The purpose of this research is to examine objections made by Jones to Rawls's discussion of the law of peoples as derived from a liberal political conception of justice. The plan of the research will be to set forth Rawls's general line of thought in regard to the law of peoples and Jones's line of thought in response to Rawls, and then to make a rebuttal of Jones's objections.
Rawls's liberal conception of a law of peoples is designed to explain how politically liberal societies, which are presumed to be well ordered, can coexist with comparatively illiberal, or as Rawls puts it, well-ordered hierarchical societies. It is a particular conception of right and justice that applies to the principles and norms of international law and practice. In Rawls's formulation (43), societies of each category are agreed that, because societies of the other category have been conferred political legitimacy by their own people and to the degree they are not territorially expansionist, they honor basic human rights and are on that account to be tolerated as legitimate members of the international community. This conception of what is termed a "law of peoples" is a "problem of extension" for Rawls's idea of justice, inasmuch as his concept of justice in a liberal society, which he describes as a "constructivist" concept of "justice as fairness" (46), has to be set beside political institutions of a hierarchical society that "specify a just consultation hierarchy . . . while their basic social institutions satisfy a conception of justice expressing an appropriate conception of the common good" (Rawls 52). The content of these institutions is not defined, except to the degree they contribute to the fact of a hierarchical society's being well ordered, to the degree they involve "honest belief and respect for the possibility of dissent" (Rawls 62), and to the degree they secure certain minimum rights to life, liberty, and formal equality before the law...