La teoría rawlsiana de la justicia internacional: maximalismo en la justificación, minimalismo en la universalización

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to critically assess John Rawls’s theory of international justice, by examining its evolution from A Theory of Justice to The Law of Peoples. Under its latest version, Rawls’s theory turns maximalist in its justification, though in its application it turns minimalist. His minimalism proves basically correct as long as it considers human rights, free from their liberal cover, as the fundamental core of morals and politics in international relations. Nonetheless, his maximalism is not convincing when justifying human rights by arguing them as the common result of the deliberations held at the Original Position by the representatives both of liberal societies and of hierarchical societies.