The Law of Peoples: Beyond Incoherence and Apology

Abstract

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.