent life, better education, etc.

1.2 Global Justice

Global justice builds on key intuitions and insights developed in the framework of justice as it has been traditionally explored in the context of local and national communities. It is the pursuit of justice at the global level, i.e., at the level of the whole of humanity. As such, global justice entails at least four related defining features:

1. 1.It makes human beings, whoever they are and wherever they are, the primary right holders.
2. 2.It addresses issues that in nature and scope must be to a significant extent taken up at the global level (like climate change and the global political economy).
3. 3.Addressing features 1 and 2 requires some sort of global community conscience, made of shared global values and prudential considerations (a mix of projection of values by powerful countries, negotiation in the context of international agreements and the need to cooperate with one another).^Footnote3
4. 4.Addressing features 1, 2, and 3 calls for conceiving and establishing public goods at the global level and making them complementary with the pursuit of public goods at the national and regional levels.

These four features are by and large the benchmarks of global justice. Since there are some differences between justice within a country and justice between nations, the universal standards that exist in such issues as human rights, democracy, equality, freedom, etc., serve as a common denominator for people between nations to deal with each other.

In its most comprehensive dimension, a theory of global justice entails the following four related dimensions: (1) A normative dimension: Which criteria and values should be used for evaluating and judging what is just from a global standpoint, and the nature of the rights? (2) A methodological and procedural dimension: Which procedures and mechanisms should be mobilized to identify and implement the substance of rights? (3) An institutional dimension: Which institutions and laws are best suited to an agenda of global justice? (4) A policy dimension: Which policies should be put in place to nurture access to and respect of rights at the global level?

The concept of global justice, just as the concept of justice in the national context, recognizes different kinds of rights and their statuses in the evaluation of justice. As with justice in general, primary rights at the global level concern equal treatment of all peoples, physical, economic and health security, access to education, etc. The pursuit of the respect of these rights takes place especially in the context of the development of public goods, as articulated between the national and the global levels. For instance, given the growing economic interdependence of countries (globalization), the pursuit of economic and environmental justice calls for establishing a complementarity of rights and duties and public goods at the national and global levels. Those in international human rights circles talk about ‘first-’, ‘second-’ and ‘third-generation’ rights (see Alston 1987, p. 307). First-generation rights are the traditional liberties and privileges of citizenship: religious toleration, freedom from arbitrary arrest, free speech, the right to vote, and so on. Second-generation rights are socio-economic claims: the right to education, housing, healthcare, employment and an adequate standard of living. Though these are thought to be more radical claims requiring a more interventionist state, they remain essentially individualistic in their content, inasmuch as it is the material welfare of each man, woman and child that is intended to be secured by these provisions. Third-generation rights, in contrast, have to do with communities or whole peoples, rather than individual persons. They include minority language rights, national rights to self-determination and the right to such diffuse goods as peace, environmental integrity and economic development. But when reordering is needed, respect for human rights takes priority over respect for peoples, as a government should take the respect of the rights of its individual citizens most seriously.^Footnote4

Global justice concerns principles dealing with international relations. Rawls’ Law of Peoples was a significant work that stimulated thinking about global justice. Several questions soon became prominent in the discussions related to global justice, including: What principles should guide international action? What responsibilities do we have to the global poor? Should global inequality be morally troubling? Are there types of non-liberal polities that should be tolerated? What kind of foreign policy is consistent with liberal values? Is a “realistic utopia” possible in the global domain?

As Rawls points out, his principles of justice among free and democratic peoples include: peoples are free and independent, and their freedom and independence are to be respected by other peoples; peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them; and peoples are to observe a duty of non-intervention.^Footnote5 Rawls stresses that free and independent well-ordered peoples are ready to recognize certain basic principles of political justice as governing their conduct, and these principles constitute the basic charter of the Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999, pp. 36–37).

