The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus Revisited

John Rawls claims that a society must be stable in order to be just, and in his later work he argues that this requirement of stability can be satisfied in a liberal constitutional democracy only if it includes an overlapping consensus. In an overlapping consensus, all reasonable citizens endorse a common conception of justice, but they do so from within divergent conceptions of what is good. Rawls articulates the idea of overlapping consensus in recognition of the burdens of judgment, which are factors that make it difficult for us to exercise judgment about certain subject matters, including especially controversial questions of morality and metaphysics, such as what is good for human beings and the nature of personhood. Rawls contends that we should strive in the public realm to achieve consensus only about distributive justice, not more generally about what is right and what is good. Overlapping consensus is more plausible when it is understood as a response to the endemic existence in a constitutional democracy of citizens who are cooperative but injudicious, and not simply as a response to the conjunction of the need for stability with the fact of reasonable disagreement, since this understanding of overlapping consensus does not presuppose as strong a formulation of the liberal principle of legitimacy.