Public Justification

In this essay we criticise Rainer Forst's attempt to draw a connection between power and justification, and thus ground his normative theory of a right to justification. Forst draws this connection primarily conceptually, though we will also consider whether a normative connection may be drawn within his framework. Forst's key insight is that if we understand power as operating by furnishing those subjected to it with reasons, then we create a space for the normative contestation of any exercise of power. (...) He calls this the noumenal understanding of power. Against the conceptual connection between power and justification, we argue that (i) on most plausible accounts of political freedom, some freedom-restrictions commonly attributed to the successful exercise of power would perplexingly count as failures of power on Forst's view, and that (ii) on the most plausible account of reason-recognition, namely an appropriateness of response account, a justification relation is only a sufficient but not necessary condition for recognition. Against the normative connection, we argue that (iii) Forst can establish the existence of a right to justification only if he reconsiders the transcendental aspirations of his theory. (shrink)

The discussion develops the view that public justification in Rawls’s political liberalism, in one of its roles, is actualist in fully enfranchising actual reasonable citizens and fundamental in political liberalism’s order of justification. I anchor this reading in the political role Rawls accords to general reflective equilibrium, and examine in its light the relationship between public justification, pro tanto justification, political values, full justification, the wide view of public political culture and salient public reason intuitions. This leaves us with the (...) question of how a more plausible, post-Rawlsian political liberalism should understand the commitment to discursive respect and robust discursive equality that is reflected in its view of actualist and fundamental public justification. (shrink)

Aumann’s theorem states that no individual should agree to disagree under a range of assumptions. Political liberalism appears to presuppose these assumptions with the idealized conditions of public reason. We argue Aumann’s theorem demonstrates they nevertheless cannot be simultaneously held with what is arguably political liberalism’s most central tenet. That is, the tenet of reasonable pluralism, which implies we can rationally agree to disagree over conceptions of the good. We finish by elaborating a way of relaxing one of the theorem’s (...) axioms that arguably lends itself to a coherent account of political liberalism, namely the condition of indexical independence. (shrink)

In recent years, leading public reason liberals have argued that publicly justifying coercive laws and policies requires that citizens offer both adequate secular justificatory reasons and adequate secular motivating reasons for these laws and policies. In this paper, I provide a critical assessment of these two requirements and argue for two main claims concerning such requirements. First, only some qualified versions of the requirement that citizens offer adequate secular justificatory reasons for coercive laws and policies may be justifiably regarded as (...) plausible liberal principles of public justification. And second, the requirement that citizens offer adequate secular motivating reasons for coercive laws and policies is untenable on multiple grounds. Public reason liberals should focus on assessing the justificatory reasons offered for and against coercive laws and policies rather than requiring citizens to offer adequate secular motivating reasons for such laws and policies. (shrink)

Der Kodex, mit dem sich die Produzenten des universellen Wissens in der Gelehrtenrepublik identifizierten, befindet sich während des 18. Jahrhunderts im Wandel. Dies entnehmen wir einer bekannten Studie von Goldgar (1995), die unter anderem von der Ausbreitung der Zeitungspresse handelt. Zum Teil war dieser Umstand durch die Erfordernisse zeitgenössischer Höflichkeits- und Zivilitätskonzepte bedingt, aber auch den ökonomischen Aspekten eines stoßkräftigen Verlagsmarktes geschuldet, der sich aus dem damaligen Aufstieg der sogenannten Papierzeitungen ergab.

My aim in this paper is to provide an epistemological argument for why public reasons matter for political legitimacy. A key feature of the public reason conception of legitimacy is that political decisions must be justified to the citizens. Critics of the public reason conception, by contrast, argue that political legitimacy depends on justification simpliciter. Another way to put the point is that the critics of the public reason conception take the justification of political decisions to be based on reasons (...) that are agreement-independent. I call such reasons objective reasons. Public reasons are, however, agreement-dependent. The debate between defenders and critics of a public reason conception of political legitimacy focuses on whether objective reasons or public reasons are the right basis for the justification of political decisions. My defense of the public reason conception will grant to its critics that there are objective reasons and allow that such reasons can affect the legitimacy of political decisions. But I will show, focusing on epistemic constraints on the justification of political decisions, that it does not follow that the justification of those decisions is necessarily agreement-independent. In the epistemic circumstances that are typical of political life, public reasons will be required for the justification of political decisions. (shrink)

