Public Reason

A popular question in Canada and elsewhere, among both scholars and pundits turns on cultural diversity and deep disagreement: good? bad? some of both? What to do in the face of deep disputes over big questions of religion, cultural practices, and moral values? McGill’s Carlos Fraenkel took a stab at this recently (“In Praise of the Clash of Cultures”). I find some problems with his approach.

"This paper tackles with the issue of the place of comprehensive beliefs within the public space. It tries to strike a middle path between the liberal ban on comprehensive beliefs and the anti-liberal claim that comprehensive beliefs should be given full pride of place in public deliberations. The article relies on arguments that are inspired by the pragmatist tradition. It starts locating the main cause of failures at articulating comprehensive beliefs and public reason in a central feature of liberal epistemology, namely the way it conceives public reason via a preliminary distinction between public and non public beliefs.
After criticizing this distinction, the article introduces a distinction between the normative practice of justification and the normative practice of adjudication as a more perspicuous way to establish the place that comprehensive beliefs should play within political forums. It then concludes showing that this approach provides a satisfying answer to the issue of
the public role of comprehensive beliefs in a liberal democratic regime that is respectful of citizens’ thick identities while at the same time complying with the requirements of respect set by the liberal
tradition."

In their recent books on the debate over religious participation in political debate, Robert Audi and Christopher Eberle offer differing accounts of justified political resentment—the resentment one feels when bound by laws the reasonability of which one does not endorse. In this essay I explain why both of their accounts are unsatisfactory and argue instead that the political resentment is rational if the reasons that serve for the basis of the coercion are held in what I will call a dialogically unresponsive manner. I suggest that dialogic unresponsiveness is a civic vice and that dialogic responsiveness is a civic virtue.

John Rawls’s political liberalism and its ideal of public reason are tremendously influential in contemporary political philosophy and in constitutional law as well. Many, perhaps even most, liberals are Rawlsians of one stripe or another. This is problematic, because most liberals also support the redefinition of civil marriage to include same-sex unions, and as I show, Rawls’s political liberalism actually prohibits same- sex marriage. Recently in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, however, California’s northern federal district court reinterpreted the traditional rational basis review in terms of liberal neutrality akin to Rawls’s “public reason,” and overturned Proposition 8 and established same-sex marriage. (This reinterpretation was amplified in the 9th Circuit Court’s decision upholding the district court on appeal in Perry v. Brown.) But on its own grounds Perry should have drawn the opposite conclusion. This is because all the available arguments for recognizing same-sex unions as civil marriages stem from controversial comprehensive doctrines about the good, and this violates the ideal of public reason; yet there remains a publicly reasonable argument for traditional marriage, which I sketch here. In the course of my argument I develop Rawls’s politically liberal account of the family and defend it against objections, discussing its implications for political theory and constitutional law.

"The rational character of the political sphere largely relies upon the idea that it is effectively possible to provide rational justification to some fundamental principles of social normativity. Contemporary democratic forms of political life, in particular, are grounded upon the existence of a shared public discourse as the epistemic environment where a fair exercise of citizens’ representation, the active support for specific policies and the reasoned application of laws find their appropriate grounding.
Within these last decades, though, the widespread pluralistic character of modern societies has been often identified as a major challenge to the stability and effectiveness of liberal democracies. This scenario can be at least partially explained as the joint effect of the increasing complexity of contemporary plural societies and the decreasing cultural credit given to the justificatory power of practical reason.
Political and moral philosophy have been widely engaged with this issue and since the 90s the scene has been taken by a major debate between liberal and communitarian perspectives, characterized by a variety of articulated re-interpretations of the Aristotelian, Kantian and Utilitarian traditions. Among some the most recent elaborations, though, there has been also a significant return of philosophical views inspired by the Pragmatist tradition. Most notably, the work of Robert Talisse and J. Caleb Clanton has focused on an renewed attention to Peirce to bring about new ways to look at the issue of deep moral disagreement in democratic debate. I am here considering the views expressed by these two authors in their recent works Democracy and Moral Conflict and Religion and Democratic Citizenship , while also taking into consideration some others of their works which positively contribute to shape the setting of their stance."

The Order of Public Reason is Gerald Gaus's important new statement of justificatory liberalism. However, the book is much more than a refinement of Gaus's political philosophy, as it also attempts to explain and justify social morality. The initial purpose of this essay is to explain how the overall argument is meant to hang together. The paper also identifies four points at which the argument might be challenged, primarily as it relates to justificatory liberalism's "tilt" in favor of classical liberalism, as against social justice liberalism.

