Part of the legacy that John Rawls has left with us in political and moral philosophy lies in his idea of reasonableness. This is an idea that grows increasingly important as we pass from A Theory of Justice (Rawls1971) to Political Liberalism (Rawls1993). Specifically, it plays a decisive role when it comes to reframing the theory of justice as fairness in light of a constructivist reading of Kant’s moral philosophy (Rawls1999a,2000); likewise, the same idea subsequently figures centrally among the elements required for a stable liberal society (Rawls1993, 140–44), in a context marked by multiple conceptions of the good, and reasonableness in these conceptions becomes the starting point for the possibility of an overlapping consensus.
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Bongiovanni, G., Valentini, C. (2009). Reciprocity, Balancing and Proportionality Rawls and Habermas on Moral and Political Reasonableness. In: Bongiovanni, G., Sartor, G., Valentini, C. (eds) Reasonableness and Law. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 86. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8500-0_4
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