Public Reason, Secularism, and Natural Law

Abstract

John Rawls’ and Jürgen Habermas’ theoretical proposals constitute the most outstanding contemporary attempts to establish some discursive and procedural guidelines that may make possible an agreement among the citizens of modern democratic and pluralistic societies. In this essay I intend to deal with the question of their similarities and differences with respect to the classical theory of natural law. The justification for this is found in the fact that, like the conception of public reason in Rawls and Habermas, natural law also purports to be a sort of “universal language”, or a point of convergence regarding the question of good, and of the most significant aspects of civilized co-existence. Does public reason in Rawls and Habermas constitute a secular reformulation of the theory of natural law? In order to tackle this problem, I will pursue the following itinerary: first, I will briefly outline the notion of public reason in Rawls and Habermas; secondly, I will indicate the points in common and the points of divergence between this concept and the theory of natural law. © 2013, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.