ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to show that John Rawls's international theory is in various ways incoherent with his domestic theory of justice. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls offers his account of domestic justice, meant to provide moral guidance for the assessment, design, and reform of the institutional order of one society. The structural difference between the tasks Rawls assigns to the parties in his domestic and international original positions is associated with two distinct conceptions of economic justice. Rawls's domestic theory is three-tiered and, through the middle tier, systematically incorporates sensitivity to empirical information about the distributional effects of alternative feasible institutional arrangements. Rawls's proposed accommodation presupposes humanity's division into mutually distinct and culturally cohesive peoples. Central to both texts are thought experiments involving a fictional deliberative forum, the "original position," composed of rational deliberators, or "parties.".
