L’autonomie doctrinale des principes de justice: force ou faiblesse de la théorie rawlsienne?

Audard, Catherine (2023) L’autonomie doctrinale des principes de justice: force ou faiblesse de la théorie rawlsienne? Etudes Philosophiques, 145 (2). pp. 47-68. ISSN 0014-2166

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Abstract

How consistent is Rawls’s theory of justice in view of his later political turn? For some commentators, abandoning the search for a Kantian foundation of the principles of justice in favour of a purely “political” liberalism is too high a price to pay for gaining a wide but limited consensus in democratic societies that are in effect characterized by insoluble conflicts of values. The “inconvenient truth” that Rawls discovers is that “there can be no overlapping consensus on a Kantian conception of persons or justice as fairness more broadly” writes Robert Taylor (2011, p. 276), but that without such a foundation, the moral strength of his theory would be diluted. In this paper, I answer such criticisms and show that, far from leading to relativism, the demands of the theory of justice’s doctrinal autonomy and independence from any substantive conceptions of the Good correspond to the very meaning the democratic ideal has for Rawls: respect for the person’s moral autonomy and rejection of “the centuries-long practice of intolerance as a condition of social order and stability” (J. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxvii). However, is not such an ideal unrealistic? Is not such a trust in citizens’s autonomy, in their capacity to isolate their allegiance to public principles of justice from that to their nonpublic moral doctrines, a source of weakness for democracies instead of stability, as Rawls claims? Is the ambition of doctrinal autonomy a strength or a weakness of the Rawlsian theory?

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2023 Presses Universitaires de France
Divisions:	Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General)
Date Deposited:	08 Aug 2023 16:00
Last Modified:	25 Apr 2024 20:06
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/119949

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