Cosmopolitans have criticized Rawls’s Law of Peoples for abandoning the egalitarianism of A Theory of Justice, a retreat they trace to his concern to articulate justice as fairness as a freestanding political conception. Yet the comprehensive liberalisms they propose to underwrite as global distributive principles fall short to the extent that they neglect Kant’s defense in the Doctrine of Right (1797) of property rights as a “permissive law (lex permissiva) of practical reason.” Were Rawls’s critics to utilize this resource, the law of peoples might be refashioned in a manner both affirming Rawls’s earlier universalism and immune to claims that any comprehensive liberalism must betray its commitments to toleration and reciprocity.
