Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
I. Introduction
Charles W. Mills wrote that John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples is built on a theoretical
framework that mystifies both the past and the present1. In this paper, I will demonstrate
how such mystification enables Rawls to idealize the contemporary liberal state, granting it
a moral nature similar to personhood, and thus, shielding it from any potentially profound
empirical and non-ideal theoretical approach to criticizing Rawls, using Rawls’s own
claims on history, politics and economics. My aim will be to show how Rawls, in order to
buttress his idealization of the liberal state, undertakes an inversion of facts and principles
through presenting ideals as historical realities. My claim is that Rawls turns ought into is:
The aspiration is told as if it were historical fact while real facts are obscured, dismissed or
ignored. Mills critiques the Rawlsian process of sanitizing history from its legacies of
exploitation, white supremacy, imperialism and gender oppression. I seek to analyse the
Secondly, I will address Rawls’s claim that corporate agents have a moral nature, or
how actual states can become ideal peoples through a political exercise of reason. I propose
1
Mills 2010, 26.
1
that a peoples’s moral nature is not just an extension of an individual’s moral attribute, but
rather a bestowal of personhood upon a specific breed of liberal states. I will argue that
such a move is methodologically wrong and morally unacceptable because it dissolves the
individual into the collective, undermining pluralism and individual autonomy, and makes
the liberal state seem purely consensual. A second consequence not less important is that
the liberal state looks as if stands at a final process of historical development, morally
Thirdly, I will claim that Rawls puts forward a post-American global order. Rawls’s
realistic utopia, though committed to defending the current liberal state and its hegemony
over other alternatives, did not attempt to justify the United States and its role of global
superpower. In my reading, this is not because Rawls dislikes the international environment
under American domination, but because the United States troubles the whole empirical
justification for democratic peace: not just due to its imperialist foreign policy, but also for
its corrupted internal politics that Rawls takes on only tangentially but with disapproval.
Rawls’s models for liberal peoples are the Western European liberal states, and his realistic
utopia depicts a multilateral global order in which liberal states have the moral
justifications to keep threats at bay, but do not extend their radius of domination. In that
respect, the Law of Peoples sets a normative end to imperialism and suggests instead a
account of global justice. If Rawls’s ideal theory distorts our grasp of the world and thus
hampers our ability to change or reform it, an alternative theory should start with a
commitment to comprehend the existing unjust global order. This does not mean a purely
2
understanding what the world is and what it potentially can be, as Milciades Peña says.
Here Rawls’s mystification of the liberal state must be altogether repudiated. Conversely,
the moral egalitarianism that liberalism recognizes as one of its keystone values, should be
adopted as an agenda of political change and a call for an “all purpose means”
egalitarianism: personhood can only be achieved when all humans beings have access to
the material conditions to pursue a worthwhile life, and this will only be attained by setting
II. The Law of Peoples: a post-American settlement for the end of History
After the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, liberalism seemed to arise as the indisputable
philosophical and political doctrine. Francis Fukuyama championed the thesis that
“History” had come to an end. He did not mean that events or conflicts would stop. Rather
he put forward two claims: firstly, that, as a normative argument, liberal democracy and so-
called free markets proved to be a better option for organizing societies than any other seen
in history since such regimes fulfil better the “need of recognition” that human beings
pursue once their economic needs are met2. He then attached an empirical argument: in
recent history liberal democracy did work, whereas socialism did not, even though in
Though the author of The End of History and the Last Man is not mentioned in The
Law of Peoples, Fukuyama’s claims underwrite the Rawls’s account for international rights
and justice. Like Fukuyama, Rawls believes that liberal democracy is the best regime ever
2
“Hegel understood that even in modern polities men do not live for the rational pursuit of bread alone, but
seek recognition, and that the Hegelian universal and homogeneous state honoured this honour-seeking side
of modernity by making universal recognition the basis of all rights”. Fukuyama, 252.
3
developed3 and that an ideal world would be one in which all states are fully liberal 4. Rawls
also writes as if he believes that liberal regimes have won the historical battle against other
forms of organization and will have the last say on questions of global order. As liberal
regimes are regarded as moral and political assets, Rawls puts forward The Law of Peoples
as a practical guidance for such a post-History world, as well as a justification for the
coercion that such a world would need in order to keep threats at bay.
But such an account faces two tasks: firstly, to justify the agent that would protect
and reproduce a liberal global order, the liberal state. Rawls took that task to the limits of
mystification: the Rawlsian liberal state is bestowed with a moral nature as only humans
are, as I will explain later on. The second task was to demonstrate that the global order,
currently dominated by liberal states, does not bear responsibility for the crippling poverty,
blatant exploitation and authoritarianism that endure for a large amount of the world’s
population, otherwise a moral justification for the liberal state would crumble into pieces.
Rawls took up this task too: by intertwining and confusing abstract principles and
(mistaken) facts, he attempted to wash clean the history of Western oppression. I will seek
Rawls, his defenders claim, theorizes within the boundaries of ideal theory, thereby arguing
against him with empirical facts misunderstands his point. This is the stance taken by
3
“If a liberal constitutional democracy is, in fact, superior to other forms of society, as I believe it to be, a
liberal people should have confidence in their convictions and suppose that a decent society, when offered due
respect by liberal peoples, may be more likely, over time, to recognize the advantages of liberal institutions
and take steps towards becoming more liberal on its own”. Rawls, 62.
4
“Though we can imagine what we sometimes think would be a happier world—one in which everyone, or
all peoples, have the same faith that we do—that is not the question, excluded as it is by the nature and culture
of free institutions” Rawls, 12.
4
commentators such as Samuel Freeman, who says that radical critiques “fail to recognize
that the Law of Peoples is formulated to apply to ideal conditions among well-ordered
conditions [...] under current conditions we are in the realm of non-ideal theory and partial
compliance”6. Thus, any criticism to the Law of Peoples should be done within the bounds
of ideal theory.
