E Pluribus Unum? Critical Comments on John Rawls' Concept of Overlapping Consensus

Abstract

Taking as a starting point an example from Dutch politics, I make some critical statements on John Rawls' distinction between comprehensive doctrines and the political conception of justice as developed in his Political Liberalism. After an explanation of the concept ‘overlapping consensus’, I show that Rawls' description of political liberalism as a set of principles independent of comprehensive doctrines is ambivalent. Rawls emphasises the dualism between comprehensive doctrines and the specific demands of politics, and he states that political arrangements are indifferent to truth or virtue. At the same time he pinpoints characteristics of political liberalism that at least suggest a moral dimension. By emphasising its separation from comprehensive doctrines he does not make it clear how the morality of political liberalism is related to the primary sources of morality. Rawls' sharp distinction between the two moralities makes it hard to imagine how the two are to be combined. He suggests an implausible picture of a person adhering to two different moralities. In the last part of the paper I elaborate practical consequences of Rawls' ambivalence. Taking the principle of free speech I show that Rawls underrates the importance of the sources of comprehensive doctrines in implementation of the values of political liberalism. Rawls does not do justice to the fact that the precise status and meaning of political liberal values must constantly be re-examined in direct exchange with what is going on in comprehensive doctrines. I end with a plea to pay more attention to the several ways in which comprehensive doctrines and liberal values can influence each other fruitfully.

Notes

1. I use Political Liberalism or PL to indicate Rawls’ book, and ‘political liberalism’ to indicate the set of principles that characterises proper intercourse in the public domain.

2. References to Rawls (1993) in this form (IV.3, IV.8) refer to the chapter and section. Each chapter in the book is a separate essay.

3. The difference in focus becomes clear when we see that one of the two perspectives erodes. Liberal political assumptions temper ideologies. According to Barnard this happened in the American melting pot (Barnard, 2004, p. 268). According to Wolin, Rawls believed that pluralist politics would have a sobering effect on doctrinaire thinking (Wolin, p. 108). People also adhere in varying degrees to their comprehensive doctrines, which puts them in opposition to core elements of political liberalism. At both extremes the subtlety and complexity that characterise the interaction are overlooked.

4. Rawls (1993, p. 24) too easily states: ‘the fact that we affirm a particular religious, philosophical or moral comprehensive doctrine with its associated conception of the good is not a reason for us to propose, or to expect others to accept, a conception of justice that favours those of that persuasion’.

5. According to Rawls the opposite of ‘public reason’ cannot be ‘private reason’ (as reason is never private): its opposite is the rationality of organisations.