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Introduction
John Rawls's conception of human rights advanced in his The Law of Peoples (1999a)1 with its minimalist list of ‘human rights proper’ stands in stark contrast to the standard list of human rights endorsed by the international legal human rights system. Taking the protection of human rights proper as constitutive of a normative vision of a peaceful and stable world order – a ‘realistic utopia’ (LoP, 6) – Rawls conceived of them as a special class of urgent rights the protection of which is necessary for any system of social cooperation worthy of liberal toleration. Since Rawls thought of ‘decent’ nonliberal peoples as ‘bona fide’ members (LoP, 63) worthy of liberal toleration in the international arena, he considered his human rights proper to be acceptable to decent nonliberal peoples (DNPs) and therefore not parochial to the liberal West. Liberal theorists' initial reactions to Rawls's account of human rights in The Law of Peoples (LoP) were swift and harsh, criticizing it for ultraminimalism,2 which not only omits critically important human rights but is also excessively lenient toward internally oppressive nonliberal societies.3 Although some liberal theorists have come to defend various aspects of Rawls's LoP over the next two decades,4 such defenses came at a cost: these have typically involved relegating the mandate to protect human rights proper to a mere handmaiden to liberal foreign policy and concomitantly downgrading Rawls's stated aim in LoP to present it as constitutive of a realistic utopia.5
This paper aims to defend Rawls's minimalist conception of human rights as a crucial piece of his normative account of a realistic utopia at the international level. I shall reconstruct it as a political conception (LoP, 68) entitled the overlapping consensus view of human rights (OCV). This reconstruction requires taking seriously Rawls's claim that LoP is an ‘extension’ of his political liberalism (LoP, 9) elaborated in Political Liberalism (1993),6 which, by adopting a social contractarian framework, derives a political conception of justice in a domestic original position. Hence, LoP applies social contractualism to a Society of Peoples at the international level in order to derive a reasonably just Law of Peoples that regulates the realistic utopia in international original positions. The Law of Peoples includes the...