But we have to consider such a claim very carefully and discern when it is really
honouring Rawls’s arguments and when it is not. Rawls, certainly, offers a theory of an
ideal world in which agents adhere to strict compliance. I will argue, though, that
addressing Rawls only within the limits of ideal theory fails to understand his own
methodology.
Despite its brevity, The Law of Peoples is widely ambitious, not only providing
normative principles for the liberal state’s foreign policy. Indeed, this is just one of its
layers. Rawls goes further: he finds justifications for normative claims on empirical
grounds and historical facts or, more precisely, on laws of history, understood as grand
Outlined between normative and ideal thoughts, sometimes easily deducible from its
omissions or smuggled into ideal accounts, The Law of Peoples is a portrait of how the
Rawls makes several historical claims, but here I summarize four that are crucial for
5
Freeman, 31-2.
6
Freeman, p. 32, highlight added.
7
Rawls, 54.
5
2) Liberal peoples do not fight each other8.
4) Liberal peoples are satisfied peoples (their domestic conflicts, if any, are
The first two claims derive from one another logically: they explain that liberal
democracies have no domestic cause to wage war on other liberal states, therefore
democratic peace is attainable among them. The third claim rules out a global distributive
principle. In borrowing the fourth claim from Raymond Aaron, Rawls does not mean that
such satisfaction amounts to the end of historical, social or political conflicts. What it is
evident for him is that there will not be serious threats against liberal constitutionalism from
In this chapter, I will address just the first three, for which Rawls sketches few
though important arguments, and presents them as evidence to ground normative assertions.
Rawls addresses the issue of democratic peace in liberal states in sub-chapter 5.3,
“Democratic Peace Seen in History”, and then comes back briefly to the argument in 15.1
“simple empirical regularity”: liberal democracies, he says, have not fought each other
since 180011.
8
Rawls, 8 and 44-54.
9
Rawls, 108 and 117.
10
Rawls, 47.
11
To be considered a liberal democracy, a society must abide by five conditions: equality of opportunity;
decent distribution of income and wealth; society as employer of last resort; basic health care for all citizens,
and public finance of elections. Rawls, 50.
6
“Of course nations that are now established constitutional democracies have in the
past engaged in empire building. A number of European nations did so in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries and during the rivalry among Great Britain, France and Germany
before World War I”, admits Rawls in 5.4. Though he speaks of “empire building”, he does
not refer to imperial wars or conquests outside Europe, but within Europe alone, as he
clarifies in 15.1: “The outlaw states of modern Europe in the early modern period—Spain,
France and the Hapsburgs—or more recently, Germany, all tried at one time to subject
Europe to their will. They hoped to spread their religion and culture and sought domination
and glory, not to mention wealth and territory12.” Desire for empire building, he explains,
was supported by a specific class structure and the role of the armed forces underpinning it.
Rawls gives a hint of what he means with class structure and desire. Democratic
peoples “are not swayed by the passion for power and glory, or the intoxicating pride of
ruling. These passions may move a nobility or a lesser aristocracy; [...] yet this class, or
caste rather, does not have power in a constitutional regime”. Additionally, liberal peoples
do not attempt to convert other peoples to their religion, since they have no state religion or
comprehensive doctrine14. Rawls puts it in a rather simple fashion: peoples are not moved
by domination or pursuit of glory, nor “the excitement of conquest and the pleasure of
Rawls, however, was aware that an empirical regularity could not be taken at face
value, and then added an ideal aspiration: a society complies with external democratic
12
Rawls 53-4 and 105-6. Emphasis added.
13
Rawls, 52-4.
14
Rawls, 47.
15
Rawls, 47.
7
peace if, domestically, it reaches the ideal of a constitutional regime with its supportive
elements. The closer it gets to that point, the more likely it will engage exclusively in wars
of self-defence. And actual liberal societies move towards that idea. Such a hypothesis,
Nevertheless, there are two major problems in these claims, one of omission and
Rawls fails to explain why, say, a society like that of the British, with the longest
parliamentary history (thus free from being ruled by nobilities, though a Royal Family was
kept as a symbol), had reasons to engage in imperialist wars in India, Australia, Africa, and
the Caribbean17. European (and American) imperialism is dismissed altogether. I will come
Secondly, Rawls over-generalizes in saying that the lack of conflicts between liberal
between European states, the post-war period of 1945 to today, we would see that liberal
democracies refrained from fighting one another and directly colonizing overseas not
because they did not want to, but because they were objectively exhausted after the World
Wars18. Their position was so weak that the United States was able to rise as the global
superpower. The “democratic peace” of European countries is only valid if we have ignored
European imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then idealized a post-
16
Rawls, 53-4.
17
Recall that Rawls does not include Britain in the list of outlaw states of modern Europe, but only Spain,
France, the Hapsburgs and modern Germany.
18
See Tony Judt: “The constituent states of Europe could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or
imperial status [...] Most of the rest of continental Europe [except Britain] had been humiliated by defeat and
occupation. It had not been able to liberate itself from fascism by its own efforts; nor was it able, unassisted,
to keep Communism at bay [...] Only with considerable effort and across long decades did Europeans recover
control of their own destiny”, Judt, p. 7.
8
war period that was not the realization of an ideal, but a mere symptom of the fall of former
empires. The claim that liberal constitutional peoples do not go to war with one another is
What is, then, democratic peace in Rawls’s account? To my mind, not something to
democratic peace but, on his idealization of the European state, he attempts to turn such an
ideal into a fact. The liberal state, says Rawls, has in itself the ability of achieving
democratic peace: he claims that liberal states have no reason to go to war with one
another. In other words, that even on pragmatic, rational or pure realistic grounds, liberal
states are objectively peaceful towards their liberal peers. This is not a normative claim, but
a purely descriptive one for Rawls. But, not only is its empirical validity unacceptable, but
also its logical consequence: that there is a factual rationale to believe that the liberal state
deserves moral nature. This account of historical democratic peace is a factor to justify the
mystification of the liberal state and, in doing that, to sanitize its history of conquest,
Thomas W. Pogge calls it “the most harmful dogma ever conceived”. The “explanatory
nationalism”, as Pogge named it, has been the theory of The Law of Peoples which Liberal
wealth—and poverty—are the outcome of the political and social institutions of a people
itself, and the political culture, religious, philosophical, and moral traditions that buttress
19
Rawls excludes such historical analysis, but also another that, though unpopular should not be left aside
without examination: after 1945 “it was becoming clear to the capitalist nations that it would be far more
convenient if, instead of fighting among themselves, they could cooperate in exploiting the rest of the world”.
