Rawls's Theory Of Distributive Justice In The Law Of Peoples

In the Law of Peoples, the third phase of Rawls's theory of justice, Rawls made an effort to extend his theory of justice to the international realm. As a liberalist calling for fairness, Rawls's law of peoples also involves an issue of distributive justice among the nations, and received a lot of responses from all sides including criticism. But Chinese scholars pay less attention to this issue.First of all, this paper summarizes and sorts the criticism received by Rawls's global distributive justice, I argue that the critics are dissatisfied because Rawls neglect the issue of global economic justice as well as his two theories of distributive justice are incoherent in many ways. The paper reviews and reexplains his distributive theory in the Law of Peoples, analyzes the historical and theoretical background of the theory as well as the changes between Rawls's two theory, points out the accurate meaning and logic of the principle. I would find out the main differences between Rawls's point and the cosmopolitan view and make clear Rawls revise and his persistence as well by reviewing a series of arguments and debates. In this paper, I think Rawls's the Law of Peoples is a larger achievement of Rawls, but still, I would try to perceive its weakness or the issues have not been completed.In this paper, I argue that how to distribute the obligation of assisting the global least-advantaged people between internal and international society. Two different attitudes toward the issue of global economic justice make up the main distinction between Rawls and his critics. And his distributive justice does change a lot when he tried to extend it to international realm. But it doesn't only mean that his theory has some disadvantages, on the contrary, his standpoint on distributive justice, once clearly spread, would be more complete and more defensive. Although his distributive theory does have some weaknesses, the sticking point is not the differences between his two theories of justice, but the gap between well off and poor societies as well as the temporary sovereign state system make him hard to break the dilemma.