Abstract
Successful public justification of coercive policy in liberal societies relies on a solution to what I call the aggregation problem. Without a method of weighing and balancing shared reasons that is acceptable to all, no genuine consensus on the acceptability of a political principle or policy is possible. This is a serious problem for theories of liberalism that rely on public justification or public reason that has largely been ignored. I show the seriousness of this problem by using an example from contemporary politics, abortion policy. Within the context of abortion policy, I consider three approaches to the aggregation problem and argue that none of them offers a promising solution. This result, I argue, generalizes beyond abortion policy and poses a problem for the entire project of public reason liberalism. Even in an idealized society where all deliberate from a shared standpoint, it may not always be possible to find a policy all citizens regard as acceptable: not because there is a diversity of reasons, but because there is no uncontroversial method of weighing and aggregating reasons. This doesn’t mean public reason is useless, though. Instead of being a standard for justifying coercive policy, I argue public reason should be seen as a procedural tool for managing and mitigating the inescapable political conflicts that will inevitably arise in a pluralistic democratic society.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The present discussion sets aside convergence forms of public reason liberalism, which eschew bracketing to identify policies all idealized citizens can endorse from their non-shared perspectives. Convergence liberalisms do not face the aggregation problem, but instead confront what Kevin Vallier calls the “empty set objection” regarding especially fraught public policy debates (Vallier, 2014, p. 132).
The incompleteness objection to public reason alleges that bracketing constraints on reasoning in public discourse prevent citizens from justifying determinate policies. Influential formulations of and responses to the objection include Williams (2000) and Schwartzman (2004). The literature follows Gaus (1996, pp. 194–198) in distinguishing between two forms of the objection: indeterminacy and inconclusiveness (cf. Schwartzman, 2004, pp. 194–198). Indeterminacy occurs when public reasons alone fail to justify any public policy on a specific issue. Inconclusiveness occurs when public reasons alone justify multiple policies. Kogelmann (2019) argues that inconclusiveness poses distinctive problems of assurance, where citizens must signal to each other that they have, in fact, bracketed their sectarian or private reasons for purposes of public deliberation.
This includes feminist theories (see Schouten, op cit.) and, as I argue below, arguments like those David Boonin offers.
Jeff McMahan argues that the fetus’ interest in living, and hence its right to life, is time-relative, and strengthens as the fetus’ psychological capacities develop (2002, pp. 170–172).
So, everything I say is compatible with thinking there could be circumstances where an elective abortion should be legally impermissible but a health-related one permissible.
The following discussion is indebted to Lord and Maguire (2016) and their helpful distinction between “weight fundamentalists” and “weighter-than fundamentalists.”
Rawls cites Hutcheson and Mill as important precursors to his own approach when defending his principles of justice as lexically ordered (1999, pp. 37–38 fn. 23).
For example, Rawls presumes a lexical priority rule when he says that in the first trimester the equality of women should be “overriding” (2005, p. 243 fn. 32). Rawls’ discussion leaves open whether any reason has lexical priority in later trimesters.
Arrell (2019) also defends this line.
Cullity (2018) calls the Simple Picture.
See, e.g., Dietrich and List (2013, p. 117).
Top-down weighing has parallels to Dietrich and List’s framework for inferring the relative strength of reasons from preferences over possible outcomes (2013, pp. 112–113).
An intuition pump is a thought experiment designed to focus a reader’s attention on specific salient features of a situation.
Boonin himself never explicitly appeals to “intuition,” a word that doesn’t even appear in the book. But he is clearly making such appeals when eliciting the reader’s immediate response to thought experiments that change the circumstances of McFall v. Shimp.
The target intuitions in the previous section’s schema are “I ought to believe we ought to \( \varphi \) in CMS” and “I ought to believe we ought to \(\varphi\) in CA.”
For simplicity, I speak of the killing/letting die debate as the only one that needs to be resolved. But, as I note later in the paragraph, there are others that need resolution, too.
Ahn and Mutz (2023) show via cross-sectional analyses that changes in candidate thermometer differences, which measure differences in feeling thermometer ratings for the two American presidential candidates, was a “significant” predictor of self-reported voting behavior. But these results are more modest when using validated voting behavior instead of self-reports. A second operationalized measure of affective polarization takes the feeling thermometer differences for the two major political parties, rather than for specific candidates for office. By this second measure, affective polarization did not have a significant impact on voting behavior. (Ahn & Mutz, 2023, pp. 260–261)
Public reason theorists debate the proper scope of the bracketing requirement—whether it only applies to reasoning about constitutional essentials, or to a wider range of political contexts. The present analysis takes no stand on this issue.
Several theorists argue that belief polarization in part reflects differences in innate psychological differences, such as where one scores on the five-factor model of personality. The moral learning view traces differences in weighing back to rational responses to different learning environments. But innate psychological dispositions may also impact how rational learners update on their environments. This leaves room in ideal theory to see polarization as partly resulting from innate psychological differences. For a discussion of dispositionalist theories of ideology, see Federico and Malka (2023).
Enoch (2017, p. 144) discusses whether reasonable citizens must suspend their judgment in the face of peer disagreement.
This is the problem of assurance Kogelmann (2019) discusses.
References
Ahn, C., & Mutz, D. (2023). The effects of polarized evaluations on political participation: Does hating the other side motivate voters? Public Opinion Quarterly, 87(2), 243–266.
Allman, J., & Woodward, J. (2008). What are moral intuitions and why should we care about them? A neurobiological perspective. Philosophical Issues, 18, 164–185.
Arrell, R. (2019). Public reason and abortion: Was Rawls right after all? The Journal of Ethics, 23, 37–53.
