Fifteen years after the publication of Rawls’s The Law of Peoples (1999), the reception of it is divided. While some dismiss it as antiquated (e.g. Buchanan), others have defended it by stressing the specific aim Rawls pursued with it (e.g. Wellman). In my paper, I will reconstruct Rawls's Law of Peoples in light of his methodological writings instead of his assumed aims. I argue that his methodological considerations following Kant, laid out in his essay “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory” (1980) and in his lectures on Moral Philosophy (2000), can shed light on several issues in The Law of Peoples that have struck his critics as implausible. Much of the plausibility of Rawls’s proposal hinges not only on whether Rawls’ “mild relativism” is convincing, but also on the question whether the Kantian conception of the moral person can be transferred to a conception of peoples as moral agents.