Gerald Gaus has recently argued that the normative reasons that are relevant to the public justification of laws and moral/political principles are reasons that satisfy a strong internalist constraint.  Gaus also argues that the redistributive and social justice promoting laws and moral/political principles of liberal egalitarianism are not publicly justified, but the laws and moral/political principles of classical liberalism are publicly justified.  I argue that Gaus does not establish that only reasons that satisfy a strong internalist constraint rather than a weaker constraint are reasons that are relevant to the public justification of laws and moral/political principles, and that there are reasons to favour a weaker constraint on the reasons that matter for public justification rather than Gaus’s strong internalist constraint.  I then demonstrate that if the reasons that matter for the public justification of laws and moral/political principles are reasons that satisfy a weaker constraint rather than reasons that satisfy Gaus’s strong internalist constraint, Gaus’s claim that the laws and principles of liberal egalitarianism are not publicly justified but the laws and principles of classical liberalism are publicly justified is undermined.

In his important book, Democratic Rights, Corey Brettschneider argues that democracy is best understood in terms of three core values (equality of interests, political autonomy, and reciprocity), and legitimacy in terms of public reason and inclusion. I focus here on how Brettschneider treats a range of difficult conflicts involving a right to privacy. These treatments rest heavily on a Rawlsian standard of reasonableness, which I elaborate in a way that highlights the strength of Brettschneider’s approach. I then suggest that the distinction Brettschneider draws between perfectionist and political values seems less important to his approach than he avers: the attractiveness of his political liberalism relies on certain comprehensive liberal commitments.

In this chapter I consider a facet of justice – the importance of reasonable claims on other citizens – against some problems of inequality in U.S. urban settings, mostly having to do with unequal political voice, racist preferences, and bad implementations of otherwise-reasonable urban renewal programmes and policies. John Rawls's justificatory method of reflective equilibrium, and the importance of justifications reached in a certain way, have interesting implications for thinking about the just city, although some of those implications may be frustrating and unsettling.

R. Audi and J. Habermas share, despite their mutual differences, the goal of rethinking the relationship between public discourse and religious inspirations in a new way, with the aim of overcoming the inadequacy of traditional liberal schemes. Both focus on the issue at stake from the point of view of a possible ethics of citizenship and find a key point in the epistemological position of religious discourse inside the public sphere. Audi’s proposal effectively offers normative boundaries to a public ethics of political arguments of religious nature, within a liberal but fairly inclusive perspective. Habermas’ reflection looks more persuasive at the level of premises, as it radically questions the epistemological issue behind public discourse in liberal democracies.

Gerald Gaus's book, The Order of Public Reason, is long, rich, and highly ambitious. It is also an important work, one that attempts both to give a rigorous account of the idea of public reason, developed out of an account of "social morality", and to show how, when the idea is properly understood, Classical Liberalism is the best way to structure a society where all are treated as free and equal. The Classical Liberalism that Gaus defends is an interesting and distinctive view, differing in important ways from both the "High Liberalism" of Rawls and those working in his wake, and from Libertarianism of the sort defended by Nozick, Rothbard, and others. While there are conservative elements to Gaus's approach, his is not a social conservative view, either. Classical Liberalism is not a new view, but Gaus has provided perhaps the most philosophically sophisticated justification for it.

It is common to interpret Kant’s idea of public reason and the Enlightenment motto to ‘think for oneself’ as incompatible with the view that testimony and judgement of credibility is essential to rational public deliberation. Such interpretations have led to criticism of contemporary Kantian approaches to deliberative democracy for being intellectualistic, and for not considering our epistemic dependence on other people adequately. In this article, I argue that such criticism is insufficiently substantiated, and that Kant’s idea of public reason is neither at odds with deference to a certain kind of authority, nor with making judgements of character in rational deliberation. This view is corroborated by recent work on Kant’s epistemology of testimony.

A polity is grounded in a modus vivendi (MV) when its main features can be presented as the outcome of a virtually unrestricted bargaining process. Is MV compatible with the consensus-based account of liberal legitimacy, i.e. the view that political authority is well grounded only if the citizenry have in some sense freely consented to its exercise? I show that the atraction of MV for consensus theorists lies mainly in the thought that a MV can be presented as legitimated through a realist account of public justification. Yet I argue that, because of persistent ethical diversity, that realism problematically conflicts with the liberal commitments that underpin the very ideas of consensus and public justification. Tus, despite the interest it has recently atracted from critics of political liberalism and deliberative democracy, MV is not an option for those wishing to ground liberal political authority in some form of consensus. So if realist and agonistic critiques are on target, then the fact that modus vivendi is not an option casts some serious doubt on the viability of the consensus view of liberal legitimacy.

This paper constructs a theory relating forms of democratic public reason to spatial structures. I develop a theory of forms of social consciousness which result from the ways that spatial structures impede or allow for certain forms of intersubjectivity. I then relate these ideas to theories of democratic politics, consciousness, and values.