Berker, S. (2007). Particular Reasons Ethics, 118 (1), 109–139.
Bishop, B., & Cushing, R. (2009). The big sort: Why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Boonin, D. (2019). Beyond Roe: Why abortion should be legal–even if the fetus is a person. Oxford University Press.
Cullity, G. (2018). Weighing reasons. In D. Star (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of reasons and normativity (pp. 423–442). Oxford University Press.
Dietrich, F., & List, C. (2013). A reason-based theory of rational choice. Nous, 47(1), 104–134.
Dietrich, F., & List, C. (2017). What matters and how it matters: A choice-theoretic representation of moral theories. Philosophical Review, 126(4), 421–479.
Druckman, J., & Levendusky, M. (2019). What do we measure when we measure affective polarization? Public Opinion Quarterly, 83(1), 114–122.
Eberle, C. (2002). Religious conviction in Liberal politics. Cambridge University Press.
Enoch, D. (2017). Political philosophy and epistemology: The case of public reason. In D. Sobel, P. Vallentyne, & S. Wall (Eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy volume 3. Oxford University Press.
Federico, C., & Malka, A. (2023). Ideology: The Psychological and Social Foundations of Belief Systems. In L. Huddy, D. Sears, J. Levy, & J. Jerit (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (Third Edition). Oxford University Press.
Freeman, S. (2007). Rawls. Routledge.
Gaus, G. F. (1996). Justificatory Liberalism: An essay on Epistemology and Political Theory. Oxford University Press.
Gaus, G. (2016). The Commonwealth of bees: On the impossibility of Justice-through-ethos. Social Philosophy & Policy, 33(1–2), 96–121.
Greasley, K. (2021). Review of david boonin, beyond roe: Why abortion should be legal even if the fetus is a person (Oxford University Press, 2019). Criminal Law and Philosophy, 15(3), 535–544.
Iyengar, S., Lelkes, Y., Levendusky, M., Malhotra, N., & Westwood, S. (2019). The origins and consequences of Affective polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science, 22, 129–146.
Kogelmann, B. (2019). Public reason’s Chaos Theorem. Episteme, 16(2), 200–219.
Larmore, C. (1999). The Moral basis of political Liberalism. The Journal of Philosophy, 96(12), 599–625.
Levendusky, M., & Malhotra, N. (2016). Does Media Coverage of partisan polarization affect political attitudes? Political Communication, 33(2), 283–301.
Lloyd, S. (2004). Toward a Liberal theory of sexual Equality. In A. Baehr, et al. (Eds.), Varieties of Feminist Liberalism (pp. 56–72). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Lord, E., & Maguire, B. (2016). An Opinionated Guide to the weight of reasons. In E. Lord, & B. Maguire (Eds.), Weighing reasons (pp. 3–26). Oxford University Press.
McMahan, J. (2002). The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the margins of life. Oxford University Press.
Neal, P. (2012). Rawls, Abortion, and public reason. Journal of Church and State, 56(2), 338–342.
Nguyen, C. T. (2020). Echo chambers and Epistemic Bubbles. Episteme, 17(2), 141–161.
Nichols, S., Kumar, S., Lopez, T., Ayars, A., & Chan, H. (2016). Rational learners and Moral rules. Mind & Language, 31(5), 530–554.
Pew Research Center (2016, June 22). Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016. From https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/06/22/partisanship-and-political-animosity-in-2016/.
Railton, P. (2014). The affective dog and its rational tale: Intuition and attunement. Ethics, 124(4), 813–859.
Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice: Revised Edition. Harvard University Press.
Rawls, J. (2005). Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press.
Rosenberg, R. (2013). Between killing and letting die in criminal jurisprudence. Northern Illinois University Law Review, 34(2), 391–430.
Scanlon, T. M. (2014). Being realistic about reasons. Oxford University Press.
Schouten, G. (2017). Fetuses, orphans, and a famous violinist: On the Ethics and Politics of Abortion. Social Theory and Practice, 43(3), 637–665.
Schwartzman, M. (2004). The completeness of public reason. Politics Philosophy & Economics, 3(2), 191–220.
Shaw, D. M. (2011). Justice and the Fetus: Rawls, Children, and abortion. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 20(1), 93–101.
Singer, P. (1972). Famine, affluence, and morality. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1(3), 229–243.
Thomson, J. J. (1986). A defense of abortion. In W. Parent (Ed.), Rights, restitution, & risk: Essays in Moral Theory (pp. 1–19). Harvard University Press.
Vallier, K. (2014). Liberal politics and public faith: Beyond separation. Routledge.
Vallier, K. (2020). Trust in a polarized age. Oxford University Press.
Williams, A. (2000). The alleged incompleteness of public reason. Res Publica, 6(2), 199–211.
Williams, J. (2015). Public reason and prenatal Moral Status. The Journal of Ethics, 19(1), 23–52.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to John Thrasher for his extensive feedback on early versions of the paper and his encouragement that kept me from abandoning it. Three anonymous referees for Synthese offered astute comments and challenging criticism that greatly improved the clarity and structure of the argument. Finally, I wish to thank friends, colleagues, and mentors for helpful discussion and correspondence related to this project over the years, especially Tom Christiano, Jerry Gaus, Keith Hankins, Brian Kogelmann, Ryan Muldoon, Sarah Raskoff, Dave Schmidtz, Kevin Vallier, Bas van der Vossen, Steve Wall, and Fabian Wendt.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
No competing interests to declare.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Gjesdal, A. Liberalism, polarization, and the aggregation problem. Synthese 203, 5 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04441-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04441-7