Human rights and the global original position argument in The law of peoples

Abstract

In The Law of Peoples Rawls defends a set of principles of international justice that are meant to govern relationships among idealized countries that he calls “peoples.” In defending these principles of international justice, Rawls avoids any appeal to the ideal of individual persons as free and equal that was so central to his earlier account of domestic justice. He seems to think that appealing to the basic interests of the individual persons involves cosmopolitan claims that are too controversial to gain widespread agreement among the representatives of reasonable peoples, and that for this reason such claims cannot serve as grounds for principles of international justice. This paper argues that Rawls’ arguments do not justify the principle of respect for human rights, because such a principle cannot be properly justified without introducing the kind of cosmopolitan premises that Rawls wants to avoid. It also argues that a cosmopolitan view of human rights is compatible with a political defense of human rights that is Rawlsian in spirit and that grounds the validity of justice in a consensus of reasonable people.