Personhood Usurped:

The Law of Peoples or the Mystification of the Liberal State

Emiliano Ruiz Parra

University College London

I. Introduction

Charles W. Mills wrote that John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples is built on a theoretical

framework that mystifies both the past and the present1. In this paper, I will demonstrate

how such mystification enables Rawls to idealize the contemporary liberal state, granting it

a moral nature similar to personhood, and thus, shielding it from any potentially profound

reformative action. I will develop a methodological critique. First, I will defend an

empirical and non-ideal theoretical approach to criticizing Rawls, using Rawls’s own

claims on history, politics and economics. My aim will be to show how Rawls, in order to

buttress his idealization of the liberal state, undertakes an inversion of facts and principles

through presenting ideals as historical realities. My claim is that Rawls turns ought into is:

The aspiration is told as if it were historical fact while real facts are obscured, dismissed or

ignored. Mills critiques the Rawlsian process of sanitizing history from its legacies of

exploitation, white supremacy, imperialism and gender oppression. I seek to analyse the

methodological process through which such sanitation is carried out.

Secondly, I will address Rawls’s claim that corporate agents have a moral nature, or

how actual states can become ideal peoples through a political exercise of reason. I propose

1
Mills 2010, 26.

1
that a peoples’s moral nature is not just an extension of an individual’s moral attribute, but

rather a bestowal of personhood upon a specific breed of liberal states. I will argue that

such a move is methodologically wrong and morally unacceptable because it dissolves the

individual into the collective, undermining pluralism and individual autonomy, and makes

the liberal state seem purely consensual. A second consequence not less important is that

the liberal state looks as if stands at a final process of historical development, morally

perfect and thus free of the need to be reformed or rethought.

Thirdly, I will claim that Rawls puts forward a post-American global order. Rawls’s

realistic utopia, though committed to defending the current liberal state and its hegemony

over other alternatives, did not attempt to justify the United States and its role of global

superpower. In my reading, this is not because Rawls dislikes the international environment

under American domination, but because the United States troubles the whole empirical

justification for democratic peace: not just due to its imperialist foreign policy, but also for

its corrupted internal politics that Rawls takes on only tangentially but with disapproval.

Rawls’s models for liberal peoples are the Western European liberal states, and his realistic

utopia depicts a multilateral global order in which liberal states have the moral

justifications to keep threats at bay, but do not extend their radius of domination. In that

respect, the Law of Peoples sets a normative end to imperialism and suggests instead a

weak domination of a liberal club of states.

Finally, I sketch general guidelines to be taken into consideration in a normative

account of global justice. If Rawls’s ideal theory distorts our grasp of the world and thus

hampers our ability to change or reform it, an alternative theory should start with a

commitment to comprehend the existing unjust global order. This does not mean a purely

descriptive sociology or “physics of society” but a dialectical approach towards

2
understanding what the world is and what it potentially can be, as Milciades Peña says.

Here Rawls’s mystification of the liberal state must be altogether repudiated. Conversely,

the moral egalitarianism that liberalism recognizes as one of its keystone values, should be

adopted as an agenda of political change and a call for an “all purpose means”

egalitarianism: personhood can only be achieved when all humans beings have access to

the material conditions to pursue a worthwhile life, and this will only be attained by setting

an end to exploitation, including the various forms of institutional exploitation enshrined

within the liberal state.

II. The Law of Peoples: a post-American settlement for the end of History

After the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, liberalism seemed to arise as the indisputable

philosophical and political doctrine. Francis Fukuyama championed the thesis that

“History” had come to an end. He did not mean that events or conflicts would stop. Rather

he put forward two claims: firstly, that, as a normative argument, liberal democracy and so-

called free markets proved to be a better option for organizing societies than any other seen

in history since such regimes fulfil better the “need of recognition” that human beings

pursue once their economic needs are met2. He then attached an empirical argument: in

recent history liberal democracy did work, whereas socialism did not, even though in

theory—but in theory only—socialist systems of distribution could be fairer.

Though the author of The End of History and the Last Man is not mentioned in The

Law of Peoples, Fukuyama’s claims underwrite the Rawls’s account for international rights

and justice. Like Fukuyama, Rawls believes that liberal democracy is the best regime ever

2
“Hegel understood that even in modern polities men do not live for the rational pursuit of bread alone, but
seek recognition, and that the Hegelian universal and homogeneous state honoured this honour-seeking side
of modernity by making universal recognition the basis of all rights”. Fukuyama, 252.

3
developed3 and that an ideal world would be one in which all states are fully liberal 4. Rawls

also writes as if he believes that liberal regimes have won the historical battle against other

forms of organization and will have the last say on questions of global order. As liberal

regimes are regarded as moral and political assets, Rawls puts forward The Law of Peoples

as a practical guidance for such a post-History world, as well as a justification for the

coercion that such a world would need in order to keep threats at bay.

But such an account faces two tasks: firstly, to justify the agent that would protect

and reproduce a liberal global order, the liberal state. Rawls took that task to the limits of

mystification: the Rawlsian liberal state is bestowed with a moral nature as only humans

are, as I will explain later on. The second task was to demonstrate that the global order,

currently dominated by liberal states, does not bear responsibility for the crippling poverty,

blatant exploitation and authoritarianism that endure for a large amount of the world’s

population, otherwise a moral justification for the liberal state would crumble into pieces.

Rawls took up this task too: by intertwining and confusing abstract principles and

(mistaken) facts, he attempted to wash clean the history of Western oppression. I will seek

to show why Rawls failed in both attempts.

III.Principles as facts: the ideological inversion

Rawls, his defenders claim, theorizes within the boundaries of ideal theory, thereby arguing

against him with empirical facts misunderstands his point. This is the stance taken by

3
“If a liberal constitutional democracy is, in fact, superior to other forms of society, as I believe it to be, a
liberal people should have confidence in their convictions and suppose that a decent society, when offered due
respect by liberal peoples, may be more likely, over time, to recognize the advantages of liberal institutions
and take steps towards becoming more liberal on its own”. Rawls, 62.
4
“Though we can imagine what we sometimes think would be a happier world—one in which everyone, or
all peoples, have the same faith that we do—that is not the question, excluded as it is by the nature and culture
of free institutions” Rawls, 12.

