The Flaws of Cosmopolitanism: On John Rawls’s Idea of Global Justice

John Rawls’s political philosophy is involved in what has been called constructive interpretation. It requires that a theory of justice be limited within the boundaries of political or social practices of any particular society, but not with the most abstract elements. A constructivist conception of justice represents the principles of justice not as part of some abstract moral rules known through theoretical reason, but rather as “the outcome of a procedure of construction” founded in practical reasoning. Given this Rawls’ methodology in political philosophy, his conception of human rights is part of an answer to the question of what principles of justice must be applied in a global order. Contrary to the cosmopolitan egalitarians which claim that people everywhere should have the same rights as citizens of a liberal government claim for themselves, Rawls, in The Law of Peoples , expands his ideas on justice to the global society comprised of different “peoples” with different values and traditions. He proposes a conception of human rights, as a fundamental component of an idea of global justice for a culturally plural world. Rawls conceives human rights as the broad requirements of justice that are compatible with all reasonable political moralities, and so are not “peculiarly liberal or special to the Western tradition.”