One of the most crucial issues in the debate between liberals and communitarians concerns the nature of a just society. Answering the question of how a just society should be arranged, John Rawls accepts the thesis of the “priority of the right over the good”. According to this claim, pluralistic societies of the Western World should be based on the principle of justice, which cannot be merely one important value among others. To provide a standard by which conflicting values and competing interests are reconciled, justice has to be both prior to and detached from those values and those interests. This type of liberalism, due to the fact that it gives priority to just procedures, has been called “procedural liberalism”. Michael Sandel has shown that historical roots of procedural liberalism can be found in the Kantian notion of the “supremacy” of the moral law over the natural desires of human beings.
One of the most prominent critic of procedural liberalism, Charles Taylor, uses in his recent publications the Rawlsian concept of “overlapping consensus” to deal with the problem of the fundaments and stability of pluralistic societies. Does it mean that Taylor has rejected his previous standpoint and has joined political thinkers inspired by Kant who, like Rawls and Habermas, believe in the possibility of universal justification of basic political values?
In my paper, I would like to show that although in Taylor’s recent writings one can find a lot of common points between his conception of secularism and Rawls’s and Habermas’s conception of a secular state, one should not think that Taylor eventually dropped his communitarian position. For he believes, contrary to Rawls and Habermas, that basic political rules cannot be justified by means of reason alone, that is, independently from our deep commitments. Accepting the Rawlsian notion of “overlapping consensus”, Taylor modifies it significantly and this has important consequences for the model of the public sphere he endorses. In his view the scope and meaning of a given norm (for instance the right to life) is determined by the way we justify it. For some the right to life is justified by God, for others by the Kantian notion of human dignity and this has an impact on our attitude towards lively debated issues such as abortion or death penalty. This makes Taylor’s model of the public sphere, as Ulrike Spohn has rightly noted, “more conflictual” but at the same time “more inclusive”.
