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The concept of justice as fairness entails a tendency toward equalizing the distribution of social benefits, or more exactly making sure that privileged persons do not exploit their advantages in ways that do not contribute to the welfare of those who are not privileged (Liberalism 101). It could be argued that such equalized distribution of benefit is impossible to either guarantee or police in the international arena on one hand, and on the other that many societies are demonstrably illiberal in this regard. In either case, it could be concluded a liberal political society would violate its own legitimacy or very raison d'Ttat by acknowledging and tolerating the international legitimacy of the illiberal society(ies). Rawls's entire discussion in Law of Peoples is aimed at explaining this difficulty and arriving at a concept of international relations that avoids placing politically liberal societies in the position of judging--still less acting on--illiberal social structures in terms of a just concern for human rights. His method of doing so is to adopt a specifically nonuniversal doctrine of rights. He acknowledges that this approach "appears hopelessly unsystematic" (Rawls 46) because there is not a universal, unifying conception that makes a connection between human rights and international relations. But he assumes "that there are other forms of unity than that defined by completely general first principles forming a consistent scheme" (Rawls 46).
Accordingly, Rawls appeals to the authority of what he terms practical reason, assuming as well that the states involved in working out agreement on the law of peoples are "rational agents fairly, or reasonably, situated given the case at hand" (Rawls 47). To put it another way, Rawls's focus is not first and always on standards of human rights, even though a conception of human rights is meant to be derived from the outcome of the discussion. Rather, the focus is on how those s...