Chapter 3: Two Forms of Proceduralism: Rawls's and Habermas's Theories of Democratic Legitimacy

The theories of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas share “a common starting point in Kant's practical philosophy” and propose a “moral point of view” that suggests to conceptualize the validity of norms in terms of their universalizability. The crucial question is, therefore, “what everyone could rationally will to be binding on everyone alike” (McCarthy, 1994, pp. 43; 46; also see Tschentscher, 1999, pp. 83; 198–199). On this basis, Rawls and Habermas both attempt to develop “a Kantian procedural conception of practical reason without recourse to Kantian metaphysics” (Gledhill, 2011, p. 181). Rawls and Habermas consider the autonomy of human beings as the fundamental source of normativity and aim at reinterpretations of this Kantian idea that do justice to two distinctly modern requirements: the value pluralism that characterizes contemporary societies and calls for philosophical modesty vis-à-vis the loss of authority of metaphysical foundations. The view that normativity has its source in individuals' autonomy is rooted in the European Enlightenment tradition and is intrinsically associated with the assumption that democratic procedures have a legitimizing potential.