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Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2019

With its philosophical origins in early modern struggles for religious toleration, political libe... more With its philosophical origins in early modern struggles for religious toleration, political liberalism was developed to explain how essential liberal-democratic principles and norms might be acceptable to people who otherwise hold incompatible worldviews and comprehensive religious or philosophical doctrines. As Gerald Gaus and Chad Van Schoelandt observe, "[t]he genius of the political liberalism project was its relentless search for new and better ways to think about political philosophy in a diverse world" (2017, 146).

John Rawls and the Common Good, ed. Roberto Luppi (Routledge, forthcoming 2022)

According to the Rawlsian idea of public reason, government officials and even ordinary citizens... more According to the Rawlsian idea of public reason, government officials and even ordinary citizens should decide fundamental matters of law and policy on the basis of reasons that are in principle acceptable to others in light of some reasonable political conception of justice along with other publicly accessible standards of evaluation. One requirement of public reason is restraint, i.e., the willingness to refrain from supporting such laws and policies solely on the basis of nonpublic reason. This chapter begins by revisiting Rawls’s remarks on respect and self-respect, mutually reinforcing moral attitudes essential to a well-ordered society. I argue, first, that the restraint requirement is based primarily on an underlying duty of mutual respect. Second, an ideal of civic friendship plays a complementary but secondary role in grounding the main requirements of public reason. This is because we are civic friends not just as fellow citizens but also through our participation in the smaller groups, associations, and affiliations of civil society, which are part of the social bases of self-respect.

Public Reason, 2017

Some public reason liberals identify coercive law as the subject ma er of public justi cation, wh... more Some public reason liberals identify coercive law as the subject ma er of public justi cation, while others claim that the justi cation of coercion plays no role in motivating public justi cation requirements. Both of these views are mistaken. I argue that the subject ma er of public justi cation is not coercion or coercive law but political decision-making about the basic institutional structure. At the same time, part of what makes a public justi cation principle necessary in the rst place is the inherent coerciveness of a legally organized basic institutional structure. While most public reason liberals seem to presuppose that the meaning of "coercion" is su ciently obvious so as not to warrant further analysis, my defense of the essay's main thesis explicitly draws on an account of coercion as a powerful agent's employment of enforceable constraints to determine the will of another agent.

Res Publica, 2019

Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Nature B.V... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Nature B.V.. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".

Thanks so much to José Mendoza for inviting me to participate in this session. And congratulation... more Thanks so much to José Mendoza for inviting me to participate in this session. And congratulations to Adam Hosein for publishing a terrific introductory text on the ethics of immigration. The first two sections of my commentary deal with the open borders debate, sketching an approach not treated directly by Hosein. The third section focuses on unauthorized immigration. And the final section highlights some issues for further inquiry.

Papers by James Boettcher

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2014

Compared to standard liberal approaches to public reason and justification, the asymmetric conver... more Compared to standard liberal approaches to public reason and justification, the asymmetric convergence model of public justification allows for the public justification of laws and policies based on a convergence of quite different and even publicly inaccessible reasons. The model is asymmetrical in the sense of identifying a broader range of reasons that may function as decisive defeaters of proposed laws and policies. This paper raises several critical questions about the asymmetric convergence model and its central but ambiguous presumption against coercion. By drawing on the theory of structural coercion, a main conclusion of the paper is that the asymmetric convergence model ultimately encounters the very incompleteness problems that its proponents often associate with more familiar consensus models of public justification. The paper also develops an alternative, Rawlsian-inspired account of public justification that includes elements of both convergence and consensus but not asymmetry. The Rawlsian model enables us to understand how democratic decisions may possess a degree of procedural, but still morally significant, liberal legitimacy under conditions of pluralism even when citizens fail to agree fully about either the premises of or conclusions to their political arguments.

Social Philosophy Today, 2019

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John Rawls

This chapter proposes to widen Rawls’s idea of public reason in order to respond to a dilemma ori... more This chapter proposes to widen Rawls’s idea of public reason in order to respond to a dilemma originally developed by David Reidy in his article “Rawls’s Wide View of Public Reason: Not Wide Enough” (2000). The dilemma is that public reason is either indeterminate or inconsistent with the animating values of political liberalism, including the value of political autonomy. Reidy’s article identifies two different ways in which public reason might turn out to be indeterminate, one arising when there are too few public reasons in support of some law or policy and the other when there are too many. The latter problem is not as serious as Reidy supposes, at least with respect to several conceptions of justice that might provide the content of public reason. The problem of there being too few reasons suggests that the idea of public reason should include a more expansive set of politically relevant justifying reasons than is otherwise suggested by Rawls’s theory. The chapter proposes a pr...

Radical Philosophy Review, 2022

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Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2019

With its philosophical origins in early modern struggles for religious toleration, political libe... more With its philosophical origins in early modern struggles for religious toleration, political liberalism was developed to explain how essential liberal-democratic principles and norms might be acceptable to people who otherwise hold incompatible worldviews and comprehensive religious or philosophical doctrines. As Gerald Gaus and Chad Van Schoelandt observe, "[t]he genius of the political liberalism project was its relentless search for new and better ways to think about political philosophy in a diverse world" (2017, 146).

