Rawls's Law of peoples

Abstract

A symposium on John Rawls’s Law of Peoples. The writer examines the differences between Rawls’s theory and cosmopolitan theories of international relations, to which the Law of Peoples constitutes a powerful challenge. Rawls’s aim in The Law of Peoples is to show that social liberalism can be constructed in such a way as to be more attractive than alternative cosmopolitan theories. If successful, his approach would disarm cosmopolitan liberalism of its critical thrust by showing that a view with more conservative premises converges with it at the level of policy. The extent of the convergence cannot be known until we have a cosmopolitan theory as detailed as Rawls’s one, but one suspects that the normative differences may be more significant than Rawls suggests, especially regarding the content of the doctrine of human rights and the reach and requirements of international distribution justice. Such divergences would be expected given the main theoretical contrast between the views–the tendency of the Law of Peoples to conceive of domestic societies as moral agents in their own right, with interests of their own and a corporate capacity for exercising responsibility over time.