Biel, 56.
9
them, together with “the industriousness and cooperative talents of its members, all
“Explanatory nationalism” matters much because it’s put forward by Rawls (and
followed by some of his commentators such as Mathias Risse and David Miller) to reject
calls for global distributive justice. In brief, the argument claims that, since wealth has
uniquely national causes, there is no need for a global scheme of cooperation, so global
justice does not require wealth being distributed beyond national borders. Although Rawls
includes as an outcome of the Second Original Position a duty of assistance, this does not
imply global redistributive justice21. Liberal states, Rawls says, have the duty to assist
burdened societies for them to build just institutions. Once this target is met, no further
distribution should be done22. The Law of Peoples, he says, is compatible with economic
attacked such claims. They oppose economic and political facts. Pogge argues that the
global order as we know it is cast in such a way to strengthen the interests of the already
strong actors: states, multinational corporations, and elite individuals; a global order that at
his followers, such as Freeman and Reidy. Freeman, as noted above, claims that arguing
with facts from the real world amounts to opposing non-ideal theory while Rawls theorizes
according to strict compliance. Reidy goes further: he argues that according to Rawls
collective peoples are self-sufficient in a way that individual humans can never be, and can
20
Rawls, 108 and 117.
21
Buchanan rightly says that the duty of assistance “seems to resemble an imperfect duty of charity rather
than a duty of justice”, Buchanan, 710. I think, however, that Rawls might have had in mind the Marshall
Plan.
22
Rawls, 115-8
23
Pogge 2001ª, 252.
10
“persist over time as corporate moral agents apart from cooperation with other peoples”24.
In other words, peoples are ideally perfectly self-sufficient, and thus it is irrelevant whether
they do interact in the real world or not. For Freeman and Reidy, ideal theory is an
Yet Rawls himself did not make such a claim on an ideal-theoretical level. Although
he does not provide further empirical evidence (as he attempts when arguing for democratic
peace) he never says: “ideally, national wealth should be caused by domestic institutions,
values and mores”. He affirms that national wealth (or lack of wealth) derives from
domestic causes factually. Though he phrases it with the more intuitive verb “I believe”, he
is unequivocally referring to the actual world. For him it is a matter of facts, not a matter of
ideals and strict compliance. It’s, yet again, a grand descriptive generalization to justify a
normative principle.
Thus rebutting Rawls with non-ideal facts is perfectly valid and consistent with his
own methods. I believe Liberal Cosmopolitans have successfully broken down explanatory
nationalism describing how the world is economically interdependent and the global order
oppressive and unjust25 (not to mention post-colonial theorists, the 70’s school of
dependency theorists26 and Marx himself). I will only add two points with regard to my
argument. Firstly, that Rawls echoes the cultural-supremacist argument that was popular
until the sixth decade of the twentieth century. In Bad Samaritans, a study of the official
narrative of capitalism and so-called free markets, Ha Joon Chang describes how the
Japanese, German and South Korean people were described by Western historians as “lazy”
in the beginning of the 20th century, and their poor economic performance was blamed on
24
Reidy, 299.
25
See Beitz, Pogge and Caney.
26
See Brewer.
11
their cultural and religious traditions. Nonetheless those same cultures, over time, were
regarded as models of hard work, efficiency and entrepreneurism when their economic
situation improved. When East Asia was poor, Confucianism was held responsible as
catastrophic to development. When the region arose, Confucianism was used to explain the
industriousness of its peoples and their economic success. Cultural-related judgements are
always made post-facto: the cultural thesis of economic development, Chang adds, was
revived with the promotion of free market-oriented policies in the Third World. Those
policies, undertaken from the seventies on after World Bank (WB) and International
Monetary Fund (IMF) political pressures, provoked stagnation in all the countries that
followed them, and then the cultural argument was invoked again to blame the failure of
Chang supplies some interesting data on the economic global order: between 70 and
90 per cent of the foreign direct investment, 80 per cent of production and 70 per cent of
trade are managed by a handful of rich countries, who make most of the global economic
decisions. The WB, IMF and World Trade Organization (WTO) are largely controlled by
them, and all the loans attach political as well as economic conditions to open markets in
favour of rich countries. Sub-Saharan economies, for example, “have been practically run
Bad Samaritans argues against the official account of capitalism, which holds that
free-trade policies made big economies successful. Chang seeks to demonstrate that infant-
industry protection and high tariffs were the real causes of economic expansion for, say, the
United States and Britain, at least until they were strong enough to compete abroad and take
advantage of free markets. Britain based its own growth on hampering the industrial
27
Chang, 186-196.
12
development of its colonies, by banning advanced manufactures and exports that competed
with its own at home and abroad. The wool industry in Ireland was bankrupted in such a
way28.
In light of those facts, Rawls’s explanatory nationalism (which is then turned into a
normative account of justice in one country) is unsustainable. The history of capitalism has
been the history of interconnection, globalization, and dependence, all consorted by the
diplomatic, political and military pressures that states exert in favour of particular
interests29. The thesis that an individual country develops in isolation is not supported even
Yet the methodological error reflects the same confusion between principles and
facts. The goal of the Law of Peoples is democratic peace; in order to be attained, peoples
should respect their peers. Rawls does not call such respect by its traditional name,
sovereignty, because he relates sovereignty to the right of states to wage war against other
states for rational interests, as well as to enjoy complete autonomy to rule its population,
both entitlements supposedly enshrined in international law. But he himself notes that
international law since WWII tends to limit the right to war to self-defence, and also place
rights30. The Law of Peoples is a moral reformulation of the latter. Rawls defends such a
post-war definition of sovereignty, with a more moral and less political name—respect
rather than sovereignty—but he does refer to the same concept. The Law of Peoples aims
for, and presupposes, autarkic states. They may cooperate for their mutual benefit through
fair and free trade, but this is additional and irrelevant to their economic performance.
