Rawls's Narrow Doctrine of Human Rights

Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia?

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 134-149

  Macleod, Alistair M ^a,b  

^a QUEEN S UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

^b UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Liberal democracy; Minimalism; Political participation; Religious traditions; State sovereignty

Indexed keywords

EID: 84891318512     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1002/9780470776612.ch8     Document Type: Chapter

References (22)

1. For a recent example of this sort of argument, see Michael Ignatieff's Tanner Lectures at Princeton, published in 2001 under the title Human Rights as Politics and as Idolatry.
2. For a critical discussion of some of the issues raised by Ignatieff, see Joshua Cohen's "Minimalism about Human Rights: the Most We Can Hope For?" in The Journal of Political Philosophy, 12/2 (2004).
3. That is, both the "principled" minimalism for which a justification simply cannot be provided in principle for many of the putative rights on longer lists, and the "pragmatic" minimalism for which the best that can be expected is an international consensus about the status of only the most fundamental rights on longer lists.
4. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (hereafter LoP), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
5. For Rawls's understanding of a "decent" society, see footnote 2 on p. 3 of LoP and also the extensive discussion in Part II of LoP (esp. pp. 59-78).
6. See, for example, p. 65 of LoP for one version of the short-list of human rights he sponsors and pp. 79-80 for another version.
7. By the "early" Rawls, I mean the author of A Theory of Justice, and by the "later" Rawls the author of Political Liberalism.
8. See, for example, LoP, p. 83. ("... I am not saying that a decent hierarchical society is as reasonable and just as a liberal society. For... a decent hierarchical society clearly does not treat its members equally.") There is further discussion in Section 6 below of this feature of Rawls's account in LoP.
9. Rawls's claim is that "decent" societies should respect (all) "the" human rights of their members. The claim is not that such societies should recognize and protect some, or even most, of their members' human rights.
10. The sort of decent society, at any rate, that he describes at some length in his account of the institutional arrangements in "Kazanistan."
11. See LoP, sect. 9, pp. 71-8.
12. The principle, as set out in LoP, reads: "Peoples are to honor human rights" (p. 37).
13. See LoP, p. 65 for the first of these passages, and LoP, pp. 79-80 for the second.
14. LoP, sect. 11, pp. 82-3.
15. LoP, p. 68.
16. LoP, p. 80.
17. Importance obviously attaches to care in the devising of implementation strategies, given (a) that principles of justice are in practice only imperfectly realized in societies as we find them, and (b) that there are obstacles of various kinds to be overcome-including the rather formidable obstacle presented all too often by the sheer unwillingness of those who wield political power to adopt justice-promoting policies.
18. Consider, for example, the "democratic deficit" there is in such nominally democratic societies as the United States-and the degree to which they have failed to adopt measures for the adequate recognition and protection of certain fairly fundamental human rights in the areas of health, education, and welfare.
19. LoP, p. 81.
20. See footnote 26 on this page.
21. see also the later discussion, in sections 14 and 15, of the "question of interfering with outlaw states simply for their violation of human rights, even when these states are not dangerous or aggressive."
22. If the right to participate on terms of equality in political decision-making processes is to be given recognition by the members of a "decent hierarchical" society, it is almost certainly not going to be on the basis of a military invasion aimed at establishing a democratic regime.