This book advances a novel justification for the idea of "public reason": citizens within diverse societies can realize the ideal of shared political autonomy, despite their adherence to different religious and philosophical views, by deciding fundamental political questions with "public reasons." Public reasons draw upon or are derived from ecumenical political ideas, such as toleration and equal citizenship, and mutually acceptable forms of reasoning, like those of the sciences. This book explains that if citizens share equal political autonomy—and thereby constitute (...) "a civic people"—they will not suffer from alienation or domination and can enjoy relations of civic friendship. Moreover, it contends that the ideal of shared political autonomy cannot be realized by alternative accounts of public justification that eschew any necessary role for public reasons. In addition to explaining how the ideal of political autonomy justifies the idea of public reason, this book presents a new analysis of the relation between public reason and "ideal theory": by engaging in "public reasoning," citizens help create a just society that can secure the free compliance of all. It also explores the distinctive policy implications of the ideal of political autonomy for gender equality, families, children, and education. (shrink)

The paper critically discusses the dualism in the interpretation of the moral basis of public reason. We argue that in order to maintain the complementarity of both liberal and democratic values within the debate on public reason, the arguments from liberty and from civic friendship cannot be considered in isolation. With regard to the argument from liberty, we contend that because the idea of natural liberty is an indispensable starting point of liberal theory, no explanation of the justification of political (...) power can do without it. In particular, we focus on the requirement of reasonableness and show that we should retain the epistemic aspect of the reasonableness of persons. The main reason for this is to be found in the criterion of reciprocity which provides the deepest justification of the respect for people’s liberty – that is, the liberal aspect of liberal democracy. At the same time, however, we argue that reciprocity also provides the grounds for responding to the criticism that the essentially liberal approach fails to adequately take into consideration the role of political community. Because reciprocity may also be interpreted as being based on civic friendship, it provides the resources to respond to such criticism. It thus supplies the normative background also for the second, democratic pillar of public reason. We then critically examine the newly emerging approach built predominantly on the argument from civic friendship, arguing that by prioritising the civic friendship interpretation and, at times, tending to completely abandon the liberty-based one, it overlooks the indispensability of liberty-based considerations for the criterion of reciprocity. We conclude that in order to adequately capture the common liberal-democratic basis of public reason, both interpretations of reciprocity must be linked within a comprehensive account. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that solutions to normative challenges associated with autonomous driving, such as real-world trolley cases or distributions of risk in mundane driving situations, face the problem of reasonable pluralism: Reasonable pluralism refers to the fact that there exists a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive moral doctrines within liberal democracies. The corresponding problem is that a politically acceptable solution cannot refer to only one of these comprehensive doctrines. Yet a politically adequate solution to the normative challenges (...) of autonomous driving need not come at the expense of an ethical solution, if it is based on moral beliefs that are (1) shared in an overlapping consensus and (2) systematized through public reason. Therefore, we argue that a Rawlsian justificatory framework is able to adequately address the normative challenges of autonomous driving and elaborate on how such a framework might be employed for this purpose. (shrink)

This article addresses the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor on the implications of state secularism for the public use of reason. Recent commentators have traced this debate either to Habermas’s and Taylor’s divergent views about the status of Western modernity or to their disagreement about the relation between the good and the right. I argue that these readings rest on misinterpretations of Habermas’s theory of social evolution and understanding of impartial justification. I show that the debate rests on (...) diverging interpretations of what it means for citizens to embed the principles of liberal democracy in their respective conceptions of the good. This difference in turn leads Habermas and Taylor to espouse different criteria of democratic legitimacy. I conclude by suggesting that we have prima facie reasons to prefer Habermas’s conception of legitimacy to Taylor’s, and to that extent, to favor his model of the public use of reason. (shrink)

In “Neutrality and Perfectionism in Public Health,” Hafez Ismaili M’hamdi poses a dilemma for defenders of “state neutrality” about political justification: either they must reject a wide ra...