28
Chang, 45.
29
See Wallerstein, especially, “The Politics of Accumulation. The Struggle for Benefits”.
30
Rawls, 25-7.
13
Thus “explanatory nationalism” is the economic facet of the myth of political
autonomy. Rawls assumes that states make their own policies and decisions without
pressure from stronger equals. They decide whether to industrialize or take on a pastoral
they are politically autonomous, their economic decisions are autonomous too. On ideal
bases this is perfectly valid and, perhaps, morally appealing; as a purported fact it is simply
false. Whether it is compelling to achieve the ideal of perfect autonomy for peoples is yet to
be settled. But making it an empirical explanation distorts reality and places us in a wrong
Rawls claims that the Law of Peoples relies on a key theoretical distinction between states
and peoples, which is a distinction between the actual and the ideal. According to Rawls,
states enjoy two powers of sovereignty: the right to go to war to pursue state policies, and
“a certain autonomy in dealing with its own people”32. In contrast, ideal peoples give up
such rights, especially the entitlement to attack their peers to gain wealth, territory, glory,
power and so on. States belong to the sphere of non-ideal theory and partial compliance
since they act rationally in pursuit of pragmatic interests, whereas peoples stick to strict
compliance and honour the criterion of reciprocity: they regard other peoples as equals and
31
Rawls, 117.
32
Rawls, 26.
14
Rawls says peoples adhere to strict compliance because they have moral nature 33.
When peoples attack their peers—in reason different from self-defence and to impede
egregious violations of human rights—they stop being peoples and thus become outlaw
states. Such an equation may be inverted and the account remains unaffected: if peoples
honour the criterion of reciprocity, they get moral nature.. Unlike humans (that are born
with personhood), peoples are not born peoples: they choose to be so and gain moral nature
I argue that current and actual Western European constitutional democracies are
peoples in the Rawls’s account34. Although he keeps the distinction between the actual and
the ideal, he is not making room for altogether different countries or a different geopolitical
division35, but he is just setting a political condition for actual liberal societies to become
ideal peoples. And he seeks to provide empirical evidence to demonstrate that such a
political condition has been obeyed since 1800 by the states aforementioned. I am not being
original in this point: David Reidy says that contemporary liberal democracies “are
peoples” in Rawls’s utopia. Charles Beitz says that “Rawls writes as if he believes” that
All human beings have personhood37. This is not a material or social attribute, but a
statement of moral nature that makes us all equal in moral worth. Personhood encompasses
33
Rawls, 23-5.
34
“The possibility of democratic peace is not incompatible with actual democracies.” Rawls, 48-9.
35
“An important role of a people’s government, however arbitrary a society’s boundaries may appear from a
historical point of view, is to be the representative and effective agent of a people as they take responsibility
for their territory...” Rawls, 38-9.
36
Reidy, 295; Beitz, 690.
37
On the account of personhood, see Griffin, 32-7.
15
all the differences that make individuals unique as well as those that are often defined as
group differences: skin colour, country of birth, sex, sexual orientation, and social class.
personhood. Holding personhood grants us basic rights that we deny, for instance, to plant
life and animals: the right to life, as well as rights not to be enslaved, or not to be tortured.
Perhaps there will be a time when people grant some sort of personhood to other mammals.
But Rawls turned personhood into a sort of collective quality, an attribute not just
for individuals but for a specific form of collective organization developed in modern
times: the state. Rawls does not call it personhood but rather “moral nature” 38. Still, both
concepts are equivalent: they make their holders subjects of moral respect. Rawls declares
that the “Law of Peoples”, as a “political conception of right and justice that applies to the
principles and norms of international law and practice”39, pursues democratic peace and
stability for the right reasons as its main moral purpose. And such an ideal is possible if
states are able to act reasonably and not just rationally40. As a parallel condition, peoples
must be reasonable in their domestic social institutions, and they may fulfil this by either
being liberal, with liberal just constitutional governments, or by merely being decent. In
order to accommodate non-liberal peoples in the Society of Peoples, Rawls makes room for
societies with state religion and in which there is no universal suffrage. Yet, says Rawls,
these societies should respect a list of fundamental rights and permit members of minorities
38
For an account on Rawls’s peoples, see Petit, who does not question the moral nature of peoples, though.
39
Rawls, 3.
40
Rawls 23-30.
41
Rawls attaches a third feature which is more descriptive than normative: peoples are bound by “common
sympathies”.
16
Liberal peoples have a certain moral character. Like citizens in domestic society, liberal peoples are
both reasonable and rational, and their rational conduct, as organized and expressed in their elections
and votes, and the laws and policies of their government, it is similarly constrained by the sense of
what is reasonable. As reasonable citizens in domestic society, offer to cooperate on fair terms with
other citizens, so (reasonable) liberal (or decent) peoples offer fair terms of cooperation to other
peoples. A people will honour these terms when assured that other peoples will do so as well42.
Thus internally, peoples may differ, but their foreign policy should be the same:
they are not offensive at all. Rawls, following Kant, grounds moral nature on agency, which
itself is based on reason. Peoples can follow the law of nature and act rationally for their
pragmatic interests. Yet they are endowed with reason to act according to the moral law, to
Beitz and Pogge44 question the fact that Rawls gives moral relevance to state-like peoples
rather than individuals. Pogge says Rawls’s peoples don’t reflect the facts of the
contemporary world. Beitz argues that an “analogy” between individuals and peoples is
incorrect. I think these criticisms point in the right direction, but do not go deep enough,
“moral nature” upon states and, with it, all the natural rights that liberalism, on normative
Among other attributes, moral nature entails individual autonomy; that is, as Griffin
puts it, the exercise of “choosing paths through life and being at liberty to pursue them”.
