A ‘well-ordered’ society is one which is stable and respects both basic human rights
and the sovereign status of other nations. Such a society need not be liberal (see
Chapter 18 on Human rights). It does not follow from what Rawls terms the ‘law
of peoples’ that existing well-ordered societies must transfer resources to burdened
societies in order to achieve the goal of bringing them into the society of peoples.
Part of the reasoning is that transfers are indeterminate – we do not know at what
point transfers must cease. This seems an odd point – surely, so long as we know
our transfers are having some effect we should make them? A second, and more
substantial, argument against transfers is that a society with few resources can be
well ordered if ‘its political traditions, law, and property and class structure with
their underlying religious and moral beliefs and culture are such as to sustain a
liberal or decent society’ (Rawls, 1999: 106). Rawls goes on to make a subtly
different point: the culture of a society is a very significant determinant of the wealth
of that society. These are indeed distinct points. The first establishes the limits of
a well-ordered society’s duties to a burdened society – transfers are aimed at creating
a well-ordered society and not directly at benefiting the individual members of that
society. The second is an observation – grounded in Sen’s work – on the causes of
poverty. On this second point Rawls makes various elaborations: a society’s
population policy is extremely important; failure in food distribution rather than
food decline is the cause of most famines; and the unemployed in prosperous
societieswould starve without domestic income transfers (1999: 9, 109–10).
Rawls rejects the extension of the difference principle to international relations,
arguing that the target of distribution is the achievement of a society’s political
autonomy and consequent upon that its joining the society of peoples. This argument
fits with his rejection of the extension of domestic liberal justice to the international
sphere: peoples are represented in the society of peoples, not individual human
beings. A practical result of Rawls’s position is that while he has a relatively
egalitarian theory of domestic justice he has a relatively inegalitarian theory of
international justice. One might admire Rawls’s hard-headedness: it is extremely
difficult to motivate citizens in prosperous societies to accept income transfers to
poor societies, and that reluctance is not based solely on a lack of confidence in
recipient governments to ensure the money benefits the worst-off in those burdened
societies. Although Rawls does not make this point, a further argument for an
inegalitarian theory of global justice is that in the absence of global economic
institutions it is very difficult to determine when duties correlated to ‘socio-economic
rights’ have been fulfilled. This contrasts with so-called ‘negative’ human rights,
such as the right to practise one’s religion or marry a partner of your choice.
However, there are more fundamental objections to global egalitarianism at the
heart of Rawls’s theory of international relations, and to grasp these requires
distinguishing three levels of justice: local, domestic and global.
An illustration of local justice is the distribution of resources within a family;
other examples include the rules governing voluntary associations, such as clubs or
churches. Domestic justice, which is the primary focus of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice
(1972), is concerned with the distribution of resources at the level of the nation-
state. Domestic justice will affect local justice: the state will not tell families how
to distribute housework and child-rearing duties, but it must ensure that women
get fair equality of opportunity. Likewise, domestic justice will indirectlyaffect the
third level of justice: the global. For Rawls the primary ethical relationship holds
Chapter 22 Global justice 493