| Special Workshop Title: | Politics of Human Rights - Special Session on Rawls |
| Author: |
Chris Brown, London School of Economics |
| Paper Title: | Decent Peoples, Outlaw States, Burdened Societies: Conceptual Categories in the Law of Peoples |
| Abstract: | The account of international justice outlined by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice [ToJ] (1970) and elaborated in The Law of Peoples [LoP](1999) has not been accepted by other, more cosmopolitan, theorists of justice such as Brian Barry, Charles Beitz, Allen Buchanan and Thomas Pogge. These writers challenge Rawls’s core assumption that, for the purposes of theory, there are many, essentially self-contained societies as opposed to simply one global society; in more detail they also contest his assertion that a hierarchical, non-liberal, people could be ‘decent’ and full members of a Society of Peoples, and, in the realm of non-ideal theory, they object to his account of ‘burdened’ societies. I argue in this paper that the more general critique of Rawls’s anti-cosmopolitanism has led to a uninteresting stalemate but that there is much enlightenment to had from a closer examination of the secondary points of critique concerning decent peoples and burdened societies. I argue that the category of non-liberal but decent peoples is, in fact, an essential theoretical resource for understanding contemporary international relations and distinguishing between those regimes that should be treated as legitimate and those that should not; Rawls is mistaken only in apparently assuming that the most appropriate basis for a decent, hierarchical people is religious. In the case of burdened societies, his critics are right in asserting that Rawls pays too little attention to the structural causes of the burdens that some societies bear, but, nonetheless, Rawls’s policy prescriptions are basically valid. On the other hand, Rawls’s account of ‘outlaw’ states, generally neglected by his critics, is radically flawed because it confuses two different bases for outlawry, internal oppression and external aggression; as a result Rawls is unable to formulate a doctrine of humanitarian intervention. These consideration lead into an examination of Rawls’s categories of ‘peoples’, ‘societies’ and ‘states’, and an examination of his reasons for changing these categories between ToJ and LoP. In the closing section of the paper I argue that Rawls’s understandable suspicion that states rarely act ‘reasonably’ (that is, with regard to the interests of others) as opposed to rationally (that is, instrumentally) has caused him to unnecessarily complicate his terminology, and, perhaps, to draw too sharp a distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory. |
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