4
commentators such as Samuel Freeman, who says that radical critiques “fail to recognize

that the Law of Peoples is formulated to apply to ideal conditions among well-ordered

societies”5. Freeman adds: “The Law of Peoples is designed to apply to hypothetical

conditions [...] under current conditions we are in the realm of non-ideal theory and partial

compliance”6. Thus, any criticism to the Law of Peoples should be done within the bounds

of ideal theory.

But we have to consider such a claim very carefully and discern when it is really

honouring Rawls’s arguments and when it is not. Rawls, certainly, offers a theory of an

ideal world in which agents adhere to strict compliance. I will argue, though, that

addressing Rawls only within the limits of ideal theory fails to understand his own

methodology.

Despite its brevity, The Law of Peoples is widely ambitious, not only providing

normative principles for the liberal state’s foreign policy. Indeed, this is just one of its

layers. Rawls goes further: he finds justifications for normative claims on empirical

grounds and historical facts or, more precisely, on laws of history, understood as grand

theoretical generalizations of actual events in history, economics and politics alike.

Outlined between normative and ideal thoughts, sometimes easily deducible from its

omissions or smuggled into ideal accounts, The Law of Peoples is a portrait of how the

West tells itself its own history.

Rawls makes several historical claims, but here I summarize four that are crucial for

his normative stance:

1) Constitutional democracy rules expansionism out7.

5
Freeman, 31-2.
6
Freeman, p. 32, highlight added.
7
Rawls, 54.

5
 2) Liberal peoples do not fight each other8.

3) Domestic causes shape national development9.

4) Liberal peoples are satisfied peoples (their domestic conflicts, if any, are

irrelevant to international democratic peace)10.

The first two claims derive from one another logically: they explain that liberal

democracies have no domestic cause to wage war on other liberal states, therefore

democratic peace is attainable among them. The third claim rules out a global distributive

principle. In borrowing the fourth claim from Raymond Aaron, Rawls does not mean that

such satisfaction amounts to the end of historical, social or political conflicts. What it is

evident for him is that there will not be serious threats against liberal constitutionalism from

the liberal people themselves.

In this chapter, I will address just the first three, for which Rawls sketches few

though important arguments, and presents them as evidence to ground normative assertions.

Democratic peace: fact or mystification?

Rawls addresses the issue of democratic peace in liberal states in sub-chapter 5.3,

“Democratic Peace Seen in History”, and then comes back briefly to the argument in 15.1

“Unfavorable Conditions”. Always backing himself up on academic research, he notes a

“simple empirical regularity”: liberal democracies, he says, have not fought each other

since 180011.

8
Rawls, 8 and 44-54.
9
Rawls, 108 and 117.
10
Rawls, 47.
11
To be considered a liberal democracy, a society must abide by five conditions: equality of opportunity;
decent distribution of income and wealth; society as employer of last resort; basic health care for all citizens,
and public finance of elections. Rawls, 50.

6
 “Of course nations that are now established constitutional democracies have in the

past engaged in empire building. A number of European nations did so in the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries and during the rivalry among Great Britain, France and Germany

before World War I”, admits Rawls in 5.4. Though he speaks of “empire building”, he does

not refer to imperial wars or conquests outside Europe, but within Europe alone, as he

clarifies in 15.1: “The outlaw states of modern Europe in the early modern period—Spain,

France and the Hapsburgs—or more recently, Germany, all tried at one time to subject

Europe to their will. They hoped to spread their religion and culture and sought domination

and glory, not to mention wealth and territory12.” Desire for empire building, he explains,

was supported by a specific class structure and the role of the armed forces underpinning it.

Sailing companies with monopolistic rights (granted by the Crown in an era of

mercantilism) were also important13.

Rawls gives a hint of what he means with class structure and desire. Democratic

peoples “are not swayed by the passion for power and glory, or the intoxicating pride of

ruling. These passions may move a nobility or a lesser aristocracy; [...] yet this class, or

caste rather, does not have power in a constitutional regime”. Additionally, liberal peoples

do not attempt to convert other peoples to their religion, since they have no state religion or

comprehensive doctrine14. Rawls puts it in a rather simple fashion: peoples are not moved

by domination or pursuit of glory, nor “the excitement of conquest and the pleasure of

exercising power over others”15.

Rawls, however, was aware that an empirical regularity could not be taken at face

value, and then added an ideal aspiration: a society complies with external democratic
12
Rawls 53-4 and 105-6. Emphasis added.
13
Rawls, 52-4.
14
Rawls, 47.
15
Rawls, 47.

7
peace if, domestically, it reaches the ideal of a constitutional regime with its supportive

elements. The closer it gets to that point, the more likely it will engage exclusively in wars

of self-defence. And actual liberal societies move towards that idea. Such a hypothesis,

Rawls adds, “underwrites the Law of Peoples as realistic utopia”16.

Nevertheless, there are two major problems in these claims, one of omission and

another of over-generalization. Firstly, in omitting European imperialism outside Europe,

Rawls fails to explain why, say, a society like that of the British, with the longest

parliamentary history (thus free from being ruled by nobilities, though a Royal Family was

kept as a symbol), had reasons to engage in imperialist wars in India, Australia, Africa, and

the Caribbean17. European (and American) imperialism is dismissed altogether. I will come

back to this later on.

Secondly, Rawls over-generalizes in saying that the lack of conflicts between liberal

constitutional democracies since the nineteenth century is explained by the internal

structure of peoples alone. If we take a period marked indisputably by absence of conflict

between European states, the post-war period of 1945 to today, we would see that liberal

democracies refrained from fighting one another and directly colonizing overseas not

because they did not want to, but because they were objectively exhausted after the World

Wars18. Their position was so weak that the United States was able to rise as the global

superpower. The “democratic peace” of European countries is only valid if we have ignored

European imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then idealized a post-

16
Rawls, 53-4.
17
Recall that Rawls does not include Britain in the list of outlaw states of modern Europe, but only Spain,
France, the Hapsburgs and modern Germany.
18
See Tony Judt: “The constituent states of Europe could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or
imperial status [...] Most of the rest of continental Europe [except Britain] had been humiliated by defeat and
occupation. It had not been able to liberate itself from fascism by its own efforts; nor was it able, unassisted,
to keep Communism at bay [...] Only with considerable effort and across long decades did Europeans recover
control of their own destiny”, Judt, p. 7.

8
war period that was not the realization of an ideal, but a mere symptom of the fall of former

empires. The claim that liberal constitutional peoples do not go to war with one another is

sustained on a statistical coincidence that ignores more relevant factors19.

