英文摘要 |
It is a controversial claim in John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples that liberal toleration should extend to non-liberal decent peoples. According to Rawls, non-liberal decent peoples will agree on the same Law of Peoples affirmed by liberal peoples, and are thus to be recognized as members in good standing in the Society of Peoples. Cosmopolitan liberals charge Rawls’s notion of international toleration with being distant from the core liberal commitments. For them, only societies that are liberal in character meet the criteria for toleration. Specifically, they take issue with 1) Rawls’s use of the original position device, 2) Rawls’s human rights criteria for decency, and 3) the less than fully liberal rinciples of the Law of Peoples that Rawls claims would be agreed upon by liberal peoples and decent non-liberal ones. In this thesis, I will examine the cosmopolitan criticisms against Rawls’s conception of international toleration. I argue that Rawlsian toleration is not only defendable from the cosmopolitan charge, but also substantiable within a genuinely liberal framework. I will provide an interpretation of the Law of Peoples as a “principled consequentialist” liberal project. Based on this interpretation, a Rawlsian notion of toleration is not only required by the commitment to fundamental liberal principles, but also conducive to the realization of liberal values across societies in the long term. |