Are Decent Non-Liberal Societies Really Non-Liberal? – A Critical Response to John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples

A notable feature of Rawls’ theory of international justice, which he presented in The Law of Peoples, is his insistence on the toleration of non-liberal states provided that they are decent. Many political philosophers have criticized Rawls for being too generous towards non-liberal states. These critics feared that Rawls’ theory would safeguard non-liberal states to perform many forms of domestic injustices. In this paper, I make an entirely opposite objection. I claim that the real problem with Rawls’ theory of international justice is not of its being too generous, but rather of its being too stringent. Specifically, I will argue that when The Law of Peoples is correctly interpreted, it turns out that “the decent non-liberal societies” that the theory so emphatically proclaims to tolerate are not really non-liberal societies, but rather are only more than sufficiently liberal societies.