سید علیرضا حسینی بهشتی

John Rawls introduced the idea of public reason as a precondition of decision-making processes based on justice in a well-ordered society. There are critics, however, who doubted whether the idea is consistent with deliberative democracy. While Rawls saw his idea of reasonable overlapping consensus as an outcome of public reasoning, his suggested political liberalism seems to be morally too thick to work as the basis of such a consensus in culturally diverse societies. Here, through a critical evaluation of Rawls’s view, I try to use his idea of public reason by reference to the brilliant distinction he makes between ‘the rational’ and ‘the reasonable’. I show that it is the latter, which defines the nature of ‘the political’, that could be employed for the relationship between different cultural identities of a society, governed by political principles justified by referring to thin or non-moral arguments that in turns allow liberal as well as non-liberal cultural communities to participate in a just framework of social cooperation. Moreover, I argue that this revised interpretation of Rawlsian overlapping consensus can help us in the democratic assessment of constitutions and revising them in order to became more legitimate to citizens. Using this theoretical framework, and as the Islamic Republic is claimed to represent a religious democracy, I suggest that the criterion of public reason can be used in assessing the Constitution of the Islamic Republic and, therefore, highlights the necessary revisions for achieving more democratic basic structures of the Iranian society.

The problem of "alienation" and the "alienated man" is one of the most attractive features of the critique of modernity. Ali Shariati, the contemporary Iranian theorist who was highly concerned with the critique of both tradition and modernity, introduced the idea of a "third way". As the main cause for decadence, defining and defying alienation was at the core of Shariati's intellectual agenda. In this paper, we will explain his view on alienation and his recommended solution which invites peoples of the third world to return to their very identity. Then, some critical arguments raised by his critics will be explored and assessed.

Since the la.st two decades of the last centery, the American cosiaty has witnessed that emergence of a social movement could "multiculturalism". It has challenged the dominated moniestic view which prescient for a long time the American culture as more or less homogeneus with little (if any at all) respect for different concerning divers cultural identities of the citizens. The first section of the present paper will deal with exploring the main features of the debate over the challenges to sight in details. The second section will attempt to explore the philosophical assumptions behind each view. The third section is design to offer a better understanding of the issue at bands in the debate which shall mainly rely on Alasdair MacIntyre’s conception of traditional of moral enqurity and will be follow by some concluding points to the arguments of this paper.