Equal respect and treatment of all peoples should be universal, namely not only for those in liberal democratic and decent societies, but also for those of outlaw states or those in unfavorable conditions. A principle of justice such as that of non-intervention may have to be qualified in the general case of outlaw states and grave violations of human rights, but the principle of equal respect and treatment still applies to all peoples. For those outlaw states, when humanitarian disasters happen, it is possible to envision sanction or intervention, as equal treatment of all peoples is still requisite. From the perspective of international relations, a people is like a person: It has its own personality, and equal rights and respect of persons can be extended to the global context. As peoples enjoy equality of rights, they should not be prejudiced or discriminated against for reasons having to do with their geographical size, population, religion, race, and cultural tradition.

While most moral and political solidarity and global responsibility must be founded or based upon primary rights, global justice must also be evaluated on the basis of how rights that are secondary but are nonetheless significant for human life are respected. This is particularly important since global justice seeks to identify and respect the most important, and as such universal, rights of human beings in the midst of cultural pluralism.

The state or the nation-state can be a key instrument of global justice in creating and maintaining respect for the rights of human beings. The legitimacy of a nation-state regime and even the nation-state itself and its rights will be evaluated on the basis of its contribution to the rights of human beings and public goods both at a national and global level. This is to say that the pursuit of the national interest at the exclusion of rights and public goods beyond borders is at odds with the normative, policy, institutional, and political agenda of global justice. In a global context, the national interest is not exclusively self-centered. It is also geared toward global solidarity and responsibility, and not simply in a marginal fashion. A hierarchy may exist in what a state owes to its people and what it owes to strangers, but this hierarchy is meant to be inclusive (to make room for and look after the rights of strangers, since they are human beings) and not exclusionary.

Supporters of global justice seek to determine, in the service of the rights of individuals, the right balance between just universalism and just particularism and pluralism. They try to adjudicate how the equality and hierarchy (all people should have equal rights of some type but a hierarchy exists between certain kinds of rights) of individual rights should be negotiated, conceptualized and implemented in the midst of the dilemmas that relations between universalism, particularism, and pluralism can create.

Natural resources often figure prominently in several topics of global justice. Some relevant questions include: Are national communities entitled to the resources they find on their territories? Should principles of global justice apply to our arrangements for justly distributing natural resources? As an early proponent of a resource distribution principle, Charles Beitz argues that natural resources should be allocated such that each society is able to provide adequately for its population (Beitz 1975).

1.3 Conceptualization of Global Justice

A key problematic for the conceptualization of global justice is: How is it possible to reconcile a cosmopolitan and universalist agenda (primacy of the rights of individuals, especially when it comes to basic security and economic rights) with the particularistic logic of nation-states and pluralism of cultures, and the challenges that this can create from both theoretical and practical standpoints?

The eight sets of considerations below could serve as guidelines for the conceptualization of global justice:

1. 1.The rights of human beings have primacy.
2. 2.The rights of states are based on the extent to which they serve the rights of human beings, domestically and internationally, and contribute to the establishment of public goods, nationally and globally, themselves at the service of the rights of human beings. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. And no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust territory, non-self-governing territory, or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
3. 3.In a justice context, the rights of states are not absolute, or an end in themselves. They are based upon the rights of human beings. As such, nation-states have a key role to play in global justice, both at the domestic and global levels. The fact that the rights of states are based upon their contribution to the rights of human beings and public goods makes them open to criticism if they do not take the requirement of solidarity and responsibility seriously.^Footnote6
4. 4.From the perspective of global justice, the legitimacy of a nation-state will be evaluated on the basis of its contribution to the rights of human beings and public goods nationally but also on the basis of its contribution to these rights at the global level. This is to say that the pursuit of the national interest at the exclusion of rights and public goods beyond borders is at odds with a global justice normative, policy, institutional and political agenda. In a global context, the national interest has to factor in global solidarity and responsibility.
5. 5.Equal respect and treatment of all peoples should be universal. From the perspective of international relations, a people is like a person; It has its own personality, and equal rights and respect of persons can be extended to the global context. As peoples enjoy equality of rights, they should not be prejudiced or discriminated against for reasons having to do with their geographical size, population, religion, race, or cultural tradition.
6. 6.The first priority of global solidarity and responsibility on the part of states, international organizations and other actors (such as non-governmental organizations, the private sector, or individual actors) is to ensure that those rights viewed as basic, as primary rights, are not overlooked nationally and globally. This can entail socio-economic rights, security rights, etc. It is upon these primary rights that the bulk of solidarity and responsibility must be conceived and exercised, and that a sense of global justice must be first and foremost evaluated. But the sense of global justice must also be evaluated on the basis of how the rights that are secondary but nonetheless important for human life are respected. In addition, cosmopolitan engagement in the service of global justice should not necessarily lead to a homogenization of ways of life and thinking, or even of modalities of development. Universality of rights does not mean uniformity of rights and ways of life.
7. 7.The key is to identify the nature of primary rights, on which there can be no compromise, and the nature of secondary rights, on which there can be some compromise, and then assess the extent to which they are respected (threshold of realization and implementation). Competition and hierarchy of rights in the context of global justice, and the tensions, dilemmas and trade-offs that come with them, must always be managed in favor of primary rights.
8. 8.The identification and negotiation of these rights (primary and secondary) must be agreed upon by people, and not simply by their government or global institutions, so that people have a say, agency and participation in how they live. This is a key aspect of global justice, as of any level of justice.

