| Summary: | 博士 === 國防大學政治作戰學院 === 政治研究所 === 100 === The concepts of “pluralization” and “unification” or “integration” are relevant to one of the internal polemics of liberalism: if we recognize that “pluralization”, whether it is concerned with value or with ways of life, constitutes a cardinal characteristic of liberal society, then is it possible to erect a certain sort of rational, political consensus to accomplish a social integration?
This dissertation intends to explore John Rawls’s political philosophy of social justice and political consensus. I indicate that in Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, the principles of justice are based on liberalism as a comprehensive doctrine. Rawls offered an account of “justice as fairness,” claiming that the principle of justice justified by fair procedure could be accepted by all citizens. He, however, failed to achieve the aim. In order to overcome the difficulty, Rawls in his later argument in Political Liberalism focused on the diversity in the modern constitutional democracy. Rawls argued that, although value diversity is the fact of a modern democratic society, reasonable citizens will follow a political conception of justice endorsed by the overlapping consensus between different kinds of comprehensive doctrines in order to resolve the deep conflicts. Especially when the problems about constitutional essentials and basic justice occur, reasonable citizens will abide by the idea of public reason to deal with the problems.
Rawls further claimed that political conception of justice could be overlapping consensus between citizens who hold different reasonable, comprehensive doctrines. Many philosophers, such as Jürgen Habermas, argue that Rawls gave up doing what a philosopher should do for he did not justify political conception of justice as philosophically true. However, Rawls defended that his theoretical purpose is different from traditional political philosophers. The justification of political conception of justice made by overlapping consensus is “public justification by political society.” Therefore, the idea of overlapping consensus could be the public basis of modern constitutional democracy and could forge social unity.
Despite that Rawls’s theory of social unity is criticized by many scholars for his replacement of the philosophically true by the political reason as the criterion of theoretical construction, I conclude that Rawls' approach is feasible to solve the difficult problem of social unity in modern pluralistic society.
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