In the law of peoples, Rawls develops an account of the fundamental principles of the foreign policy platform of a well-ordered liberal democratic society. In organizing this effort, Rawls identiies ive types of societies, each of which presents its own type of foreign policy challenge for a liberal society. One type of society he identiies is the benevolent absolutism (LP 4, 63, 92). However, Rawls spends little time on benevolent absolutisms, as they are not his primary concern.

Benevolent absolutisms are societies that honor and respect most human rights, domestically and internationally.Thus, benevolent absolutisms are nonaggressive. Their evident peacefulness, coupled with their honoring ofmost human rights, gives them a right to wage war in self-defense. Nevertheless, they do not deserve full and good standing in the international community because they are not well-ordered.

Benevolent absolutisms are not well-ordered because their members are not given any role in political decision-making. Even if some benevolent absolutism were structured in accordance with some principles of justice, these principles could not be voluntarily afirmed by the members of that benevolent society, just because the members would have no say in political decisions. What we have, then, even where the content of human rights is reliably supplied, is not a genuine scheme of social cooperation, but an (admittedly benevolent) exercise of power. Social cooperation requires at least some small measure of reciprocity, not just of advantage or beneit, but also of reason-giving. But reciprocal reason-giving is missing in the case of benevolent absolutisms, because political decision-making is an entirely one-sided affair.