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Critics of political liberalism argue that the appeal to what reasonable people could accept must either confuse mere agreement with justification, or else the appeal to what reasonable people could accept is altogether unnecessary. This chapter responds to these objections. The author argues that there is an important role for the idea of an overlapping consensus amongst reasonable persons within the justificatory structure of political liberalism. The view of the overlapping consensus that the author advocates, however, differs significantly from the one offered by Rawls. Because the practice of public justification requires some common ground, the author argues that an overlapping consensus between reasonable people ought to mark the first stage, not the last stage of the justificatory structure of political liberalism. Presenting political liberalism in this way helps avoid objections that political liberalism mistakes agreement for justification, as well as objections that the reference to reasonable persons is superfluous to the project of political justification.

Attempts to ground liberal toleration in pluralism about value, in scepticism about value, or in the simple need for a modus vivendi are all subject to various difficulties. John Rawls, in his book Political Liberalism, develops a fourth proposal, one that aims to give toleration and other liberal institutions a basis in moral reasons without presupposing any controversial moral outlook. In this essay, Scheffler critically examines Rawls's argument that the principles of justice can rest on an overlapping consensus of comprehensive moral and religious doctrines. Among the issues Scheffler discusses are the possibility of including classical utilitarianism in an overlapping consensus, the relationship between such a consensus and the ideal of public reason, and the relevance of political liberalism for societies that lack liberal, democratic traditions.

This chapter elaborates a methodology for engaging in what Rawls referred to as “conjecture,” here called “justificatory comparative political theory” or “comparative ethics.” It moves beyond Rawls’s remarks to a conception of comparative ethics that takes the integrity of religious ethics seriously, and advances the following principles designed to guide the search for an overlapping consensus: plausibility, sincerity, “canon first,” transparency, sympathy, and restraint. This results in a less ambitious form of conjecture suggested by Rawls which is characterized as diagnostic, evaluative and synthetic. This chapter also addresses the problem of locating “Islam” as a comprehensive doctrine, justifying this book’s preference for arguments drawn from the Islamic legal tradition, particularly the “jurisprudence of Muslim minorities” (fiqh al-aqalliyyat al-muslima).

After reviewing John Rawls's arguments against utilitarianism in A Theory of Justice and then examining Michael Sandel's and Robert Nozick's criticisms of those arguments, Scheffler points to three important similarities between utilitarianism and Rawls's own theory. Both the theories are systematic and constructive in character, both treat common‐sense notions of justice as deriving from a more authoritative standard, and both are committed to distributive holism, in the sense that they regard the justice of any assignment of benefits to a particular individual as dependent on the justice of the overall distribution of benefits in society. These similarities may make it seem that Rawls's theory fails to remedy utilitarianism's neglect of the distinctness of persons. But Scheffler argues that Rawls's theory accommodates holistic pressures while maintaining a commitment to the inviolability of the individual. Scheffler also suggests that the complexity of Rawls's attitude toward utilitarianism in A Theory of Justice may help to explain his willingness, in Political Liberalism, to treat utilitarianism as a candidate for inclusion in an overlapping consensus.

This chapter seeks to establish what is reasonable for citizens in a liberal society to demand of Muslim fellow citizens by way of an “Islamic doctrine of citizenship” if it is to be said that there is an overlapping consensus on the terms of social cooperation. This inquiry involves two distinctions: between justice and citizenship, and between a citizen and a “loyal resident alien” or an “alienated citizen.” It is best perceived as the search for a fully reasonable account of the minimal demands of liberal citizenship least in conflict with the aims and sprit of Islamic political ethics. Ideal-typical “reasonable” Islamic positions are formulated on the core questions of residence, political obligation, loyalty, recognition, solidarity and political participation to be used in later chapters for evaluating existing Islamic views.

This chapter focuses on agreement theories, which conceptualize human rights as standards that are or might be objects of agreement among members of cultures whose moral and political values are in various respects dissimilar. The notion that human rights express an intercultural agreement might also be understood in several ways. Three of these ideas, ‘common core’, ‘overlapping consensus’, and ‘progressive convergence’ are described. This chapter also explains why people have been attracted to these ideas as a basis for conceiving human rights.