Autonomy requires agency, yet abstracting from the biological species and grounding
42
Rawls, 25.
43
As Kemp summarizes the Kantian thinking: “The supreme principle of morality is the supreme principle of
practical reason; and this is the principle of autonomy, which implies that the determining ground of the moral
will must be, not any empirical rule or concept, but the formal concept of the lawfulness in general, which is a
concept of pure reason”, Kemp, 61.
44
See Pogge 2001, p. 248 and ff, and Beitz 2000, 678.
17
agency merely on reason, says Griffin, “is dangerous. It turns the holder of rights into a
highly spare, abstract identity, characterized solely by rationality and intentionality. This
In Rawls’s account, however, collective agents get moral nature and, with it,
that makes choices. He assumes: A people decide to migrate... a people decide to take a
pastoral and leisurely life46. As in the Catholic Eucharist, Rawls’ doctrine involves a kind
of transubstantiation: a people become truly, and not metaphorically, an agent that acts as
an individual. This involves a high price to pay: here the actual individual, who lives within
that people, dissolves, fades away—each and every one. Individual decisions appear as
being made by the collective and politically driven for the collective benefit. It may be
argued that conferring moral nature upon a people does not imply automatically to give up
the free choice of the individual, especially if such society is liberal, but Rawls repeatedly
attributes to peoples choices that are made by individuals in the real world, as the next
quote about migration proves: “People must recognize that they cannot make up for failing
to regulate their numbers [...] by migrating into another people’s territory without their
consent” 47. This claim is absurd: save rare exceptions, migration is an individual decision
The multiplicity of voices and paths to choose in a worthwhile life that interplay in a
collective all become one voice, one path, one person. The state-like people seems
homogeneous and consensual. This sole feature of granting personhood upon collectives
45
Griffin, 34-5.
46
About the latter, see Rawls 117.
47
Rawls, 8 and 39
18
jeopardizes our concepts of pluralism, individual (human) autonomy and each person’s
However, there is an even more serious moral implication here. Holding moral nature gives
humans a moral shield from harmful and destructive action. While humans are born with
moral nature, Rawls’s peoples get theirs by abiding by the Law of Peoples. But the crucial
fact is that Rawls requires a very low threshold to grant such moral nature on states, so low
that all Western liberal democracies (excepting the United States) can claim they are
complying with it already. In acquiring moral nature, state-like peoples become, too,
subjects of moral concern and protection48. And the question is whether we are eager to
accept the consequences of such a move. The state, undoubtedly, has produced many good
outcomes: some rich states have been able to guarantee, for a large percentage of their
population, a set of political rights and material welfare never seen before. In Western
Europe—a region that benefited from four centuries of unfettered imperial conquest—
hunger has nearly disappeared, people do not die from curable diseases, and the rate of
illiteracy is close to zero. Politically, save for the international uprising of 1968 and some
domestic conflicts, the West has enjoyed peaceful times since 1945. Those facts led some
thinkers such as Raymond Aaron to claim that liberal societies are “satisfied peoples”, an
idea that Rawls endorses and extends: “their basic needs are met, and their fundamental
48
As Fukuyama puts it: “By this Hegelian scheme, one can distinguish between a human being and a rock, a
hungry bear, and a clever monkey, but one cannot distinguish between the first man who kills a fellow human
being in a battle and a Mother Teresa who sacrifices her worldly happiness to follow the dictates of God”.
Fukuyama, 252.
49
Rawls, 47-8.
19
Yet this picture is romanticised. The United States, for instance, owes a tremendous
debt to its non-white citizens, who are underrepresented in politics and overrepresented in
prisons. Women still lack equality of opportunity in all Western states. It’s worth
mentioning that other constitutional democracies outside the West have yet to grant
minimum well-being or democratic standards, such as India, with a third of its population
below the line of poverty, or Israel, that segregates Palestinians, even those with Israeli
citizenship.
And even assuming that this particular liberal organization is good, the idealization
of the state entails another high price to pay: it curtails our capacity to reform it. If states
are worthy of moral respect, why should we change them? Regarding them as the
the Prussian state, and grants states a safeguard against reformative action. If a state-like
Perhaps many moralists, politicians and citizens agree with this. But such a stance
idealizes something that is far from being perfect, as many empirical examples show, such
as the liberal states of Latin America51. Rawls would argue that those states were not fully
liberal or not fully just, getting them out of the liberal picture. But that leave us with the
question of whether the liberal state is workable in deprived or culturally different societies,
50
Beitz explains that Rawls’s “social liberalism” conceives of a division of labour: justice and freedom are
domestic tasks of societies, whereas the international arena is to guarantee a peaceful environment for them to
flourish. Beitz, 677.
51
Replicating Western laws and institutional designs, the constitutional liberal state was transplanted into
Latin America with dubious outcomes: the region is the most unequal in the world; in some countries such as
Mexico, liberal laws and institutions were a facade to cover authoritarian regimes for nearly two centuries.
Colombia, a long-term liberal democracy, is at the same time going through the longest domestic war in the
region. None of the South American democracies could resist the strike of military dictatorships or
authoritarian regimes, ironically fuelled by the region’s most self-celebrated democracy, the United States.
20
But these are false problems since they fail to see an unjust global order. As said
above, the world, opposite to Rawls’s version of perfect autonomy, is ruled by a hierarchy
among states where the United States, supported by what Noam Chomsky calls its client
and at times, direct military invasion52. Political and economic development in the Third
World has been largely hampered by these relations. Sometimes powerful states hinder
their peer’s abilities to develop just regimes, often with the venal collaboration of the
governments and elites of such regimes. The liberal state, it is quite easy to show, is not
good as such.
