| Special Workshop Title: | Politics of Human Rights - Special Session on Rawls |
| Author: |
Alistair M. Macleod, Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario |
| Paper Title: | Rawls on Human Rights: Justification and Selective Enforcement |
| Abstract: |
An important feature, in The Law of Peoples,
of Rawls’ account of international justice (justice among
‘peoples’) is his repudiation of the traditional doctrine of
state-sovereignty. According to Rawls, states are entitled neither to
pursue their own interests in the international domain by any means in
their power nor to adopt whatever policies they please in matters of
domestic policy. Both of these claims are related to what he has to say
in The Law of Peoples about the role of human rights. In matters
of domestic policy, what states are entitled to do is constrained by the
obligation to respect the human rights of their citizens. In matters of
foreign policy, intervention in the internal affairs of other states may
sometimes be justified to put an end to gross violations of human
rights. The two points are of course connected, in that it is only by
pursuing domestic policies that are respectful of human rights that
states can secure themselves against legitimate intervention in their
internal affairs by other states.
It consequently looks as though Rawls’ doctrine of human rights in The Law of Peoples offers hope for more effective protection of human rights in all parts of the world, on the one hand by diminishing the right of states to violate human rights with impunity within their own borders, and on the other by giving other states the right to intervene in their internal affairs if such violations continue to occur. My principal aim in this paper is to try to determine how far this hope is well-founded. One reason for thinking that the hope might prove to be somewhat illusory is that the rights to be given international protection under the Rawlsian doctrine form a small sub-class of the rights recognized in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Not included are such rights as (a) the right of individuals to full liberty of conscience, (b) the right of individuals to participation on terms of equality in political decision-making processes, and (c) the right to social security. A second reason for disappointment with Rawls’ view is the meagerness of the account he offers of the conditions under which various strategies for the international enforcement of respect for human rights can be defensibly adopted. It is understandable that he should be reluctant to authorize military intervention whenever human rights are being violated within a state. After all, military intervention should be considered only as a last resort, and then only if it can be expected to be an effective means of securing respect for the violated rights. But Rawls comes very close in at least one key passage (on p. 81) to indicating that resort to war is never defensible if the sole aim is to stop human rights violations. In this passage, Rawls seems to be suggesting that military intervention should be limited to occasions when the offending state is also “aggressive and dangerous”—that is, when it is also a threat to the safety and security of neighboring states. The caution he displays here may of course prove to be fully warranted. Even so, it would be difficult to be sanguine about the prospects for effective protection of human rights if it turned out that he is comparably reluctant to resort to non-military strategies for the international enforcement of respect for human rights. However, his discussion of such issues is too sparse for it to be possible to say that he has a judicious sense either of the many different forms non-military intervention might take or of the conditions under which it might prove useful. |
This page was last updated on: 2003-05-29.