Is public reason innocuous?

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 11 (2):131-152 (2008)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Rawls?s controversial idea of public reason is often criticized for being exclusionary and unfair. Yet it is possible to read the idea of public reason as being largely innocuous, especially if one attends to all the qualifications and specifications of the idea that Rawls articulated. This essay pursues such a reading, by systematically considering each element of qualification that Rawls built into the idea of public reason. Considered together and in terms of their cumulative effect, they make the innocuous reading possible. My aim is not, however, to try to defend Rawls?s idea of public reason by claiming that it is innocuous, but to help clarify the ambiguous nature of the idea through this reading

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Analytics

Added to PP
2010-08-10

Downloads
36 (#382,919)

6 months
5 (#244,526)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Patrick Neal
University of Vermont

Citations of this work

Partisanship and public reason.Matteo Bonotti - 2014 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 17 (3):314-331.
Introduction: Parties, partisanship and political theory.Veit Bader & Matteo Bonotti - 2014 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 17 (3):253-266.

View all 6 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

Political Liberalism.John Rawls - 1993 - Columbia University Press.
Justice as fairness: a restatement.John Rawls (ed.) - 2001 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
The law of peoples.John Rawls - 1999 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Edited by John Rawls.
Political Liberalism.J. Rawls - 1995 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 57 (3):596-598.
Collected papers.John Rawls - 1999 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Edited by Samuel Richard Freeman.

View all 8 references / Add more references