Jacques Maritain: An Intellectual Profile

VII. John Rawls and Jacques Maritain on the Law of Peoples

   JOHN RAWLS AND JACQUES MARITAIN ON THE LAW OF PEOPLES In a commencement address delivered at the University of Notre Dame in May , United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, “It is particularly shameful that the United States, the most prosperous and successful country in the history of the world, should be one of the least generous in terms of the share of its gross national product it devotes to helping the world’s poor.”1 He admitted that the United States is the second highest contributor in foreign aid after Japan in absolute terms, spending close to $ billion a year, but he called for debt relief and for volunteers to train groups of people in poor nations in the use of information technology. Kofi Annan offered no description, let alone justification , of principles that would require such a financial commitment on the part of the United States. Seemingly, justice, not charity, demands it. Kofi Annan cited John Paul II’s “burning desire to see the benefits of human progress more widely and equitably shared,” concurring with him in the hope that given the world’s increasing interdependence, individuals and peoples will accept “responsibility for their fellow human beings, for all the earth’s inhabitants.”  . Reuters, May , . John Paul II has frequently urged rich nations to assist poor ones. His appeal is made both within a theological context and within the natural-law tradition and its concept of the brotherhood of mankind. John Paul II prefers the term “human solidarity .” In the largely secular world of the West, distinctively Christian morality has lost some of its efficacy as a motivator. But certain principles remain difficult to ignore or repudiate. Since the Enlightenment , philosophers have attempted to justify, on purely secular grounds, principles grounded in Christianity. This is reflected in the plethora of metaphors suggesting responsibilities heretofore unacknowledged. We speak of a “global village” and the responsibility of the “international community” to “underdeveloped countries .” John Paul II himself speaks of the “rich North” and “impoverished South.” A cosmopolitan outlook is thought to trump national concerns. No program, national or international, is proposed without moral justification. Often that justification is advanced without any reference to a supporting concept of nature and human nature and often in contravention to the otherwise purely materialistic philosophy of the proponent. Echoing Hobbes and Rousseau, John Dewey, for example, assumed it to be one of his tasks to provide a pragmatic or naturalistic justification of those values formerly supported on “supernaturalistic” grounds, grounds critical intelligence can no longer accept. One of the most recent attempts in the tradition of Dewey to justify global concerns is that of John Rawls. The parameters of discourse have shifted somewhat. Dewey had to contend only with Western modes of thought, working within an inherited Western culture, in which traditional morality was more or less intact. Rawls has to contend with “multiculturalism” and “procedural democracy,” the latter barring governing authorities from favoring any one concept of the good. Dewey’s task was to defend tradition-      al morality on purely materialistic grounds. Now with that morality having virtually disappeared, Rawls has had to start from scratch, so to speak. One can appreciate the enormity of his task, deprived of the natural law tradition and unable to acknowledge the biblical roots of Western culture. In reading John Rawls’s, the Law of Peoples2 and Christopher Morris’s An Essay on the Modern State,3 I noted with some interest that the issues these authors consider were addressed by Jacques Maritain in the Walgreen Lectures that he delivered at the University of Chicago in  and published as Man and the State.4 On the surface the pragmatic naturalistic approach of Rawls would seem to be the antithesis of the natural-law approach of Maritain, although in the last analysis Rawls comes close to a natural-law justification of his distributionist policies. Morris, like Maritain, challenges the notion that nations are sovereign entities. Rawls is perhaps the best known and most often quoted contemporary philosopher in North America. No graduate student of philosophy in any Western university is unaware of his seminal work, A Theory of Justice (). The James B. Conant Professor Emeritus of Harvard University has in the Law of Peoples expanded his theory of justice from that of a single, liberal, democratic society to “the global network of nations,” extending the idea...