Jim Nickel has criticized the account of human rights Rawls gives in The Law of Peoples as “ultraminimalist” and as wrongheadedly grounded in an excessive desire to accommodate illiberal and nondemocratic polities and in a confused identification of human rights with the regulation of coercive intervention in the international order. I show that Rawls’s position is not “ultraminimalist” and, more importantly, that it is more complex and attractive than Nickel (and other critics) recognizes. Rawls distinguishes between the human rights necessary and sufficient to there to being no principled grounds for coercive intervention into a state and those necessary and sufficient to there being a principled ground to accord a state status recognition and respect in the international order. This distinction reflects a distinction in The Law of Peoples between two forms of liberal toleration: toleration as mere non-interference and toleration as recognition or status respect. I discuss the role of each in the law of peoples and show how each is both principled and liberal.
