Abstract
Eric Mack’s “Inside Public Reason” is thorough and fair-minded review of The Order of Public Reason. My deep thanks to him for his insights, as well as his judiciousness. In these remarks I cannot take up all the important matters he raises; in particular I put aside two important issues—the analysis of the political and discussion of how contingent social processes play a fundamental role in public justification (Fred D’Agostino focuses on this second feature of The Order of Public Reason in his “The Orders of Public Reason,” Analytical Philosophy, forthcoming.). I plan to take up the latter on another occasion.
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Notes
Mack writes: “However, unlike Mill, Gaus thinks that we need authoritative (and non-political) moral rules and that such authoritative rules can be publically justified. Hence, in a departure from Mill that I do not think he notes, Gaus holds that some of what Mill called ‘moral coercion’ is publically justified.” (Mack 2013) The implication here is that Mill does not think that some moral coercion can be so justified; but recall that Mill writes: “The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.” [John Stuart Miil, On Liberty. In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by J. M. Robson, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963: vol. 18: p. 223. Emphasis added.] Certainly the “moral coercion of public opinion” can be justified regarding actions that concern others.
See Kurt Baier, The Rational and the Moral Order: The Social Roots of Reason and Morality (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1995); P.F. Strawson, “Social Morality and Individual Ideal,” Philosophy, vol. 36 (1961): 1–17.
I have argued for this interpretation in “On the Appropriate Mode of Justifying a Public Moral Constitution,” The Harvard Review of Philosophy, forthcoming.
I am thinking here, obviously, of Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority. See his Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), Part I.
See Thomas Christiano, The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
See my “Public Reason Liberalism” in The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism, edited by Chandran Kukathas and Stephen Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
See here Public Reason in the History of Political Philosophy, edited by Piers Turner and Gerald Gaus (New York: Rutledge, forthcoming).
Especially important has been the work of Cristina Bicchieri, in particular her Grammar of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and and The Bloomington School, led by Elinor Ostrom. On the latter see Paul Dragos and Peter J. Boettke, Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development: the Bloomington School (New York: Routledge, 2009).
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, 2nd edition, edited and translated by John Ladd (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), p.116 [§43]. Emphasis added.
Baier, The Rational and the Moral Order, chap. 5. On rejecting the sharing view see my essay, “A Tale of Two Sets: Public Reason in Equilibrium.” Public Affairs Quarterly, vol. 25 (October 2011): 305–325.
Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns” in Political Writings of Benjamin Constant, edited by Biancamria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 308–328.
Admittedly, I was more explicit about this in “The Demands of Impartiality and the Evolution of Morality” in Partiality and Impartiality: Morality, Special Relationships, and the Wider World, edited by Brian Feltham and John Cottingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 42–64.
To call these “preferences” is not to say that they are desires or mere likings, but they are pairwise orderings in terms of choice worthiness. A preference is simply a pairwise ordering relation—it is not the basis of that ordering.
I have greatly benefited from discussing these issues with John Thrasher and reading his paper “Rule-Following: Constraints and Objectives,” delivered to the Southern Economics Association, Washington D.C. (2011).
See his “Moral Individualism: Agent-Relativity and Deontic Restraints,” Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 7 (September 1989): 81–111. For more recent and formal analysis employing this approach, see Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Amartya Sen, “Maximization and the Act of Choice” in his Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002): 159–205.
For advocates of this view, see Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society, chap. 1; Herbert Gintis, The Bounds of Reason: Game Theory and the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 233; Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, The Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 4, chap. 10.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, second edition (New York: Penguin, [1879] 2004), p. 120.
References
Mack, E. (2013). Inside public reason. Criminal Law and Philosophy. doi:10.1007/s11572-013-9204-2.
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Gaus, G. On Being Inside Social Morality and Seeing It. Criminal Law, Philosophy 9, 141–153 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-013-9219-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-013-9219-8