Rawls and Human Rights

Abstract In The Law of Peoples Rawls endeavors to articulate and defend a reasonable and realistic ideal by reference to which liberal democratic peoples, presumably committed in their respective domestic affairs to the ideal of political liberalism, if not to justice as fairness, might orient their foreign policies and international relations. A commitment to human rights figures prominently in this ideal. Distinctive and nuanced, it departs in many ways from putative orthodoxies within contemporary human rights theory and practice and has been widely criticized. In this chapter, the author clarifies and develops Rawls’s view with an eye toward not only addressing its critics but also indicating its underappreciated merits and underdiscussed problems. The author closes by reflecting on the importance to human rights in the twenty-first century of thoughtfully engaging with Rawls’s view.