Rawls's Law of Peoples: Rules for a vanished Westphalian world

Abstract

A symposium on John Rawls’s Law of Peoples. The writer assesses the value of Rawls’s Law of Peoples, understood as a set of rules for relations among states where “state” is shorthand for societies of peoples organized in their own states. He maintains that when understood as a method for deriving interstate principles rather than all the principles for a moral theory of international law, Rawls’s choice of principles by representatives of peoples seems plausible. He argues, however, that this device yields quite different principles from those that Rawls believes it does when it is remembered that there is a global basic structure that is an important subject of justice and that the populations of states are not “peoples” in Rawls’s sense. He contends that Rawls’s failure to consider these factors explains the puzzling omission of principles of international distributive justice and principles addressing intrastate group conflicts in the Law of Peoples. He insists that the Law of Peoples is a set of rules for a vanished Westphalian world that is of little value to our world.