Democracy and public deliberation in John Rawls

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the Rawls’ conception of deliberative democracy. Some thinkers of deliberative democracy have argued that Rawls’ aim in A Theory of Justice is the problem of social justice, but not that of the legitimity of political power. I think, on the contrary, that this work offers at least two constitutive ideas of deliberative democracy: the first is that original position is understood as a fair system of public justification; the second in that original position is based on the ideas of impartiality, reciprocity and neutrality. In the Political Liberalism, Rawls introduces the idea of “public reason”, offering, therefore, a complete justification of his notion of political justice. In a society marked by the fact of reasonable pluralism, the more important questions in terms of justice should be resolved from public-political argumentation and deliberation, without appealing to a comprehensive moral doctrine.