Charles beitz (b. 1949) is Professor of Politics and afiliated professor of philosophy and director of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Before moving to Princeton Beitz taught in the political science departments at Swarthmore and Bowdoin Colleges. He earned his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 1978, where he studied under Dennis Thompson and Thomas Scanlon, and attended Scanlon’s early important seminar on TJ.

Beitz is best known in relation to Rawls for his innovative extension and adaptation of ideas from Rawls to the global realm. In his early work Political Theory and International Relations (1979, second edition 1999) Beitz provides the first detailed attempt to work out a “globalized” version of the view presented in TJ, and in his recent work on human rights, culminating in the book The Idea of Human Rights (2009), Beitz develops what he calls a “practical conception” of human rights, signiicantly developing and extending ideas drawn from the comparatively sketchy account of human rights presented by Rawls in LP.

Although the idea of “globalizing” Rawls’s account from TJ had already been discussed by Thomas Scanlon and Brian Barry, Beitz, in Political Theory and International Relations, provided the irst sustained and detailed attempt to work out the view. Beitz there argues that ideas developed by Rawls in TJ could and should be applied at the global level, and should not be applied merely within “closed societies.” Beitz suggests two ways in which Rawlsian principles could be globalized: first, within an international “original position” with states as members; second, in a cosmopolitan original position, where all individuals in the world would be represented as individuals.