The Public Conception of Morality in Political Liberalism

Abstract

When John Rawls made the transition from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism, he adopted a new family of conceptions to define his political turn. Central to this new family of conceptions is the political conception of justice. According to Rawls, one of the three features of the political conception of justice is that it is “a moral conception worked out for a specific kind of subject, namely, for political, social, and economic institutions.” In “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” Rawls states that “political values are intrinsically moral.” In his last work, The Law of Peoples, Rawls also makes references to “the political (moral) conception of right and justice” and “political (moral) ideals.” Together, these remarks point to a puzzle regarding Rawls’ understanding of morality in the domain of the political. On the one hand, Rawls distinguishes between the political conception of justice from what he calls “background culture” that consists of reasonable comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines. On the other hand, his remarks obviously suggest that the political conception of justice is intrinsically moral. Unfortunately, Rawls never fully explains what he means by morality in relation to the political conception of justice. So the guiding question of this chapter is: if Rawls thinks that the political conception of justice is indeed a moral conception, what conception of morality does he hold? In other words, how should one understand Rawls’ “political turn” when Rawls demarcates the domain of the political as one part of the domain of the moral?