The paper considers a fundamental issue set against the backcloth of John Rawls’s theory of justice, namely the structure of its justification system. The issue is so significant, because justification fulfills a key role in the Rawlsian conception. J. Rawls offers a sophisticated system consisting of different arguments aimed at reaching full justification. In the author’s opinion, there are five elements that relate to each other: 1) original position with the idea of the veil of ignorance, 2) reflective equilibrium, 3) public reason, 4) overlapping consensus, and 5) fundamental constructivist ideas. The five above mentioned arguments seem to be based on four different argumentative strategies: 1) a coherentist strategy – referring to the general and internal coherence of the system; 2) a contractualist strategy – based on the notion of social contract; 3) a pragmatic strategy – referring to the connection with effective social practices; and 4) a constructivist strategy which is founded in the particular view of reasonableness. The justification system evolves from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism. However, though the system develops, it is always aimed at the same goal – to gather our considered beliefs and facts about a modern society into a coherent set of judgments which may claim to be valid.
In 1971 J. Rawls published A Theory of Justice. It became the subject of numerous analyses that can be reduced – with respect to reactions to it – to two positions: rejection and radicalization. The rejection reaction consists in the proposition that justice, understood by Rawls as impartiality, cannot be put into practice in real life. On the other hand, radicalization may be reduced to a multidirectional development of methodological suggestions in this theory. O. Höffe, who made this analysis, should be numbered among the radicals. He mainly discovered that Rawls was not able to defend the idea of justice as impartiality. For this reason he himself makes an attempt to formulate a new theory of justice for which practical philosophy is the philosophical base, and the theory of social contract and a semantic analysis of the idea of justice are premises for construing it.
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