罗尔斯“重叠共识”的逻辑困境与重构

The Logical Dilemma and Reconstruction of Rawls’ “Overlapping Consensus”

摘要: 在现代民主社会中各种合理却互不相容的哲学与道德学说长期并存，也就是罗尔斯所说的“合理多元论”。为了回应这一现实，罗尔斯在《政治自由主义》中提出了“重叠共识”理论，希望以此解决正义原则在多元社会中的稳定性问题。他试图构建一种不同于其他学说的政治正义观念，让持有不同价值立场的人都能在政治层面达成一致，从而为自由社会提供合法性基础。目前学界对重叠共识的讨论大多集中在对其现代价值的正面辩护或从外部立场展开批判，很少从理论内部的逻辑结构展开细致分析。本文以罗尔斯后期政治哲学文本为基础，梳理重叠共识的基本内涵，并指出它在道德中立性与政治合法性、普遍正义与特殊语境、静态共识与动态社会之间存在的内在张力。在此基础上，本文尝试用“弱公共理性”的思路对重叠共识进行修正，适当放宽对整全性学说的限制，在保持政治共识稳定的同时提升其包容性，为多元社会的共识建构提供一种更具现实性的解释路径。

Abstract: In modern democratic society, various reasonable but incompatible philosophical and moral doctrines coexist for a long time, which is what Rawls calls “reasonable pluralism”. In response to this reality, Rawls put forward the theory of “overlapping consensus” in Political Liberalism, hoping to solve the stability problem of the principle of justice in a pluralistic society. He attempts to construct a political conception of justice different from other doctrines, so that people with different value positions can reach agreement at the political level, so as to provide a legitimate basis for a free society. At present, most academic discussions on overlapping consensus focus on the positive defense of its modern value or criticism from an external standpoint, and few conduct detailed analysis from the internal logical structure of the theory. Based on Rawls’ later texts of political philosophy, this paper combs the basic connotation of overlapping consensus, and points out its internal tensions between moral neutrality and political legitimacy, universal justice and special context, static consensus and dynamic society. On this basis, this paper tries to revise the overlapping consensus with the idea of “weak public reason”, appropriately relax the restrictions on comprehensive doctrines, improve its inclusiveness while maintaining the stability of political consensus, and provide a realistic explanatory path for the consensus construction of pluralistic societies.