What is, then, democratic peace in Rawls’s account? To my mind, not something to

be taken at face value—as it is presented—but the reification of an ideal. Rawls aspires to

democratic peace but, on his idealization of the European state, he attempts to turn such an

ideal into a fact. The liberal state, says Rawls, has in itself the ability of achieving

democratic peace: he claims that liberal states have no reason to go to war with one

another. In other words, that even on pragmatic, rational or pure realistic grounds, liberal

states are objectively peaceful towards their liberal peers. This is not a normative claim, but

a purely descriptive one for Rawls. But, not only is its empirical validity unacceptable, but

also its logical consequence: that there is a factual rationale to believe that the liberal state

deserves moral nature. This account of historical democratic peace is a factor to justify the

mystification of the liberal state and, in doing that, to sanitize its history of conquest,

exploitation and thus shield it from reformative action.

The myth of sovereignty and economic autarky

Thomas W. Pogge calls it “the most harmful dogma ever conceived”. The “explanatory

nationalism”, as Pogge named it, has been the theory of The Law of Peoples which Liberal

Cosmopolitans have largely criticized on empirical grounds. According to Rawls, national

wealth—and poverty—are the outcome of the political and social institutions of a people

itself, and the political culture, religious, philosophical, and moral traditions that buttress
19
Rawls excludes such historical analysis, but also another that, though unpopular should not be left aside
without examination: after 1945 “it was becoming clear to the capitalist nations that it would be far more
convenient if, instead of fighting among themselves, they could cooperate in exploiting the rest of the world”.
Biel, 56.

9
them, together with “the industriousness and cooperative talents of its members, all

supported by their political virtues”20.

“Explanatory nationalism” matters much because it’s put forward by Rawls (and

followed by some of his commentators such as Mathias Risse and David Miller) to reject

calls for global distributive justice. In brief, the argument claims that, since wealth has

uniquely national causes, there is no need for a global scheme of cooperation, so global

justice does not require wealth being distributed beyond national borders. Although Rawls

includes as an outcome of the Second Original Position a duty of assistance, this does not

imply global redistributive justice21. Liberal states, Rawls says, have the duty to assist

burdened societies for them to build just institutions. Once this target is met, no further

distribution should be done22. The Law of Peoples, he says, is compatible with economic

inequalities among peoples or morally indifferent to it. Cosmopolitans have largely

attacked such claims. They oppose economic and political facts. Pogge argues that the

global order as we know it is cast in such a way to strengthen the interests of the already

strong actors: states, multinational corporations, and elite individuals; a global order that at

the same time impoverishes the poor23.

Interestingly, responses to the Cosmopolitan critique differ from Rawls to some of

his followers, such as Freeman and Reidy. Freeman, as noted above, claims that arguing

with facts from the real world amounts to opposing non-ideal theory while Rawls theorizes

according to strict compliance. Reidy goes further: he argues that according to Rawls

collective peoples are self-sufficient in a way that individual humans can never be, and can
20
Rawls, 108 and 117.
21
Buchanan rightly says that the duty of assistance “seems to resemble an imperfect duty of charity rather
than a duty of justice”, Buchanan, 710. I think, however, that Rawls might have had in mind the Marshall
Plan.
22
Rawls, 115-8
23
Pogge 2001ª, 252.

10
“persist over time as corporate moral agents apart from cooperation with other peoples”24.

In other words, peoples are ideally perfectly self-sufficient, and thus it is irrelevant whether

they do interact in the real world or not. For Freeman and Reidy, ideal theory is an

intellectual barricade and no empirical counterargument can affect it.

Yet Rawls himself did not make such a claim on an ideal-theoretical level. Although

he does not provide further empirical evidence (as he attempts when arguing for democratic

peace) he never says: “ideally, national wealth should be caused by domestic institutions,

values and mores”. He affirms that national wealth (or lack of wealth) derives from

domestic causes factually. Though he phrases it with the more intuitive verb “I believe”, he

is unequivocally referring to the actual world. For him it is a matter of facts, not a matter of

ideals and strict compliance. It’s, yet again, a grand descriptive generalization to justify a

normative principle.

Thus rebutting Rawls with non-ideal facts is perfectly valid and consistent with his

own methods. I believe Liberal Cosmopolitans have successfully broken down explanatory

nationalism describing how the world is economically interdependent and the global order

oppressive and unjust25 (not to mention post-colonial theorists, the 70’s school of

dependency theorists26 and Marx himself). I will only add two points with regard to my

argument. Firstly, that Rawls echoes the cultural-supremacist argument that was popular

until the sixth decade of the twentieth century. In Bad Samaritans, a study of the official

narrative of capitalism and so-called free markets, Ha Joon Chang describes how the

Japanese, German and South Korean people were described by Western historians as “lazy”

in the beginning of the 20th century, and their poor economic performance was blamed on

24
Reidy, 299.
25
See Beitz, Pogge and Caney.
26
See Brewer.

11
their cultural and religious traditions. Nonetheless those same cultures, over time, were

regarded as models of hard work, efficiency and entrepreneurism when their economic

situation improved. When East Asia was poor, Confucianism was held responsible as

catastrophic to development. When the region arose, Confucianism was used to explain the

industriousness of its peoples and their economic success. Cultural-related judgements are

always made post-facto: the cultural thesis of economic development, Chang adds, was

revived with the promotion of free market-oriented policies in the Third World. Those

policies, undertaken from the seventies on after World Bank (WB) and International

Monetary Fund (IMF) political pressures, provoked stagnation in all the countries that

followed them, and then the cultural argument was invoked again to blame the failure of

neo-liberalism on cultural causes27.

Chang supplies some interesting data on the economic global order: between 70 and

90 per cent of the foreign direct investment, 80 per cent of production and 70 per cent of

trade are managed by a handful of rich countries, who make most of the global economic

decisions. The WB, IMF and World Trade Organization (WTO) are largely controlled by

them, and all the loans attach political as well as economic conditions to open markets in

favour of rich countries. Sub-Saharan economies, for example, “have been practically run

by the IMF and the WB over the past quarter of a century”.

Bad Samaritans argues against the official account of capitalism, which holds that

free-trade policies made big economies successful. Chang seeks to demonstrate that infant-

industry protection and high tariffs were the real causes of economic expansion for, say, the

United States and Britain, at least until they were strong enough to compete abroad and take

advantage of free markets. Britain based its own growth on hampering the industrial

27
Chang, 186-196.

12
development of its colonies, by banning advanced manufactures and exports that competed

with its own at home and abroad. The wool industry in Ireland was bankrupted in such a

way28.

