PUBLIC REASON Journal of Political and Moral Philosophy PUBLIC REASON Journal of Political and Moral Philosophy (original) (raw)
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The Moral Status of Public Reason*
Journal of Political Philosophy, 2012
R ECENT philosophical discussion of the idea of public reason has focused mainly on two issues, namely, the plausibility of its standard of political justification and the feasibility and fairness of its demands on religious citizens. An even more basic question about public reason has, by comparison, received far less attention. How, and to what degree, are requirements of public reason binding on citizens? In short, what kind of moral requirements are they? Call this the question of public reason' s moral status. Rawls's writings offer almost no substantive guidance on the question of public reason's moral status beyond the repeated suggestion that requirements of public reason are duties of some sort-part of the so-called "duty of civility." 1 Rawls also makes the rather obvious point that the duty of civility is moral rather than legal, and so not enforceable by state power. But several more interesting questions and ambiguities remain. A first question is whether all of the requirements of public reason are aspects of the duty of civility. The initial definition of this duty in Political Liberalism states that citizens and officials should remain fair-minded in their deliberation and be able to explain their political advocacy and choice in terms of the political values of public reason. 2 Thus this initial definition does not refer to public reason's requirement of restraint. Yet it would seem from other passages in the text that the restraint requirement is supposed to have the same moral status as public reason's requirements of deliberation and political justification. 3 A second set of questions concerns the significance of the duty of civility, once its content is adequately specified. How much normative weight does the idea of public reason carry? How is its significance or weight affected by injustices and other nonideal social realities that are all too familiar features of existing liberal democracies? *Thanks especially to Micah Schwartzman and Bernard G. Prusak for helpful comments and criticisms. Instructive feedback was also provided by the Journal's referees and an audience at the 2010 International Social Philosophy Conference in Toronto. 1 John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), especially pp. 217-8 and 444-5. 2 Ibid., p. 217. 3 Ibid., p. 219, citing the duty of civility and rejecting the view that citizens may vote solely on the basis of their comprehensive doctrines.
What Pragmatism Means by Public Reason
In this article I examine the main conceptions of public reason in contemporary political philosophy (Rawls, Habermas, critical theory) in order to set the frame for appreciating the novelty of the pragmatist understanding of public reason as based upon the notion of consequences and upon a theory of rationality as inquiry. The approach is inspired by Dewey but is free from any concern with history of philosophy. The aim is to propose a different understanding of the nature of public reason aimed at overcoming the limitations of the existing approaches. Public reason is presented as the proper basis for discussing contested issues in the broad frame of deep democracy.
Constructing an Ideal of Public Reason
The San Diego law review, 1993
How should citizens in a modern pluralist democracy debate and discuss public affairs? There is wide agreement that the government should not censor public debate about politics, at least not without very good reason. But when it comes to a related question of political morality-"To what ideal should citizens aspire in political debate?"the issue is cloudy. For example, some have argued that religious reason should be excluded from public debate; others argue for the exclusion of statements which degrade people on the basis of their religion, race or ethnicity. Still others contend that in public debate, an ideal of political morality should mirror the freedom of expression: all viewpoints should contend in a marketplace of ideas. An ideal of public reason can provide guidance on these issues. Thus, an investigation of the idea of public reason may illuminate the relationship between religion and politics. This Article undertakes the construction of an ideal of public reason.' It begins with an investigation of the idea behind the phrase "public reason"focusing on the work of John Rawls. The idea is further developed by considering the various possibilities for an ideal or normative standard of public reason. As each option is considered, some possible formulations are discarded and additional specifications are added. The penultimate section of the Article restates the ideal that is constructed through this process of elaboration, evaluation, and elimination. Finally, a brief survey of historical uses of the * D 1993 by the Author.
Synthesis philosophica, 2016
The paper is an effort to reflect on the prospects of comparative political and social philosophy based on interaction with empirical and theoretical research in the social sciences and humanities. It consists of the following components: 1. Short presentation of the sources of the "comparative turn" and the fourth wave of the critique of Eurocentrism. 2. Reflection on the problem of "multiple modernities" ("new modernities") as the consequence of the "comparative turn", and a challenge for the idea of society and politics based on the concept of secular public reason. 3. Reference to a challenge to the classical notion of the public sphere (rooted in the ideal of public reason) which was developed by Nilüfer Göle while studying new "Islamic public visibility as a critique of a secular version of the public sphere" in Western Europe.
