_________________________________________________________________________Swansea University E-Theses Is justice as fairness a realistic utopia? A critical examination of Rawls's idea of overlapping consensus. Felton, Maria Paz C How to cite: _________________________________________________________________________ Felton, Maria Paz C (2006) Is justice as fairness a realistic utopia? A critical examination of Rawls's idea of overlapping consensus.. thesis, Swansea University. http://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa42460 Use policy: _________________________________________________________________________ This item is brought to you by Swansea University. Any person downloading material is agreeing to abide by the terms of the repository licence: copies of full text items may be used or reproduced in any format or medium, without prior permission for personal research or study, educational or non-commercial purposes only. 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Felton Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. University of Wales, Swansea Department of Politics and International Relations 2 0 0 6 ProQuest Number: 10798168 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10798168 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 SUMMARY DECLARATION This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not being concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree. Signed -................. (candidate) Date Z\ .( .0 ^ 0 .4 ................................................... STATEMENT 1 This thesis is the result of my own investigations, except where otherwise stated. Where correction services have been used, the extent and nature of the corrections is clearly marked in a footnote(s). Other sources are acknowledged by footnotes giving explicit references. A bibliography is appended. Signed ...........*..................................................(candidate) Date .............................................. STATEMENT 2 I hereby consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organizations. Signed ...................... (candidate) Date ,?.V\o3\.Q4 Summary Is Justice as Fairness a Realistic Utopia? A Critical Examination of Rawls’s Idea of Overlapping Consensus. The purpose of this thesis is to develop an alternative account of how justice as fairness can be delivered. My general proposition is that if justice as fairness is to be regarded as a realistic utopia, some alterations need to be made into the argument about the possibilities of its realization offered by Rawls. The main problem comes from the idea of overlapping consensus and its association with stability. A crucial working conjecture is that we need overlapping consensus neither to stabilize justice as fairness, nor to justify it. My alterations to Rawls’s argument also originate as a result of two theoretical burdens within political liberalism: its notion of stability and its account of the fact of reasonable pluralism. Both ideas have been inadequately problematized, and therefore demand significant revision. The idea of stability needs to be revised because of its exclusive focus on questions of moral coherence at the expense of more relevant aspects such as institutional and political stability. The account of reasonable pluralism also needs to be revised because it is both too narrow and significantly unfocused. A crucial consequence that follows from these revisions is that, in order to preserve institutional stability under the conditions of pluralism, we need to render the stability of institutions separately from the coherence of citizens’ overall moralities. These two conceptual revisions lead me to effect three alterations into Rawls’s argument. In particular I show that: ^constitutional consensus is necessary, but not yet sufficient, for stability of the required kind, 2)political justification is necessary and sufficient for the right kind of justification, and 3)overlapping consensus is part of moral, not political, justification and, therefore, not required for a political project such as Rawls’s. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks are due to various people and, first of all, to my supervisor, Dr. Mark Evans. I am particularly grateful for his support and for helping me in the pursuit of something that I have always valued -clarity of thought. I wish to thank him also for his comments on both general and detailed matters. I am also especially indebted to Professor Bruce Haddock for his encouragement and for the numerous discussions that we had about political philosophy, and to Professor Rex Martin for his invaluable help with the reading of Rawls’s texts. I am also grateful to the Department of Political Theory and International Relations at the University of Wales, Swansea for the support offered during the course of my study. My work on this thesis would not have been possible without the help and encouragement of my husband, John. He has taken over, particularly in the last year, some of the tasks that the running of a household with three young children normally requires. I am deeply thankful to him for sharing some of the worry that goes with writing a thesis. My mother has also been involved in this thesis by providing invaluable childcare at crucial times. I am also grateful to her. My three children, Antonio, James and Daniel, all bom whilst studying for this Ph.D have been a constant source of motivation. I finally wish to thank the audiences of three conferences at the Universities of Manchester and Essex for various valuable comments on some of the ideas contained in this thesis, and to the editors of Politeia for publishing my paper ‘Overlapping Consensus and Critical Justification’. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 1 THE BACKGROUND 10 1 Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical 11 2.The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus 16 3.The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus 27 4.Political Liberalism and Beyond 32 5. Conclusion 42 2 OVERLAPPING CONSENSUS: A CRITICAL ENQUIRY 44 1 .Critiques of Overlapping Consensus 44 2.Overlapping Consensus: A Critical assessment 66 3. Conclusion 89 3 THE PROBLEM OF STABILITY 91 1. Stability: Some General Considerations 92 2.Stability in TJ 105 3. Stability in PL 135 4.Conclusion 141 4 PLURALISM AND POLITICAL LIBERALISM 144 1 .Reasonable Pluralism: Features and Implications for Political Liberalism 147 2.Problems with Rawls’s account 153 5 CONSENSUS AND STABILITY 173 1 .Constitutional Consensus: Preliminary Remarks 174 2.Rawls on Constitutional Consensus 182 3.Stability and Constitutional Consensus 189 6 CONSENSUS AND JUSTIFICATION 202 1 .The limits of Constitutional Consensus 202 2.Rawls on Justification 208 3 .The Idea of Public Reason 213 4.Public Reason and Political Justification 218 5.Stability and Legitimacy 223 7 OVERLAPPING CONSENSUS REVISITED 226 1 .Overlapping Consensus: Realistic or Unrealistic Utopia? 227 2,Overlapping Consensus: A Dystopia? 235 3.Overlapping Consensus and Critical Justification 239 CONCLUSION 245 BIBLIOGRAPHY 247 Abbreviations A Theory o f Justice TJ ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’ PnM ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus’ IOC ‘The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus’ DPOC Political Liberalism PL ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’ IPRR ‘The Law of Peoples’ LoP Justice as Fairness: A Restatement JFR INTRODUCTION The purpose of my thesis is to develop an alternative account -to the one offered by Rawls himself- of how justice as fairness can be delivered. In doing so, my general intention is not to challenge the overall aim of his project, but to improve on his particular framework. The initial impetus for pursuing this programme was prompted by an increasing dissatisfaction with the Rawlsian notion of overlapping consensus and its association with the problem of stability. Whilst I was generally sympathetic towards his attempt to reconcile people’s political perspectives with their overall moralities, the more I looked into the notion of overlapping consensus, the more I was led to think that it was too utopian, and therefore not a realistic utopia. By way of clarification, let me state at the outset what constitutes, in Rawls’s own terms, a realistic utopia. A given project of political philosophy