Rawls and the Challenges to Human Rights

Abstract

Having elaborated the challenges in my second and third chapters, this fourth chapter looks at Rawls’s account of human rights and confronts it with them to see whether we can respond to them satisfactorily. To do so, I first reconstruct his political theory from his Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism, in order to situate the origin of his conception of human rights. Building on this first point, the second point then analyzes Rawls’s view of human rights. Conceived as necessary conditions for any reasonable system of cooperation and drawn from his political liberalism theory free from any comprehensive doctrines, Rawls integrates human rights into the list of the features of the Law of Peoples that is to guide liberal foreign policy. Subscribing to the evolution of international law, Rawls assigns two major roles to human rights: to restrict the reasons that justify a war and redesign the contours of state’s sovereignty. That is why, for Rawls, gross violations of human rights are a legitimate motive for humanitarian intervention. In the third point, that conception is confronted to the theoretical and practical challenges, examining whether they are fully responded to.