公共理性与政治共识——罗尔斯对康德及霍布斯观点的继承与改造
Public Reason and Political Consensus: Rawls' Inheritance and Transformation of Kant and Hobbes' Views

公共理性通常被构想为一种有助于促成或维持政治共识的理念。以康德为代表的启蒙主义者乐观地估计了理性自由运用与政治共识之间的关联。罗尔斯拒斥了启蒙主义的观点，转而采纳霍布斯式的构想，将公共理性作为一种机制以维持某种政治关系。但也因此，罗尔斯必须在不诉诸纯粹实践理性的基础上为公共理性提供新的规范性基础，以弥补霍布斯式公共理性的伦理缺陷。结果，罗尔斯式的公共理性既无法解决根本的价值冲突，亦无法在具体公共政策上促成实际的共识；其功能在于维护由作为公共理性规范基础的那些政治价值所界定的公民间的政治关系，以及使公民相互确信在这种关系中达成政治共识的道德可欲性和实践可能性。
The idea of public reason is often considered to be helpful in promoting or maintaining political consensus. The enlightenment philosophers represented by Kant optimistically estimated the correlation between the free use of reason and political consensus. Rawls rejected the enlightenment views and adopted a Hobbesian conception, while conceiving public reason as a mechanism to maintain some kind of political relationship. However, Rawls must provide a new normative basis for his idea of public reason without resorting to purely practical reason to make up for the ethical defects of Hobbesian conception of public reason. As a result, Rawlsian idea of public reason could not solve the conflict of fundamental values or contribute to the actual consensus on specific policies. Its function is to preserve and defend the political relationships defined by those political values that constitute the normative base of Rawlsian idea of public reason and to make citizens mutually believe that it is moral desirable and political practicable to reach political consensus under this kind of political relationships