Abstract
At the core of public reason liberalism is the idea that the exercise of political power is legitimate only if based on laws or political rules that are justifiable to all reasonable citizens. Call this the Public Justification Principle. Public reason liberals face the persistent objection (articulated by, among others, Joseph Raz, Steven Wall, Allen Buchanan, and David Enoch) that the Public Justification Principle is self-defeating. The idea that a society’s political rules must be justifiable to all reasonable citizens is intensely controversial among seemingly reasonable citizens of every liberal society. So, the objection goes, the Public Justification Principle is not justifiable to all reasonable citizens, and thus fails its own test of legitimacy. And this, critics conclude, undermines the public reason liberal project. This article argues that answering the self-defeat objection to public reason liberalism requires fundamentally rethinking prevailing accounts of the Public Justification Principle’s role. My aim is to develop an account of the Public Justification Principle that vindicates its coherence and moral appeal in the face of reasonable disagreement.
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Notes
Important defenses of the Principle include Larmore (1987, ch. 3), Waldron (1987), Nagel (1991, ch. 4), Gaus (1996), Larmore (1996, chs. 6 and 7), Rawls (2005), Estlund (2008, ch. 3), Gaus (2011), Quong (2010), Nussbaum (2011). Though see n. 38 for more on how Gaus’s conception of public reason liberalism differs from the prevailing conception.
Buchanan (2004a, p. 127).
Estlund and Quong are notable exceptions. See my discussion of their views in Sect. 2.
One important difference between different versions of this requirement has to do with the question of scope; some public reason liberals, like Rawls, hold that it applies only to essential elements of constitutions and matters of basic justice, while others, like Quong, hold that it applies to all laws. See Sect. 3.1. for more on this issue.
This characterization follows Buchanan (2004b, p. 235).
See e.g., Gaus (1996, ch. 3), Rawls (1999b, p. 508), Quong (2010, p. 141). Many public reason liberals seemingly hold that whether a political rule is justifiable to an individual is determined solely by her beliefs. In this article, I hold that it also depends on her values, by which I mean the elements of what Bernard Williams calls one’s “subjective motivational set,” including desires, ‘‘dispositions of evaluation, patterns of emotional reaction, personal loyalties, and various projects… embodying commitments of the agent’’ Williams (1981, p. 105). I thus follow Gaus and, arguably, Rawls, the latter of which holds that political rules must be justifiable to reasonable citizens according to their ‘‘deepest religious and philosophical commitments” Rawls (2005, p. 390) (emphasis added).
See Quong (2010, p. 141).
Williams (1981, p. 105).
Wall (2002, p. 386).
Rawls (2005, p. 36).
Rawls (2005, p. xxiv).
Gaus (2011, p. 17).
Ibid. p. xvi.
Nagel (1991, p. 36).
See citations contained in fn. 2.
Estlund (2008, pp. 54, 61).
Quong (2010, p. 235 n. 34). Quong’s view of reasonableness is part of what he calls the “internal” conception of public reason liberalism. The goal of the internal conception is not to justify liberal principles or institutions to non-liberals, but to render public reason liberalism internally coherent in light of reasonable pluralism among citizens committed to “fairly abstract” liberal values. As I aim to show, however, reasonableness does not need to be defined in terms of acceptance of the Public Justification Principle in order for public reason liberalism to be coherent.
Quong (2010. p. 162).
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 313.
Ibid. p. 291.
To be clear, I am not arguing that public reason liberals should not exclude anyone from the constituency of the reasonable. I am simply arguing that they should not exclude those who endorse plausible weightings of freedom, equality, and fairness. Also, see fn. 21 for more on Quong’s internal conception of political liberalism.
For example, Enoch suggests that the Principle might be normatively self-undermining in the same sense as the following principle: “Controversy undermines the goodness of any theory.” This theory applies to itself because it is a theory. And because the theory is controversial, it is normatively self-undermining because it says of itself that it is not a good theory. Enoch (2013, p. 172).
Quong (2010, ch. 9), for example, believes that the Principle should apply to all laws, not just the aspects of constitutions that Rawls targets.
This is the Liberal Principle of Legitimacy. See Rawls (2005, p. 137).
Ibid. p. 227.
Ibid. p. 235. See Sect. 4 for more on this point.
Ibid. p. xlvi.
Ibid.
