John Rawls · Philosophy
Rawls’s later question: how can a just and stable society endure among citizens permanently divided by religion and philosophy? His answer - a political conception of justice that each can affirm from within their own worldview (an ‘overlapping consensus’), and a shared ‘public reason’ for justifying the use of state power on terms all can accept.
A Theory of Justice had a hidden assumption, and over the following two decades Rawls came to see it as a serious flaw. The book imagined a ‘well-ordered society’ in which everyone accepts the same principles of justice - and, Rawls later realized, it had quietly assumed that citizens would also share the same broad philosophical and moral outlook that supported those principles, a roughly Kantian-liberal view of the person and the good. But that assumption, he decided, was unrealistic and even self-undermining. A free society, precisely because it is free, will always contain a plurality of incompatible religions, philosophies, and moral doctrines; this diversity is not a temporary defect to be overcome but the permanent, natural result of human reason working freely under liberty. Rawls called this the fact of reasonable pluralism. It forced a hard question: if citizens will never agree on the deepest matters of faith and philosophy, how can they possibly agree on, and remain loyal to, shared principles of justice? His answer filled a second great book, Political Liberalism (1993).
Rawls’s solution begins with a act of self-restraint. If citizens cannot agree on the deep questions, then a conception of justice must not be grounded in any answer to them. It must be, in his phrase, political, not metaphysical. A political conception of justice has three features: it applies only to the ‘basic structure’ of society (its constitution and main institutions), not to all of life; it is presented as freestanding, not derived from any particular religion or comprehensive philosophy; and it is worked up from ideas already latent in the public political culture of a democracy - above all the idea of citizens as free and equal, and of society as a fair system of cooperation. Justice as fairness, Rawls now says, should be understood not as part of a Kantian philosophy of life but as such a freestanding political conception, one that people holding many different comprehensive doctrines could all accept. He no longer asks everyone to become a Kantian liberal; he asks only that they converge, from their many different starting points, on shared political principles for their life together as citizens.
The overlapping consensus tells us how a diverse society can be stable; public reason tells its citizens how to talk to each other about fundamentals. When we debate the most basic political questions - what Rawls calls constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice - we exercise, together, the coercive power of the state, which will be imposed on everyone including those who disagree. Rawls argues that because this power is used in the name of all, we owe one another a special kind of justification: we should appeal not to our own comprehensive doctrine (our religion, our metaphysics) but to reasons that our fellow citizens, despite their different worldviews, could reasonably be expected to share - to political values, publicly available evidence, and principles all can recognize. This is the ‘duty of civility.’ It does not forbid religious or philosophical conviction; citizens may hold and even voice their deepest views. But when it comes to justifying coercive law on fundamentals, Rawls asks that we be able to back our position with public reasons others could accept, not only with appeals to authorities they do not share. Public reason is how free and equal citizens honour one another’s standing when they cannot agree on the whole truth.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that the later Rawls faced ‘the fact of reasonable pluralism’ and rebuilt his theory as a strictly political conception, justified by an ‘overlapping consensus’ of reasonable comprehensive doctrines and constrained by ‘public reason’ when citizens argue about fundamentals. Explain reasonable pluralism, ove…
Leads to Jean Jacques Rousseau.
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