'Rawls'' Public Reason Reinterpreted: Construction, Reconstruction, and Overlapping Consensus of a Political Conception of Justicee

Abstract

Public reason is an important concept in Rawls’ political liberalism. As Rawls puts it, ‘it is the reason of the public and its subject is the public good concerning questions of fundamental political justice, which deals with constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice.’ He further explains that ‘the content of public reason is given by a family of political conceptions of justice’ and that ‘a citizen can engage in public reason when he or she deliberates within a framework of what he or she sincerely regards as the most reasonable political conception of justice.’ Rawls’ specification of public reason assumes that a political conception of justice is already given. He does not attempt to explain the role of public reason in the process of constructing a political conception of justice. Rawls is unclear on the distinction between the two roles of public reason, theoretical construction and practical interpretation. In my paper I shall argue that there should be two stages of public reason, theoretical construction and practical interpretation of a political conception of justice. In the theoretical stage, public reason is to construct a political conception of justice, with the help of two moral powers, the capacity for a conception of the good and the capacity for a sense of justice, within the condition of original position as the device of public representation. Through this stage a political conception of justice appears. And then in the practical stage, public reason gets its content from the political conception of justice that we obtained in the theoretical process. In this understanding, public reason is primarily independent from a political conception of justice and becomes the most fundamental capability for constructing a political conception of justice. Thus a political conception of justice is always theoretically challenged by public reason through cultivating new understanding and interpretation, that opens to reconstruction process, even if it has reached an overlapping consensus from the citizens divided by comprehensive doctrines as the source of nonpublic reasons in civil society.