Professor John Rawls revivified the study of political philosophy by taking one necessary step away from this traditional search for harmony. In A Theory of Justice, he declared that his rationally chosen principles of justice must be independent of conceptions of the good. But he has also acknowledged that his principles are to be rationally chosen specifically by those who live in a liberal and democratic society, where they may represent an overlapping political consensus about the principles of substantial justice. Once again, there is harmony, but harmony within the liberal stockade. Someone whose conception of good and evil is founded on a supernatural authority, which represents any tolerance of a contrary moral view as evil, will not, for example, accept the primacy of liberty. In any truly liberal society such illiberal persons are to be expected. This confinement of reasonably acceptable principles of justice to liberal and democratic societies bypasses the outstanding political problem of our time, which is the relation between two kinds of society: on the one hand, self-consciously traditional societies and governments, where priests of the church or rabbis or imams or mullahs, and other experts in the will of God, maintain a single conception of the good that determines the way of life of the society as a whole; and on the other hand, the liberal democratic societies and governments that permit, or encourage, a plurality of conceptions of the good. The severity of this confrontation was for a long time concealed by the belief in a positivist theory of modernization. The positivists believed that all societies across the globe would gradually discard their traditional attachments to supernatural forces because of the need for rational, scientific, and experimental methods of thought which a modern industrial economy involves. This is the old faith, widespread in the nineteenth century, that there must be a step-by-step convergence on liberal values, on "our values."
We now know that there is no "must" about it, and that all such general theories of human history have a predictive value near to zero. They are just diachronic versions of the Platonic and Marxist belief in a final rational harmony. It is not only possible but, on present evidence, probable that most conceptions of the good, and most ways of life, which are typical of commercial, liberal, industrialized societies will often seem altogether hateful to substantial minorities within these societies, and even more hateful to most of the populations within traditional societies elsewhere. As a liberal, I think I ought to expect to be found superficial by a large part of mankind, both at home and abroad. One needs to see that one's own way of life and habits of speech and of thought, not only seem wrong to large populations, but can be repugnant in very much the same way in which alien habits of eating, or alien sexual customs, can be repugnant.
---SPSmith
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