Abstract
We need a conception of public reason that specifies what can be put forward by NGOs as political actors in the postnational constellation vis-à-vis corporations. A plea is made for a conception of public reason which promotes an unconstrained public dialogue. The background against which to assess public reason is the “fact of reasonable pluralism” (Rawls), i.e. the assumption that modern societies are characterized by the lack of a shared moral view on questions of the good life. It is argued that the liberal restrictions of the content of public reason have a number of implications which make it difficult for NGOs to adopt an emancipatory role as actors in the public sphere, and that liberalism in particular frees the interaction between NGOs and corporations from conforming to the requirements of public reason. Deliberative democracy agrees with feminist thinkers that public reason must be unrestricted since interests of actors must be discursively clarified even if they disagree. Any a priori restriction of what is acknowledged as part of public reason risks to oppress less powerful actors and to exclude them from public debate.
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Notes
- 1.
Even though it has been stated above that liberalism does not assign NGOs to the public sphere in a broad sense, in a liberal-constitutionalist analysis NGOs are part of the public sphere if they are embedded in an institutional context.
- 2.
See Moon (2003) on the exemplary difference between Rawls’ and Habermas’ conceptions of public reason. See also Habermas (1996b: 313) on the importance of distinguishing the procedural and the substantive dimension and Gaus: “Political liberalism stresses justification of [substantive] basic political principles that can be the focus of an overlapping consensus among irreconcilable comprehensive doctrines, while deliberative democrats stress an open-ended discourse that validates political claims” (Gaus, 1997: 197).
- 3.
- 4.
Rawls actually makes free institutions responsible for the diversity of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. He says that the diversity of reasonable comprehensive doctrines in a modern society is the result of free practical reason that operates in a society with free institutions (Rawls, 1993: 36f.).
- 5.
- 6.
Similarly, Jean Cohen claims that “[a] relatively thin conception of national identity, together with political processes that accommodate diversity and acknowledge the equal claim of all to participate and to live openly according to their evaluations, could foster rather than undermine social inclusion, trust and social solidarity” (Cohen, 1999b: 228).
- 7.
Joshua Cohen first contends that “the fact of reasonable pluralism appears to require a procedural conception because it deprives us of a background of shared moral or religious premises that could give determinate content to the idea of popular authorization or constrain the substance of genuinely collective choices” (Cohen, 1996: 96, emphasis added). But in a further step he criticizes this assumption and sketches a view that combines the assumption of reasonable pluralism with a more substantive conception of democracy. This includes among other principles, freedom of expression and religious freedom (Cohen, 1996: 103, 105). Yet, by defining these principles as substantive restrictions to public reason, commitments based on these principles become immune to public reason and to public policy (Dryzek, 2000: 11). Besides such attempts to justify liberal rights through deliberative principles, Dryzek names two other ways in which deliberative democracy converges with constitutional liberalism: the claim that liberal constitutions promote deliberation on the one hand, and the view that constitution-making is itself a deliberative process on the other hand (Dryzek, 2000: 10ff.).
- 8.
As Benhabib states, with his “conversational restraint” on public dialogue Ackerman confines public dialogue to “productive ends” and thereby excludes certain conceptions of the good life from the agenda of public debate, which in effect become privatized (Benhabib, 1992: 97).
- 9.
Habermas states that substantively delimiting “a sphere for a privately autonomous pursuit of individual interests and life plans (…) once and for all from the public sphere oriented to the ‘common weal’” is just as impossible as delimiting “the ‘intimate sphere’ (…) like a core inside the wider private sphere” (Habermas, 1996b: 314).
- 10.
Rawls concedes that proving that the liberal conception of public justice is not too restrictive is an intractable task. But he claims that this is not a serious problem because most of the questions on which a well-ordered constitutional democratic society needs to find agreement can be settled by reference to political values alone (Rawls, 1997: 803). He cites as an example the debate whether school prayers should be admitted in public schools. He admits that it might be thought that a liberal position would deny the admissibility of prayers in public schools, but he then demonstrates that this question can be addressed with exclusively political arguments (Rawls, 1997: 794f.).
