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Moral Psychology, Stability and The Law of Peoples

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2017

David A. Reidy
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Abstract

In this paper I take seriously Rawls’s characterization of his The Law of Peoples as carrying forward the project of Political Liberalism. The latter articulates Rawls’s reworking of the stability argument from Part III of A Theory of Justice to better square it with the permanent fact of reasonable doctrinal pluralism under conditions of freedom and right. As presented in Theory the stability argument is an argument from moral psychology. This moral psychology structures the problem generated by doctrinal pluralism in both Political Liberalism and The Law of Peoples, each of which sets out a consistent principled liberal response to it, the former in the domestic, and the latter in the international, context. Bringing this moral psychology to the surface sheds considerable light on Rawls’s attempt to vindicate the possibility of world hospitable to enduring just and stable constitutional liberal democracies governed by legitimate law.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , August 2017 , pp. 363 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 2017 

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References

1. See Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples (Harvard University Press, 1999) at 11f.Google Scholar

2. See Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1993, 1996, 2005)Google Scholar and A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971, 1999).

3. Ibid at section 58.

4. See Rawls, supra note 1 at ch VIII.

5. See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, supra note 2 at ch IX, especially section 86.

6. See ibid at section 60.

7. One might think here of an idealized version of late 20th century Cuba or Singapore.

8. The parallel between Rawls’s theory of individual moral development and his account of bodies politic might suggest an unwelcome influence of the discredited notion, first promulgated by Ernst Haeckel, that within biological evolution ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. But it does not. What it does suggest are Rawls’s debts to Jean Piaget and Laurence Kohlberg, for whom within the context of moral development (rather than biological evolution), there is a sense in which ontogeny parallels phylogeny.