Paul M.

Nguyen (OMV) Contemporary Philosophy, OConnor September 26, 2011 Essay Response to Lecture II Political Liberalism, John Rawls In Lecture II, John Rawls moves beyond his initial introduction of the concepts of justice and the good and comprehensive doctrines to lay out several principles concerning the Powers of Citizens and Their Representation. By powers, he means the rational and reasonable powers of citizens, and by representation, he refers to the dynamics and circumstances of the original position. Some key inconsistencies and omissions, including a disregard for absolute truth, are addressed below. Rawls' assertion that the original position, the neutral starting place from which the political conception of justice as fairness may be characterized by individuals representing the various members of society, requires that neither rationality nor reasonability be prior to one another. He associates rationality with the moral power of citizens to have a conception of the good; and reasonability a conception of justice. This begs the question, however, for if neither is prior, they must both be coincident in each individual that is both reasonable and rational. That is, one may not form his own conception of the good according to a rational process without, at the same time, arriving at a conception of justice, namely that the good identified is also reasonable and just, that is, acceptable to all, and that this individual believes that all are willing to follow the terms of this dual conception thus reached. Rawls does mention, however, that there is no positive argument why the characteristics of reasonable and rational must not be prior to one another. He does concede, however, that a public society and widely-held conception of the reasonable may precede the rational, precisely because of the fact that reasonable-ness depends on public acceptance of terms reached in the political conception of justice as fairness.

In all of this, however, Rawls remains agnostic with respect to the idea of a comprehensive moral, religious, or philosophical doctrine (CD), which would dictate, apart from the reasonable or the rational, which elements would then comprise the political conception of justice as fairness for a particular society (which is closed, per Rawls' apparatus). He further disregards the notion that a people may hold a particular truth to govern their rationally-reached conception of the good, or another truth to govern their reasonably-reached conception of justice, for though subscribers of some CDs would hold their views to be supported by some truth transcending CDs, though such a claim is, itself, according to Rawls, part of one's CD and therefore inadmissible to the original position. Rather, he asserts that thinking, communicating people can arrive at an agreeable political conception of justice as fairness that can ensure the stability of their society. He does seem to indicate, however, that members of society holding an unreasonable CD could not survive as such in a society composed of members professing various reasonable CDs, and, though they leave them at the doorstep of the original position in order to arrive at a political conception of justice as fairness for their society, they nonetheless arrive at that conception via the overlapping consensus of their reasonable CDs, which inevitably contradict, in whole or in part, the unreasonable CDs that are held by those few members of society. The presumed harmony of the reasonable with the rational, then, may be questioned if, in this case, those unreasonable-CD-professing members of society are known in advance to disagree with whatever political conception of justice as fairness may be reached in the original position. Though the original position is designed to be blind to these differences, Rawls does require that society contain no member professing an unreasonable CD in order that the original positions achievements be of any value in ensuring the stability of society in political liberalism.