Free public reason: making it up as we go

New York: Oxford University Press (1996)
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Abstract

Free Public Reason examines the idea of public justification, stressing its importance but also questioning the coherence of the concept itself. Although public justification is employed in the work of theorists such as John Rawls, Jeremy Waldron, Thomas Nagel, and others, it has received little attention on its own as a philosophical concept. In this book Fred D'Agostino shows that the concept is composed of various values, interests, and notions of the good, and that no ranking of these is possible. The notion of public justification itself is thus shown to be contestable. In demonstrating this, D'Agostino undermines many current political theories that rely on this concept. Having broken down the foundations of public justification, D'Agostino then offers an alternative model of how a workable consensus on its meaning might be reached through the interactions of a community of interpreters or delegates at a constitutional convention.

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Citations of this work

Collectivizing Public Reason.Lars J. K. Moen - forthcoming - Social Theory and Practice.
Survey article: The coming of age of deliberative democracy.J. Bohman - 1998 - Journal of Political Philosophy 6 (4):400–425.
Public Reason.Jonathan Quong - 2013 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
In Defence of Intelligible Reasons in Public Justification.Kevin Vallier - 2016 - Philosophical Quarterly 66 (264):596-616.

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