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72 Fordham L. Rev. 1739 (2003-2004)
The Incoherence between Rawls's Theories of Justice

handle is hein.journals/flr72 and id is 1757 raw text is: THE INCOHERENCE BETWEEN RAWLS'S THEORIES OF JUSTICE Thomas W. Pogge* Would it be desirable to reform the global institutional order in conformity with the principles Rawls defends in A Theory of Justice? Rawls himself denies this and proposes a different moral theory (The Law of Peoples) for the relations among self-governing peoples. While sharing a questionable, purely recipient-oriented approach, his two theories differ importantly in substance and structure. The former gives weight only to the interests of individual persons, yet the latter gives no weight to these interests at all. The former theory is three-tiered and institutional, centering on a public criterion of justice that is justified through a contractualist thought experiment and in turn justifies particular institutional arrangements and reforms under variable empirical circumstances. Yet, the latter theory is two-tiered and interactional, deploying a contractualist thought experiment to justify rigid rules of good conduct for peoples. Poorly motivated, these asymmetries help Rawls's anti- cosmopolitan case. But they fail to vindicate his claim that global economic justice demands only a modest duty of assistance. INTRODUCTION In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls offers his account of domestic justice, meant to provide moral guidance for the assessment, design, and reform of the institutional order (basic structure) of one society. Twenty-eight years later, he published a work on international justice: The Law of Peoples, which he presents as an extension of his domestic theory. Central to both texts are thought experiments involving a fictional deliberative forum, the original position, composed of rational deliberators, or parties. In the domestic case, the parties represent individual persons. As each prospective citizen has his or her own representative, this original position is said to model the freedom and fundamental equality of all persons. The parties have the task to agree on a public criterion of justice for assessing alternative feasible * Columbia University, Department of Philosophy. Professor Pogge is the author of Realizing Rawls (1989) and has written numerous important papers in ethics and moral and political philosophy, especially on global justice and on the work of Rawls and Kant. 1739

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