Yet a new model of the well-ordered society-one that looks radically different from what Rawls originally imagined-does succeed. It is shown that two models that resemble closely Rawls' model of the well-ordered society but are also capable of dealing with justice pluralism do not perform well when judged against such criteria. To do so, we ought to remain faithful to those reasons Rawls has for introducing the idea of the well-ordered society in the first place. This requires we develop new models of society to replace the well-ordered society in order to adequately address such disagreements. Yet, once we introduce justice pluralism-the fact that reasonable people disagree about the nature and requirements of justice, something Rawls eventually admits is inevitable in liberal societies-then a well-ordered society as Rawls defines it is impossible. One unchanging feature of John Rawls' thought is that we theorize about well-ordered societies.

In this paper I argue that regardless of which plausible interpretation of acting from overdetermined motives we adopt, the prospect of citizens realizing their full autonomy in Rawls’s PL are small. This raises the interesting question of acting from overdetermined motives in Kant’s system of ethics. The problem is that in the well-ordered society of PL people’s reasons for complying with the principles of justice are overdetermined in a problematic way. Though the model of the well-ordered society presented in TJ is arguably consistent with Kant’s notion of autonomy, the model of the well-ordered society presented in PL is not. This constancy, I shall argue, raises problems.

This notion of full autonomy is explicitly Kantian. One feature of John Rawls’s well-ordered society in both A Theory of Justice (TJ) and Political Liberalism (PL) is that citizens in the well-ordered society, when adhering to the principles of justice governing that society, realize their full autonomy.

A theory of justice by john rawls