Constructing a Genuine Realistic Utopia

John Rawls's The Law of Peoples adopts a people-centric approach to international ethics. Many liberal theorists find his account too oriented to the status quo; they prefer a more cosmopolitan, egalitarian approach to international ethics. In this book Hsuan-Hsiang Lin offers a theoretical defense for Rawls's approach via expounding the key ideas of Rawls's political constructivism, including reasonableness, justification, and public reason. On the other hand, Lin qualifies his defense by adding two minor revisions to Rawls's framework. Lin argues that Rawls's taxonomy of peoples runs against his doctrine of the equality of peoples and Rawls's conception of toleration smacks of paternalism. Lin suggests that the first problem can be fixed by redrawing the line between ideal and nonideal theory in accordance with Seyla Benhabib's distinction between the standpoint of the generalized other and the standpoint of the concrete other, and the second problem by incorporating a Habermasian dialogical approach into Rawls's framework. Students and scholars of international ethics, international relations, and political philosophy will be interested in this book.