 It may be helpful to connect this view regarding the structure of public reason to Rawls’s discussion of the related concepts of public justification and the idea of an overlapping consensus. For Rawls, public justification is achieved “when all the reasonable members of political society carry out a justification of the shared political conception by embedding it in their several reasonable comprehensive views” (Rawls 1996, 387). When each reasonable person has found a sufficient comprehensive or non-shared justification of a political liberal conception of justice, then we can say that an overlapping consensus on a political conception of justice exists, and as a result of this consensus, there is a public justification of our shared political conception of justice. But Rawls is clear that “while the public justification of the political conception…depends on reasonable comprehensive doctrines, it does so only in an indirect way. That is, the express contents of the doctrines have no normative role in public justification; citizens do not look into the content of others’ doctrines…Rather, they take into account and give some weight only to the fact—to the existence—of the reasonable overlapping consensus itself” (Rawls 1996, 387). For Rawls, public justification thus depends on the fact that all reasonable persons can endorse a political conception of justice from within their non-public or comprehensive doctrines, but public reason itself makes no reference to the content of those nonpublic doctrines—it depends only on the shared political ideas found within the political conception of justice.