John Rawls e a questão da religião e da razão pública

Abstract

The pervasive problem of Rawls's late book, Political Liberalism, is how people with different comprehensive doctrines such as philosophical, moral, and religious can agree on fundamental political issues. However, religious issues permeate the whole Rawlsian work, for example, when John Rawls died in 2002, a text entitled On My Religion was found in his archives. In it Rawls describes the history of his beliefs, referring to a period as a graduate student at Princeton (1941-1942). In December 1942 he writes A Brief Investigation into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community. In such cases, the problem is how people with different understanding religious doctrines can come to overlapping consensus. The solution to the problem of how political legitimacy can be achieved despite religious conflict, and how, among citizens of different faiths, political justification can proceed without specific reference to religious conviction. This is all related to the idea of public reason.