We all agree that democratic decision-making requires a factual input, and most of us assume that when the pertinent facts are not in plain view they should be furnished by well-functioning scientific institutions. But how should liberal democracy respond when apparently sincere, rational and well-informed citizens object to coercive legislation because it is based on what they consider a misguided trust in certain parts of science? Cases are familiar, the most prominent concerning climate science and evolution, but one may also (...) count GMO-skepticism and vaccine-skepticism, and there are plenty of others. The paper defends what I, borrowing an expression from Badiola, call Science as Public Reason, asserting roughly that some policy-relevant factual proposition P is part of public reason if and only if there is consensus about P among scientific experts in the relevant well-functioning scientific institutions. I defend this view against the controversiality objection claiming that scientific findings cannot in this general way pass as public reason as they are sometimes controversial among reasonable citizens. My preferred line of defense is what I call Dogmatism about Science as Public Reason, which roughly amounts to insisting on Science as Public Reason on the ground that it is a philosophically well-motivated view, while conceding that it may not be acceptable to all minimally rational and well-informed individuals. (shrink)

The paper deals with the methodological clash between idealism and anti-idealism in political philosophy, and highlights its importance for public reason (PR) and public justification (PJ) theorising. Upon reviewing the broader context which harks back to Rawls’s notion of a realistic utopia, we focus on two major recent contributions to the debate in the work of David Estlund (the prototypical utopian) and Gerald Gaus (the cautious anti-utopian). While Estlund presents a powerful case on behalf of ideal theorising, claiming that motivational (...) incapacity and other non-ideal features of “human nature” – the so-called bad facts – do not normally refute the desirability of highly utopian theories of justice, we show that Gaus is correct in stressing the importance of feasibility considerations, including empirical knowledge about human societies. Because moral disagreement is to be expected even among cognitively and morally excellent reasoners, we argue that Estlund’s search for Truth about justice must idealise away normative diversity as just another bad fact. This methodological dispute has important ramifications for current debates about PR and PJ as the grounds of liberal legitimacy. Because consensual approaches rely on strong idealisation which results in exclusion of numerous comprehensive doctrines from consideration, we conclude that convergence-based liberal political theory has distinct advantage as regards exploiting normative diversity to the advantage of everyone. (shrink)

We argue that deliberative decision-making that is inclusive, transparent and accountable can contribute to more trustworthy and legitimate decisions on difficult ethical questions and political trade-offs during the pandemic and beyond.

Using a recent example from US politics as representative of contemporary liberal democracies, this chapter highlights how public opinion is shaped through the exploitation of our epistemic interdependence and partisan bias. Climate change was an important issue leading into the 2010 US mid-term elections. Public opinion on climate change was subject to a number of willfully disseminated distorting influences, having a significant impact on the election’s outcome and subsequent political discourse surrounding climate change policies. One impact of this type of (...) exploitation is that it has epistemically compromising effects on the electorate, which in turn undermines democratic legitimacy. In the interest of defending democratic legitimacy, this chapter suggests we re-evaluate and update those liberal institutions necessary for informed public opinion surrounding our current political epistemic needs. (shrink)

Political philosophers have long disagreed on the issue of whether churches should exercise restraint in the appeal to religious reasons in public discussion and political mobilization. Exclusivists defend the restraint, whereas inclusivists reject it. Both sides, however, assume the existence of a democratic government. In this essay, I discuss whether churches should exercise restraint in a non-democratic, authoritarian society. I defend inclusivism and believe that churches should not restrain themselves, especially when doing so can promote democracy and prevent severe injustices. (...) First, I argue that two exclusivist arguments which justify the restraint cannot be applied in an authoritarian society. Second, I defend inclusivism because religious reasons are effective in cultivating active citizens that strengthen the democratic movement. Finally, I use the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong as an example to show how inclusivism can enhance democratic movements under authoritarianism. (shrink)

According to the standard liberal egalitarian approach, religious exemptions from generally applicable laws can be justified on the grounds of equal respect for each citizen’s conscience. I contend that claims of conscience cannot justify demands for exemptions, since they do not meet even the most inclusive standards of public justification. Arguments of the form ‘My conscience says so’ do not explicate the rationale behind the practices that the claimants seek to protect. Therefore, such arguments do not constitute even pro tanto (...) reasons for exemptions. Rather, they are what Francis Bacon called idola fori – ‘idols of the marketplace’– conventional justifications that are deemed rational and even self- evident, while in fact they are not. (shrink)

The chapter explores the ways in which philosophical thinking about public reason and public justification can shed light on some deep issues regarding the legitimacy or purpose of law, as well as shallower yet no less important questions of constitutional engineering and institutional desing.