In light of those facts, Rawls’s explanatory nationalism (which is then turned into a

normative account of justice in one country) is unsustainable. The history of capitalism has

been the history of interconnection, globalization, and dependence, all consorted by the

diplomatic, political and military pressures that states exert in favour of particular

interests29. The thesis that an individual country develops in isolation is not supported even

by neo-liberal economists, who canvass monetarist policies on a global scale.

Yet the methodological error reflects the same confusion between principles and

facts. The goal of the Law of Peoples is democratic peace; in order to be attained, peoples

should respect their peers. Rawls does not call such respect by its traditional name,

sovereignty, because he relates sovereignty to the right of states to wage war against other

states for rational interests, as well as to enjoy complete autonomy to rule its population,

both entitlements supposedly enshrined in international law. But he himself notes that

international law since WWII tends to limit the right to war to self-defence, and also place

limits on states’ rights to domestic sovereignty in cases of grave violations of human

rights30. The Law of Peoples is a moral reformulation of the latter. Rawls defends such a

post-war definition of sovereignty, with a more moral and less political name—respect

rather than sovereignty—but he does refer to the same concept. The Law of Peoples aims

for, and presupposes, autarkic states. They may cooperate for their mutual benefit through

fair and free trade, but this is additional and irrelevant to their economic performance.

28
Chang, 45.
29
See Wallerstein, especially, “The Politics of Accumulation. The Struggle for Benefits”.
30
Rawls, 25-7.

13
 Thus “explanatory nationalism” is the economic facet of the myth of political

autonomy. Rawls assumes that states make their own policies and decisions without

pressure from stronger equals. They decide whether to industrialize or take on a pastoral

society on their own31, unaffected by an interdependent and hierarchical global order. As

they are politically autonomous, their economic decisions are autonomous too. On ideal

bases this is perfectly valid and, perhaps, morally appealing; as a purported fact it is simply

false. Whether it is compelling to achieve the ideal of perfect autonomy for peoples is yet to

be settled. But making it an empirical explanation distorts reality and places us in a wrong

position to understand our world and then theorize about justice.

IV.The collective usurpation of personhood

Dropping ambiguity: the actual liberal democracies are ideal peoples

Rawls claims that the Law of Peoples relies on a key theoretical distinction between states

and peoples, which is a distinction between the actual and the ideal. According to Rawls,

states enjoy two powers of sovereignty: the right to go to war to pursue state policies, and

“a certain autonomy in dealing with its own people”32. In contrast, ideal peoples give up

such rights, especially the entitlement to attack their peers to gain wealth, territory, glory,

power and so on. States belong to the sphere of non-ideal theory and partial compliance

since they act rationally in pursuit of pragmatic interests, whereas peoples stick to strict

compliance and honour the criterion of reciprocity: they regard other peoples as equals and

thereby do not attack them.

31
Rawls, 117.
32
Rawls, 26.

14
 Rawls says peoples adhere to strict compliance because they have moral nature 33.

When peoples attack their peers—in reason different from self-defence and to impede

egregious violations of human rights—they stop being peoples and thus become outlaw

states. Such an equation may be inverted and the account remains unaffected: if peoples

honour the criterion of reciprocity, they get moral nature.. Unlike humans (that are born

with personhood), peoples are not born peoples: they choose to be so and gain moral nature

by following a particular course of action.

I argue that current and actual Western European constitutional democracies are

peoples in the Rawls’s account34. Although he keeps the distinction between the actual and

the ideal, he is not making room for altogether different countries or a different geopolitical

division35, but he is just setting a political condition for actual liberal societies to become

ideal peoples. And he seeks to provide empirical evidence to demonstrate that such a

political condition has been obeyed since 1800 by the states aforementioned. I am not being

original in this point: David Reidy says that contemporary liberal democracies “are

peoples” in Rawls’s utopia. Charles Beitz says that “Rawls writes as if he believes” that

existing constitutional democracies satisfy his own account of peoples36.

Why it is unacceptable to confer personhood on states

All human beings have personhood37. This is not a material or social attribute, but a

statement of moral nature that makes us all equal in moral worth. Personhood encompasses

33
Rawls, 23-5.
34
“The possibility of democratic peace is not incompatible with actual democracies.” Rawls, 48-9.
35
“An important role of a people’s government, however arbitrary a society’s boundaries may appear from a
historical point of view, is to be the representative and effective agent of a people as they take responsibility
for their territory...” Rawls, 38-9.
36
Reidy, 295; Beitz, 690.
37
On the account of personhood, see Griffin, 32-7.

15
all the differences that make individuals unique as well as those that are often defined as

group differences: skin colour, country of birth, sex, sexual orientation, and social class.

There is no human characteristic, individual or social, that excludes a human from

personhood. Holding personhood grants us basic rights that we deny, for instance, to plant

life and animals: the right to life, as well as rights not to be enslaved, or not to be tortured.

Perhaps there will be a time when people grant some sort of personhood to other mammals.

For the moment it is a uniquely human and individual attribute.

But Rawls turned personhood into a sort of collective quality, an attribute not just

for individuals but for a specific form of collective organization developed in modern

times: the state. Rawls does not call it personhood but rather “moral nature” 38. Still, both

concepts are equivalent: they make their holders subjects of moral respect. Rawls declares

that the “Law of Peoples”, as a “political conception of right and justice that applies to the

principles and norms of international law and practice”39, pursues democratic peace and

stability for the right reasons as its main moral purpose. And such an ideal is possible if

states are able to act reasonably and not just rationally40. As a parallel condition, peoples

must be reasonable in their domestic social institutions, and they may fulfil this by either

being liberal, with liberal just constitutional governments, or by merely being decent. In

order to accommodate non-liberal peoples in the Society of Peoples, Rawls makes room for

societies with state religion and in which there is no universal suffrage. Yet, says Rawls,

these societies should respect a list of fundamental rights and permit members of minorities

to be heard by official authorities (Kazanistan)41:

38
For an account on Rawls’s peoples, see Petit, who does not question the moral nature of peoples, though.
39
Rawls, 3.
40
Rawls 23-30.
41
Rawls attaches a third feature which is more descriptive than normative: peoples are bound by “common
sympathies”.

