The debate between Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls concerns the question of how to do political philosophy under conditions of cultural pluralism, if the aim of political philosophy is to uncover the normative foundation of a modern liberal democracy. Rawls’s political liberalism tries to bypass the problem of pluralism, using the intellectual device of the veil of ignorance, and yet paradoxically at the same time it treats it as something given and as an arbiter of justification within the political conception of justice. Habermas argues that Rawls not only incorrectly operationalizes the moral point of view from which we discern what is just but also fails to capture the specificity of democracy which is given by internal relations between politics and law. This deprives Rawls’s political philosophy of the conceptual tools needed to articulate the normative foundation of democracy.

于尔根·哈贝马斯（JürgenHabermas）和约翰·罗尔斯（John Rawls）之间的辩论涉及的问题是，如果政治哲学的目的是揭露现代自由民主制的规范基础，那么在文化多元化的情况下如何做政治哲学。罗尔斯的政治自由主义试图利用愚昧无知的面纱的知识手段绕开多元主义的问题，但同时却自相矛盾的是，罗尔斯的政治自由主义将其视为正义的政治观念中的既定事物和正义的仲裁者。哈贝马斯认为，罗尔斯不仅错误地操作了我们从中辨别正义的道德观点，而且未能抓住政治和法律之间的内部关系所赋予的民主的特殊性。