Since John Rawls, public reason theorists have attempted to show how liberal political norms could be acceptable to people with diverse religious and ethical viewpoints. However, these theories overlook the importance of the distinction between acceptability to realistic people and acceptability to viewpoints, which matters because public reason theories are committed to the former, but only deliver the latter, thereby failing to justify liberal norms. Public reason theories therefore face a dilemma: abandon realistic people and lose normative appeal, or retain (...) realism and find a new way to justify liberalism. (shrink)

Democratic institutions are appealing means of making publicly justified social choices. By allowing participation by all citizens, democracy can accommodate diversity among citizens, and by considering the perspectives of all, via ballots or debate, democratic results can approximate what the balance of reasons favors. I consider whether, and under what conditions, democratic institutions might reliably make publicly justified social decisions. I argue that conventional accounts of democracy, constituted by voting or deliberation, are unlikely to be effective public justification mechanisms. I (...) conclude that the limitations of conventional mechanisms can be ameliorated through the use of lotteries instead of elections. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Political liberals usually assume the coercion account, which argues that state actions should be publicly justified because they coerce citizens. Recently some critics object this account for it overlooks that some policies are non-coercive but still require public justification. My article argues that, instead of understanding coercion as particular laws or policies, it should be understood as the exercise of collective political power that shapes the basic structure. This revised coercion account explains why those ostensibly non-coercive policies are in fact (...) coercive. Moreover, I argue that the alternative accounts suggested by critics fail, unless they assume the revised coercion account. (shrink)

This thesis is an inquiry into the Liberal Principle of Legitimacy, formulated by John Rawls in his later writings. According to this principle, the exercise of political power is legitimate only if it is justifiable to all citizens. This view can be interpreted in different ways, and I argue that the presently most popular way of doing so faces serious problems. The aim is to identify and defend a more plausible version of the principle, which overcomes these problems, and yet (...) preserves the most essential and appealing features of the approach. Among the most central issues for how to interpret the principle are how to understand the notion of justifiability to a person, and who should be included in the group of persons referred to as "all citizens". On the currently received view, only justifiability to those who count as "reasonable" matter, and justifiability to these persons is understood in non-moral terms, as being determined by what is accessible to them, given the beliefs that they happen to hold. I argue that we have good reasons to reject both of these suggestions. We should instead spell out justifiability to a person in terms of what could be reasonably accepted in a moral sense, which allows us to retain the appealing idea that legitimacy is dependent on justifiability to all citizens over whom political power is exercised. I further suggest that we can use the original position – Rawls’s version of the social contract – to determine what is justifiable to all in this sense. I defend this suggestion against the expected objection that it will not be able to take reasonable pluralism – the assumption of deep disagreement between citizens – into account, by explaining why we should sharply distinguish this principle of political legitimacy from the theory of Political Liberalism. This distinction also contributes to my response to the objection, raised against this principle, that it is self-defeating. That my suggested interpretation allows us to convincingly respond to this line of criticism is yet another reason as to why it is preferable to the standard view. (shrink)

Conceptions of acceptability-based moral or political justification take it that authoritative acceptability, widely conceived, constitutes, or contributes to, validity, or justification. There is no agreement as to what bar for authoritativeness such justification may employ. The paper engages the issue in relation to (i) the level of idealization that a bar for authoritativeness, ψ, imparts to a standard of acceptability-based justification, S, and (ii) the degree of discursive purchase of the discursive standing that S accords to people when it builds (...) ψ. I argue that (i) and (ii) are interdependent: high idealization values entail low discursive purchase, while high degrees of purchase require low idealization values. I then distinguish between alethic conceptions of justification that prioritize ends that commit to high idealization values, and recognitive conceptions that favor high discursive purchase. On this basis, I argue for a moderately recognitivist constraint on idealization. To render the recognitive discursive minimum available to relevant people at the site of justification, S should set ψ low enough so that it is a genuine option for actual people to reject relevant views in ways that S recognizes as authoritative. (The Appendix applies this to a Forst-type view of reciprocity of reasons to draw out some limitations of this view.) [Draft available from author on request.]. (shrink)

This paper explores the idea of robust discursive equality on which respect-based conceptions of justificatory reciprocity often draw. I distinguish between formal and substantive discursive equality and argue that if justificatory reciprocity requires that people be accorded formally equal discursive standing, robust discursive equality should not be construed as requiring standing that is equal substantively, or in terms of its discursive purchase. Still, robust discursive equality is purchase sensitive: it does not obtain when discursive standing is impermissibly unequal in purchase. (...) I then showcase different candidate conceptions of purchase justice, and draw conclusions about the substantive commitments of justificatory reciprocity. (shrink)

