Uma teoria política da ação: uma defesa da ideia de justificação pública do liberalismo político de John Rawls

Abstract

This work addresses Gerald Gaus's critique of liberal theories that, despite considering the problem of public justification as a matter of first importance, do not offer satisfactory bases to support their approaches – in particular, they do not start from a solid understanding of the very concept of justification, a matter which the author tries to remedy by building an epistemological approach. To offer an answer to this criticism, I develop an interpretation of John Rawls's theory of justice that highlights the role of a conception of the person and practical rationality and how they lead to his idea of publica reason, so that Political Liberalism may be reconstructed as a political theory of action. This reading is intended to show that the author's approach to public justification has more solid foundations than initially conceived, and stems from a fundamental methodological position on the relationship between political philosophy and epistemology and other fields of knowledge.