John Rawls and the Common Good, ed. Roberto Luppi (Routledge, forthcoming 2022)

According to the Rawlsian idea of public reason, government officials and even ordinary citizens... more According to the Rawlsian idea of public reason, government officials and even ordinary citizens should decide fundamental matters of law and policy on the basis of reasons that are in principle acceptable to others in light of some reasonable political conception of justice along with other publicly accessible standards of evaluation. One requirement of public reason is restraint, i.e., the willingness to refrain from supporting such laws and policies solely on the basis of nonpublic reason. This chapter begins by revisiting Rawls’s remarks on respect and self-respect, mutually reinforcing moral attitudes essential to a well-ordered society. I argue, first, that the restraint requirement is based primarily on an underlying duty of mutual respect. Second, an ideal of civic friendship plays a complementary but secondary role in grounding the main requirements of public reason. This is because we are civic friends not just as fellow citizens but also through our participation in the smaller groups, associations, and affiliations of civil society, which are part of the social bases of self-respect.

Public Reason, 2017

Some public reason liberals identify coercive law as the subject ma er of public justi cation, wh... more Some public reason liberals identify coercive law as the subject ma er of public justi cation, while others claim that the justi cation of coercion plays no role in motivating public justi cation requirements. Both of these views are mistaken. I argue that the subject ma er of public justi cation is not coercion or coercive law but political decision-making about the basic institutional structure. At the same time, part of what makes a public justi cation principle necessary in the rst place is the inherent coerciveness of a legally organized basic institutional structure. While most public reason liberals seem to presuppose that the meaning of "coercion" is su ciently obvious so as not to warrant further analysis, my defense of the essay's main thesis explicitly draws on an account of coercion as a powerful agent's employment of enforceable constraints to determine the will of another agent.

Res Publica, 2019

Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Nature B.V... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Nature B.V.. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".

Thanks so much to José Mendoza for inviting me to participate in this session. And congratulation... more Thanks so much to José Mendoza for inviting me to participate in this session. And congratulations to Adam Hosein for publishing a terrific introductory text on the ethics of immigration. The first two sections of my commentary deal with the open borders debate, sketching an approach not treated directly by Hosein. The third section focuses on unauthorized immigration. And the final section highlights some issues for further inquiry.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2014

Compared to standard liberal approaches to public reason and justification, the asymmetric conver... more Compared to standard liberal approaches to public reason and justification, the asymmetric convergence model of public justification allows for the public justification of laws and policies based on a convergence of quite different and even publicly inaccessible reasons. The model is asymmetrical in the sense of identifying a broader range of reasons that may function as decisive defeaters of proposed laws and policies. This paper raises several critical questions about the asymmetric convergence model and its central but ambiguous presumption against coercion. By drawing on the theory of structural coercion, a main conclusion of the paper is that the asymmetric convergence model ultimately encounters the very incompleteness problems that its proponents often associate with more familiar consensus models of public justification. The paper also develops an alternative, Rawlsian-inspired account of public justification that includes elements of both convergence and consensus but not asymmetry. The Rawlsian model enables us to understand how democratic decisions may possess a degree of procedural, but still morally significant, liberal legitimacy under conditions of pluralism even when citizens fail to agree fully about either the premises of or conclusions to their political arguments.

Social Philosophy Today, 2019

<jats:p />

John Rawls

This chapter proposes to widen Rawls’s idea of public reason in order to respond to a dilemma ori... more This chapter proposes to widen Rawls’s idea of public reason in order to respond to a dilemma originally developed by David Reidy in his article “Rawls’s Wide View of Public Reason: Not Wide Enough” (2000). The dilemma is that public reason is either indeterminate or inconsistent with the animating values of political liberalism, including the value of political autonomy. Reidy’s article identifies two different ways in which public reason might turn out to be indeterminate, one arising when there are too few public reasons in support of some law or policy and the other when there are too many. The latter problem is not as serious as Reidy supposes, at least with respect to several conceptions of justice that might provide the content of public reason. The problem of there being too few reasons suggests that the idea of public reason should include a more expansive set of politically relevant justifying reasons than is otherwise suggested by Rawls’s theory. The chapter proposes a pr...

Radical Philosophy Review, 2022

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John Rawls and the Common Good, 2021

Res Publica, 2019

Public reason liberals disagree about the relationship between public justification and deliberat... more Public reason liberals disagree about the relationship between public justification and deliberative democracy. My goal is to argue against the recent suggestion that public reason liberals seek a 'divorce' from deliberative democracy. Defending this thesis will involve discussing the benefits of deliberation for public justification as well as revisiting public reason's standard Rawlisan restraint requirement. I criticize Kevin Vallier's alternative convergence-based principle of restraint and respond to the worry that the standard Rawlsian restraint requirement reduces the likelihood of public justification by limiting the diversity of inputs into the justificatory process.

Social Philosophy Today, 2009

This paper looks at recent efforts within the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma to expel descendants of... more This paper looks at recent efforts within the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma to expel descendants of the freedmen, persons of African descent held as slaves until their emancipation and subsequent adoption as tribal citizens according to the terms of an 1866 treaty. The unavoidable racial dimensions of this controversy lead me to examine it as an example of the internal minorities problem, i.e., the problem of minorities within minority cultures, familiar from the literature on liberal multiculturalism. I argue that while no single approach to the internal minorities problem is fully adequate for resolving the controversy, the balance of reasons drawn from these approaches shows expulsion of the freedmen descendants to be unjust. Furthermore, in contrast to leading theoretical approaches, a deliberative approach to multiculturalism can best account for the need to encourage critical public dialogue about underlying notions of blood, race and Cherokee identity.