Rawlsian liberals define legitimacy in terms of the public justification principle (PJP): the exercise of political power is legitimate only if it is justified on the grounds of reasons that all may reasonably be expected to accept. Does PJP exclude religious reasons from public justification of legal provisions? I argue that the requirement of ‘reasonable acceptability’ is not clear enough to answer this question. Furthermore, it fails to address the problematic fact that justification on the grounds of religious faith involves (...) non-negotiable claims, which is incompatible with respect for fellow citizens as co-legislators. Accordingly, I reformulate PJP in fallibilistic terms: the exercise of political power is legitimate only if it is justified on the grounds of reasons that can be subject to reasonable criticism. I show that reasons based on religious faith do not meet this principle, just like any other reasons that involve claims about final values. (shrink)

I put forward three reasons why religious exemptions from generally applicable laws are not publicly justifiable in a liberal democratic society. First, mere claims of the form “God says so and my conscience requires that I obey” do not explicate the rationale behind the legal provisions that they are expected to support. Therefore, such claims cannot be regarded even as pro tanto justificatory reasons for any legal provisions, be they laws or exemptions. Second, no matter how elaborate, reasons based on (...) religious faith cannot be allowed in public justification of exemptions because such reasons involve non-negotiable claims about final values, which is incompatible with respect for fellow citizens as equal co-legislators. Third, even if religious arguments are allowed in public justification, carving out religious exemptions from generally applicable laws is still impermissible because it arbitrarily bends the sovereign will of the people to the dictate of religious doctrines. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine global public reason as a method of justifying a global state. Ultimately, I conclude that global public reason fails to justify a global state. This is the case, because global public reason faces an unwinnable dilemma. The global public reason theorist must endorse either a hypothetical theory of consent or an actual theory of consent; if she endorses a theory of hypothetical consent, then she fails to justify her principles; and if she endorses a theory (...) of actual consent, her theory will lead to a highly unstable political system. On either side of the dilemma, global public reason faces untenable implications. Although similar criticisms have been advanced against domestic public reason, my argument is not repeating points made before me. My argument is new, in that it raises these objections specifically against global public reason, and in that it shows how, due to increased diversity of belief in the global arena, these problems are more pressing for global public reason than they are for domestic public reason. (shrink)

The main claim of this chapter is that planetary defense against asteroids cannot be implemented under a decentralized model of democratic global governance, as espoused elsewhere in this book. All relevant indices point to the necessity of establishing a centralized global political authority with legitimate coercive powers. It remains to be seen, however, whether such a political system can be in any recognizable sense democratic. It seems unconvincing that planetary-wide physical-threat, all-comprehensive macrosecuritization, coupled with deep transformations of international law, global (...) centralization of core decision-making powers, de-stigmatization of nuclear weapons and the like can proceed, succeed, and be implemented in a non-hierarchical international system where planetary defense constitutes only one regime among many, and where states basically remain the decisive actors. Although rationally and scientifically robust, the project suffers from oversimplification, as well as naivety with respect to how both international and domestic politics works. Among other topics, this chapter discusses problems associated with the rule of law and constituent powers, political representation and sources of legitimacy, conditions of multilevel collective action, or limits of theoretical idealization. The general message is that the planetary defense community needs to be more aware of the social and political context of its own enterprise. (shrink)

L’idéal démocratique est accusé d’être irréaliste. Le gouvernement du peuple par le peuple et pour le peuple serait une chimère dans les sociétés contemporaines. Il faudrait lui préférer les visées plus modestes associées à l’élection : un droit de vote égal et la satisfaction du plus grand nombre. La démocratie ne se laisse pourtant pas réduire à la compétition électorale. Les acteurs et les institutions politiques qui s’en réclament invoquent non seulement un marché, où rivalisent des intérêts privés, mais un (...) forum, où s’affrontent des visions adverses de la justice. Ils attendent de la délibération collective qu’elle serve l’autonomie politique et le bien commun, mais savent aussi qu’elle peut les menacer, lorsque la liberté, l’égalité ou la publicité lui font défaut. Cette enquête philosophique interroge la pertinence de l’idéal démocratique pour des sociétés complexes, dotées d’institutions représentatives et soumises à la communication de masse. Elle montre à quelles conditions cet idéal peut aujourd’hui orienter la critique et l’action. Les citoyens peuvent encore aspirer à se gouverner eux-mêmes, donc à délibérer en égaux. -/- The democratic ideal is accused of being unrealistic. Government of the people by the people and for the people would be a chimera in contemporary societies. The more modest aims associated with election should be preferred: equal suffrage and the satisfaction of the greatest number. But democracy cannot be reduced to electoral competition. The political actors and institutions that claim it invoke not only a market, where private interests compete, but also a forum, where opposing visions of justice confront each other. They expect collective deliberation to serve political autonomy and the common good, but they also know that it can threaten them when it lacks freedom, equality or publicity. This philosophical inquiry questions the relevance of the democratic ideal for complex societies with representative institutions and subject to mass communication. It shows under what conditions a deliberative understanding of this ideal can today orient criticism and action. Citizens can still aspire to govern themselves, hence to deliberate as equals. (shrink)

