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On Actualist and Fundamental Public Justification in Political Liberalism

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Abstract

Public justification in political liberalism is often conceptualized in light of Rawls’s view of its role in a hypothetical well-ordered society as an ideal or idealizing form of justification that applies a putatively reasonable conception of political justice to political matters. But Rawls implicates a different idea of public justification in his doctrine of general reflective equilibrium. The paper engages this second, more fundamental idea. Public justification in this second sense is actualist and fundamental (rather than ideal or idealizing and conception-applying). It is actualist in that it fully enfranchises actual reasonable citizens. It is fundamental in that political liberalism qualifies conceptions of political justice as reasonable to begin with only if they can be accepted coherently by actual reasonable citizens. Together, these features invite the long-standing concern that actualist political liberalism is objectionably exclusionary. I argue that the exclusion objection, while plausible, is more problematic in own right than it seems if actualist and fundamental public justification hypotheticalizes and discursive respect is compatible with substantive discursive inequality. This leaves proponents and critics of political liberalism with deeper questions about the nature of permissible discursive inequality in public justification.

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Notes

  1. See Rawls and Kelly, 2001 and 2005; Weithman 2011, 2015 and 2017; Gaus 2011; see also the discussion of various stability-centric claims about the role of public reason in Lister 2017.

  2. Rawls and Kelly, 2001, 2005; Macedo 1991; Larmore 2015 and 2008, part II, and 1996, chapters 6 and 7.

  3. Actualist readings of public justification in Rawls-type political liberalism are around for a long time, but they rarely take it to be fundamental or focus on the political role of reflective equilibrium: see Hampton 1989 and 1993; Campos 1994; Forst 1994; Wenar 1995; Estlund 1998; Besch 1998; Gaus 1999; Mulhall & Swift 1996 ; see also the notes to sections 4 and 5, below. The view suggested here develops further the “deep view” of public justification: see Besch 1998 and 2012.

  4. E.g., it is one concern of Quong’s internal conception to show that JF itself would equally acceptable by the hypothetical reasonable citizens of JF’s well-ordered society: see Quong 2011 and 2012. Gaus and Weithman foreground assurance problems: Gaus 2011, p. 315ff; Weithman 2011, chapter II.

  5. For one account of reasonableness in Rawls-type public justification: see Besch 2012 and 2004 . See also Enoch 2015.

  6. On this picture, also public reason giving is conception-dependent: reasonable people are to reason publicly if political justice, as specified by a reasonable conception of justice, requires it. Some authors who see public justification as IJ-justification think of matters in such terms: e.g., see Quong 2014, p. 273. This sits well with non-constructivist views of public justification: it suggests that the public justifiability of political things is required only if a reasonable conception of justice prescribes that they must be so justifiable–where the reasonableness of the latter hence cannot depend on its public justifiability: see Enoch 2015, Wall 2016.

  7. Some authors suggest that JF’s stability-centric considerations are part of the argument from OP: Gaus and Schoelandt 2017, p. 149; Weithman 2017. On this view, it is from the perspective of the parties of OP that stability-centric considerations bear on the selection of principles of justice. I foreground a different perspective. For Rawls, JF is reasonable only if JF as a whole is acceptable from the perspective of actual reasonable citizens (see below). It is from this perspective that the role of the argument from OP and JF’s stability-centric considerations vis-à-vis each other and the task of principle selection must be acceptable. But it is possible that, from this perspective, reasons can arise to revise OP or its role on the basis of stability-centric considerations. Hence, it is best to see Rawls’s level-3-arguments and his level-2-arguments as distinct stages of his overall view.

  8. The below adds to my discussion in Besch 2012 That CRE has a political role has been observed before: see Lister 2008; Nielsen 1994; Besch 1998.

  9. On reflective equilibrium: see Rawls 2005, p. 28, 45; Rawls and Kelly, 2001, p. 30ff; Rawls 1971, p. 20f, 48–51; see also Daniels 1979 and 1980; Raz 1982; Scanlon 2002; Knight 2006; Kelly and McGrath 2010; Laden 2014; Baderin 2017.

