چکیده:
An examination of some of the main ideas of John Rawls first two books, A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism and of the relations between these ideas. Particular attention is given to the sense in which Rawls’ theory is a liberal theory, and to the relation between the rationale for Rawls’ two principles of justice and his later ideas of overlapping consensus and public reason
خلاصه ماشینی:
When Rawls says that social institutions are to be justified on the ground that they are a fair system for advancing “the good” of the individuals taking part in them, the relevant idea of an individual’s “good” is a broad one, including all of the aims that an individual has reason to want to promote, whether or not these aims are “self-interested” ones that involve private benefits.
A second way in which Rawls’ theory is a liberal view lies in the fact that he sees conflicts of values in particular as ineliminable because the only way to avoid them would involve unacceptable interference with the liberty of individuals to adopt and pursue their own conceptions of the good.
This relied on the idea that many different religions and other comprehensive doctrines can provide sufficient reasons for endorsing a liberal sense of justice based on principles of the kind that Rawls defends.
Rawls’ reason for shifting to the solution to the problem of stability that he gives in Political Liberalism, based on the ideas of overlapping consensus and public reason, was his belief that the answer he had given earlier, in A Theory of Justice, unjustifiably privileged his own, liberal and secular comprehensive doctrine, by assuming that the citizens of the well-ordered society he was imagining would all, or almost all, come to hold that view.