Justification, coercion, and the place of public reason

Philosophical Studies 172 (4):1031-1050 (2015)
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Abstract

Public reason accounts commonly claim that exercises of coercive political power must be justified by appeal to reasons accessible to all citizens. Such accounts are vulnerable to the objection that they cannot legitimate coercion to protect basic liberal rights against infringement by deeply illiberal people. This paper first elaborates the distinctive interpersonal conception of justification in public reason accounts in contrast to impersonal forms of justification. I then detail a core dissenter-based objection to public reason based on a worrisome example advanced by Jonathan Quong. While we may be able to impersonally justify coercing the illiberal dissenter, public reason liberals must explain how we can interpersonally justify such coercion—meaning justify given the perspective of the dissenter. The two prominent strategies for dealing with dissenters involve idealization of reasoning and requiring liberal values; I show that these strategies do not succeed in a way compatible with the public reason project. That is, the prominent strategies leave public reason theorists with a dilemma between denying the legitimacy of using coercion to protect core freedoms against deeply illiberal people or abandoning the fundamental public reason project. I conclude by proposing a different answer to public reason liberalism’s fundamental question: what requires justification? On my account, it is not that coercion requires interpersonal justification for its permissibility, but that such justification is necessary as a constitutive element of a kind of moral community

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Chad Van Schoelandt
Tulane University

Citations of this work

In Defense of Idealization in Public Reason.Kevin Vallier - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (5):1109-1128.
In Public Reason, Diversity Trumps Coherence.Kevin Vallier & Ryan Muldoon - 2020 - Journal of Political Philosophy 29 (2):211-230.
The Moral Basis of Religious Exemptions.Kevin Vallier - 2016 - Law and Philosophy 35 (1):1-28.
Public Reason.Jonathan Quong - 2013 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Is Anti-Sectarianism a Desideratum of a Public Reason View?Collis Tahzib - 2021 - Public Affairs Quarterly 35 (3):228-46.

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References found in this work

A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition.John Rawls - 1999 - Harvard University Press.
Leviathan.Thomas Hobbes - 1904 - Harmondsworth,: Penguin Books. Edited by C. B. Macpherson.
Justice as fairness: a restatement.John Rawls (ed.) - 2001 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Freedom and Resentment.Peter Strawson - 1962 - Proceedings of the British Academy 48:187-211.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments.Adam Smith - 1759 - Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications. Edited by Elizabeth Schmidt Radcliffe, Richard McCarty, Fritz Allhoff & Anand Vaidya.

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