From Rational Dialogue To Independent Choice

This research tries to conduct a comprehensive reading and explanation of Bruce Arnold Ackerman's political liberalism theory,including his political ethical opinion,value point,and constitutional model.We know that public reason and its constitutional democracy practices constitute two main issues of contemporary political liberalism,the former pays attention to the legitimacy of the political power,and the latter pays attention to the transformation of public right to reality by legal reason and system.The point is,there is a gap between public reason and its practices,causing a trouble about transforming the public authority to citizen's independent choice.Ackerman describes the issue of overcoming the gap as utopian leap.During the same time,Ackerman concludes that discussion is the most important question in political philosophy.More specifically,in his early career,Ackerman makes research on political liberalism theory raised by John Rawl,during the same time,Ackerman focuses on how to rectify Rawl's distributive justice theory,how to raise his own social justice theory,and how to update political liberalism theory in a more extensive perspective.Ackerman argues that people ought to talk in the liberal state,only in such way can people understand each other in the issue of distribution of resources.Besides,Ackerman argues that if someone could show,in a rational way,that his conception of the good is superior to that of rival claimants,why wouldn't that be a valid basis for recognizing his claim over theirs?On the contrary,if one cannot persuade others,some special values may not be received,and that's the reason why Ackerman insists his principle of conversational constraint.On this period,Ackerman insists that everybody in public dialogue ought to abide by the principle of neutrality.The logic behind the principle is one must give up his power if he failed in justifing its legitimacy.Ackerman's theory is different from Rawl's veil of ignorance theory.Ackerman does not depend on veil of ignorance,instead,Ackerman tries to enforce citizen's identification in his theory.Obviously,open society can produce an equal environment,which is better than the closed one.It sees great progress in deliberative democracy theory in the late 20th centry.At the same time,Ackerman changes his interest to deliberative democracy theory.Ackerman tries to put public reason into democracy society,and proposes the conception of two-track deliberative democracy theory.This is a special dialogue theory,we can find it is beneficial for citizens' both privite life and public life.Generally speaking,the success of Ackerman is that his political liberalism theory replaces the conception of social justice with the idea of people's rational and independent choice.However,there are some shortcomings in his theory.For instance,Ackerman's definition about liberalism is not clear,and some of his views may conflict with liberalism.