Politikai igazságosságkoncepciók a világképek kontextusában: Jürgen Habermas és az overlapping consensus lehetősége
Political Concepts of Justice in the Context of Worldviews. Jürgen Habermas and the Possibility of the "Overlapping Consensus"

Summary/Abstract: The article reconstructs the critique of Jürgen Habermas about the Rawlsian conceptof „overlapping consensus”. According to Habermas, the possibility of the Rawlsianoverlapping consensus depends on the „division of labor” between private individuals’philosophical-metaphisical use of reason, and citizens’ public-political use of reason. Fromtheir „participant perspective”, private individuals use metaphisical arguments to underlie their worldviews and their ethical beliefs. From this perspective they can agree with politicalprinciples of justice created through monological, generalizing procedures. From thepoint of view of Habermas this idea can be criticized with the fact that it is counterintuitive,and it makes the agreement vulnerable if the bases of „consensus” – the moral andethical elements – are not seen as possibly part of the consensus, and thus they are notpublicly debated. A further problem from the point of view of Habermas is that if beforereaching a politial consensus there is no reference to publicly accountable criteria ofreason, then it becomes impossible to resolve conflicts between individuals followingsolely their own ethical beliefs and moral expectations, thus it becomes impossible toexplain how an overlapping consensus can be achieved. The article shows that accordingto Habermas the problems can be solved if the individuals, trying to reach a consensus,are asked at the first steps leading towards the consensus – at the moment of articulatingtheir ethical or moral beliefs – to present the norms of the public use of reason. Thus,even from the first steps leading toward a consensus, we can refer to reasonable norms,and if we presume these, it becomes easier to explain why it is obligatory to aspire forreasonable difference of opinions, and to appeal with more general moral and politicalnorms in cases of ethical differences of opinion.

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