We argue that violent political protest is justified in a generally just society when violence is required to send a message about the nature of the injustice at issue, and when it is not ruled out by moral or pragmatic considerations. Focusing on protest as a mode of public address, we argue that its communicative function can sometimes justify or require the use of violence. The injustice at the heart of the Baltimore protests—police brutality against black Americans —is a paradigmatic (...) case of this sort, because of the relationship of the police to the injustice and the protests against it. (shrink)

International institutions have become increasingly important not only in the relations between states, but also for individuals. When are these institutions legitimate? The legitimacy standards fo...

Public reason liberals from John Rawls to Gerald Gaus uphold a principle of public justification as a core commitment of their theories. Critics of public reason liberalism have sometimes conceded that there is something compelling about the idea of public justification. But so far there have not been many attempts to elaborate and defend a ‘comprehensive’ liberalism that incorporates a principle of public justification. This article spells out how public justifiability could be integrated into a comprehensive liberalism and defends the (...) claim that what is worthwhile about public justification can be extracted from public reason liberalism. (shrink)

Political liberals assume an accessibility requirement, which means that, for ensuring civic respect and non-manipulation, public officials should offer accessible reasons during political advocacy. Recently, critics have offered two arguments to show that the accessibility requirement is unnecessary. The first is the pluralism argument: Given the pluralism in evaluative standards, when officials offer non-accessible reasons, they are not disrespectful because they may merely try to reveal their strongest reason. The second is the honesty argument: As long as officials honestly confess (...) their beliefs after offering non-accessible reasons, disrespect and non-manipulation do not occur. This paper defends the accessibility requirement and asserts that these two arguments overlook a unique feature of the political domain. While all citizens collectively own political power as a corporate body, an official does not privately own her political power. Instead, she is a trustee who has a duty to act on behalf of the corporate body, that is, she has to make decisions on grounds that are accessible to others. This duty explains why, despite pluralism, the accessibility requirement is necessary. Moreover, given that political decisions are profoundly influential to each person, requiring people to be honest is ineffective in discouraging disrespectful and manipulative acts. (shrink)

Clayton and Stevens argue that political liberals should engage with the religiously unreasonable by offering religious responses and showing that their religious views are mistaken, instead of refusing to engage with them. Yet they recognize that political liberals will face a dilemma due to such religious responses: either their responses will alienate certain reasonable citizens, or their engagements will appear disingenuous. Thus, there should be a division of justificatory labour. The duty of engagement should be delegated to religious citizens. In (...) this comment, I will argue that the division of justificatory labour is indefensible. This dilemma can be avoided if politicians and political philosophers correctly use conjecture, a form of discourse that involves non-public reason. As a conditional response, conjecture avoids alienating any reasonable citizens. Also, if conjecture is given in a sincere and open-minded manner, then the problem of disingenuousness can be overcome. My comment concludes that while the engagement of politicians and political philosophers does not necessarily jeopardize overlapping consensus, they should be permitted, or perhaps even required, to engage with the religiously unreasonable due to the natural duty of justice. (shrink)

Norman Daniels’s theory of ‘accountability for reasonableness’ is an influential conception of fairness in healthcare resource allocation. Although it is widely thought that this theory provides a consistent extension of John Rawls’s general conception of justice, this paper shows that accountability for reasonableness has important points of contact with both utilitarianism and intuitionism, the main targets of Rawls’s argument. My aim is to demonstrate that its overlap with utilitarianism and intuitionism leaves accountability for reasonableness open to damaging critiques. The important (...) role that utilitarian-like cost-effectiveness calculations are allowed to play in resource allocation processes disregards the separateness of persons and is seriously unfair towards individuals whose interests are sacrificed for the sake of groups. Furthermore, the function played by intuitions in settling frequent value conflicts opens the door for sheer custom and vested interests to steer decision-making. (shrink)

