The purpose of this paper is to prepare the ground for a constructivist justification of a non-cosmopolitan duty of distributive justice between nation-states. It starts by accounting for the incapacity of Rawlsian theorists to provide for such ground in terms of the failure of political constructivism to properly accommodate the notion of practical teleology. By practical teleology, I mean the principle integral to Kantian constructivism according to which the choice of practical principles is to be somehow influenced by the ends set before us a priori by reason. It is well known that, in its attempt to remedy the alleged empty formalism of Kantian constructivism, political liberalism replaces these a priori ends by the ends contained within the conceptions of the person and society integral to the public political culture of western democratic societies. Though this solution might be appropriate to domestic justice, it does not fit a global framework which does not offer a unified public political culture with a robust conception of social cooperation. The argument of this paper goes back to the original Kantian solution based on the doctrine of the a priori ends of reason ? the so-called doctrine of rational faith ? and revisits it in order to make it relevant to the problem of international distributive justice. In so doing, we mean to offer a new constructivist justification for a duty of international distributive justice that unfolds within the bounds of practical wisdom.
