羅爾斯《文集》中與宗教有關的兩篇文章

Public Reason and Religious Belief: A Review of John Rawls's Collected Papers

黃勇(HUANG Yong)

《道風：基督教文化評論》 13期 (2000/07) Pp. 249-265+301-302

並列摘要

This essay examines John Rawls's most recent view of the role of religious beliefs in political discourses as developed in his two articles published after his Political Liberalism, now collected in his Collected Papers. In contrast to his previous view that religious reasons cannot be used to support one's political ideas unless and until one has sufficient independent public reasons, Rawls now says that religious reasons can be introduced anytime as long as one is also prepared to provide such independent public reasons sufficient to support his/her political ideas in due time. The main reason that Rawls insists that there has to be independent public reasons to support one's political idea is to avoid imposing one's religious beliefs upon others, which is important to show the respect to one's equal and free fellow citizens in a religiously pluralistic society. A question has already been asked whether there are public reasons in Rawls's sense after all (reasons that can be accepted by all) and, if there are, whether such reasons are always sufficient to support one's political ideas. This, however, is not the main concern of this paper. Instead, it argues that to use religious reasons to support one's political ideas in a religious pluralistic society does not necessarily mean to impose one's religious beliefs upon others: one can use Christian beliefs to convince Christians, Islamic beliefs to convince Muslims, Buddhist beliefs to convince Buddhists, and so on, to support one's political ideas. More importantly, to show one's respect for one's fellow citizens is not to ignore their unique belief systems but is precisely to carefully examine their systems, different from each other, and in this process to see whether these different systems could provide different supports for one's political ideas.