This paper analyzes the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for education, which sets benchmarks for member states to "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong opportunities for all" by the year 2030. I examine ways in which the underlying philosophical rationale for the targets invokes a liberal social justice tradition along the lines of four rationales: equal distribution, just recognition, moralism, and utilitarianism. An analysis of the SDG education targets along each of these views is followed by a discussion of some of the challenges and contradictions inherent in applying a liberal social justice rationale to the achievement of education for all in a global setting. From this analysis, I suggest that while liberalism has provided a compelling rationale to harness public and political will around the claims of equality and democracy in the West, it has not proved adequate to informing the emergence of the kinds of education needed for social and economic justice and transformation on a global scale. Education scholars may well consider an epistemological "shift" that informs a vision of society and human nature reflective of the interconnectedness of a complex world-wide community.