Friday, December 13, 2002

Coming next week: a response to Nick Shulz's Tech Central Station column on Rawls and foreign policy.

The debate over Rawls' ideas rarely spilled over into the realm of foreign policy.
And whether Rawls had strong feelings about, say, the war on terror or toppling
Saddam Hussein, I do not know. But Rawls' concern for the least well-off can -
indeed, it should - extend far beyond domestic political economy to the realm
of foreign policy. After all, he was positing universal principles, principles in
many ways useful and suitable for an examination of foreign policy.


Rawls did indeed have strong views on the relationship between the principles of Theory of Justice and international politics-- published in The Law of Peoples. That relationship doesn't turn out at all the way Shulz suggests here-- for reasons that some of Rawls' leftist admirers and critics have disputed but with which I (in large part) agree.

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