Volume 50, 2008
Social and Political Philosophy
James Hersh
Pages 243-249
The Impossibility of Democracy
Rawls’s and Rousseau’s Unacknowledged Demand for Irony
John Rawls, in his Political Liberalism (1993), claims that his justice-as-fairness prescription for liberal democracy does not require its citizens to harbor doubts regarding the truth claims of their religious, philosophical, or moral comprehensive doctrines. Citizens, he says, need not be “hesitant or uncertain, much less skeptical, about [their] own beliefs.” This claim is necessary for the protection of liberty of conscience, a “primary goods”, but it is also necessary to his description of his scheme as a “reasonable utopia” since citizens are not likely to agree to a demand for skepticism. The problem arises for Rawls’s scheme when he says that for a citizen to participate in this political process she must be “reasonable” and that to qualify as “reasonable”, she must acknowledge what Rawls calls the “burdens of judgment” (that is, “limits on what can be reasonably justified to others”). This acknowledgment allows her not only to qualify as reasonable herself, but forces her to concede the reasonableness of other citizens who hold different truth claims from her own. Rawls’s fourth “burden of conscience” is an admission that the truth claims of all citizens, including her own, are conditioned by what Rawls calls her “total experience”. Unless she is willing to make the admission that her truth claims are contingent, a citizen cannot qualify as “reasonable” and is excluded from the conversation of public reason whose purpose is to produce a consensus on justice principles. This leaves his scheme in the category of “unreasonable utopias”.