In Political Liberalism, J. Rawls describes a meta-ethical procedure — political constructivism — whereby political theorists formulate political principles by assembling and reworking ideas from the public political culture. To many of his moral realist and moral constructivist critics, Rawls's procedure is simply a recent version of the “popular moral philosophy” that Kant excoriates in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. I defend the idea of political constructivism on philosophical and political grounds. I argue that political constructivism is the (...) best available methodology for self-legislating, socially embedded and fallible human beings; then I show that political constructivism may produce principles that could garner the principled assent of Euro-American Muslims such as Taha Jabir Al-Alwani. The article considers how political constructivism might be employed to formulate new political principles for Euro-American societies experiencing and confronting the Islamic revival. [R]. (shrink)

In this article I address two objections to Rawls’ account of international toleration. The first claims that the idea of a decent people does not cohere with Rawls’ understanding of reasonable pluralism and sanctions the oppressive use of state power. The second argues that liberal peoples would agree to a more expansive set of principles in the first original position of Law of Peoples. Contra the first I argue that it does not properly distinguish between the use of state power (...) aimed at curtailing difference and the oppressive use of state power. Contra the second I argue that transposing a liberal egalitarian set of principles in Law of Peoples would entail the unnecessary duplication of entitlements within different levels of governance and affect liberal peoples’ self-determination. The article also highlights how these criticisms are premised on the assumption that all societies should be liberal and that the correct view of global justice is a cosmopolitan one. (shrink)

De acuerdo a este artículo, la extensión realizada por Rawls de su concepción de justicia doméstica al contexto de las relaciones internacionales contradice premisas básicas de su propia teoría de justicia. Una extensión de la teoría doméstica consistente con sus propias premisas debería llevar a considerar una clase mayor de demandas como derechos humanos y a aceptar algún principio de distribución global.

John Rawls argued in The Law of Peoples that we should reject any principle of international distributive justice, whether in ideal theory or nonideal theory. Instead, he advocated a duty of assistance on the part of well‐ordered societies toward burdened societies. I argue that Rawls is correct that we should endorse a principle with a target and cut‐off point rather than a principle of international distributive justice. But the target and cut‐off point he favors is too undemanding, because it can (...) be met by assisting a burdened society to become a decent people. Instead, only a society that respects the right to an adequate standard of living, and not simply a right to subsistence, can be an acceptable target. Rawls is prevented from drawing this conclusion by a failure to disentangle issues of intervention and assistance, a failure bound up with his flawed, intervention‐driven account of human rights in defining a decent people. (shrink)

In my reply to Pogge's critique of Rawls's international relations theory, I will try to show two things: (1) that Pogge's account of the public criterion of domestic social justice endorsed by Rawls is a partial one and (2) that this leads him to wrongly postulate a significant asymmetry between Rawls's domestic and international theories of justice. In the end, I hope to show that the domestic and international accounts are characterized by a significant degree of symmetry ? that both (...) accounts are motivated by Rawls's fundamental concern with self-respect. In other words, a more expansive, complete account of the domestic public criterion of social justice necessarily leads us (contra Pogge) to affirm a significant degree of continuity between the domestic and international accounts. (shrink)