Is Rawls' Theory of Justice Biased by Methodological Nationalism?

International Studies, 2003

Critical response to John Rawls's The Law of Peoples has been surprisingly harsh. 1 Most of the complaints center upon Rawls' claim that there are no obligations of distributive justice among nations. Many of Rawls's critics evidently had been hoping for a global application of the difference principle, so that wealthier nations would be bound to assign lexical priority to the development of the poorest nations, or perhaps the primary goods endowment of the poorest citizens of any nation. Their subsequent disappointment reveals that, while the reception of Rawls's political philosophy has been very broad, it has not been especially deep. Rawls has very good reason for denying that there are obligations of distributive justice in an international context. A global application of the difference principle would have been in tension with a number of very central features of his political philosophy. There is a sense in which Rawls's claims about distributive justice, in The Law of Peoples, are under-argued. But this is primarily because they follow almost immediately from more fundamental commitments that he has adopted over the years: the idea of the basic structure as subject, the requirement that conceptions of justice be freestanding, the status that is assigned to the principle of efficiency, not to mention the overall pragmatism that informs his project. By drawing upon these themes in Rawls' work, I will try to show that one cannot deny the view of international relations outlined in The Law of Peoples without rejecting Rawls's approach to political philosophy as a whole (in all contexts, including the domestic one). What Rawls puts forward, in the Law of Peoples, is essentially a dilemma for the partisans of global distributive justice. It should go without saying that if world government were either an 1 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). All further citations to this work are in the text. Thomas Pogge calls Rawls's view an academic "rationalization of double standards of economic justice."

Thomas Pogge has been challenging liberal thinking on global politics, often through critical engagement with John Rawls' work. Pogge presents both normative and empirical arguments against Rawls: normatively, Rawls' domestic Theory of Justice (TJ) and global Law of Peoples (LP) are incompatible ideal theories; empirically, LP is too removed from the actual world to guide the foreign policy of liberal societies. My main purpose here is to contest the first, ideal theory criticism in order to direct more attention to the second, non-ideal objection. I argue against Pogge that TJ and LP can be read as coherent, once one employs a Rousseauian rather than Pogge's economic Kantian reading of TJ. The first two sections present Pogge's view of TJ and contrast it with a Rousseauian alternative that is less cosmopolitan and economic and much more focused on the democratic and sovereign context of justice as fairness. The third section seeks to refute Pogge's incoherence arguments, which encompass the identity of the parties to the international original position, their motivations and their decisions. Instead of a conclusion, the last section emphasizes LP's non-ideal problems, and suggests that insofar as LP is the most robust liberal ideal theory of global politics, its empirical failure indicates the need to shift global justice theorizing even more to the non-ideal realm.

After briefly examining Rawls' theory of justice that deals with a single country and the cosmopolitan theories which extend Rawls' theory of justice to the global level, this paper will argue that the latter finds its grounds in Rawls' theory of justice. By examining the criticisms against Rawls, the paper will make an attempt to understand what Rawls aims to accomplish with Law of Peoples, and fails to do so. Lastly, the paper will discuss how cosmopolitanism gives a better interpretation of Rawls' own ideas when applied onto the global scale than his own global justice theory, which is considered as merely inadequate.

Fordham Law Review, 2004

Would it be desirable to reform the global institutional order in conformity with the principles Rawls defends in A Theory of Justice? Rawls himself denies this and proposes a different moral theory (The Law of Peoples) for the relations among self-governing peoples. While sharing a questionable, purely recipient-oriented approach, his two theories differ importantly in substance and structure. The former gives weight only to the interests of individual persons, yet the latter gives no weight to these interests at all. The former theory is three-tiered and institutional, centering on a public criterion of justice that is justified through a contractualist thought experiment and in turn justifies particular institutional arrangements and reforms under variable empirical circumstances. Yet, the latter theory is two-tiered and interactional, deploying a contractualist thought experiment to justify rigid rules of good conduct for peoples. Poorly motivated, these asymmetries help Rawls's anticosmopolitan case. But they fail to vindicate his claim that global economic justice demands only a modest "duty of assistance." * Columbia University, Department of Philosophy. Professor Pogge is the author of Realizing Rawls (1989) and has written numerous important papers in ethics and moral and political philosophy, especially on global justice and on the work of Rawls and Kant.

Chul Hak Sa Sang <철학사상> (Journal of Philosophical Ideas), Vol. 52, May, 2014 (indexed in KCI)

A notable feature of Rawls’ theory of international justice, which he presented in The Laws of Peoples, is his insistence on the toleration of non-liberal states provided that they are decent. Many political philosophers have criticized Rawls for being too generous towards non-liberal states. These critics feared that Rawls’ theory would safeguard non-liberal states to perform many forms of domestic injustices. In this paper, I make an entirely opposite objection. I claim that the real problem with Rawls’ theory of international justice is not of its being too generous, but rather of its being too stringent. Specifically, I will argue that when The Law of Peoples is correctly interpreted, it turns out that “the decent non-liberal societies” that the theory so emphatically proclaims to tolerate are not really non-liberal societies, but rather are more than sufficiently liberal societies.

Journal of International Political Theory

The essay provides a reconstruction of Rawls's The Law of Peoples that makes sense of three main discontinuities between Rawls's domestic theory of justice and his international outlook, namely the absence in the latter of: a) individualism, b) egalitarianism, and c) structural justice. The essay argues that while we can make sense of such differences without charging Rawls's account of blatant inconsistency, we can nonetheless criticize such an outlook from an internal perspective. There is a middle way between claiming that no significant differences are present between A Theory of Justice and The Law of Peoples and, on the other hand, that the differences between the two are so large as to make them totally incompatible. Furthermore, to argue in favour of Rawls's consistency does not, as many seem to have thought, entail agreeing with his overall conclusion for justice in international relations. The final part of the essay illustrates this point by analyzing the case of trade.

Theoria, 1998

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The paper discusses Thomas Pogge's and Allan Buchanan's criticisms of Rawls' Law of Peoples. Rawls argues for the exclusion of distributive justice from the global arena. Pogge and Buchanan attack Rawls starting from the premise that if there is a global basic structure, then there should be global distributive justice. The paper accepts the existence of a global system which resembles the domestic basic structure, but argues that the Rawlsian argument is still tenable. Rawls argues that because the basic structure, made up by social and political institutions, deeply affects the lives of individuals, it must be considered the primary subject of justice. However, in the Law of Peoples, Rawls refuses to establish principles of distributive justice at the global level by arguing that no basic structure exists. He uses a two-step model of the original position to establish principles of justice at the global level. In Realizing Rawls, Pogge disapproves of Rawls not using a one-time global original position model in order to arrive at the global definition of justice. Pogge attacks the two-step model and defends a single global original position. Buchanan, in "Rawls' Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World," accepts the two-step model, but argues that a global original position with peoples as represented parties would lead to more stringent demands of global distributive justice. The paper incorporates Laura Valentini's distinction between interactional coercion and systemic coercion, but argues that even if the global system is systemically coercive it dot not need to be subjected to Rawls' principles of justice for domestic societies. Rather, it can be reformed to become less coercive. Then the paper argues that in this non-coercive system of internally just states, Pogge and Buchanan would not have an argument against Rawls.

This is a draft of my contribution to a forthcoming Handbook of International Political Theory (Palgrave) covering Rawls and "The Law of Peoples." I take special care to situate LoP within the larger context of Rawls's oeuvre.