6 Rawls on International Justice

Abstract

In her book Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006), Martha Nussbaum has advanced a feminist critique of Rawls’s theory of international justice. While she identifies herself as a student of Rawls and dedicates the book to his memory, Nussbaum seeks to show the insufficiency of his theory of international justice, particularly as found in his Law of Peoples (1999), when it comes to defending the rights of women in developing countries. She contends that this insufficiency is mainly due to his use of social contract theory, and its attendant concepts of basic human rights, nationality, and the public-private distinction. In contrast, she offers an alternative human rights approach to global justice: the capabilities approach. The capabilities approach seeks to establish and defend a just and robust standard of human development across nation-states. While the capabilities approach gives Nussbaum an edge over Rawls in making strong, universalistic critiques of unjust patriarchal, religious, and familial practices toward women in developing nations, it runs the risk of seeming imperial and appearing as though it seeks to impose “Western” and “feminist” values on such nations. For this reason, the universalistic language of Nussbaum’s capabilities approach is more valuable for defending women’s human rights in situations of minimum cultural or religious conflict. Because of his stricter commitment to tolerating a reasonable pluralism of values across nations, Rawls’s basic human rights approach is more useful for defending women’s human rights in situations of cultural or religious conflict. Moreover, Rawls provides an argument for the just, emergency use of military force to defend women’s human rights, a hard case from which Nussbaum’s theory steers clear. Through the comparison of their theories of justice, both Rawls’s and Nussbaum’s human rights approaches emerge in different ways as useful resources for advancing feminist values in international and transnational relations.