English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

The main concern of the following pages, and the principal aim of my argument which runs through all parts of this lecture, is to answer the question: "How in liberal constitutional democracy as it actually exists in most free and developed countries is natural law in the classical sense a legitimate and politically workable standard of reasonableness and objective moral value?" In order to answer this question, I will have to talk extensively about history (Part One). Moreover, I will develop my argument in a partly sympathetic confrontation with what I consider to be the main and most valid contemporary philosophical theory of liberal constitutionalism: John Rawls's Political Liberalism and its conception of public reason and liberal legitimacy (Part Two). In my view, this theory contains sufficient truth to be worthy of being continuously and fruitfully revisited, but also sufficient evident untruth as to be a useful contrast-background for a political-philosophical argument in favor of the relevance of natural law for public reason (Part Three). The nearly unquestioned framework for normative thinking on political matters today seems to be constitutional democracy of some kind. The democratic constitutional state is the expression of a complex ethos, grown in the course of a long history. This ethos forms a specific conception of public reason which is embedded in a framework of pre-political reasonableness that we refer to as "natural law." Being "natural" and, thus, pre-political, it is not to be identified with public reason.

The Political Ethos of Constitutional Democracy and the Place of Natural Law in Public Reason: Rawls's "Political Liberalism" Revisited