16
 Liberal peoples have a certain moral character. Like citizens in domestic society, liberal peoples are
both reasonable and rational, and their rational conduct, as organized and expressed in their elections
and votes, and the laws and policies of their government, it is similarly constrained by the sense of
what is reasonable. As reasonable citizens in domestic society, offer to cooperate on fair terms with
other citizens, so (reasonable) liberal (or decent) peoples offer fair terms of cooperation to other
peoples. A people will honour these terms when assured that other peoples will do so as well42.

Thus internally, peoples may differ, but their foreign policy should be the same:

they are not offensive at all. Rawls, following Kant, grounds moral nature on agency, which

itself is based on reason. Peoples can follow the law of nature and act rationally for their

pragmatic interests. Yet they are endowed with reason to act according to the moral law, to

the Law of Peoples43.

The dissolution of the individual

Beitz and Pogge44 question the fact that Rawls gives moral relevance to state-like peoples

rather than individuals. Pogge says Rawls’s peoples don’t reflect the facts of the

contemporary world. Beitz argues that an “analogy” between individuals and peoples is

incorrect. I think these criticisms point in the right direction, but do not go deep enough,

because Rawls is not making an analogy or simply an extension. He is literally conferring

“moral nature” upon states and, with it, all the natural rights that liberalism, on normative

grounds, grants on humans for the very fact of being humans.

Among other attributes, moral nature entails individual autonomy; that is, as Griffin

puts it, the exercise of “choosing paths through life and being at liberty to pursue them”.

Autonomy requires agency, yet abstracting from the biological species and grounding

42
Rawls, 25.
43
As Kemp summarizes the Kantian thinking: “The supreme principle of morality is the supreme principle of
practical reason; and this is the principle of autonomy, which implies that the determining ground of the moral
will must be, not any empirical rule or concept, but the formal concept of the lawfulness in general, which is a
concept of pure reason”, Kemp, 61.
44
See Pogge 2001, p. 248 and ff, and Beitz 2000, 678.

17
agency merely on reason, says Griffin, “is dangerous. It turns the holder of rights into a

highly spare, abstract identity, characterized solely by rationality and intentionality. This

goes too far”45.

In Rawls’s account, however, collective agents get moral nature and, with it,

autonomy in an individual fashion. The collective appears as an individual, as one person

that makes choices. He assumes: A people decide to migrate... a people decide to take a

pastoral and leisurely life46. As in the Catholic Eucharist, Rawls’ doctrine involves a kind

of transubstantiation: a people become truly, and not metaphorically, an agent that acts as

an individual. This involves a high price to pay: here the actual individual, who lives within

that people, dissolves, fades away—each and every one. Individual decisions appear as

being made by the collective and politically driven for the collective benefit. It may be

argued that conferring moral nature upon a people does not imply automatically to give up

the free choice of the individual, especially if such society is liberal, but Rawls repeatedly

attributes to peoples choices that are made by individuals in the real world, as the next

quote about migration proves: “People must recognize that they cannot make up for failing

to regulate their numbers [...] by migrating into another people’s territory without their

consent” 47. This claim is absurd: save rare exceptions, migration is an individual decision

mainly driven by the pursuit of better opportunities

The multiplicity of voices and paths to choose in a worthwhile life that interplay in a

collective all become one voice, one path, one person. The state-like people seems

homogeneous and consensual. This sole feature of granting personhood upon collectives

45
Griffin, 34-5.
46
About the latter, see Rawls 117.
47
Rawls, 8 and 39

18
jeopardizes our concepts of pluralism, individual (human) autonomy and each person’s

right to be different and dissent from collective decisions.

A moral shield for the state

However, there is an even more serious moral implication here. Holding moral nature gives

humans a moral shield from harmful and destructive action. While humans are born with

moral nature, Rawls’s peoples get theirs by abiding by the Law of Peoples. But the crucial

fact is that Rawls requires a very low threshold to grant such moral nature on states, so low

that all Western liberal democracies (excepting the United States) can claim they are

complying with it already. In acquiring moral nature, state-like peoples become, too,

subjects of moral concern and protection48. And the question is whether we are eager to

accept the consequences of such a move. The state, undoubtedly, has produced many good

outcomes: some rich states have been able to guarantee, for a large percentage of their

population, a set of political rights and material welfare never seen before. In Western

Europe—a region that benefited from four centuries of unfettered imperial conquest—

hunger has nearly disappeared, people do not die from curable diseases, and the rate of

illiteracy is close to zero. Politically, save for the international uprising of 1968 and some

domestic conflicts, the West has enjoyed peaceful times since 1945. Those facts led some

thinkers such as Raymond Aaron to claim that liberal societies are “satisfied peoples”, an

idea that Rawls endorses and extends: “their basic needs are met, and their fundamental

interests are fully compatible with those of other democratic peoples”49.

48
As Fukuyama puts it: “By this Hegelian scheme, one can distinguish between a human being and a rock, a
hungry bear, and a clever monkey, but one cannot distinguish between the first man who kills a fellow human
being in a battle and a Mother Teresa who sacrifices her worldly happiness to follow the dictates of God”.
Fukuyama, 252.
49
Rawls, 47-8.

19
 Yet this picture is romanticised. The United States, for instance, owes a tremendous

debt to its non-white citizens, who are underrepresented in politics and overrepresented in

prisons. Women still lack equality of opportunity in all Western states. It’s worth

mentioning that other constitutional democracies outside the West have yet to grant

minimum well-being or democratic standards, such as India, with a third of its population

below the line of poverty, or Israel, that segregates Palestinians, even those with Israeli

citizenship.

And even assuming that this particular liberal organization is good, the idealization

of the state entails another high price to pay: it curtails our capacity to reform it. If states

are worthy of moral respect, why should we change them? Regarding them as the

realization of a moral or political satisfaction echoes a Hegelian idea of the perfection of

the Prussian state, and grants states a safeguard against reformative action. If a state-like

people is to be preserved, then it needs not be changed or rethought50.

Perhaps many moralists, politicians and citizens agree with this. But such a stance

idealizes something that is far from being perfect, as many empirical examples show, such

as the liberal states of Latin America51. Rawls would argue that those states were not fully

liberal or not fully just, getting them out of the liberal picture. But that leave us with the

question of whether the liberal state is workable in deprived or culturally different societies,

or whether liberal institutions are good as such.

