Rawls's List of Human Rights and Self-Determination of Peoples

Scholars have struggled with identifying the exact reasoning that leads to the list of human rights in Rawls's Law of Peoples. This essay argues that the list can best be explained by a reasoning based on the value of self-determination of peoples. At the same time, it argues that this reasoning still has serious difficulties. In particular, it is necessary to clarify whether human rights may always be enforced by coercive means against states that violate them. However, once this has been clarified, the balance of reasons on which Rawls’s argument rests no longer indisputably supports his conclusion.