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What is the point of public reason?

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Notes

  1. Gaus (2011), cited hereafter as OPR.

  2. By “non-moralized” I mean the constituency is not defined by reference to acceptance of any substantive moral rules or ideals.

  3. Again, note that the problem generalizes beyond the specific example to many less extreme cases (e.g., not discriminating on the basis of race or religion).

  4. One might insist that if Carl believes he is permitted to kill infidels while making no moral demands on them, he does not qualify as a moral person: he is something closer to a psychopath to whom normal reactive attitudes do not apply, and thus we should see him as entirely outside our moral community. I say more about a variant of this reply in the text below, but I do not believe that Gaus’s theory has the resources to explain why Carl does not qualify as a moral person, regardless of whether we ultimately decide to exclude him from our moral community and thus abandon having moral relations with him. Carl may, after all, have many moral beliefs and practices that are perfectly intelligible to us apart from his aim of killing infidels while making no moral demands on the infidels.

  5. Note there are two dimensions along which views might classified as restrictive or expansive. One is the scope of the account: the range of possible actions to which the requirement of public reason applies. The other is the degree of normative content that is assumed by the account of public reason. Here I’m focused only on the latter issue.

  6. This thesis is deliberately similar to Gaus’s ‘presumption in favor of liberty’ (OPR, p. 341).

  7. I don’t necessarily endorse the specific normative assumptions proposed in this paragraph as the best ones to use in developing a conception of public reason—I only use them to illustrate the possibility of a moderate conception of freedom and equality.

Reference

  • Gaus, G. (2011). The order of public reason: A theory of freedom and morality in a diverse and bounded world. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

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Acknowledgments

Versions of this paper were presented at: the University of Richmond, the LSE, the University of Essex, TU Darmstadt, University of Stirling, Warwick University, and the Eastern APA in 2012. I’m grateful to all the participants at those events for their questions, in particular: Richard Arneson, Aslan Amani, Kim Brownlee, Matthew Clayton, Bob Goodin, Andrew Lister, Tom Porter, Ben Saunders, Lad Sessions, Zofia Stemplowska, Rebecca Stone, Victor Tadros, and Kevin Vallier. Most of all I’m grateful to Jerry, whose work and generosity are an inspiration, and who patiently endured several versions of this paper.

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  1. School of Philosophy, University of Southern California, Mudd Hall of Philosophy, 3709 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Jonathan Quong

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Correspondence to Jonathan Quong.

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Quong, J. What is the point of public reason?. Philos Stud 170, 545–553 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0270-z

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