Justice in the distribution of goods is one of the main topics in the domain of global justice. It deals with the question of the global duty under which we are obliged to ensure that people meet their basic needs and enjoy decent lives regardless of their nationality, color, sex, religion and social class, etc. This section discusses the mainstream goods-based approaches as the metrics of justice, including the Rawlsian social primary goods approach, the capability approach, and the equal opportunities of welfare approach. All of these approaches “have sought to answer the question ‘what should we look at, when evaluating whether one state of affairs is more or less just than another’” (Brighouse and Robeyns 2010, p. 1).

2.1 Goods-Based Approach versus Rights-Based Approach

Goods-based approaches, alongside the discourse of human rights, add important clarification to the concept of global justice. They are deemed complementary to the discourse of human rights for the following two main reasons.

First, there is a gap between the nominal recognition of rights and the actual satisfaction of needs. In addition to the highly abstract language of human rights, we still need the down-to-earth language of goods to determine the materials and institutional support that the government is obliged to provide (Nussbaum 2011).

Second, the human rights approach—the libertarian or neoliberal understanding of rights—is widely criticized for its excessive emphasis on the “negative” aspect of liberty. (For the distinction between negative and positive liberty see Berlin 1958). Instead of merely “keeping hands off” to ensure the absence of interference, the government needs to do more in order to “positively” secure the basic goods for people to achieve their desired lives (Nussbaum 2004, 2011).

2.2 Historical Analysis of the Connection Between Goods and Justice

Theoretical connections between goods and justice can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy. Aristotle held that a “just” government must pay attention to common goods, while an “unjust” government pays attention to the goods of the rulers (Aristotle 1984). When common goods conflict with private goods, the latter is always secondary. This perfectionist view, with a comprehensive account of good, is labeled the “unitary conception of common good” by Held (1970). It was further developed in Christian thought, especially in Roman Catholicism, before the advent of liberalism in the Seventeenth century. Since Hobbes offered an interpretation of human nature as desirous of the satisfaction of private needs, private goods have gradually become a legitimate motive and gained moral authority (Douglass 1980). From the point of view of the contractarians, pursuing private interests is considered legitimate since it is supported by natural law as the “natural right” (Hobbes 2016; Locke 1982; Rousseau 1978). This is how the discourse of “rights” enters the debate and replaces “common goods” as the most important element in the interpretation of the conception of justice.