This view bears similarities to the view Charles Larmore defends when he argues that the Principle is the “abiding moral heart of liberal thought” (1999, pp. 606–609). But there are important differences. First, Larmore argues that political rules must be justifiable to citizens only on the counterfactual assumption that they accept a public justification requirement on the use of power (1990, p. 352, 2015, pp. 83–85). So, on Larmore’s view, the Principle is justifiable to all reasonable individuals. As I made clear in Sect. 2, I reject this view. Second, Larmore argues that the Principle is part of the “basis” of political rules that satisfy it (1999, 2015, p. 81). Insofar as this means that the Principles is part of the justificatory basis of rules that satisfy it, I reject this aspect of Larmore’s view as well, as I make clear in my response to Wall’s version of the self-defeat objection later in this Section. Third, Larmore believes that it is important for the success of public reason liberalism that the moral basis of the Principle “has its place in a great many otherwise disparate ideas of the human good” (1999, pp. 623–4). As I will argue in Sect. 4, I do not think that this is important for the success of public reason liberalism.
Wall (2002, p. 388).
Ibid.
Ibid.
It is unclear that this version of the self-defeat objection threatens convergence conceptions of the Principle. Convergence views generally do not place restrictions on the sorts of reasons to which citizens properly appeal in justifying political rules to other citizens. So, even if members of G(1) invoke the Principle as a reason for imposing L(1), convergence views might deem this unproblematic insofar as members of G(2) have their own non-shared reasons to accept L(1).
This seems to be what Wall has in mind when he writes that there is no “clean separation between advocacy for tests of public justification and the activity of publicly justifying political arrangements… For an essential part of the public justification of a political arrangement is an account of the conditions that establish that the arrangement is publicly justified” Wall (2013, p. 165).
See Sect. 2 for more on how this is possible.
There are at least two plausible ways of undertaking this task. The first is to identify certain basic liberal and democratic institutions that are common ground between individuals who endorse plausible weightings of the core liberal values of freedom and equality, including a wide range of citizens who reject a public justification requirement on political power. The second way is to argue that a commitment to basic liberal and democratic rights follows from certain very general features of practical agency together with a minimal moral commitment to not denying others rights or advantages one seeks for oneself. The second strategy, if successful, seems to me more attractive because it shows that liberal and democratic institutions are publicly justified without simply defining reasonableness in terms of acceptance of such institutions.
Rawls (2005, p. 445).
Rawls 1999a, p. 395.
Rawls (2005, p. 139).
Ibid. pp. 100–1.
Rawls (1999a, p. 395).
Rawls (2005, p. 100). The public culture “comprises the political institutions of a constitutional regime and the public traditions of their interpretation (including those of the judiciary), as well as historic texts and documents that are common knowledge.” Ibid. pp. 13–14.
Ibid. p. 29.
Ibid. p. 100.
See Habermas (1990).
See Scanlon (1998).
See Darwall (2006).
See Gaus (2011).
Quong (2010, pp. 313–314).
Ibid. p. 181.
For desire-based forms of instrumentalism, the relevant notion of practical commitment is strength of desire. For preference-based forms of instrumentalism, the relevant notion of commitment is degree of preference.
This characterization follows Schroeder (2007, p. 98).
One implication of the view I am defending is that while there are practical reasons
for all individuals to comply with the moral duties the Principle entails, individuals need not appreciate those reasons in order to be reasonable (see Sect. 2). It might seem problematic for public reason liberals to hold that individuals can be reasonable even if they do not appreciate the reasons there are. Yet, it is important to keep in mind that “reasonable” is a term of art within public reason liberalism. And no suitable definition of reasonableness will entail that only those who appreciate the reasons there are count as reasonable. This is because accepting that others can be wrong but reasonable—and thus owed an acceptable justification of their society’s political arrangements—is at the heart of the public reason liberal project.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging me to be careful in this respect.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and discussion, I thank Jonny Anomaly, Jacob Barrett, Elvira Basevich, Kenneth Baynes, Michael Bennet, Allen Buchanan, Michael Bukoski, Tom Christiano, David Enoch, David Estlund, Rainer Forst, Jerry Gaus, Keith Hankins, Jon Quong, Jeremy Reid, Greg Robson, Dave Schmidtz, Chad Van Schoelandt, Sibyl Schwarzenbach, Tom Sinclair, Stephen G.W. Stich, Steve Wall, Fabian Wendt, Sophia Wistehube, audiences at the Brave New World Conference at the University of Manchester, the Eastern Division Meeting of the APA, the University of Arizona SWAP brown bag series, and the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal.
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Bajaj, S. Self-defeat and the foundations of public reason. Philos Stud 174, 3133–3151 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0850-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0850-9