between the individual and the state. Ethical issues in international relations –
military intervention, global distributive justice, human rights – are only of indirect
concern for individuals. It is interesting that Rawls’s stated reason for writing The
Law of Peoples(1999) is to establish whether or not liberal democracies should
tolerate non-liberal societies, and, by extension, whether individual citizens of a
liberal democracy have an obligation to support military intervention by their state
in the affairs of another state.
The assumption that principles of justice are operative in a self-contained, closed
society should not be understood as an endorsement of the nationas intrinsically
valuable. The principles of justice will necessarily be coercively enforced, and that
presupposes the existence of a statewhich we are obliged to obey, but the state is
a juridical and not a cultural concept. This distinguishes his position from the
patriotism of Alasdair MacIntyre and even from the more moderate ethical
particularism of David Miller. That ‘peoples’ rather than individuals are the primary
ethical entities in international politics does not contradict Rawls’s ‘individualism’.
Rawls’s aim in The Law of Peoplesis to show that a liberal society can tolerate a
non-liberal one:
To tolerate means not only to refrain from exercising political sanctions –
military, economic, or diplomatic – to make a people change its ways. To tolerate
also means to recognize these non-liberal societies as equal participating members
in good standing of the Society of Peoples, with certain rights and obligations,
including the duty of civility requiring that they offer other peoples public reasons
appropriate to the Society of Peoples for their actions.
(Rawls 1999: 59)
Many liberal political theorists – Nagel, whose work we will discuss, is among
them – would reject this second idea of toleration. Certainly the stability of the
international order may require refraining from what is commonly referred to as
‘regime change’, but we have no reason to tolerate non-liberal societies at that deeper
level of ‘civility’. Since a non-liberal people does not treat its citizens as free and
equal then it cannot itselfbe treated as an equal among the community of peoples.
Rawls is not, however, advocating a MacIntyrian communitarianism. His refusal
to extend the individualism of domestic justice to international politics can be
explained by his rejection of a teleological view of the world, and of history. The
‘society of peoples’ does not serve an end, such as the gradual adoption of liberal
values, even though the adoption of a law of peoples might have such a consequence.
The ‘universalism’ of moral agents in the domestic sphere – modelled by the domestic
original position – is of a different kind to the ‘universalism’ of the global sphere,
as modelled by the global original position. That peoples rather than individuals
are represented in the latter does not mean that ‘peoples’ have a primary, or ultimate,
moral status.
Nagel rejects Rawls’s toleration of non-liberal peoples but does endorse the
political conception of (global) justice. Although there may be good, practical
reasons for not intervening in the affairs of another sovereign state these are not
principled reasons: ‘it is more plausible to say that liberal states are not obliged
either to tolerate non-liberal states or try to transform them, because the duties of
justice are essentially duties to our fellow citizens’ (Nagel, 2005: 135).494 Part 4 Contemporary ideas