The Political Meaning of the Right and the Privatization of the Good

Abstract

The Political Meaning of the Right and the Privatization of the GoodIn today's philosophical and political world we come across an influential current within liberalism called procedural. It faces the problem of building a just society by proposing a formula: the priority of the right over the good. It can be easily found in Rawls's A Theory of Justice which starts from the original position which means that individuals, behind the veil of ignorance, do not know anything about their social location, talents and their own conceptions of the good. Because of such ignorance they would constitute the just society. It would be regulated by two principles of justice, chosen behind the veil of ignorance and reflecting the priority of the right over the good. Nevertheless Rawls understood that this conception could be accepted only by Liberals because it represents an example of a comprehensive doctrine. Therefore he reinterpreted his conception and presented it as political in his Political Liberalism. It has three features: it is worked out for the basic structure of a constitutional democratic regime; it does not depend for its justification on any particular comprehensive doctrine; and, it is formulated in terms of two fundamental ideas implicit in the public culture of a democratic society (the ideas of society as a fair system of cooperation, and of persons viewed as free and equal). Due to this reinterpretation, the justification of his principles of justice proceeds from what is held in common and leads to an agreement based on "an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines". In this way the good becomes something strictly private and completely absent in the public sphere. Such position is obviously very controversial but a critical approach to it will be a subject of another paper.