The liberal dilemma in formulating a fundamental political principle: Political unanimity and non-political diversity

The fundamental question facing the well being of contemporary liberal democratic societies is whether people with diverse and comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines can coexist peacefully. Political liberals respond to this challenge by proposing a project of political unanimity and non-political diversity in the attempt to construct unanimous agreement through the fundamental principle of justice as the basis for toleration, regulation, and the free pursuit of divergent doctrines and conceptions of the good.; I argue that political liberals fail to work out a unanimous political principle because they avoid the problem of reasonable disagreement, whether by way of “original position” in John Rawls or the “principle of neutrality” in Ronald Dworkin, Charles Larmore, and Bruce Ackerman. The exclusion of comprehensive commitments to and conceptions of the good in political construction, I argue, does not ensure political agreement and may result in moral skepticism and value-blindness in politics. Faced the necessity of reintroducing conceptions of the good, political liberals have difficulty in determining what is a common good and a common value. Political liberals are confronted with a complicated dilemma when forced to address the problem of diversity, namely, the dilemma of including various conceptions of the good that falsify the original position of neutrality.; In order to address the challenge of reasonable pluralism in human coexistence, and to overcome the liberal dilemma, I propose an “engaged model for the mutual understanding of differences” as the basis of reaching political consensus. This model consists of a procedural presentation of differences in order to achieve mutual understanding and a rationale for a common political project. I argue that different reasonable doctrines, religious and non-religious, political and non-political, liberal and non-liberal, should have legitimate status in solving the basic problems of human coexistence and the determination of justice in a pluralistic democratic society. I further argue that an “engaged model” opens new possibilities for the comparative study of political, philosophical, moral, and religious doctrines that enhance the prospect of toleration, political consensus and political justice in pluralistic democratic societies.