2.3 Three Approaches to the Goods-Based Conception of Global Justice

2.3.1 Primary Goods Approach^Footnote7

Against this backdrop, Rawls offered a new interpretation of goods as an attempt to fit the rights-justice discourse. On the basis of the liberal commitment that individuals have an interest in being able to make their own choices without violation by the “good of all”, Rawls propounded the idea of “primary goods”, which are defined as the basic goods that everyone needs for the satisfaction of their various ends, to replace the unitary and comprehensive conception of “common goods”. He argued that “primary goods…are things which it is supposed a rational man wants whatever else he wants…with more of these goods men can generally be assured of greater success in carrying out their intentions and in advancing their ends” (Rawls 1971, p. 92). More specifically, although individuals have different ends and various life plans, primary goods are necessary means. In this case, “good” is no longer an encompassing idea that regulates every aspect of citizens’ lives, but is the primary material for individuals to fulfil their specific rational desires.^Footnote8

Rawls’s view of primary goods involves rights and basic liberties, income and wealth, powers and prerogatives of office, and the social bases of self-respect. Generally speaking, it includes both materials and relations that we generate together through social interaction.^Footnote9 It is a requirement of justice for the government to maintain the social conditions that answer to the primary goods of individuals (Rawls 1982, 2001).

Defenders of the primary goods approach to justice include Thomas Pogge (2002), Freeman (2006), Richardson (2006), and Norman Daniels (2010), among others. They defended this approach against the capability approach, an alternative metric of justice that we discuss subsequently.

2.3.2 Capability Approach

As an improvement on the Rawlsian approach of primary goods, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum developed the capability approach. Sen argued that the primary goods metric fails to notice the inter-individual variations between people, such as metabolism, intelligence, and political and physical environments. These variations, together with primary goods, determine the extent to which people can achieve their purposes and ambitions. Thus, provision merely of primary goods is not enough to meet the requirements of justice (Sen 1980, 1990). In this sense, Sen argued that we should focus on people’s being and doing, that is, their capabilities.

Nussbaum developed a well-known list of the ten central human capabilities: life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; and control over one’s environment (Nussbaum 2006). These capabilities require “many things from the world: adequate nutrition, education of faculties, protection of bodily integrity, liberty for speech and religious self-expression, and so forth. If this is so, then we all have entitlements based on justice to a minimum of each of these central goods” (Nussbaum 2004). In this way, Nussbaum justified the capability approach in the framework of global justice.

It should be noted that the capability approach, although emphasizing peoples’ being and doing, in no way denies the importance of resources, materials, social institutions, and other forms of goods with regard to people’s well-being. Scholars such as Henry Richardson (2006) have shown that the primary goods approach and the capabilities approach can be combined into a coherent framework.

2.3.3 Equal Opportunities for Welfare

Alternative approaches exist in addition to the two metrics discussed above. Richard Arneson (1989) offered an account of justice with the idea of “equal opportunities for welfare”. He concurred with Sen’s criticism of the Rawlsian primary goods approach. But with regard to the capability approach, he also doubted “whether there are any objectively decidable grounds by which the value of a person’s capabilities can be judged apart from the person’s preferences” (Arneson 1989, pp. 91–92). The valuation of capability independent of preferences, in his view, “presuppose[s] the adequacy of an as yet unspecified perfectionist doctrine” (Arneson 1989, p. 92). As a result, he understood “welfare” as preference satisfaction. Goods must be distributed equally among people to the degree that the distribution ensures the same opportunities for each person to satisfy his preferences. Other variants of this idea can be found in the works of Cohen (2011), Otsuka (2003), and John Roemer (1998).

2.4 Summary

Briefly, the three approaches, although presenting disagreements about the details of goods distribution, share the same commitment that the government, as the primary agent of justice, has the responsibility to distribute basic social goods (in a broad sense) to ensure that basic rights are met and satisfied. More specifically, the government should maintain a basic social order to protect citizens’ security, provide primary materials for citizens’ basic survival, improve the system of education to promote equal opportunities, and provide equal employment opportunities to ensure that individuals with similar capabilities have similar prospects, regardless of their gender, class or background.

Similar ideas exist in Chinese philosophy. Confucianism holds the view that the government should “extensively confer benefits on the people and assist all” (Confucius 2018), and Mozi (2003) argued that good governance is based on universal justice, which requires the government to “enrich the people, increase the population and bring stability and order to the nation”. These theories support the goods-based idea of justice from a non-Western backdrop and reflect its wide applicability in various cultural contexts.

