ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief review of John Rawls's theory of justice for a single country and the cosmopolitan theories that developed out of it. It summarizes Rawls's law of peoples and some of his puzzling statements about its justification. The chapter explains why Rawls's fundamental norm of legitimacy rules out cosmopolitanism, and how Rawls's conception of a people led him to reject international egalitarianism. It suggests that Rawls's morality of states may be more plausible than is commonly supposed, especially when contrasted to rival cosmopolitan theories. Rawls's vision of a well-ordered society of peoples is, in essence, that each people should be just by its own lights within the bare constraints of political legitimacy, and that peoples should be good neighbors to each other. In Political Theory and International Relations Charles Beitz set out three approaches to normative international political theory: realism, cosmopolitan morality, and the morality of states.
