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http://info.bris.ac.uk/~plcdib/lect10.html.

Political Philosophy: Lecture 10: Rawls's Political
Liberalism

In A Theory of Justice Rawls is committed to something
like the liberal principle of legitimacy. If we are to
justify the use of the coercive power of the state
over individuals it ought to be in terms of reasons
that all can accept (or at least ought to accept). But
people disagree with one another not just because of
their unreasonable selfishness but also because of
their quite reasonable attachment to a diversity of
incompatible religious and philosophical doctrines. A
Theory of Justice has a picture of the well-ordered
society as being one where citizens affirm something
like the doctrine of Theory. If the coercive power of
the state ever needs to be deployed it will be
deployed for the reasons outlined in Theory and when
citizens advance justifications to one another they
are advanced in terms derived from Theory. But it is
perfectly possible to be a reasonable person and to
disagree with the reasonings of A Theory of Justice.
Nor is there any reason to suppose that this problem
will go away. Rather a theory of justice has to take
cognisance of what Rawls calls 'Four general facts'
about modern societies. These are: (1) The fact of
pluralism; (2) The only way round the fact of
pluralism is the oppressive use of state power to
enforce unity; (3) If a well-ordered society is to
survive it much enjoy the support of the majority of
its citizens and so it must be justified in terms of
reasons that most of them can affirm (yet most of them
cannot affirm particular sectarian doctrines); (4) The
public culture of most democratic societies contains
intuitive ideas which it is possible to work up into
the justificatory basis for a constitutional regime.

This fourth fact leads Rawls to believe that it is
possible to elaborate principles to govern the basic
structure of society (its political realm) which will
be acceptable to most citizens despite their
conflicting views. Citizens may have all kinds of
beliefs but they also have, Rawls believes, a public
persona as citizens. In that role they see themselves
and others as free choosers of ends and capable of
revising and examining the conception of the good
which they are to pursue. . Not only do people see
themselves and others as free, pursuers of ends, they
also have a conception of themselves and others as
equal which disposes them to moderate their own claims
in order to accommodate the reasonable claims of
others and (a further and new dimension to
reasonability) they can understand that how ever much
they believe that their views about the good life, how
to live, the existence of God etc., are true, yet
another reasonable person might come to quite
different conclusions about those same matters.
Because of that fact of reasonable disagreement it
would be quite wrong (and unreasonable) to insist on
the enforcement by the state of that part of my
beliefs that can be the object of such reasonable
disagreement.

Now Rawls describes his new theory as being 'political
not metaphysical'. He means two things: first that the
theory is restricted in scope to cover the 'basic
structure' of society. Second, it is political in that
it does not rely on any of the general metaphysical
facts that are disputed among reasonable persons in a
pluralistic society. Rather it relies on working up
the shared values of freedom and equality that he
presumes are shared among citizens into more
determinate principles to govern society. These shared
values are the focus of what Rawls calls an
'overlapping consensus'.

Critique
What about the societies where there is no such
overlapping consensus? Surely Rawls wants to say that
such societies are defective in some way and that it
would be better for them if they were to have liberal
institutions? Yet he seems to have deprived himself
through his new-found contextualism of the means to
make these points.

A further criticism we might make is to point to the
uncertain status of the reasonable within Rawls's
later theory. At its most basic level the reasonable
has to do with the capacity for forbearance, for being
willing to moderated one's own claims when others are
also prepared to moderate theirs. But Rawls also seems
to want to use the term in a more neutral, epistemic
sense. These senses conflict.

Why should someone grant priority to the values of the
political domain ? Rawls fails to give an adequate
answer to this problem. Someone who is already
predisposed to liberalism will no doubt agree with (or
at least tend to give considerable weight to) the
suggestion that those matters that will be the object
of intractable disagreement between reasonable people
(such as abortion, foxhunting and pornography) ought
to be outside the province of legislation, but it is
unclear that the demand to be reasonable is in itself
enough to secure this conclusion.

Reading
* John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: Political not
Metaphysical in Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, no,
3 (1985) (available online via the Library web page)
and in Milton Fisk ed. Justice.

* John Rawls, 'The Domain of the Political and
Overlapping Consensus' in Robert E. Goodin and Philip
Pettit eds,Contemporary Political Philosophy: An
Anthology.

* John Rawls, Political Liberalism, introduction and
ch. 1.

Jeremy Waldron, 'Theoretical Foundations of
Liberalism' in his Liberal Rights, and in the
Philosophical Quarterly,37 (1987) (available online
via the Library web page).

Jean Hampton, 'The Moral Commitments of Liberalism',
in Copp, Roemer and Hampton (eds) The Idea of
Democracy

© Chris Bertram 2000