Making Political Justice More Open to Religions: Reconstructing Political Liberalism

Today, religious groups have increasingly represented themselves in various public scenes, making it difficult to address the issues under the existing legal framework; the separation of church and state and freedom of religion. Though political liberals, such as Rawls, have proposed a conception of political justice that attempts to be tolerant of religions, it is limited by their view of the public/private distinction as given and their representative viewpoint of public authority. To make political justice more open to religions, a paradigm shift to the religious viewpoint should be necessary. Political liberalism then is reconstructed so that it opens an interactive process between justice and religions. A theorist, adopting a distanced internal perspective of religions, can help with this task by providing a list of doctrinal reasons that religious believers can voluntarily endorse and appeal to when they are involved in consensus and deliberation.

論説 (Article)