Rawls and Acceptable Dispositional Standards

The emphasis of many of Rawls’s interpreters has been upon the conceptual incompatibilities that would distinguish the overlapping consensus from the doctrinal commitments of religious believers. But an issue that the interpreters have not emphasized is to what extent the consensus would allow the faithful to abide by the dispositional injunctions of their religious traditions when they perhaps could accept the consensus’s conceptual requirements. This article highlights the consensus’s “dispositional incompatibility” problem: that the dispositional traits of the consensus would impact the traits of its religious participants in ways that would undermine their flourishing and capacity for lifestyle integration.