Besides, the claim that the liberal state prospers in isolation is wrong. By contrary,
“overly generous privileges [...] are not innocent errors of institutional design, but hugely
important to the wealth and convenience of the corporations, citizens and governments of
the rich countries. Our lifestyle absolutely depends upon our appropriation of the natural
resources of poor countries, ”53 Pogge writes. I will argue later that Western lifestyle
depends not only on the appropriation of cheap natural resources, but also on the
Dominated by liberal states, the global order is flagrantly unjust to the majority of
the world’s population, who live under a “capability-denying poverty”, as Pogge has called
it. Rawls himself claims that equality of opportunity, decent distribution of income and
52
Rawls puts forward a moral—not empirical—hierarchy of societies. At the top are listed liberal
constitutional peoples, followed by decent peoples, forming the two of them the Society of well-ordered
peoples. Then come three kinds of societies that do not meet the requirements of moral nature. If we regard
reasonableness as a measure, taking reasonableness as not being a threat to other peoples, we should then put
at the third place “burdened societies”, that are so poor that they cannot meet minimal standards of justice but
they do not represent a menace either. They are followed by “benevolent absolutisms” that deny political
rights to their members but do not threaten peoples. “Outlaw states” come up at the bottom of the list. They
act rationally and so pose a threat to democratic peace.
53
Pogge 2006, 220.
21
wealth, and basic health care for all citizens are all conditions a regime must meet to be
just. Otherwise its inhabitants lack both the ability to choose a worthwhile life and
participate in the political life of the community54. Such capability-denying poverty denies
life, neither of the liberal aspirations can be met by the individual, and rights become
“purely formal” as Rawls himself claims. I will come back later to this point.
The paradox is evident: while we grant moral nature (personhood) to ideal states we
tolerate a global order that denies personhood to actual people and treats them as suppliers
of cheap labour and natural resources. While the person is deprived from moral nature in
fact, the artificial people is bestowed with it on the ideal level, turning it into a subject of
The Rawlsian mystification of contemporary liberal states simply could not work with the
United States of America. All the normative models for peoples (that Rawls attempts to
demonstrate as factual) clash with the conduct of the global superpower. The United States
is clearly an outlaw state that pursues wealth, natural resources, might and glory at the
expense of other states, even (somewhat) constitutional democracies. Rawls had two
choices: to deal with the US and do his best to justify a blatantly immoral superpower on
ideal grounds and then portrait a realistic utopia dominated by a global police-officer, or
simply to rule out the US from the Law of Peoples. Evidently, Rawls opted for the latter.
And this is neither a minor concession nor just a mere symptom of theorizing from
the ideal. To my mind, The Law of Peoples brings an interesting and deep critique to the
54
Rawls, 50.
22
US—hidden, as many important things in Rawls’s book, behind the ideal. Rawls rather
Although Rawls never uses the term “multilateral”, he repeatedly emphasizes a scheme of
horizontal cooperation among well-ordered peoples. In the Law of Peoples, the current
unipolar superpower has no moral place. Conversely, power would rest on the Society of
“allegedly” constitutional democracy for its aggressive foreign policy. This criticism, in my
reading, points at the internal structure of the US too. On ideal grounds, Rawls claims that
deliberation must be set free from “the curse of money”, otherwise politics “is dominated
by corporate and other organized interests who through large contributions to campaigns
distort if not preclude public discussion and deliberation” 55. It is obvious to me that this
criticism targets the US, where private financing of campaigns is not only legal but a matter
of cynical pride, that often turns the American Congress into “a bargaining chamber” in
which private interests are protected. If it is true that Rawls’s criticism is done from an
‘ideal-theory’ perspective, it is also true that such practices are more visible and
determinant in the US than in any other actual Western liberal constitutional state.
Yet other features of American policies are criticized, though indirectly. Writing
about trade he says: “the wealthier economies will not attempt to monopolize the market, or
to conspire to form a cartel, or to act as an oligopoly”56. About loans for worse-off societies,
55
Rawls says: “reasonably just constitutional democratic government” cannot be directed by “the interests of
large concentrations of private economic and corporate power [...] With the great wealth being in the control
of economic power, is it any wonder that congressional legislation is, in effect, written by lobbyists, and
Congress becomes a bargaining chamber in which laws are bought and sold?” Rawls, 24. When he speaks of
the internal requirement a constitutional democracy ought to fulfil, public finance of elections comes up “to
ensure that representatives and other officials are sufficiently independent of particular social and economic
interests”, Rawls, 50.
56
Rawls, 43.
23
Rawls demands that no political condition to become liberal should be attached. Again,
these are ideal points, but Rawls has in mind the United States. He is claiming that the
realistic utopia cannot be morally justifiable with a country like America and its current
role.
In 1988, the historian Paul Kennedy put forward an account of “the rise and fall of
the great powers”. Through an analysis of European empires from the Renaissance to our
times, he claimed that international superpowers lose their competitiveness to keep up with
military expenses. New superpowers arise because they are relatively better-off to spend on
the armed forces. Since then, Kennedy foresaw that the US started to fall into that situation
and it could be replaced by a multipolar order dominated by the US, Russia, the European
Union, Japan and, perhaps, China57. Michael Mendelbaum, in a book recently published
(2010), argues that in 20 years’ time the American debt service will exceed its defence
budget58. Whether Rawls anticipated the American decline or not, the striking fact is that
the Law of Peoples rules out a global superpower. Alongside that absence, important in
itself, there is a succinct though clear criticism of the US’s foreign policy and its zeal for
corrupting its politics with the curse of money (a “curse” idea that it is also romanticized,
So the realistic utopia excludes the US (or any other state in its place) and its
though because, on normative grounds, it sets an end to any imperialistic enterprise, at least
on territorial and military terms. Imperialism turns out to be morally indefensible even for a
utopia eagerly committed to the status quo. Rawls may defend the boundaries as they are
57
See Kennedy, XV-XXV.
58
“The 21st century seems tilted towards peace, but this tilt is scarcely irreversible, and if it should be
reversed, America's fiscal position will hamper efforts to cope with that reversal”. See Walden, 37.
