John Rawls · Philosophy

Political Liberalism: Overlapping Consensus and Public Reason

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.

What you'll be able to recall

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 fundamental…

Leads to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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