John Rawls IV: Political, Not Metaphysical, Liberalism

Posted: Mon, Apr 13, 2026

Today

  • Use today’s reading to clarify Rawls’ view [45 min]
  • Use civil disobedience to test Rawls’ view [30 min]
Meme of a falling building (“Rawls’s entire political theory) being supported by only a few beams (“the world ‘reasonable’”)

Rawls’ problem

Modern constitutional democracies are “marked by deep divisions between opposing and incommensurable conceptions of the good” (p. 414).

  • Given this fact, how can we make society into “a system of cooperation between free and equal persons” (p. 413)?
  • Even if we so disagree, we want to be in a position to cooperate on fair terms—i.e., on terms mutually acceptable to all of us.
  • The task then is to offer “a stable overlapping consensus” supported by, but not itself assuming, any reasonable “comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrine” (p. 414).
  • This is why justice as fairness concerns chiefly the basic structure of society.
  • And it is why justice as fairness addresses chiefly a “well-ordered” society (roughly, a reasonably just constitutional democracy).

“Political liberalism”

  • Liberalism as a “comprehensive moral doctrine” ✗
  • Liberalism as a “political conception of justice” ✓

The argument: Justice as fairness, considered as an overlapping consensus of a diverse plurality of comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines, is acceptable to each in their own way as a political conception of justice.

  • “[T]hat is, each comprehensive doctrine, from within its own point of view, is led to accept the public reasons of justice specified by justice as fairness” (p. 411, my emphasis).
  • Case study: The principle of equal basic liberties. (What about its lexical priority?)
  • Case study: Justice Blackmun’s separate opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).