ABSTRACT
The political conception of justice leaves issues related to personal morality or to the relations of human beings in their nonpolitical, private lives untouched. The requirements of political morality in modernist liberalism are justified by reference to a wider moral theory. As a general, 'fully-fledged' philosophical theory about the nature of morality it is a potential source of controversy and conflict in a plural society. Paradoxically, however, it seems that when John Rawls gives up the traditional justification of political morality, he still has to accept a particular conception of the good life, namely, the one appropriate for the citizen of a liberal democratic society. In a way, Rawls divides morality into two distinct categories, one of which governs the public, political realm and the other the culture of daily life. Instead of being based on particularistic, cultural and contextual justifications, it seems to rely on general knowledge and objective truth.
