Here are the projected introductory paragraphs of the book we have (almost!) completed with Loren Lomasky:

What do we owe distant others? In this book we offer a simple answer to this question: what we owe others is to leave them alone. Our central claim is that all of us, but especially the world’s poor, are saddled with a host of coercive barriers that impede flourishing. These barriers are quite diverse: political oppression, exploitive institutions, and burdensome regulations, both within and without borders. In particular, we suggest that the plight of the world’s poor is caused (mainly) by bad domestic institutions and ineffectual corrupt governance, and not by the failures of rich countries to help. To be sure, rich countries harm the world’s poor in three ways: first, by maintaining unjustified protectionist and immigration barriers; second, by sometimes unjustly interfering by force; and third, by sometimes cooperating with unjust regimes. But we maintain our primary diagnosis: most of the ills that afflict large populations in the world are homegrown. It follows that, in contrast with the dominant literature, the recommendations of this book are addressed not only to persons in rich countries. They are mainly addressed to the local elites who unjustly interfere with the lives of their subjects. These elites, in other words, must honor the obligation to leave their people alone. Persons in rich countries should do the same, leave people alone, but at the same time exercise prudent pressure for reform in order to get the local elites to desist from the unjust interference with their subjects’ lives.

The dominant approach to global justice is essentially regulatory. On this view, redistribution of global wealth is required by justice. Accordingly, the main ills of the word, unfreedom and poverty, should be addressed by appropriate national and international regulation. The dominant approach is to enlarge state institutions and international agencies in order to enforce justice, coercively redistribute wealth, and correct the supposed injustices and inefficiencies of markets. Most of the debate is how to do this effectively –whether by robust state-initiated foreign-aid schemes, or by reinforcing international redistributive institutions. Strong labor and environmental regulations complete this picture. The world’s poor, it is thought, will be best served by substituting good coercion for bad, ineffectual coercion, and, above all, by enforcing the duties of global justice that citizens in rich countries are supposed to have toward the world’s less fortunate. So this strategy is dual: on one hand, states must be improved by enlarging them so they can carry out internal duties of justice. On the other hand, international agencies should be likewise empowered to coerce people in rich countries to transfer resources to the poor.

We dissent. We believe that what the poor need is less regulation, less coercion, less state presence in their lives. They need, in other words, more political and economic space where they can engage in the positive-sum games that trade, mobility and commerce offer. We agree that they need good institutions, but those institutions should be liberty-friendly, and especially market-friendly.

This classic-liberal vision is usually characterized as callous because it does not recommend foreign aid or forced redistribution. Yet, a view, like ours, that supports a liberal world order is far from being callous and indifferent to the plight of the poor. On the contrary: we think our view is truly humanitarian. We firmly believe that freedom will help the poor and vulnerable more than the alternative regulatory vision. We are convinced that the majority of writers on global justice have simply misdiagnosed the problem and for that reason have recommended ineffectual or counterproductive solutions. As we shall see, we agree with the preponderance of writers that justice is cosmopolitan. But justice requires, not that we coercively transfer resources or increase international bureaucracies, but that we leave people alone to pursue their personal projects. This duty of noninterference is global in scope. As we indicated, governments and citizens of rich countries sometimes unjustly interfere with the lives of distant persons. But the main culprits, the unjust interferers par excellence, are the local elites who have captured their societies’ resources for their own benefit.