Introduction

John Rawls's Law of Peoples has been widely criticized for not properly extending the liberal egalitarian principles of his domestic theory of justice to the international level. Cosmopolitan critics refer to his conception of international politics as “utopian realism.” They argue that Rawls's minimalist conception of human rights, and his attendant adoption of bounded state sovereignty, are too statist (Westphalian state sovereignty) to do justice to the needs of individuals. Moral cosmopolitans, for instance, focus on the ideals of equal respect and the inclusiveness of all individuals. Their emphasis on these ideals places them at odds with Rawls's insistence that international society is made of peoples, not individuals. Yet those sympathetic with Rawls's statist conception in the Law of Peoples contend that this conception downplays “the fact that individual human persons share globally no self-understanding or idea of persons as free equals morally and politically speaking.” This is not to say that we should ignore our responsibilities of encouraging non-democratic states to adopt the same political and economic liberties. Rather, it underscores the objective that peoples of such states must develop their own ethical self-understanding of equality and freedom.

In this chapter, I provide a limited (or qualified) defense of Rawls's Law of Peoples by stressing how social cooperation and the second-level formulation of the original principle can and should be considered as part of an emerging ethical world order.