Responding to Multiple Global Challenges: Global Priorities, Global Scarcities, and Global Harms

States face a range of multiple, ongoing global challenges that appear to be increasing each year. In this article, we argue that a three-tiered approach is needed to think through how states should respond to the multiple challenges that they face. The first tier has us ask how states should prioritize among the many global issues, threats, and crises that confront them under conditions of scarce resources. We demonstrate the need for both ideal and nonideal theorizing about how states should prioritize their global responsibilities. The second tier has us consider how these feasibility constraints might be challenged and overcome. And the third tier has us examine how states need to refrain from contributing to the very global harms that they then need to address. In combination, these second and third tiers have us ask what steps can and should be taken to make the world itself more ideal and thus to overcome, or at least significantly reduce, the need for states to prioritize among global challenges in the first place. A more complete reckoning with the demands of global justice, we argue, requires engagement with all three tiers. That is, we need to not only consider (1) how states should prioritize the use of scarce resources, but also to (2) problematize states' rhetoric of scarcity and (3) interrogate how states are commonly implicated in the production of the same global vulnerabilities and global crises that they seek (insufficiently) to address.