On the Vacillations of Public Justification

Abstract: Many scholars try to defend the Rawlsian turn from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism from the perspective of public justification. This justification has dual tasks. On the one hand, it is to obtain stability with the facts of pluralism. On the other hand, it doesn’t want to give up its universality. Moreover, this justification is based on the controversial Kantian concept of practical reason and consequently results in vacillations in three basic aspects. First, it is not certain whether the actual agreement or reasonable agreement of ordinary citizens gives the justification; Second, it adopts inconsistent presuppositions about the moral capabilities of citizens; Third, it is not clear for us how to determine whether pluralism is reasonable. And these problems are probably resulted from the method of reflective equilibrium adopted by Rawls. According to it, we have to accommodate all kinds of deep-rooted intuitions of ordinary people which are often incoherent.