50
Beitz explains that Rawls’s “social liberalism” conceives of a division of labour: justice and freedom are
domestic tasks of societies, whereas the international arena is to guarantee a peaceful environment for them to
flourish. Beitz, 677.
51
Replicating Western laws and institutional designs, the constitutional liberal state was transplanted into
Latin America with dubious outcomes: the region is the most unequal in the world; in some countries such as
Mexico, liberal laws and institutions were a facade to cover authoritarian regimes for nearly two centuries.
Colombia, a long-term liberal democracy, is at the same time going through the longest domestic war in the
region. None of the South American democracies could resist the strike of military dictatorships or
authoritarian regimes, ironically fuelled by the region’s most self-celebrated democracy, the United States.

20
 But these are false problems since they fail to see an unjust global order. As said

above, the world, opposite to Rawls’s version of perfect autonomy, is ruled by a hierarchy

among states where the United States, supported by what Noam Chomsky calls its client

states, exercises a role of superpower, dominating other states by relations of subordination,

and at times, direct military invasion52. Political and economic development in the Third

World has been largely hampered by these relations. Sometimes powerful states hinder

their peer’s abilities to develop just regimes, often with the venal collaboration of the

governments and elites of such regimes. The liberal state, it is quite easy to show, is not

good as such.

Besides, the claim that the liberal state prospers in isolation is wrong. By contrary,

“overly generous privileges [...] are not innocent errors of institutional design, but hugely

important to the wealth and convenience of the corporations, citizens and governments of

the rich countries. Our lifestyle absolutely depends upon our appropriation of the natural

resources of poor countries, ”53 Pogge writes. I will argue later that Western lifestyle

depends not only on the appropriation of cheap natural resources, but also on the

appropriation of cheap labour.

Dominated by liberal states, the global order is flagrantly unjust to the majority of

the world’s population, who live under a “capability-denying poverty”, as Pogge has called

it. Rawls himself claims that equality of opportunity, decent distribution of income and

52
Rawls puts forward a moral—not empirical—hierarchy of societies. At the top are listed liberal
constitutional peoples, followed by decent peoples, forming the two of them the Society of well-ordered
peoples. Then come three kinds of societies that do not meet the requirements of moral nature. If we regard
reasonableness as a measure, taking reasonableness as not being a threat to other peoples, we should then put
at the third place “burdened societies”, that are so poor that they cannot meet minimal standards of justice but
they do not represent a menace either. They are followed by “benevolent absolutisms” that deny political
rights to their members but do not threaten peoples. “Outlaw states” come up at the bottom of the list. They
act rationally and so pose a threat to democratic peace.
53
Pogge 2006, 220.

21
wealth, and basic health care for all citizens are all conditions a regime must meet to be

just. Otherwise its inhabitants lack both the ability to choose a worthwhile life and

participate in the political life of the community54. Such capability-denying poverty denies

personhood in reality to individuals. Lacking material conditions to pursuit a worthwhile

life, neither of the liberal aspirations can be met by the individual, and rights become

“purely formal” as Rawls himself claims. I will come back later to this point.

The paradox is evident: while we grant moral nature (personhood) to ideal states we

tolerate a global order that denies personhood to actual people and treats them as suppliers

of cheap labour and natural resources. While the person is deprived from moral nature in

fact, the artificial people is bestowed with it on the ideal level, turning it into a subject of

our moral respect and protection.

The Post-American Settlement

The Rawlsian mystification of contemporary liberal states simply could not work with the

United States of America. All the normative models for peoples (that Rawls attempts to

demonstrate as factual) clash with the conduct of the global superpower. The United States

is clearly an outlaw state that pursues wealth, natural resources, might and glory at the

expense of other states, even (somewhat) constitutional democracies. Rawls had two

choices: to deal with the US and do his best to justify a blatantly immoral superpower on

ideal grounds and then portrait a realistic utopia dominated by a global police-officer, or

simply to rule out the US from the Law of Peoples. Evidently, Rawls opted for the latter.

And this is neither a minor concession nor just a mere symptom of theorizing from

the ideal. To my mind, The Law of Peoples brings an interesting and deep critique to the

54
Rawls, 50.

22
US—hidden, as many important things in Rawls’s book, behind the ideal. Rawls rather

suggests a multilateral global order in which an imperial superpower is outright excluded.

Although Rawls never uses the term “multilateral”, he repeatedly emphasizes a scheme of

horizontal cooperation among well-ordered peoples. In the Law of Peoples, the current

unipolar superpower has no moral place. Conversely, power would rest on the Society of

Peoples as a whole or in confederations of Peoples.

When speaking of “democratic peace seen in history”, the US is called bluntly an

“allegedly” constitutional democracy for its aggressive foreign policy. This criticism, in my

reading, points at the internal structure of the US too. On ideal grounds, Rawls claims that

deliberation must be set free from “the curse of money”, otherwise politics “is dominated

by corporate and other organized interests who through large contributions to campaigns

distort if not preclude public discussion and deliberation” 55. It is obvious to me that this

criticism targets the US, where private financing of campaigns is not only legal but a matter

of cynical pride, that often turns the American Congress into “a bargaining chamber” in

which private interests are protected. If it is true that Rawls’s criticism is done from an

‘ideal-theory’ perspective, it is also true that such practices are more visible and

determinant in the US than in any other actual Western liberal constitutional state.

Yet other features of American policies are criticized, though indirectly. Writing

about trade he says: “the wealthier economies will not attempt to monopolize the market, or

to conspire to form a cartel, or to act as an oligopoly”56. About loans for worse-off societies,

55
Rawls says: “reasonably just constitutional democratic government” cannot be directed by “the interests of
large concentrations of private economic and corporate power [...] With the great wealth being in the control
of economic power, is it any wonder that congressional legislation is, in effect, written by lobbyists, and
Congress becomes a bargaining chamber in which laws are bought and sold?” Rawls, 24. When he speaks of
the internal requirement a constitutional democracy ought to fulfil, public finance of elections comes up “to
ensure that representatives and other officials are sufficiently independent of particular social and economic
interests”, Rawls, 50.
56
Rawls, 43.

23
Rawls demands that no political condition to become liberal should be attached. Again,

these are ideal points, but Rawls has in mind the United States. He is claiming that the

realistic utopia cannot be morally justifiable with a country like America and its current

role.