- 11.
Rawls claims that forms of nonpublic reason “belong to the internal life of the many associations in civil society… Since we seek a shareable public basis of justification for all citizens in society, giving justifications to particular persons and groups here and there until all are covered fails to do this” (Rawls, 1997: 800). Benhabib criticizes Rawls on this point and states that “the constitutional-democratic state and the institutions of civil society are (…) not as sharply separable as some of Rawls’ formulations suggest” (Benhabib, 1996b: 76).
- 12.
The impression that the locus of political interaction plays an important role for liberalism fits well with the observation, made in the section on the deliberative conception of the public sphere in the postnational constellation (see section “The Deliberative Conceptualization of the Public Sphere in the Postnational Constellation” (Chapter 6)), that the deliberative model does not define political interaction by the locus or by the actors involved but rather by the discursive character of the interaction.
- 13.
Yet we must not equate nonpublic reasons with private reasons; nonpublic reasons of civil society are “social, and certainly not private” (Rawls, 1993: 220).
- 14.
Whereas Rawls states that public reason holds for citizens when they “vote in elections when constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice are at stake” and “when they engage in political advocacy in the public forum” (Rawls, 1993: 215), Charney suggests an expansion of the applicability of public reason to “those venues where debate or advocacy occurs on matters of potential legislation concerning citizens in general and the arguments – the reasons invoked – are intended to apply to any and all citizens.” He thus widens the range of venues which are subject to public reason (Charney, 1998: 101).
- 15.
As McCarthy points out, in “Political Liberalism” Rawls connects public uses of reason with governmental and quasi-governmental venues which include political campaigns and voting (Rawls, 1993: 215–6). He connects nonpublic uses with non-governmental venues such as churches, universities and voluntary associations in civil society (Rawls, 1993: 213, 220). He thus assigns nonpublic uses of reason explicitly to the unofficial networks in which people debate public matters. These are the networks which Habermas in turn considers to be the nervous system of the political public sphere (McCarthy, 1994: 50).
- 16.
More about different styles of reasoning will be said in Chapter 14.
- 17.
Yet Rawls expresses his belief that a well-ordered constitutional democratic society “can resolve the second kind of conflict, which deals with conflicts between citizens’ fundamental interests – political, economic, and social”. This belief rests upon the hope that if reasonable principles of justice are accepted and recognized as reasonable and if the political and social institutions satisfy them, then the “second kind of conflict need not arise, or arise so forcefully” (Rawls, 1997: 805). The problem is that the interaction between NGOs and corporations in the postnational constellation characteristically occurs in the institutional vacuum where there are no (or not yet) political and social institutions that could satisfy reasonable principles of justice.
- 18.
The conventional occlusion of matters of the good life from public debate reflects the domination of “male voices” in drawing the boundary between public and private, because assigning these issues to the private sphere legitimizes women’s oppression and exploitation in the private realm (Benhabib, 1992: 110). As feminists have consistently argued, areas in life that are not being subjected to the principles of public reason are potential sites of injustice (Cooke, 2000: 960). The initial criticism of feminist thinkers was aimed not only at the liberal model but also at Habermas’ earlier restrictions of public reason. They reproached Habermas for relying on “overly rigid boundaries (…) between matters of justice and those of the good life, public interests versus private needs, privately held values and publicly shared norms” (Benhabib, 1992: 111). However, in the meantime Habermas has revised his conception of public reason and emphasises that every topic should be subject to deliberation (Habermas, 1996b: 312f.).
- 19.
It is important to note though that this argument is open to criticism. After all, it took the Civil War to end slavery in the US, which suggests that a deliberative outcome with these “Southern gentlemen” was not likely.
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Baur, D. (2012). Public Reason. In: NGOs as Legitimate Partners of Corporations. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 36. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2254-5_7
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