The paper challenges the view that public justification sits well with emancipatory and egalitarian intuitions. I distinguish between the depth, scope and the purchase of the discursive standing that such justification allocates, and situate within this matrix Rawls’s view of public justification. A standard objection to this view is that public justification should be more inclusive in scope. This is both plausible and problematic in emancipatory and egalitarian terms. If inclusive public justification allocates discursive standing that is rich in purchase, (...) as seems desirable in emancipatory terms, it may be unable to allocate equal standing to all relevant people. And if it is to allocate equal standing, then the equality of that standing should be construed in terms that allow for unequal discursive purchase. (shrink)

This essay critically assesses the central claim of Kevin Vallier’s Liberal Politics and Public Faith: that public religious faith and public reason liberalism can be reconciled, because the values underlying public reason liberalism should lead us to endorse the ‘convergence view’, rather than the mainstream consensus view. The convergence view is friendlier to religious faith, because it jettisons the consensus view’s much-criticised ‘duty of restraint’. I present several challenges to Vallier’s claim. Firstly, if Vallier is right to reject the duty (...) of restraint then consensus theorists can also do so, and on the same grounds. Secondly, the independent force of the objections to the duty of restraint is unclear. Thirdly, Vallier has not successfully identified desiderata that unite all public reason liberals and favour convergence over consensus. Finally, even if convergence is in some ways friendlier to religious faith, this does not show that it will be attractive to religious citizens. (shrink)

In the Laws, Plato argues that the legislator should attempt to persuade people to voluntarily obey the laws. This persuasion is accomplished through use of legislative preludes. Preludes (also called preambles) are short arguments written into the legal code, which precede laws and give reasons to follow them. In this paper, I argue that Plato’s use of persuasive preludes shows that he endorses the core features of a public reason theory of political justification. Many philosophers argue that Plato’s political philosophy (...) is deeply at odds with contemporary liberal political philosophy. While Plato certainly does not affirm (and even rejects) some of the main features of liberalism, if it could be shown that he endorses some account of public reason (which is a liberal idea to its core), this would suggest that there is more in common between Plato and liberalism than many philosophers think. Furthermore, if combined with the work of philosophers, like C.C.W. Taylor, this could form a cumulative case against those who argue that there is little in common between Plato’s political philosophy and liberalism. In short, by showing that Plato endorses the core features of public reason, I endeavor to show that there is more in common between Plato and liberalism than is often thought. (shrink)

The normative and metanormative pluralism that figures among core self-descriptions of democratic theory, which seems incompatible with democratic theorists’ practical ambitions, may stem from the internal logic of research traditions in the social sciences and humanities and in the conceptual structure of political theory itself. One way to deal productively with intradisciplinary diversity is to appeal to the idea of a meta-consensus; another is to appeal to the argument from cognitive diversity that fuels recent debates on epistemic democracy. For different (...) reasons, both strategies fail, such that a metatheoretical step aside may be desirable, one that entails modeling democratic theory after the public justification approach. (shrink)

The ‘convergence conception’ of political liberalism has become increasingly popular in recent years. Steven Wall has shown that convergence liberals face a serious dilemma in responding to disagreement about whether laws are publicly justified. What I call the ‘conjunctive approach’ to such disagreement threatens anarchism, while the ‘non-conjunctive’ approach appears to render convergence liberalism internally inconsistent. This paper defends the non-conjunctive approach, which holds that the correct view of public justification should be followed even if some citizens do not consider (...) enacted laws to be publicly justified. My argument sheds light on the fundamental structure of convergence liberalism. (shrink)

The variety of religious communities present in today’s western-European countries, and their subsequent political impact, urgently calls for a new model of articulation between church and state, religion and politics. This essay makes some suggestions for one such model based on Saint Augustine’s sermons and letters. In those writings, Augustine shows us the everyday political practices of his Christian community – practices based on which this article proposes a model where both the religious communities are entitled to be present in (...) the public arena, and the political authorities have the tools to assure peace and order. For that reason, revisiting Augustine’s work is crucial for a contemporary reflection on the relationship between state and church. Finally, this essay also systematizes the Augustinian distribution of political tasks between Monks, Christian laity, Christian magistrates, and Bishops. (shrink)

The corruption of public officials and institutions is generally regarded as wrong. But in what exactly does this form of corruption consist and what kind of wrong does it imply? This article aims to take stock of the current philosophical discussion of the different senses in which political corruption is wrong in a general sense, beyond the specific negative legal, economic, and social costs it may happen to have in specific circumstances. Political corruption is usually presented as a pathology of (...) the public order. Therefore, the senses in which political corruption has been presented as wrong have varied depending on the normative theory of the public order that is presupposed. In this article, we offer a critical presentation of two major interpretations of the wrongfulness of political corruption that draw respectively on a neo-republican and a liberal account of the public order. Finally, we show how the analytical distinction between these approaches has important normative implications for the identification of relevant cases of political corruption. (shrink)