In 1988, the historian Paul Kennedy put forward an account of “the rise and fall of

the great powers”. Through an analysis of European empires from the Renaissance to our

times, he claimed that international superpowers lose their competitiveness to keep up with

military expenses. New superpowers arise because they are relatively better-off to spend on

the armed forces. Since then, Kennedy foresaw that the US started to fall into that situation

and it could be replaced by a multipolar order dominated by the US, Russia, the European

Union, Japan and, perhaps, China57. Michael Mendelbaum, in a book recently published

(2010), argues that in 20 years’ time the American debt service will exceed its defence

budget58. Whether Rawls anticipated the American decline or not, the striking fact is that

the Law of Peoples rules out a global superpower. Alongside that absence, important in

itself, there is a succinct though clear criticism of the US’s foreign policy and its zeal for

corrupting its politics with the curse of money (a “curse” idea that it is also romanticized,

but I will not go into that here).

So the realistic utopia excludes the US (or any other state in its place) and its

position of global police-officer. This seems to be a little moral concession. It is important

though because, on normative grounds, it sets an end to any imperialistic enterprise, at least

on territorial and military terms. Imperialism turns out to be morally indefensible even for a

utopia eagerly committed to the status quo. Rawls may defend the boundaries as they are

57
See Kennedy, XV-XXV.
58
“The 21st century seems tilted towards peace, but this tilt is scarcely irreversible, and if it should be
reversed, America's fiscal position will hamper efforts to cope with that reversal”. See Walden, 37.

24
now regardless of their historical arbitrariness and, in doing that, he makes no room for any

rectificatory justice of past conquest or exploitation59. But Rawls’s insistence on mutual

respect of territorial integrity, even in favour of outlaw states, burdened societies or

benevolent absolutisms, marks a normative standpoint against expansionism. The Law of

Peoples is thus a post-American utopia, in which America may remain the wealthier state,

though it should give up its foreign policy and its corrupted domestic politics if it is to be a

Law of Peoples.

And that means that, even weak, the Law of Peoples becomes a critique of the US

as it is here and now: harmful to other peoples and opportunist to the extent of asking its

citizens to fight wars for glory, wealth and domination; bad Samaritan in lending money

with morally unacceptable conditions; advantageous in its international trade policies and,

even worse, corrupted in the core of its liberal institutions by private and corporate money.

Some would argue that this is an over-interpretation of Rawls. I think the mere absence of a

global superpower is very relevant. Disregarding the question about how such ideal and

multilateral would work without a liberal police-officer, the fact is that morally American

imperialism is excluded from the utopia.

V. Shifting to non-ideal: Exploitation and racialized division of labour

The post-war British people “might have been the luckiest generation in human history”, as

Ken Livingstone believes, former mayor of London and one of the baby-boomers: “we

were brought up with free healthcare and free education, and we left school at a time when

unemployment barely existed”. That picture completely contrasts with the plight of London

inhabitants described by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England in

59
Rawls, 38-9.

25
184460. Images of British hippies happily dancing in Hyde Park in the seventies

counterpoints the “idiocy and cretinism” that estranged labour produces in the worker,

according to the Marx of the Manuscripts who had England in mind, too. Exploitative

labour disappeared from the Western European picture and was substituted by an eight-

hour’s journey, labour rights, Keynesianism and the welfare state.

Unfortunately exploitation was simply relocated on a global scale. The same “mass

of wretchedness and misery” that Curate Alston—quoted by Engels—denounced in 1844 in

his Parish in Bethnal Green is now blatantly visible in Asian slums. Reporting for The

Observer, Gethin Chamberlain tells how forced labour and excessive overtime persist in

factories that produce clothes for Gap, Next and Marks & Spencer for 26 pence per hour.

His description of contemporary Gurgeon—satellite city of Delhi—is nearly the same as

the Engel’s industrial London, with children “roaming the streets for hours on end [...]

playing in the filthy streets where pigs rummage through rubbish and stinking open drains

carry sewage”.

Accounts of the situation of Chinese workers of Foxconn, a 400,000-employee

factory of Apple, Dell, Nintendo, Nokia, and Sony devices, could have been written by the

young Marx: “as they make the world’s finest gadgets, it seems that while they are

controlling machines, the machines are also dominating them”, as wrote the undercover

reporter Liu Zih Yi. Another account of the Foxconn situation adds, “[workers] live in a

sort of indentured servitude. They work all day long, stopping only to quickly eat or to

sleep. They repeat the same routine again and again except on public holidays. For many

workers, the only escape from this cycle was to end their life61”. Such workers earn 130

dollars a month.
60
Engels, “The great towns”.
61
See http://gizmodo.com/5542527/undercover-report-from-foxconns-hell-factory.

26
 Such exploitation seems to me to neglect the Kantian imperative to not

treat humans as means. Exploited labour and the poverty it entails is in

practice a deprivation of the “all purpose means” that Rawls requires for the liberal

freedoms and rights not to be “purely formal”62. We can then derive that denying such all

purpose means amounts to denying human dignity. An exploited worker is treated as a

supplier of cheap labour, as means. And that is precisely what the global order does: a

relocation of personhood-denial that is global in scope and racist in essence. While the

Western white working class gained rights and well-being (and I think this was a great

political conquest that should not be reversed; it is a tiny minority that enjoys the benefits

of global exploitation, not the working and middle classes of the West), non-whites

continue to bear the burden of toil and wretchedness, as did Latin American indigenous

during the Spanish empire; enslaved African blacks until the nineteenth century, and Asians

in the 21st; all the while with women enduring the worst part, often being placed at home to

carry out domestic labour with no wages, labour rights, nor recognition of their work in the

GDP63. Relocation of global exploitation is based on the racial prejudice that the non-white

poor should bear the destructive consequences of the mass accumulation of capital. Pogge

is right in pointing out that Western wealth is fed by the appropriation of cheap natural

resources from the Third World. Yet he fails to see the appropriation of cheap labour from

the developed to the underdeveloped world which represents, by far, larger amounts of

wealth than natural resources.

Pluralism, cultural relativism and “exploitation denial”

62
Rawls, 15.
63
For an account of a global division of labour on racial grounds, see Wallerstein.

27
Presented as an appraisal of the virtues of wealthy and successful peoples, Rawls’s

explanatory nationalism is the denial of global exploitation. But as its empirical weight is

so weak and easily contestable, it would have not been sufficient to reject a global

distributive principle. An effective account for exploitation-denial needed a stronger claim,

one with normative appeal, and Rawls found it in the mutual respect among peoples.

Following the analogy persons-peoples, Rawls says that peoples deserve the same respect

that individuals do; actually, the right to such respect is the core of the Law of Peoples. As

liberal societies demand to be respected by their peers, liberal societies, honouring the

criterion of reciprocity, do not intervene in other countries’s affairs.

