On Tan's Criticism Of Rawls's International Tolerance

Rawls' s the law of peoples aims at addressing the below question: how peoples can coexist peacefully under a pluralistic international background? In the social forms that Rawls divides,the decent society is non-liberal,just like the benevolent absolutisms,societies of burdens and the outlaw states,but it is obvious that Rawls gives more favors to the decent society than the three others,and presents a more tolerant attitude.Rawls believes that liberal people should not only not interfere with the political system of the decent society,but also should tolerate them normatively.In fact,Rawls' s view of international tolerance is closely related to the political liberalism he put forward earlier.It can be said that his international tolerance is an inevitable result when political liberalism extends from the domestic to the international community,and the form of his argument on international tolerance is also an analogy argument.As a nationalist,Rawls received a lot of criticism from cosmopolitans.As a cosmopolitan,Tan advocates the cosmopolitan scheme,that is,taking individuals rather than a group as representatives of various parties in the original position,and believed that the discussion on the decent people should be placed in the non-ideal part of the theory.At the same time,he thinks his cosmopolitanism could successfully avoid the traps of interventionism and moral tyranny.Based on such a position,Tan is dissatisfied with Rawls' s argument,and believes that Rawls' s analogy argument is not a correct analogy,because the tolerant object of political liberalism does not include the political diversity,while the tolerant of the decent society is the tolerance of the political diversity,which does not have consistency.And while oppressed individuals are free to withdraw from and join other groups within liberal democracies,leaving a country is much more difficult in the international community.Tan believes that the fundamental problem lies in the defect of political liberalism itself,which cannot deal with the contradiction between individual autonomy and tolerance of non-free groups.However,Tan's position and criticism are still to be discussed.Cosmopolitanism,due to its insistence on universalism,will inevitably presuppose the "universal-special" dichotomy and thus ignore individuals with special characteristics.By ignoring the fact of international pluralism,he failed to note that the important feature of the international community is the existence of different types of political systems.When circumstances change,tolerance should extend to politics.At the same time,the degree of impaired individual autonomy within the decent society is not as bad as Tan imagines,because the decent society protect basic human rights,and the consultative hierarchy allows group representatives to fight for important interests of group members.