of justice are generated from a moral standpoint occupied by autonomous moral
agents is a form of comprehensive liberalism, and as such is controversial.
Reasonable people can deny that human beings are autonomous, or that political
values derive from such autonomy. As the title of his later book indicates, what he
came to defend was a political, rather than a comprehensive, liberalism.
Rawls lists a number of features of human interaction that explain why reasonable
people can disagree: evidence is conflicting and complex; different weights can be
attached to different considerations; concepts are vague; there are conflicts between
different moral considerations, such as duties to family and duties to strangers; no
society can contain a full range of values. He then goes on to define a ‘reasonable
conception of the good’:
- It entails the exercise of theoretical reason.
- It entails the exercise of practical reason.
- ‘While a reasonable comprehensive view is not necessarily fixed and unchanging,
it normally belongs to, or draws upon, a tradition of thought and doctrine’. It
is not subject to ‘sudden and unexplained changes, it tends to evolve slowly in
the light of what, from its point of view, it sees as good and sufficient conditions’
(Rawls, 1993: 59).
From the idea of reasonable pluralism Rawls offers an explanation of how
citizens, from a variety of different reasonable comprehensive conceptions of the
good can come to respect liberal political institutions. We develop an ‘overlapping
consensus’: it is for citizens as part of their liberty of conscience individually to
work out how liberal values relate to their own comprehensive conceptions, where
a ‘comprehensive conception’ could be a religious belief system. Each reasonable
comprehensive doctrine endorses the political conception from its own standpoint.
Individuals work towards liberal principles from mutually incompatible
comprehensive perspectives, and respect for those principles is built on the overlap
between them.
Rawls does not give concrete examples of how such an overlapping consensus
can be achieved, so to illustrate his argument we provide an example of our own:
how might Muslims embrace, from withintheir comprehensive conception of the
good, liberal political principles? Some possible grounds are as follows:
- Islam has a long history of toleration of Jews and Christians, grounded in the
belief that Islam is an aboriginal and natural form of monotheism, which
incorporates the prophets of the Jews and the Christians. - So long as secular law is not incompatible with holy law (shariah), then the former
should be obeyed. There are arguments in Islam for obeying secular rulers. - Jihad(exertion, struggle) has been misinterpreted: a believer is required to carry
out jihadby ‘his heart; his tongue; his hands; and by the sword’. Jihadcan be
an individual, spiritual struggle. - ‘Islam’ is often defined as ‘submission’ or ‘self-surrender’. Submission understood
as self-imposed discipline is not incompatible with respect for human freedom –
a person might chooseto submit. - For Muslims, behaviour is classified as: (a) required – includes prayer, alms-giving,
fasting; (b) prohibited – theft, illicit sex, alcohol consumption; (c) recommended- charitable acts, additional prayers and fasts; (d) discouraged – might include
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