In this paper I defend a form of epistocracy I call limited epistocracy— rule by institutions housing expertise in non-political areas that become politically relevant. This kind of limited epistocracy, I argue, isn’t a far-off fiction. With increasing frequency, governments are outsourcing political power to expert institutions to solve urgent, multidimensional problems because they outperform ordinary democratic decision-making. I consider the objection that limited epistocracy, while more effective than its competitors, lacks a fundamental intrinsic value that its competitors have; namely, (...) political inclusion. After explaining this challenge, I suggest that limited epistocracies can be made compatible with robust political inclusion if specialized institutions are confined to issuing directives that give citizens multiple actionable options. I explain how this safeguards citizens’ inclusion through rational deliberation, choice, and contestation. (shrink)

It is rare to find a book in political philosophy whose arguments successfully utilize both ideal and non-ideal theory. Rarer still does one find a book in political philosophy that takes seriously the proposition that the oppressed are not merely passive victims to injustice, but rather rational and moral agents, capable of making meaningful and informed choices concerning those things they have reason to value. Dark Ghettos does both.

What is the place of religion in a pluralist democracy? The continuous presence of religion in the public sphere has raised anew normative and practical issues related to the role of religion in a democratic polity, generating spirited political debates in Western and non-Western contexts. Contemporary Political Philosophy and Religion provides an advanced introduction to, and a critical appraisal of, the major schools of political thought with a focus on the relationship between democracy and religion. Key features of this book (...) include: -/- - Analyses of different political traditions: liberalism, republicanism, deliberative democracy, feminism, postmodernism, multiculturalism, and interculturalism; -/- - Critical discussions of key contemporary philosophers, such as John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Susan Moller Okin, Martha Nussbaum, Will Kymlicka, Chandran Kukathas, and Bhiku Parekh; -/- - A pluralist approach that questions the strict divide between analytical and continental political philosophy; -/- - Discussion on the place of religion in politics from multiple perspectives by drawing on a plurality of political contexts, both Western and non-Western; -/- - Analyses of legal and political cases related to different religious traditions, for example, Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism. -/- This comprehensive text will be of great use to students of religion and politics in the fields of political and legal theory, and religious and theological studies, while also offering critical insights and arguments that will be of interest to the experts in the field. (shrink)

In morally grounding a public justification requirement, public reason liberals frequently invoke the idea that persons should be construed as “free and equal.” But this tells us little with regard to what it is about us that makes us free or how a claim about our status as persons can ultimately ground a requirement of public justification. In light of this worry, I argue that a public justification requirement can be grounded in a Nozick-inspired argument from the separateness of persons (...) (one that is consistent with the idea that individuals are free and equal). As I claim, one particular feature of the fact of our separateness – the possession of a basic psychology consisting of beliefs, intentions, sentiments, and a variety of desire-like psychological states – does the most work in grounding both a principle of liberty (PL) and a requirement of public justification (RPJ). Together, PL and RPJ provide the basic framework for a theory of public reason liberalism. (shrink)

Americans today are far less likely to trust their institutions, and each other, than in decades past. This collapse in social and political trust arguably fuels our increasingly ferocious ideological conflicts and hardened partisanship. Many believe that our previously high levels of trust and bipartisanship were a pleasant anomaly and that we now live under the historic norm. Seen this way, politics itself is nothing more than a power struggle between groups with irreconcilable aims: contemporary American politics is war because (...) political life as such is war. -/- Must Politics Be War? argues that our shared liberal democratic institutions have the unique capacity to sustain social and political trust between diverse persons. In succinct, convincing prose, Kevin Vallier argues that constitutional rights and democratic governance prevent any one ideology or faith from dominating all others, thereby protecting each person's freedom to live according to her values and principles. Illiberal arrangements, where one group's ideology or faith reigns, turn those who disagree into unwilling subversives, persons with little reason to trust their regime or to be trustworthy in obeying it. Liberal arrangements, in contrast, incentivize trust and trustworthiness because they allow people with diverse and divergent ends to act with conviction. Those with opposing viewpoints become trustworthy because they can obey the rules of their society without acting against their ideals. Therefore, as Vallier illuminates, a liberal society is one at moral peace with a politics that is not war. (shrink)