24
now regardless of their historical arbitrariness and, in doing that, he makes no room for any
Peoples is thus a post-American utopia, in which America may remain the wealthier state,
though it should give up its foreign policy and its corrupted domestic politics if it is to be a
Law of Peoples.
And that means that, even weak, the Law of Peoples becomes a critique of the US
as it is here and now: harmful to other peoples and opportunist to the extent of asking its
citizens to fight wars for glory, wealth and domination; bad Samaritan in lending money
with morally unacceptable conditions; advantageous in its international trade policies and,
even worse, corrupted in the core of its liberal institutions by private and corporate money.
Some would argue that this is an over-interpretation of Rawls. I think the mere absence of a
global superpower is very relevant. Disregarding the question about how such ideal and
multilateral would work without a liberal police-officer, the fact is that morally American
The post-war British people “might have been the luckiest generation in human history”, as
Ken Livingstone believes, former mayor of London and one of the baby-boomers: “we
were brought up with free healthcare and free education, and we left school at a time when
unemployment barely existed”. That picture completely contrasts with the plight of London
59
Rawls, 38-9.
25
184460. Images of British hippies happily dancing in Hyde Park in the seventies
counterpoints the “idiocy and cretinism” that estranged labour produces in the worker,
according to the Marx of the Manuscripts who had England in mind, too. Exploitative
labour disappeared from the Western European picture and was substituted by an eight-
Unfortunately exploitation was simply relocated on a global scale. The same “mass
his Parish in Bethnal Green is now blatantly visible in Asian slums. Reporting for The
Observer, Gethin Chamberlain tells how forced labour and excessive overtime persist in
factories that produce clothes for Gap, Next and Marks & Spencer for 26 pence per hour.
the Engel’s industrial London, with children “roaming the streets for hours on end [...]
playing in the filthy streets where pigs rummage through rubbish and stinking open drains
carry sewage”.
factory of Apple, Dell, Nintendo, Nokia, and Sony devices, could have been written by the
young Marx: “as they make the world’s finest gadgets, it seems that while they are
controlling machines, the machines are also dominating them”, as wrote the undercover
reporter Liu Zih Yi. Another account of the Foxconn situation adds, “[workers] live in a
sort of indentured servitude. They work all day long, stopping only to quickly eat or to
sleep. They repeat the same routine again and again except on public holidays. For many
workers, the only escape from this cycle was to end their life61”. Such workers earn 130
dollars a month.
60
Engels, “The great towns”.
61
See http://gizmodo.com/5542527/undercover-report-from-foxconns-hell-factory.
26
Such exploitation seems to me to neglect the Kantian imperative to not
practice a deprivation of the “all purpose means” that Rawls requires for the liberal
freedoms and rights not to be “purely formal”62. We can then derive that denying such all
supplier of cheap labour, as means. And that is precisely what the global order does: a
relocation of personhood-denial that is global in scope and racist in essence. While the
Western white working class gained rights and well-being (and I think this was a great
political conquest that should not be reversed; it is a tiny minority that enjoys the benefits
of global exploitation, not the working and middle classes of the West), non-whites
continue to bear the burden of toil and wretchedness, as did Latin American indigenous
during the Spanish empire; enslaved African blacks until the nineteenth century, and Asians
in the 21st; all the while with women enduring the worst part, often being placed at home to
carry out domestic labour with no wages, labour rights, nor recognition of their work in the
GDP63. Relocation of global exploitation is based on the racial prejudice that the non-white
poor should bear the destructive consequences of the mass accumulation of capital. Pogge
is right in pointing out that Western wealth is fed by the appropriation of cheap natural
resources from the Third World. Yet he fails to see the appropriation of cheap labour from
the developed to the underdeveloped world which represents, by far, larger amounts of
27
Presented as an appraisal of the virtues of wealthy and successful peoples, Rawls’s
explanatory nationalism is the denial of global exploitation. But as its empirical weight is
so weak and easily contestable, it would have not been sufficient to reject a global
one with normative appeal, and Rawls found it in the mutual respect among peoples.
Following the analogy persons-peoples, Rawls says that peoples deserve the same respect
that individuals do; actually, the right to such respect is the core of the Law of Peoples. As
liberal societies demand to be respected by their peers, liberal societies, honouring the
This concept of respect, however, takes us to the same point critiqued above: that
such respect among peoples is presented as a fact, as if it has been achieved already;
forms of society domestically and consensually decided without external interference. And
being then a domestic issue, the only thing that liberals can do is sit back and respect64. The
confusion between facts and ideals becomes dramatic here: In reality we have a global
order that relies on a racial division of labour and enhances mass accumulation of capital.
But we can do very little because we consider that such global order does not exist. For
64
See Pogge 2002, 45.
28
Liberal cosmopolitans have put forward three insightful critiques to The Law of Peoples:
first, that there is a global scheme of cooperation (which I prefer to de-romanticize and call
Second, that collective agents ought not to be subjects of our moral concern, but humans.
Third, that there is no moral reasoning to say that principles of A Theory of Justice should
However, the cosmopolitan assessment of the Law of Peoples has not pushed far
enough. From my point of view, the most powerful critique to Rawls has come from the
Jamaican philosopher Charles W. Mills. He claims, and I follow him fully in this point, that
of the last few decades has overall been a disaster, or, at the very least, has greatly hindered
rather than helped the project of theorizing and bringing about social justice”65. Ideal theory
abstracts away “realities crucial to our comprehension” of actual injustice and therefore
“guarantees that the idealized model will never be achieved”66. He then proposes to
theorize from a non-ideal framework, useful to recognize historical and current relations of
oppression, exploitation and domination, which have largely favoured whites. Shifting to
non-ideal theory moves us to tear apart the Rawlsian historical narrative that ignores the
global division of labour). He then suggests a descriptive “racial contract”, which I will not
discuss here67.
demonstrate that Rawls presents ought as is, the ideal as the actual. Society appears as a
65
Mills 2010, 1.
66
Mills 2005, 170.
