| John Rawls's The Law of Peoples, which endeavors to construct a realistic utopia at the international level, is not well received by liberals; many of them strive to extend Rawls's theory of justice from the domestic level to the global level and demand a more egalitarian global order. For some liberal critics Rawls's egalitarian retraction has its root in his political liberalism, and the incoherence between his domestic and global theory suggests that comprehensive liberalism provides a better basis for tackling global justice. The main interlocutors of this dissertation are these cosmopolitan liberals, and my main objective is to offer a philosophical defense of Rawls's political constructivism and political liberalism and a methodological defense (as well as revision) of his two-stage approach. At the philosophical level, I explain why political liberalism remains a better foundation of international justice than comprehensive liberalism by expounding the key ideas of Rawls's political constructivism, including reasonableness, justification, and public reason. I argue, with Rawls, that in a society characterized by reasonable pluralism appealing to comprehensive liberalism violates the criterion of reciprocity, a key component of public reason. The same holds true at the global level as at the domestic level. At the methodological level, however, I argue that Rawls is mistaken to distinguish beforehand different kinds of peoples in ideal theory and, as a result, treat non-well-ordered peoples unequally. I suggest that, to accord with Rawls's doctrine of the equality of peoples, the representatives of all peoples must be allowed to participate in the international original position. To justify my claim, I offer a stronger defense than Rawls's for the moral standing of peoples (or states). To explore the practical implications of my revision, I take up the issues of distributive justice and human rights. On distributive justice, I argue that international society is qualitatively different from domestic society and thus the difference principle does not apply at the international level. On human rights, I propose that we improve Rawls's argument for toleration by employing a less stringent conception of public reason suggested by Habermasian deliberative model. |
