Rawls on International Justice

Abstract

In “The Law of Peoples”, Rawls adapts his idea of an original position to support a more conservative account of international justice. But the divergences are not well defended. Why do the parties choose institutional rules directly rather than via a public criterion of justice? Do they use maximin reasoning? Why should supporting moral arguments that fail against a domestic application of the difference principle succeed against its global application? Rawls’s most promising explanation of the divergences invokes the need to accommodate certain (“decent”) nonliberal societies. But why are domestic nonliberals denied such accommodation? Why should decent societies reject normative individualism? Must the global order accommodate decent societies even if none actually exist?