Abstract
Like Hegel, Rawls acknowledges the immense importance of recognizing and respecting the value of cultural affiliation and its role in facilitating social identity. However, Rawls misunderstands the nature of social identity and the conditions required for its realization. His adoption of toleration as a norm fundamental to international principles of justice does not satisfactorily explain why culture ought to be respected and, more importantly, why respect for culture justifies some human rights violations. Hegel agrees with Rawls’ conclusion that the international realm cannot be governed by the same principles of justice that govern relations between individuals at the domestic level, but according to Hegel, this does not mean that we ought to abandon the liberal principle of individual rights. Hegel’s political philosophy shows not only why social identity is important, but how it can be reconciled with a strong doctrine of individual rights.
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Notes
- 1.
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples; With “the Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) cited as LP. Other references to Rawls’s writings will be as follows: A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) as TJ; Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) as PL.
- 2.
Rawls rejects “states” as agents determining principles of international justice because they seek to maximize their interests and power. Unlike states, decent societies possess a moral power. For Rawls’s discussion of states see section two of Part I of The Law of Peoples.
- 3.
The other controversial claims include the non-applicability of distributive justice to the international sphere and the truncated list of human rights.
- 4.
See, for example, Charles Beitz, “Rawls’s Law of People,” Ethics 110 (2000): 669–96; Allen Buchanan, “Rawls’s Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanishing Westphalian World,” Ethics 110, no. 4 (2000): 697–721; Simon Caney, “Cosmopolitanism and the Law of Peoples,” Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no. 1 (2002): 95–123; Andrew Kuper, “Rawlsian Global Justice: Beyond the Law of Peoples to a Cosmopolitan Law of Persons,” Political Theory 28, no. 5 (2000): 640–74; Darrel Moellendorf, “Constructing the Law of Peoples,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 77 (1996): 132–54; Thomas Pogge, “An Egalitarian Law of Peoples,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 23, no. 3 (1994): 195–224; Thomas Pogge, “The International Significance of Human Rights,” Journal of Ethics 4, no.1 (2000): 45–69; Kok-Chor Tan, Toleration, Diversity and Global Justice (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2000); Kok-Chor Tan, “Critical Notice: Rawls’s The Law of Peoples,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31, no. 1 (2001): 113–32; Fernando Tesón, A Philosophy of International Law (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998); Leif Wenar, “The Legitimacy of Peoples,” in Global Justice and Transnational Politics, ed. P. de Greiff and C. Cronin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
- 5.
John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 366.
- 6.
John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, 366. He further claims that A Theory of Justice not only takes account of this Hegelian idea but articulates it when “it takes the basic structure of society and the first principles of justice they select are to apply to the basic structure.”
- 7.
I will refer to Rawls’s list of human rights as “urgent”; “basic human rights” will refer to a list of human rights that is more extensive than Rawls’s.
- 8.
Societies that do not fall into the well-ordered category include aggressive outlaw states, which do not respect urgent human rights; societies burdened by unfavorable conditions; and benevolent absolutisms, which are not aggressive, obey human rights, but deny their citizens a “meaningful role in making political decisions” (LP, 4).
- 9.
Rawls argues, “The Law of Peoples does not say, for example, that human beings are moral persons and have equal worth in the eyes of God; or that they have certain moral and intellectual powers that entitle them to these rights. To argue in these ways would involve religious or philosophical doctrines that many decent hierarchical peoples might reject as liberal or democratic, or as in some way distinctive of Western political tradition and prejudicial to other cultures” (LP, 68).
- 10.
Rawls’s example of a decent nonliberal society is a hypothetical Islamic society that he calls Kazanistan. My discussion of decent societies is limited to the arguments Rawls makes—not the description of Kazanistan, for as Buchanan points out, “a nonliberal society could be as benign as Kazanistan, but that is beside the point.” Allen Buchanan, “Taking the Human Out of Human Rights,” 151.
- 11.
Rawls seems to think that a right to full liberty of conscience applies only to liberal democratic societies. For an argument that show that freedoms of conscience need not be exclusively associated with democratic systems see Joshua Cohen, “Pluralism and Proceduralism,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 69, no. 3 (1993–94): 589–618.
- 12.
I borrow this terminology from David Ingram, “Between Political Liberalism and Postnational Cosmopolitanism: Toward an Alternative Theory of Human Rights,” Political Theory 31, no. 3 (2003): 359–91.
- 13.
Allen Buchanan, “Taking the Human Out of Human Rights,” 151.
- 14.
In Political Liberalism Rawls’s use of the concept “rational” corresponds to the first moral power of the person, the capacity for form, revise and pursue a notion of the good. His use of the concept “reasonable” corresponds to the second moral power, the capacity to have and act in accordance to an effective sense of justice, which includes the willingness to propose and respect fair terms of cooperation, to treat others as free and equal citizens and to recognize the burdens of judgment. The relationship between the reasonable and the rational is subject to hierarchical ordering: reasonable subordinates the rational. For a comprehensive discussion of Rawls’s notion of reasonable see James W. Boettcher, “What Is Reasonableness?” Philosophy & Social Criticism 30, no 5–6 (2004): 597–621.
- 15.
Freeman argues that liberal peoples ought to tolerate decent peoples and recognize them as having equal status because they have “nothing to fear” from a society that endorses the Law of Peoples. But if we accept Rawls as adopting toleration in the strong sense, as requiring respect, then the absence of fear seems an unlikely basis for respect. Samuel Freeman, “The Law of Peoples, Social Cooperation, Human Rights, and Distributive Justice,” Social Philosophy and Policy 23, no.1 (2006): 48.
- 16.
For a discussion of Rawls’s idea of “liberal public reason” in Political Liberalism, see David A. Reidy, “Rawls’s Wide View of Public Reason: Not Wide Enough.” Res Publica 6, no. 1 (2000): 49–72 and Charles Larmore, “Public Reason,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
- 17.
For an excellent discussion of the different application of toleration in the domestic and international spheres, see Kok-Chor Tan, “Liberal Toleration in Rawls’s Law of Peoples,” Ethics 108, no. 2 (1998).
- 18.
In fact, Rawls ends The Law of Peoples with this observation: “If a reasonably just Society of Peoples whose members subordinate their power to reasonable aims is not possible, and human beings are largely amoral, if not incurably cynical and self-centered, one might ask, with Kant, whether it is worthwhile for human beings to live on the earth” (LP, 128).
- 19.
Allen Buchanan, “Taking the Human Out of Human Rights,” 79.
- 20.
Buchanan, “Taking the Human Out of Human Rights,” 157.
- 21.
According to Rawls, all political power is coercive; in a democratic state, coercive state power is legitimate only if reasonable and rational persons agree to its exercise. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 216.
- 22.
Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995), 171–72.
- 23.
References that include “PR” are to Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Translated as Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet and ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Citation is by paragraph number and, when relevant, “R” for “Remarks” and “A” for “Additions.”
- 24.
Michael Hardimon, “Role Obligations,” Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 7 (1994): 348.
- 25.
The argument supporting universalistic interpretation of Hegel’s ethics is made by Allen Wood in Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 212.
- 26.
Andrew Buchwalter, “Hegel’s Concept of Virtue,” Political Theory 20, no. 4 (1992): 572.
- 27.
Steven B. Smith, Hegel’s Critique: Rights in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 143.
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Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Andrew Buchwalter for his incisive and constructive comments on an earlier draft.
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Kowalski, M.G. (2012). Toleration, Social Identity, and International Justice in Rawls and Hegel. In: Buchwalter, A. (eds) Hegel and Global Justice. Studies in Global Justice, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8996-0_5
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