Introduction

The worry may be raised that the more demanding a conception of global justice is with respect to how states may treat their own citizens, the more readily a rationale is provided for states to intervene against each other in the name of upholding justice. Accordingly, it may be thought that to the extent that liberal cosmopolitanism, as we may call it, understands the limits of global toleration to be determined not just by how states respect and honor the basic rights of their citizens (such as the right to life, bodily integrity, basic protection of the law, basic subsistence) but also by how they promote and protect their liberal democratic political rights (such as the right of free speech and expression, democratic political participation and so on), it is a conception of global justice with strong interventionist tendencies. In contrast to liberal cosmopolitanism (henceforth also “cosmopolitanism” for short), some commentators propose a more cautionary and modest conception of liberal global justice, one which is committed to a shorter list of universal human rights, limited to basic human needs and security. Rawls's “Law of Peoples” is one key example of this more modest liberal internationalism. Rawls's liberal internationalism does not require all societies to be liberal as a matter of justice. It recognizes that certain nonliberal but decent societies can qualify as equal members in good standing in a just Society of Peoples.