This concept of respect, however, takes us to the same point critiqued above: that

such respect among peoples is presented as a fact, as if it has been achieved already;

explanatory nationalism is its empirical face: in the absence of global interdependence,

exploitation and poverty seems to be mores, practices ingrained in peoples’s culture or

forms of society domestically and consensually decided without external interference. And

being then a domestic issue, the only thing that liberals can do is sit back and respect64. The

confusion between facts and ideals becomes dramatic here: In reality we have a global

order that relies on a racial division of labour and enhances mass accumulation of capital.

But we can do very little because we consider that such global order does not exist. For

Rawls, we regard such “capability-denying poverty” in Pogge’s terms, or personhood-

denial in my own, as the result of the exercise of autonomy among peoples.

Non-ideal theory as a duty

64
See Pogge 2002, 45.

28
Liberal cosmopolitans have put forward three insightful critiques to The Law of Peoples:

first, that there is a global scheme of cooperation (which I prefer to de-romanticize and call

“global scheme of exploitation”) therefore a global redistributive principle should apply.

Second, that collective agents ought not to be subjects of our moral concern, but humans.

Third, that there is no moral reasoning to say that principles of A Theory of Justice should

not apply globally.

However, the cosmopolitan assessment of the Law of Peoples has not pushed far

enough. From my point of view, the most powerful critique to Rawls has come from the

Jamaican philosopher Charles W. Mills. He claims, and I follow him fully in this point, that

the ideal-theory orientation of Anglo-American philosophy “in its post-Rawls resurrection

of the last few decades has overall been a disaster, or, at the very least, has greatly hindered

rather than helped the project of theorizing and bringing about social justice”65. Ideal theory

abstracts away “realities crucial to our comprehension” of actual injustice and therefore

“guarantees that the idealized model will never be achieved”66. He then proposes to

theorize from a non-ideal framework, useful to recognize historical and current relations of

oppression, exploitation and domination, which have largely favoured whites. Shifting to

non-ideal theory moves us to tear apart the Rawlsian historical narrative that ignores the

oppression of non-whites and women (which, I add, is crucial to underpin a racialized

global division of labour). He then suggests a descriptive “racial contract”, which I will not

discuss here67.

As Mills argues, ideal theory sanitizes an oppressive reality. I have sought to

demonstrate that Rawls presents ought as is, the ideal as the actual. Society appears as a

65
Mills 2010, 1.
66
Mills 2005, 170.
67
See Contract and domination, that Mills cowrote with Carole Pateman.

29
“cooperative venture for mutual advantage”. A global order dominated by a hierarchy of

states is presented as peaceful and democratic by moral merits; economic interdependence

and global domination are supplanted by a perfect autarky of states. Ideally, we may or may

not aspire to such a definition of society, global democratic peace, and economic and

political autonomy of peoples. Yet Rawls does his best to show them as real historical and

social conditions. Principles are turned into facts, and facts are swept under the carpet. In

doing this, oppressive and exploitative agents—states—become subjects of moral

protection. The global economy, that favours the rich, appears as non-guilty of global

poverty and a racialized division of labour. Domination of a global superpower is simply

overlooked, giving no account of how to transition from an arbitrary American de facto

global government to a multilateral and democratic order. In Marxist terms68, Rawls carries

out an inversion of reality: oppression appears as freedom, and poverty as the outcome of

the exercise of perfect autonomy. Through such sanitation of history, there is little need to

reform the global order. Quite the opposite, we just have to abide by democratic peace and

the utopia will be realized. It will be task for autarkical states to become fully just and deal

with their problems.

VI.Conclusion

So Rawls’s very theoretical apparatus hampers the theorizing of justice and must be

abandoned altogether. But how can it be replaced? I will sketch an account of non-ideal

theory to address the global world, taking Rawls’s Law of Peoples as a negative paradigm.

1. Descriptive sociology as normative principle

68
Villoro, 40-57.

30
It would sound pretty obvious to say here that the first task of the philosopher of justice

should be to grasp a descriptive account of the world, taking into consideration an objective

history of exploitation, and then provide a theory of what is to be done, how, and why. Yet

this is not enough. As Peña says, society cannot be studied “objectively” as is chemistry or

biology. The subject who studies society intervenes on the object with her values and

judgements, biasing the outcome of what it is and what should be. Facts produce ideals and

ideals determine facts69. Sociology, then, is not science but consciousness, or self-

consciousness. Ideal theory should not be replaced by a “physics of society” but by a

consciousness of society that understands facts and values as human products that, at the

same time, shape the understanding of the philosopher. This dialectical thinking of facts

and values grasps their difference, but does not detach one another.

2. Exploitation, not poverty

Rawls argues that economic performance stems from domestic institutions and values.

Many economists and political scientists are ready to buttress such an idea (see Risse, who

argues that the current global order does not harm, but helps the poor). Causes of poverty

remain empirically disputable and insofar as poverty occurs morally far from the West,

conservative philosophers will just recommend charity instead of rectificatory justice: from

a Rawlsian standpoint, even from a critical one such as Pogge’s, remedying poverty

becomes a matter of helping the poor. Pogge has suggested that tackling extreme poverty

would be so cheap for the West that there is no reason not to do it. This approach misses the

point of an actual process of accumulation that benefits a tiny elite. Instead, following Mills

yet again, I think that exploitation should be adopted as a moral category. Exploitation,

unlike poverty, is not a phenomenon but a relation through which one part of humankind

69
See Peña.

31
benefits from another’s labour. Exploitation violates Kant’s categorical imperative not to

treat persons as means and sets the burden of justice not on the oppressed but on the

oppressor.

3. Personhood: from moral to material equality

Rawls himself agrees that rights and freedoms, without all-purpose means, are purely

formal. Over the last fifty years, human rights have been recognized in covenants and

international treaties, at the same time that the impoverished Third World has seen little

progress. For many of its inhabitants life means plight and toil. “The misery of being

exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all”,

The Economist cynically responds with the famous quote of Robinson when speaking about

a rise of strikes in Chinese factories, and its corresponding relocation of exploitative labour

to Vietnam, India, or wherever the poor can be proletarized. The current global order

violates human dignity twice: severe poverty denies personhood, and exploitation treads on

the Kantian categorical imperative of not treating people (whatever individuals or groups)

as means. It’s this global order that underpins such violations. We should not give it moral

tools to coerce, but change it altogether.

0-0-0

32
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