  10. For Onora O’Neill, this marks important differences between Rawls’s view of public reason and her Kantian view: O’Neill 2015 and 1996, chapter 2.

  11. This is worth noting: Rawls also discusses CRE in relation to the hypothetical citizens of JF’s well-ordered society: Rawls and Kelly, 2001, p. 9 f.

  12. Thus, Rawls’s wide equilibrium can be more conservative than a method of “balance and refinement” (DePaul 1993, p. 25–43). Nor is it a “free” equilibrium (Gaus 2011, p. 311ff). Rawls might not expressly restrict the deliberative field within which equilibrium is sought, but considers its pursuit only from reasonable perspectives.

  13. This draws on the account of reasonable disagreement in Rawls suggested in Besch 1998, chapter 2. . See also Larmore 2015, p. 68–74.

  14. Some Kantian readings of Rawls make this assumption: see Doppelt 1988 and 1989; see also Forst 2017b, p. 130.

  15. This is on the trajectory of Scanlon’s reading of the relationship between CRE and OP: see Scanlon 2002, p. 153–157.

  16. A related matter is the potential redundancy of the aim of reasonable overlapping consensus: see Besch 1998, chapter 3. 

  17. That Quong-type public justification can address actual citizens in one sense is sometimes overlooked: e.g., see Schoelandt 2015, p. 1039.

  18. This objection has been made since the early days of Rawls’s political turn: e.g., see Hampton 1989 and 1993; Campos 1994; Besch (1998); Friedman (2000).

  19. I discuss political legitimacy in Rawls in more detail in Besch 2013.

  20. But we should not overstate the import of the influence that APJ accords the reasonable: there may not be emancipatory trickle-down effects such that an agent’s discursive influence at the level of assessments of the reasonableness of conceptions of justice translates into influence in lower-order assessments of the legitimacy of exercises of political power–and it will often only be the latter kind of influence that demonstrates in the eyes of agents that their perspectives matter politically.

  21. Larmore 2015, p. 83. He reads Rawls’s view of political legitimacy in such terms: ibid., p. 75f, and 1999, p. 609 f.

  22. This simplifies. Hypotheticalization must add constraints that suffice for authoritativeness. Yet Larmore construes reasonableness in thin epistemic terms that make it only necessary for authoritativeness. Thus, discursive input must arguably also cohere with other things, such as the commitment to “prize most highly the norms of rational dialogue and equal respect” (Larmore 1996, p. 142). For now, I put things in terms of reasonableness and take the latter to suffice for authoritativeness. On reasonableness in Larmore: see Macedo 1991, p. 260f, and Besch 2004, chapter I.4.

  23. The following applies to the present case the account of discursive equality and discursive standing proposed in Besch 2019a and b. .

  24. The idea of substantive discursive equality is sympathetic with Susan Dieleman’s idea of substantive inclusion (Dieleman 2015, p. 803). Substantive discursive inequality (i.e., purchase inequality), when impermissible, can instantiate an objectionable failure to include substantively in her sense. See also Besch 2019a. 

  25. On conceptions of permissible purchase inequality: see Besch 2019a, p. 476-485.

  26. Even authors who stress that the discursive influence of agents in public debate matters in relation to their standing as discursive equals often do not examine in detail what would constitute a just measure of such influence, or what would justify it as just: see Peter 2009, chapters 5 and 7; Dieleman 2015, or Forst, 2017a, chapter 2. For one attempt to systematically explore the matter: see Besch 2019a.

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  1. School of Philosophy, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, Hubei, China

    Thomas M. Besch

  2. Department of Philosophy, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    Thomas M. Besch

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Besch, T.M. On Actualist and Fundamental Public Justification in Political Liberalism. Philosophia 48, 1777–1799 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00203-8

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