43 - Constitution and constitutional essentials

Summary

From his days as a graduate student at Princeton, Rawls’s work was animatedby a concern to understand and vindicate the possibility and promise of constitutional democracy. In a constitutional democracy, the constitution, whether written or unwritten, ixes, among other things, certain familiar basic individual rights and liberties and the general structure of government and the political process (PL 227). These are its “essentials,” and there is a high level of moral urgency that these essentials be just and workable.

To be just, a constitution must in its essentials satisfy the two principles of justice. It will satisfy the irst (so-called the political liberties) as a constitutive constraint on the (presumably workable) general structure of government and the political process it sets out, and (iii) providing an institutional mechanism (e.g. judicial review by a Supreme Court) to secure the basic rights and liberties within, and to ensure their priority relative to the other legitimate ends pursued through, government and the political process. These other legitimate ends will include not only other matters of basic justice as set out by the second principle of justice, e.g. matters of fair equality of opportunity and of permissible economic and social inequalities, but also important matters of the common good, e.g. environmental protection or the preservation of culture.