Alongside the two approaches mentioned above (essentially generated in the West), one focusing on rights and the other on public goods, there is another approach to global justice, largely a non-Western one which focuses on virtue, that deserves our attention. Its significance makes it important to include here. Moreover, this approach of justice as virtue, if applied today globally, could help us overcome the one-sidedness that the other two approaches may lead to as they view respect for human rights or provision of public goods simply as a mandatory obligation for international society, national governments and individual members. It will be a full testament to the significance of global justice as a noble virtue which the actors concerned are willing to acquire.

To put it another way, in the issue of global justice, the difference between the virtue approach and the other two approaches is that it does not regard people merely as passive practitioners who have to obey certain coercive obligations of global justice, nor as inactive recipients who have urgent needs for certain public goods and must be satisfied. Instead, it first regards people as positive actors who have free will, and in particular a sense of justice, and are willing to make conscious efforts to achieve the global justice of respect for human rights and provision of public goods. In this distinct way, global justice presents itself as a voluntary and noble virtue of human actors, not merely as some mandatory duties for human actions (Liu 2017).

3.1 The Confucian and Mohist Views of Justice as a Virtue

In the Eastern tradition, more specifically in China, Confucians proposed “exercising government by means of virtue”, on the basis of the idea that “politics means the government out of justice” as early as 2500 years ago. They advocated that the ruler, as the “sage-king,” should pursue a path from “self-cultivation, family regulation, country governance to peace restoration in the world” and extend his “filial piety” in family life to his “benevolent government” in order to achieve the “great unity”, in the context of which everyone in the world would be unified as one (Chan 1963, pp. 14–83).

Their Mohist contemporaries, in contrast, demanded, based on the philosophy of “honoring the worthy,” that the ruler possesses “universal love” as a virtue and “promotes what is beneficial to the world”, while observing the “universal justice” of “no harm to fellow humans” (Mozi 2003). As a result, in spite of their opposition to each other on such issues as normative justice and the relationship between collectivism and individualism, these two schools did share something in common. Not only did they view the moral affections of human relationships as the primary motive of achieving justice, but they also emphasized the significant role of the noble virtues of sages and elites in justice.

Under their complex influence, the general view of justice in Chinese traditional philosophy not only affirmed the importance of establishing the bottom line of just obligations and providing public goods, but also highlighted the virtuous role of people, in particular moral elites, who voluntarily engage in just acts by virtue of their sense of justice, i.e., their belief in “bravely defending justice” or “taking justice as supreme,” formed in their relationship with others.

3.2 Justice as a Virtue in Western Tradition

In the west, the view of justice as a virtue, which originated in ancient Greece, is prone to highly value the leading role of reason. When viewing justice as a major virtue of individuals and society (city-state), Plato and Aristotle based it on rational knowledge or wisdom, and, to varying degrees, were critical of emotional desires and feelings (Plato 2004; Aristotle 2009). This idea had some impact on the contemporary rights-based approach to global justice through the theories of Immanuel Kant, John Rawls and other deontologists (Kant 1970; Rawls 1971). David Hume, Adam Smith and other philosophers, in particular from Great Britain, on the other hand, have questioned or even rejected the leading role of reason in their view of justice as a virtue, while focusing more on the effects of moral sentiments like sympathy and benevolence on the formation of justice as a virtue (Hume 1948; Smith 1984). To some extent, their ideas influenced the approach to public goods accepted by consequentialists.

Precisely because of the relatively strong and long-term influence of deontology and consequentialism, however, the Western traditional view of justice as virtue has had little role to play in the context of global justice after it was incorporated into the other two approaches. For example, although Rawls described justice as the “first virtue of social institutions” and also discussed people’s sense of justice, he emphasized the two principles of domestic justice mainly as mandatory obligations of human action (Rawls 1971). As is well known, this deontological approach has greatly affected the theoretical efforts of most scholars to extend these two principles of domestic justice to a global scale.