This chapter states the aims of the book: its core question of the compatibility between formal Islamic doctrine and liberal citizenship It emphasizes how this book differs from historical, anthropological, sociological, or genealogical approaches to Islam and how the book seeks to avoid the pitfalls of studies which inquire into the “compatibility” of Islam with democracy or human rights. It introduces the idea of an overlapping consensus within political liberalism as an answer to the theologico-political problem and the place of a normatively committed comparative ethics, or what John Rawls referred to as “conjecture.”

Examines the relation between two of the most influential Kantian works in political philosophy in this century, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice and his Political Liberalism. The rationale for Rawls's shift in position from the earlier book to the later, it is argued, is a recognized need to satisfy a deeply Kantian requirement on the legitimate exercise of state coercive power. In a pluralistic world where reasonable people differ about the truth of religion and morality, the requirement can be met only by showing the possibility of an overlapping consensus on shared political principles. Contrary to what Rawls at times suggests, the reason for his move from a ‘comprehensive moral theory’ to a ‘political conception’ of justice was not an (perhaps doubtful) expectation that consensus on his principles would be a stabilizing force, but instead a recognition of the need to provide a justification of these principles that is respectful of the diversity of moral and religious opinions among reasonable people.

Moral philosophers differ a great deal over how we should act, but this chapter maintains that those differences can be finessed if we allow moral reasoning to consist properly, as it consists in fact, of an eclectic grab-bag of different modes of argument, in which a concrete prescription is best defended if it can be given grounds from utilitarian, Kantian, intuitionist and other moral perspectives simultaneously. Indeed, it makes sense to suppose that a social contract on how to reason morally—an “overlapping consensus” on morality, to use a Rawlsian phrase—would endorse our arguing for moral claims in such an eclectic way: precisely so that we can avoid settling definitively the nature of our highest good, an issue of supreme importance to us but on which we differ irremediably. Such a social contract will necessarily finesse religious views of our higher good along with secular ones. Our moral prescriptions will therefore not depend on religious commitment.

Many countries, including the United States, lack consensus about the core ethical principles concerning health and health care, beyond a market‐based approach to resource allocation. This chapter offers a normative theory for analyzing health policy decisions and recognizes that norms need fundamental restructuring to address existing health problems. Substantive normative principles (moral legitimacy) should be introduced into deliberative democratic process (political legitimacy) for a comprehensive, integrative theory of health and social justice. The chapter reviews the role of moral values in motivating citizens' support for public policies, and explores differences between social agreement frameworks such as incompletely theorized agreements (ITAs) and overlapping consensus and more traditional political bargaining models. ITA analysis of the American Clinton health care reform attempts reveals agreement on the mid‐level concept of universal coverage, but disagreement on both high‐ and low‐level principles. The chapter concludes that high‐level principle (e.g. health for all) or low‐level principle (e.g. willingness to pay for other's and future selves' health insurance) agreement, arising from internalization of shared public moral norms, might lead to more stable support for reform.

This introductory chapter discusses the contours of the liberal polity with specific reference to the role of religious voices therein. It suggests that the contemporary world is simultaneously secular and religious, noting that that the context in which liberal societies must function is one in which there is no prospect of religion disappearing nor of citizens agreeing on the fundamental principles of justice and of social order. The chapter highlights the range of perspectives evident in the collection through which the relationship between religion and politics in the liberal polity is discussed. There is a specific concern to assess the merits of Rawl's overlapping consensus, advanced through public reason, as the way by which the identification of such principles can be achieved.

While rationalist reflection can derive a single set of authoritative standards from a universal faculty of reason, sentimentalism must assume an implausible degree of uniformity among the contingent psychological features of human beings to do the same. Another sentimentalist alternative, however, is to accept rather than reject the pluralism of human standards, while still insisting that plural sets of standards can join in a single overlapping consensus behind basic principles of justice and reciprocity. This chapter argues that exactly such a pluralist sentimentalism can be found in the work of J. G. Herder, a student of the pre-critical, sentimentalist Kant and a vociferous opponent of the critical, rationalist Kant.

