Volume 24, Number 2
March 2023
ARTICLE

In Search of a Stable Consensus: Rawls’s Model of Public Reason and Its Critics

Volume 24, Number 2, March 2023, Pages 236–257
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v24i2.2494
PDFPDF

Abstract

Rawls’s political turn is the result of his struggle with the problem of stability in his theory of justice. Rawls’s late solution uses the concept of public reason. It requires that the members of the well-ordered society should abide by a political conception of justice for shared public reasons, thus fostering an overlapping consensus. This solution has been criticized by post-Rawlsian scholars endorsing a Diversity-Convergence account of the stability problem. I complement Rawls’s model of public reason by arguing that the stability problem can be solved if members of the well-ordered society are community-based reasoners. This leads to a Wittgensteinian reinterpretation of the concept of public reason. This solution is only partial, however. At the bottom, stability without a minimal form of consensus is unlikely.
Copyright © 2023 Cyril Hédoin
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
|

Risk and the Unfairness of Some Being Better Off at the Expense of Others

Thomas Rowe

In or Out? Benevolent Absolutisms in The Law of Peoples

Robert Huseby

Reciprocity and Liberal Legitimacy: Critical Comment on May

Blain Neufeld

Beyond a Strictly Political Liberalism? Critical Response to Abbey

Akira Inoue

Egalitarian Justice and Innocent Choice

Nir Eyal

Reply to Critics of The Constitution of Equality

Thomas Christiano

What Relational Egalitarians Should (Not) Believe

Andreas Bengtson and Lauritz Aastrup Munch

Weakness of Political Will

Camila Hernandez Flowerman

Agnosticism and Pluralism About Justice

Adam Gjesdal

The Purpose and Limits of Electoral Accountability

Finlay Malcolm

The Stability of the Just Society: Why Fixed Point Theorems Are Beside the Point

Sean Ingham and David Wiens

Children, Partiality, and Equality

David O'Brien

Portico