Rawls and the Outlaws

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 1, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 307-323

  Shue, Henry ^a  

^a MERTON COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

international justice; John Rawls; Law of Peoples; public reason; war

Indexed keywords

EID: 85004271194     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X02001003002     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. Thom Shanker and David E. Sanger, ‘U.S. Envisions Blueprint on Iraq Including Big Invasion Next Year’, New York Times, 28 April 2002: pp. 1, 18.
2. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples with “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 37. (Subsequent references to this work appear within the text and are designated within parentheses by the letter ‘R’ followed by the page number.) Pages 129-80 are constituted by ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, originally published in 1997.
3. I have argued elsewhere that Rawls's attempt to distinguish ideal theory from nonideal theory is a general failure. See Henry Shue, ‘Avoidable Necessity: Global Warming, International Fairness, and Alternative Energy’, in Theory and Practice: NOMOS XXXVII (New York and London: New York University Press, 1995): pp. 240–3. For brevity, here I will treat it as if it is a useful distinction.
4. Rawls regularly refers to five, not six, types (R: 4, 63, 92), generally ignoring the difference between the two kinds of ‘outlaw States’ that he does at least twice recognize (R: 90 n. 1, 93-4 n. 6). I will be emphasizing the significance of this weakly acknowledged difference between aggressive and non-aggressive states.
5. If Rawls is our Linnaeus, we desperately need our Darwin.
6. Andrew Kuper, ‘Rawlsian Global Justice: Beyond The Law of Peoples to a Cosmopolitan Law of Persons’, Political Theory 28(5): pp. 640–74.
7. This is very important, but is, I think, better indicated straightforwardly with terms such as ‘conditional sovereignty’. See Henry Shue, ‘Conditional Sovereignty’, Res Publica 8(1): pp. 1–7. Rawls rightly emphasizes two aspects of the conditionality of sovereignty as it has come to be understood since the Second World War (R: 25-7). Darrell Moellendorf has a splendid discussion in Cosmopolitan Justice (Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview Press, 2002), pp. 102–27.
8. See Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pp. 10, 55, 58, 63, 82-3, 92-3.
9. Charles R. Beitz, ‘Rawls's Law of Peoples’, Ethics 110 (2000): pp. 669–96.
10. Moellendorf, Cosmopolitan Justice, pp. 14–5.
11. Thomas W. Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), Ch. 5.
12. Even so, Rawls simply uncritically adopts Michael Walzer's notion of ‘supreme emergency’ (R: 98-9). I have argued elsewhere that ‘supreme emergency’ represents a dangerously large compromise of the principles of just war. See Henry Shue, ‘Liberalism: The Impossibility of Justifying Weapons of Mass Destruction’, in Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction, edited by Sohail Hoshemi and Steven Lee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).
13. Greg Dinsmore, ‘Pluralism in Rawls's Law of Peoples’ (Ithaca, NY: Department of Government, Cornell University), draft paper.
14. I have been helped enormously in thinking about international public reason by Onora O'Neill's devastating critique of domestic public reason. See Onora O'Neill, ‘Political Liberalism and Public Reason: A Critical Notice of John Rawls, Political Liberalism’, The Philosophical Review 106 (1997): pp. 411–28.
15. Thomas M. Scanlon, ‘Human Rights as a Neutral Concern’, in Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy: Principles and Applications, edited by Peter G. Brown and Douglas MacLean (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1979): pp. 83–92 (this article is cited in Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 65) and Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 and New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2000).
16. See Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy, second edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
17. Michael Walzer, of course, has famously argued that they are not the same. See, among his other discussions, Michael Walzer, ‘The Moral Standing of States: A Response to Four Critics’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 9 (1980). Whatever one thinks of Walzer's answer, his question is certainly intelligible and important.
18. Thomas W. Pogge, ‘An Egalitarian Law of Peoples’, Philosophy & Public Affairs (1994): pp. 208–14.
19. Kok-Chor Tan, Toleration, Diversity, and Global Justice (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).
20. See Michael Blake, ‘Toleration and Reciprocity’ in this issue.