Cognitivism in Political Philosophy

A constraint on political cognitivism is that it give some basis for responding to certain worries. These worries prompt political liberals such as Rawls to deny that the search for truth can provide a shared basis for a conception of justice in a pluralistic democratic society.2 On this view, a pluralistic democratic state that avoids the authoritarian use of state power should be neutral about the conflicting and incommensurable conceptions of the good held by its citizens. Now Rawls is not a sceptic about ethical truth. But he still sees the absence of commitment to ethical ideals, even liberal ideals like autonomy, as essential to liberalism as a political doctrine. There is no practicable answer for political purposes to the question of the true good, since public agreement on this cannot be obtained in a nonauthoritarian, pluralistic, democratic society.3