In this chapter, Talbott considers various interpretations of the term “human rights.” He proposes an account of basic human rights as the necessary legal guarantees for a government to be legitimate, even if not necessarily just, and explains why his proposal is an improvement over Rawls's account. He contrasts his response to moral relativism with the defensive response taken by other advocates of universal human rights, exemplified by Waldron. Talbott articulates a new way of understanding human rights claims as epistemically modest (because fallible) but metaphysically immodest (because universal). He identifies two ways of being a moral imperialist and claims that his defense of universal human rights will avoid both kinds of moral imperialism.

This chapter confronts the “problem of pluralism”: How can an ethic of political reconciliation be applied in settings characterized by multiple religious and philosophical worldviews? The chapter sets forth two central tasks of the ethic. The first is to explicate justice. The second is to show how the ethic can become the object of an overlapping consensus among diverse traditions. The chapter focuses on the second task, proposing an approach it calls “rooted reason”-an approach that allows members of traditions to endorse the ethic on the basis of reasons internal to their tradition rather than subjecting their reasons to a “filter” such as secular language. The chapter discusses strategies and dilemmas for achieving an overlapping consensus.

This introductory chapter defines liberal constitutional theory as the search for a public reason capable of justifying state coercion to those who share a confidence in individual worth. It criticizes Rawls's understanding of public reason for excluding comprehensive views regarding the most fundamental things. Such a reason privileges one conception of public reason over others and so fails as a public reason all liberals could accept. The chapter questions the widespread assumption that disagreement regarding fundamentals is reasonable among liberals, arguing that diverse liberal sects can agree on the conception of public reason that best fulfils the liberal confidence. Such a conception includes libertarian, egalitarian, and communitarian constitutional paradigms as constituent elements of a complex whole. It disputes the view that liberalism must be neutral toward conceptions of the good, arguing that the model liberal constitution permits limiting rights for the sake of goods essential to individual dignity.

This chapter applies the Millian epistemology to ground a robust, inalienable right to freedom of expression and to ground the other autonomy rights, as necessary for the process of the social process of the free give-and-take of opinion. The chapter considers a variety of exceptions to freedom of expression, including product advertising and political advertising. He uses the examples of Google and Wikipedia to provide empirical confirmation for Mill’s claims about the social process of the free give-and-take of opinion. He also shows how the Millian case for freedom of propositional expression can be extended to cover nonpropositional expression in art and literature. The chapter shows that the Millian argument does not limit freedom of expression to reasonable views. The chapter argues that the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable comprehensive views, which plays a large role in Rawls’s theory and in contemporary discussions of human rights, cannot support the weight that it is intended to bear. This leads to an extended discussion of intolerant subversive advocacy, in which the chapter argues that neither Habermas’s nor Rawls’s theory can explain why the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the Smith Act (which made membership in the Communist Party illegal) in Dennis v. U.S. was erroneous. The chapter also explains why Mill’s social process epistemology does not undermine his political philosophy. The author concludes by explaining why the main principle would endorse a human right to freedom of expression.

The issue of how to reach agreement on human rights in a culturally diverse world is of paramount importance. A Rawlsian approach would argue that overlapping consensus can be reached by bracketing out metaphysical, religious, philosophical and other comprehensive doctrines from public reason and the political arena. This chapter argues that to exclude people’s actual moral values and paradigms from political justification in this manner is ineffective, unnecessary, and excessive. It finds Charles Taylor’s approach to consensus to be superior in that it calls for people to recognize that their different values and moral ideas are each in their own way worthwhile and may all converge in supporting human rights. The challenge posed by this approach is to show how and why such convergence might come about. After drawing out some possible solutions from Taylor’s work, Drydyk aligns them with his own solution, ‘responsible pluralism’.

This chapter rejects the ‘extrinsic’ view of public reason examined in Chapter 4, and argues that political parties can play an important role in helping citizens to relate their comprehensive doctrines to political liberal values and institutions. Once we understand the distinctive normative demands of partisanship, this chapter claims, we can see that there is no inherent tension between them and the demands of the Rawlsian overlapping consensus. This is because partisanship (unlike factionalism) involves a commitment to the common good rather than the sole advancement of merely partial interests, and this implies a commitment to public reasoning. The chapter further examines three distinctive empirical features of parties that particularly enable them to contribute to an overlapping consensus. These are their linkage function, their advancement of broad multi-issue political platforms, and their creative agency.