A Political Realist Notion of Public Reason
Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy, 2016
The attraction of political liberalism's notion of public reason is that it provides an explanation and evaluation of political argumentation. 1 It views political argumentation as a reason-giving practice taking place between equal, free, and reasonable citizens who may perhaps disagree about what is valuable in life, but who will agree, it is assumed, about what is political or public reason, because it is the reason consistent with this political justice of equal freedom for all. This body of public arguments is available and acceptable to citizens and underlies the lawsof which these citizens can therefore view themselves as authors-governing their conduct. * I thank Toni van Gennip for his assistance in the first stage of this project. I thank Raf Geenens, Anthony Duff, and two anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback. 1 With 'political liberalism' I refer to John Rawls' constructivist theory of justice and legitimacy. In The Law of Peoples, Rawls refers to his theory (extended in that work to the international realm) as 'political liberalism'. See John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 9: '[…] it is important to see that the Law of Peoples is developed within political liberalism […].' 2 Some of these critics are Stuart Hampshire, Jeremy Waldron, Glen Newey, and Matt Sleat. See the references to their work in this article. 3 The question does not presuppose the truth or correctness of the realist criticism. The article does not take sides in the discussion between liberals and realists. The idea is that addressing the above question sheds new light on the discussion.
Public Reason, Positive Liberty, and Legitimacy
This is not the only form of positive liberty one may be concerned with. Alternatives include liberty as power, as discussed by Gaus (: chapter ), or freedom-to, as discussed by Schmidtz and Brennan (: -, -). See also the "Introduction" to this volume. Sensen () provides an insightful discussion relating Kant and the public reason tradition. Throughout this chapter, I discuss laws since most public reason theorists focus them. On a number of views, however, including my own, laws are secondary to the social-moral rules to which members of society hold each other accountable. On this sort of social morality, see Gaus (: chapter IV), Strawson (, ), Van Schoelandt ().
Completing Public Political Reason
Nearly twenty years ago I published an essay arguing that public reason as Rawls understood it was incomplete with respect to at least some constitutional essentials or matters of basic justice. This incompleteness, I maintained, placed the ideal of public reason, and so the associated values of liberal legitimacy and political autonomy, beyond the reach of democratic citizens engaged in public political deliberation and decision-making. Scholarly inquiry into Rawls's idea and ideal of public reason has advanced a great deal over the last twenty years. James Boettcher and others have clarified and shed important light on both the Rawlsian idea and ideal and the more compelling of the rival conceptions of public reason, often themselves rooted in rival conceptions of constitutional liberal democracy. In this essay I revisit my worry that even under favorable conditions Rawlsian public reason will prove incomplete in a way or to a degree that effectively pushes the values with which it is associated beyond the reach of democratic citizens. But I focus in this essay on a form of incompleteness unaddressed in (though I think implicit in and so consistent with) my earlier essay. As James Boettcher notes, the examples of incompleteness proffered in my earlier essay were of two sorts: cases of too many reasons and cases of too few reasons. The new cases that I proffer below are cases of too few reasons. But they are of a distinctive form and it is not obvious whether they are amenable to the handling James Boettcher proposes in response to the cases identified in my earlier essay. Without taking a view on whether they are, I offer here my own proposal for how to handle them while keeping faith with the commitments undergirding public reason and the weighty goods that trail in its wake. An attractive possibility is that together Boettcher and I will have helped not only to clarify potential problems for Rawlsian public reason but also to support an optimistic assessment of its ability to meet these problems. Were this possibility to be realized, the relative gravitational force of rival conceptions of public reason drawn from rival conceptions of constitutional liberal democracy might be diminished. I begin with some brief preliminary and I hope clarifying remarks about public reason and the values associated with it. I turn then to the issue of public reason's completeness or lack thereof. After a brief remark or two following up on my aforementioned paper from many years ago, I argue that justice as fairness is incomplete with respect to another important class of political issues concerning constitutional essentials or basic justice. I argue further that its incompleteness in this regard is not peculiar to it but will be widely shared by other reasonable political liberalisms. Drawing on a distinction between public reason and public political reason, I then try to show that permitting citizens to resolve these sorts of disagreements by reasoning publicly with one another as reasonable persons committed to diverse but reasonable comprehensive doctrines and not simply reasonable citizens committed to diverse but reasonable political conceptions of justice need not undermine the commitments and values served by either public reason or public political reason.