Purview of Rawls' Law of Peoples

Abstract

Johan Rawls' political philosophy has played a major part in discussions of liberal reading of justice in the past three decades and his justice theory has left significant impact on the formation of concepts applied in prevalent arguments within everyday debates respecting justice and politics in the contemporary West. For this reason, his works, particularly A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism have been identified as the most important works of 20th century political thoughts. In the Law of Peoples, Rawls generalizes the theory of justice as fairness to the sphere of international relations and law, thus making these discussions notable in philosophical terms. This paper first explains briefly the framework and main discussions of the Law of Peoples. In the second part, some critiques of Rawls' discussions in the book are mentioned, and the third part assesses Rawls' theory from the perspective of its purview in the relations among the peoples.

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