Just War, Political Hermeneutics and Religious Pluralism in John Rawls and Claude Geffré

Abstract

For John Rawls, it is primarily important for the Law of Peoples that justice be served through the stability of liberal and decent societies. Military intervention for humanitarian or self-defense purposes was a legitimate response to abuses perpetrated by outlaw groups or States, as they fuel war and terrorism, in which case could be characterized as an instance of “just war”. The political hermeneutics emerges in the public space because of the proposed conciliation and agreement between religious doctrines and comprehensive conceptions of the common good with their conflicts and incompatibilities. Political liberalism seeks to accommodate such a plurality of reasonable comprehensive doctrines through overlapping consensus. Claude Geffré proposes a theology with hermeneutical orientation as a new political stance in the face of today’s pluralism. The enigma of the plural otherness of religious conceptions manifest the spiritual richness of the human experience of the divine, and yet it raises important questions for social cohesion. Rawls and Geffré converge on the hermeneutical problem of normative justification postulated in a pluralistic context of recognition of the other and tolerance in the face of irreconcilable quarrels.