Modern society is pluralistic and a variety of doctrines exist in it. Rawls recognized this pluralism and tried to overcome it. In a society characterized by a reasonable plurality, he ursued political justice in the form of political agreement. Poli...
Modern society is pluralistic and a variety of doctrines exist in it. Rawls recognized this pluralism and tried to overcome it. In a society characterized by a reasonable plurality, he ursued political justice in the form of political agreement. Political justice consists of overlapping consensus and public rationality. Overlapping consensus refers to the minimal agreements made in political areas, among comprehensive doctrines which are reasonable but different. In order for overlapping agreement to be justice as fairness, he suggested public rationality as a method to maintain stability as a check through a public framework.
Overlapping agreement in Rawls' political liberalism reduces the range of disagreement by limiting the agreement in the political field and on the political aspects only. On the other hand, public rationality or the citizens' participation through public discussion acts as a means
of helping citizens to understand and solve problems in a modern democracy. Particularly, public rationality assumes active citizens as its premise, because it means direct participation of citizens. Active citizens try to solve problems by continual discussion. Since citizens' capabilities cannot be ignored in problem solving, citizens must have certain knowledge of important issues. Democratic citizens must therefore have the ability to judge the standards of the values in public rationality and be able to embrace diverse values. In political liberalism, it is believed that the quality of a citizen can be improved by political virtues. That's the point which Rawls Political Liberalism implies for our citizenship education.