Religion Within The Boundaries of Public Reason (Within the Context of John Rawls’s Toughts)

Of the most influential political thinkers in the last centruy, perhaps the most influential one, John Rawls is said to have revived the political philosophy by A Theory of Justice. In this book, primarily based on Kantian noumenal self and social contract theory, he tried to formulate a highly complicated theory of justice called “justice as fairness”. Rawls did not, however, dwell on religious matters. But, day by day, new developments in social and political milieu unprecedentedly changed the agenda of political philosophy. As modernism fades away, postmodernism has emerged with a bunch of new ideas with which religions again are able to have cultural, sociological and political power. Rawls has seen this point and engaged himself to the new reality. That’s why, instead of defining the “justice as fairness” with reference to a background theory that makes it “metaphysical”, he has developed a surprising approach to liberalism. Now, he is concerned about how (or whether) the citizens with reasonable but irreconcilable doctrines in a democratic society can also accept a political conception of justice. It seems that religions are regarded as the most problematic doctrines because of their transcendent basics. Accoridng to Rawls, public reason is the common reasons of reasonable citizens who are expected to voluntarily enter into the matters related to political justice, which results in a narrow public sphere and exclusive, not as inclusive as Rawls thinks, approach to the religions.