Liberal toleration in Rawls's Law of Peoples

Abstract

In “The Law of Peoples,” John Rawls argues that certain nonliberal societies are analogous to nonliberal but reasonable comprehensive doctrines and so meet the demands of liberal toleration. I argue that this claim forgives certain important differences between nonliberal societies and nonliberal views within a liberal society. More crucially, I go on to argue that this problem in Rawls’s global theory is not due to faulty application of political liberalism to the global context but is symptomatic of a fundamental problem with political liberalism’s idea of toleration.