Special Workshop Abstracts

Special Workshop Title:	Politics of Human Rights - Special Session on Rawls
Author:	David A. Reidy, Department of Philosophy, University of Tennessee
Paper Title:	Justice and the Global Economy in Rawls’s The Law of Peoples
Abstract:	In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls articulates and defends a conception of global economic justice the substantive heart of which is constituted by two principles. The first is that all well-ordered states (or, to use Rawls’s terminology, peoples) have a duty to assist states not well-ordered, through no fault of their own, to become well-ordered. The second is that well-ordered states may, and presumably will, voluntarily coooperate with one another on mutually acceptable terms to realize common aims. In the first section of this paper, I develop more fully these principles and their institutional implications for international relations and the global economy. I then turn to the two primary objections critics have raised against this conception of global economic justice. The first is that it wrongly takes states or peoples, instead of individual human persons, to be the relevant entities with respect to which the global economy must realize a just distribution. The second is that even if it is right to take states or peoples as the relevant entities with respect to which the global economy must realize a just distribution, it wrongly fails to include in the criteria specifying such a distribution any constraints on inequalities of wealth between well-ordered states or peoples. In this second section of the paper, I argue that properly understood Rawls’s position is vulnerable to neither of these criticisms. In the process of working out Rawls’s various lines of defense against these criticisms, however, I bring to the surface and call into question a crucial assumption Rawls makes in The Law of Peoples as well as his earlier Political Liberalism and A Theory of Justice. Rawls assumes that it is not unrealistic to suppose that well-ordered bodies politic will be able as corporate artificial moral agents to constrain the forces of and to resist the allure and false promises made by capital. In the domestic context, this assumption underwrites his hope for a domestic politics that is not dominated by the interests and values of the capitalist class. In the international context, it underwrites his hope for an international politics through which well-ordered peoples first satisfy their common duty of assistance and second cooperate with one another toward common ends on terms both mutually acceptable and consistent with their moral standing as free and equal peoples. The real weakness in Rawls’s position is that he offers no reason for thinking that his assumption about the ability of bodies politic to tame the forces of capital is true, and a good deal of modern history suggests that it’s false. I conclude that a full defense of Rawls’s realistic utopia, both its domestic and international components, awaits a more head-on critical engagement with capitalism as an economic, political and cultural force.