ABSTRACT
In James Nickel's view, John Rawls is driven to his ultraminimalist answer to the list question by, first, an excessive desire to accommodate the self-determination of certain internationally peaceful but non-liberal and/or non-democratic states and, second, a wrongheaded tendency to think of human rights primarily as norms regulating international coercion. Noting the ways in which Rawls limits "human rights proper" to a subset of both liberal democratic rights and the rights set out in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Nickel characterizes, and objects to, Rawls's answer to "the list question" as "ultraminimalist." Rawls developed an ideal of the just state in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. Both forms of toleration—toleration as non-interference wherever human rights proper are secure and toleration as status recognition and respect wherever well-ordered social cooperation is secure—are principled and liberal. One of the things human rights do is specify the conditions and limits of morally required and acceptable toleration.
