The alleged incompleteness of public reason

Res Publica 6 (2):199-211 (2000)
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Abstract

According to John Rawls's ideal of liberal public reason, comprehensive moral, religious and philosophical doctrines should play no more than an auxiliary or marginal role in the political life of constitutional democracies. David Reidy has recently claimed that since liberal public reason is incomplete, comprehensive doctrines, and non-public reasons, must play a wider role than Rawls admits. In response, I argue that Reidy's arguments do not establish that liberal public reason is incomplete. Furthermore, even if the substantive values embodied in liberal public reason were insufficient to determine certain fundamental decisions, such indeterminacy need not be eliminated by recourse to comprehensive doctrines.

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Andrew Williams
Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Citations of this work

Public Reason.Jonathan Quong - 2013 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Against the Asymmetric Convergence Model of Public Justification.James W. Boettcher - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (1):191-208.
Public Reason and Prenatal Moral Status.Jeremy Williams - 2015 - The Journal of Ethics 19 (1):23-52.
Public reason's chaos theorem.Brian Kogelmann - 2019 - Episteme 16 (2):200-219.

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