How to defend liberalism? Moral and political justification in John Rawls

This paper discusses Rawls’s way of defending liberalism. According to the author, liberalism stands as the valid – the most desirable and feasible together – response to genuine moral conflicts, given the incommensurability of values. Liberalism today must be able to let all differences live and coexist, while grounding their coexistence on a sort of public morality, and it should be defended both politically and morally. The Rawlsian defence is a moral justification of liberalism, even if this does not imply that his liberalism should be qualified as a comprehensive theory, or, even, as a kind of perfectionism. Rawls instead defends a moral view of liberalism, albeit claiming that the kind of liberalism he has in mind is a political one. Claim’s author is that there is no contradiction in arguing for what can be called a ‘moral political’ conception of liberalism. Besides, Rawlsian theory is not identified with a consensus theory since Rawls is not interested in pursuing consensus in itself but, on the contrary, views at consensus as a symptom of the fact of sharing moral values such as toleration and respect for others. Rawls does not renounce the truth or justification of his theory for obtaining consensus. Consensus is reached on the ground of a shared morality. In conclusion: liberalism cannot be adequately justified via consent; liberal institutions cannot be universally justified by mere reference to the will of consenting people. Liberalism cannot be only political and “political” does not mean “void of moral contents” and such a view could still be made attractive by rethinking the place of its values that have to be defended as genuinely public ones.