67
See Contract and domination, that Mills cowrote with Carole Pateman.
29
“cooperative venture for mutual advantage”. A global order dominated by a hierarchy of
and global domination are supplanted by a perfect autarky of states. Ideally, we may or may
not aspire to such a definition of society, global democratic peace, and economic and
political autonomy of peoples. Yet Rawls does his best to show them as real historical and
social conditions. Principles are turned into facts, and facts are swept under the carpet. In
protection. The global economy, that favours the rich, appears as non-guilty of global
global government to a multilateral and democratic order. In Marxist terms68, Rawls carries
out an inversion of reality: oppression appears as freedom, and poverty as the outcome of
the exercise of perfect autonomy. Through such sanitation of history, there is little need to
reform the global order. Quite the opposite, we just have to abide by democratic peace and
the utopia will be realized. It will be task for autarkical states to become fully just and deal
VI.Conclusion
So Rawls’s very theoretical apparatus hampers the theorizing of justice and must be
abandoned altogether. But how can it be replaced? I will sketch an account of non-ideal
theory to address the global world, taking Rawls’s Law of Peoples as a negative paradigm.
68
Villoro, 40-57.
30
It would sound pretty obvious to say here that the first task of the philosopher of justice
should be to grasp a descriptive account of the world, taking into consideration an objective
history of exploitation, and then provide a theory of what is to be done, how, and why. Yet
this is not enough. As Peña says, society cannot be studied “objectively” as is chemistry or
biology. The subject who studies society intervenes on the object with her values and
judgements, biasing the outcome of what it is and what should be. Facts produce ideals and
ideals determine facts69. Sociology, then, is not science but consciousness, or self-
consciousness of society that understands facts and values as human products that, at the
same time, shape the understanding of the philosopher. This dialectical thinking of facts
and values grasps their difference, but does not detach one another.
Rawls argues that economic performance stems from domestic institutions and values.
Many economists and political scientists are ready to buttress such an idea (see Risse, who
argues that the current global order does not harm, but helps the poor). Causes of poverty
remain empirically disputable and insofar as poverty occurs morally far from the West,
conservative philosophers will just recommend charity instead of rectificatory justice: from
a Rawlsian standpoint, even from a critical one such as Pogge’s, remedying poverty
becomes a matter of helping the poor. Pogge has suggested that tackling extreme poverty
would be so cheap for the West that there is no reason not to do it. This approach misses the
point of an actual process of accumulation that benefits a tiny elite. Instead, following Mills
yet again, I think that exploitation should be adopted as a moral category. Exploitation,
unlike poverty, is not a phenomenon but a relation through which one part of humankind
69
See Peña.
31
benefits from another’s labour. Exploitation violates Kant’s categorical imperative not to
treat persons as means and sets the burden of justice not on the oppressed but on the
oppressor.
Rawls himself agrees that rights and freedoms, without all-purpose means, are purely
formal. Over the last fifty years, human rights have been recognized in covenants and
international treaties, at the same time that the impoverished Third World has seen little
progress. For many of its inhabitants life means plight and toil. “The misery of being
exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all”,
The Economist cynically responds with the famous quote of Robinson when speaking about
a rise of strikes in Chinese factories, and its corresponding relocation of exploitative labour
to Vietnam, India, or wherever the poor can be proletarized. The current global order
violates human dignity twice: severe poverty denies personhood, and exploitation treads on
the Kantian categorical imperative of not treating people (whatever individuals or groups)
as means. It’s this global order that underpins such violations. We should not give it moral
0-0-0
32
Bibliography
Audard, Catherine. “Cultural Imperialism and Democratic Peace”, in Martin, Rex, and
Beitz, Charles R., “Rawls's Law of Peoples”. Ethics, July 2000, Vol. 110, No. 4.
Biel, Robert. The New Imperialism: Crisis and Contradictions in North/South Relations.
Brewer, Anthony. Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey. London and New
Buchanan, Allen. “Rawls’s Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World”.
Chamberlain, Gethin. “Gap, Next and M&S in New Sweatshop Scandal”, in The Observer,
August 8, 2010.
Chang, Ha-Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/,
33
Freeman, Samuel, “The Law of Peoples, Social Cooperation, Human Rights, and
Distributive Justice”. Social Philosophy and Policy (2006) Vol. 23, No. 1.
Fukuyama, Francis. “Reflections on the End of History, Five Years Later”, in Timothy
Burns (ed). After History? Francis Fukuyama and his Critics. London: Littlefield
Judt, Tony. Postwar: a history of Europe since 1945. London: William Heinemann, 2005.
Kemp, John. The Philosophy of Kant. Saint Agustine’s Press, 2000 (UOP 1968).
Kennedy, Paul M., The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military
Livingstone, Ken, “We had the duty to leave things for the better and we failed dismally”,
Peoples”, in Martin, Rex, and David Reidy (eds). Rawls’s Law of Peoples, a
Mills, Charles, W. “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology”. Hypatia (Summer 2005) Vol. 20, No. 3.
____ “Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls”. The Southern Journal of Philosophy (2009) Vol.
XLVII.
Petit, Philip, “Rawls’s Peoples”, in Rex Martin and David Reidy, Rawls’s Law of Peoples,
34
Pogge, Thomas W. “Rawls on International Justice”, in The Philosophical Quarterly,
Pogge, Thomas W. “Do Rawls’s Two Theories Fit Together?”, in Martin, Rex, and David
Publishing. 2006.
Rawls, John. The Law of Peoples with the Idea of Public Reason Revisited. Cambridge,
Reidy, David A. “Rawls on International Justice: a Defence”. Political Theory, (Jun., 2004)
Risse, Mathias, “Do We Owe the Global Poor Assistance or Rectification?”, in Ethics and
The Economist, Vol. 396, No., 8693, July 31-August 6th, 2010.
1996.
Wenar, Leif, “Why Rawls is not a Cosmopolitan Egalitarian”, in Martin, Rex, and David
Publishing. 2006.
35