Philosophical preparations for a global ethic

The “overlapping consensus”: John Rawls

“In framing a political conception of justice so it can gain an overlapping consensus, we are not bending it to existing unreason, but to the fact of reasonable pluralism, itself the outcome of the free exercise of free human reason under conditions of liberty.”
(John Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993), p. 232)

“John Rawls, who was born in Baltimore in 1921 and died in 2002, was a long time professor at Harvard. With his book, A theory of justice (1971), he intended primarily to respond to the challenge of social inequality, which since World War II had repeatedly disturbed democratic states, this was likewise meant to be a response to the war of ideologies in our times. In the first half of the 20th Century, dictatorial regimes had taken control of many countries and had threatened the democratic world. Democracies, so the reproaches coming regularly from the Right and from the Left, serve only the predominance of capital and of small elites: they fail to satisfy the needs of the majority of citizens or to bring about the common good. Admittedly, the fascist regimes inevitably collapsed and the communist regimes revealed their totalitarian, inhuman visages. Nowhere, however, have the dictatorships, whatever their colour, succeeded in bringing together in balance the interests of the citizens and the common good or even to roll back the predominance of capital. Thus, in the 1960’s, against the background of the Civil Rights Movement, the pleasure-seeking, mindless consumer stress, and the drama of the Vietnam War, the Western model of modern democracy once again came under the pressure of widespread criticism. On the one hand, democracies are accused of sharpening social inequality; on the other hand they become instable for this very reason. Whereas in the first half of the 20th Century the criticism of democracy tended primarily to take the form of antidemocratic demands, in the second half of the Century, the critics accused it of not being democratic enough in the conditions, which it creates.
      Must injustice prevail in the democracies – so the criticism of the Western World in the 1960’s – because they are unable to overcome social inequality?
What is it then that constitutes justice?
      Already in an early article published in 1958, which marked an essential step in the development of his later theory, and again in his latest reworking of the theory published in 2001, Rawls responded to these questions with the striking and groundbreaking title
Justice as fairness: a person acts fairly when he accords to his fellow citizens the same advantages and liberties that he himself enjoys, i.e. when he claims his rights only in the same measure as he is prepared to fulfil the corresponding duties.”(1)

“In fact, Rawls felt compelled radically to reform his ideas in the wake of the changing spirit of the years after 1971; he recognized that, in the war of ideologies, the position presented in A theory of justice made an untenable claim. Thus in the 1980’s he began a fundamental revision of his theory in a series of articles which were collected and published in German in 1992 under the title Die Idee des politischen Liberalismus. A year later, in 1993, Rawls published in America his new concept, meanwhile worked up and restructured into a lecture series, under the programmatic title Political liberalism, which appeared in Germany in 1998 as Politischer Liberalismus.”(2)

“The book Political liberalism responds to the new situation with an ideal which no longer pretends to touch the notion of the good as elaborated in the ideologies but instead develops a notion of justice on the political level. Well conceived comprehensive theories should not be content simply to tolerate each other, but instead they should strive after an overall consensus – the leading idea of Rawls later works. According to their own lights, they should view such an overall consensus as being necessary, just and good. Thus reasonable world views, including political Liberalism, will interpret the overall consensus not simply as a necessary evil but also as a positive moral opportunity to stabilize pluralistic social conditions.”(3)

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(1) Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann, Weltethos in philosophischer Perspektive, p. 206
(2) Ibid., p. 212
(3) Ibid., p. 216