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Rescuing Public Reason Liberalism’s Accessibility Requirement

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Abstract

Public reason liberalism is defined by the idea that laws and policies should be justifiable to each person who is subject to them. But what does it mean for reasons to be public or, in other words, suitable for this process of justification? In response to this question, Kevin Vallier has recently developed the traditional distinction between consensus and convergence public reason into a classification distinguishing three main approaches: shareability, accessibility and intelligibility. The goal of this paper is to defend the accessibility approach by demonstrating its ability to strike an appealing middle course in terms of inclusivity between shareability (which is over-exclusive) and intelligibility (which is under-exclusive). We first argue against Vallier that accessibility can exclude religious reasons from public justification. Second, we use scientific reasons as a case study to show that accessibility excludes considerably fewer reasons than shareability. Throughout the paper, we connect our discussion of accessibility to John Rawls’s model of public reason, so as to give substance to the accessibility approach and to further our understanding of Rawls’s influential model.

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Notes

  1. Fred D’Agostino, Free Public Reason: Making It Up as We Go (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 30–37.

  2. Kevin Vallier, ‘Against Public Reason Liberalism’s Accessibility Requirement’, Journal of Moral Philosophy 8, no. 3 (2011): pp. 366–389; and Kevin Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith (New York: Routledge, 2014).

  3. A notable exception is provided by Karin Jønch-Clausen and Klemens Kappel, ‘Scientific Facts and Methods in Public Reason’, Res Publica 22, no. 2 (2016): pp. 117–133.

  4. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 224; see also Jønch-Clausen and Kappel, ‘Scientific Facts and Methods’, pp. 132–133. Here it is worth clarifying that, unlike Jønch-Clausen and Kappel, we do not intend to argue that scientific reasons have a privileged place in public reason, but only that they have a place (as opposed to religious reasons).

  5. Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, p. 104.

  6. Kevin Vallier, ‘In Defence of Intelligible Reasons in Public Justification’, The Philosophical Quarterly 66 (2016): pp. 596–616, at 599.

  7. Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, p. 109. Shareability has been endorsed, for example, by Micah Schwartzman, ‘The Sincerity of Public Reason’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 19, no. 4 (2011): pp. 375–398; and by James Bohman and Henry S. Richardson, ‘Liberalism, Deliberative Democracy, and “Reasons That All Can Accept”’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 17, no. 3 (2009): pp. 253–274. Section VII will discuss the theory proposed by R.J. Leland and Han van Wietmarschen, ‘Reasonableness, Intellectual Modesty, and Reciprocity in Political Justification’, Ethics 122, no. 4 (2012): pp. 721–747 as another example of shareability public reason.

  8. Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, p. 109.

  9. Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, p. 110.

  10. Accessibility has been endorsed, for example, by Robert Audi, Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). As we aim to demonstrate in the next section, Rawls largely accepts it too.

  11. Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, p. 108.

  12. Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, p. 106.

  13. Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, p. 27; and Vallier, ‘In Defence of Intelligible Reasons’, p. 603.

  14. John Pollock and Joseph Cruz, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge, Second Edition (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), p. 196.

  15. Gerald Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 144–145.

  16. Vallier, ‘In Defence of Intelligible Reasons’, p. 607.

  17. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 223.

  18. Gerald Gaus, The Order of Public Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 284.

  19. Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, pp. 28 and 108.

  20. Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, p. 140, note 6.

  21. Gerald Gaus, ‘The Turn to a Political Liberalism’, in J. Mandle and D. Reidy (eds.), A Companion to Rawls (Malden: Blackwell, 2014), pp. 251–264.

  22. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 391.

  23. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. lvi; see also pp. 240–241.

  24. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. lv–lvii.

  25. John Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, University of Chicago Law Review 64, no. 3 (1997): pp. 765–807, at 774–775.

  26. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 241.

  27. Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, p. 774.

  28. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 224. Sections V, VI and VII will analyse what Rawls says specifically about science, which will be criticised as too close to shareability.

  29. Vallier, ‘Against Public Reason Liberalism’s Accessibility Requirement’, p. 372. Vallier explicitly adapts this term from Marilyn Friedman, who uses the expression ‘legitimation pool’ in ‘John Rawls and the Political Coercion of Unreasonable People’, in V. Davon and C. Wolf (eds.), The Idea of a Political Liberalism: Essays on Rawls (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), at p. 16.

  30. Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, p. 770.

  31. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 243–244, note 32; see also Jonathan Quong, Liberalism without Perfection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 207.

  32. Vallier, ‘Against Public Reason Liberalism’s Accessibility Requirement’.

  33. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 54–58.

  34. Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, pp. 121–123; see also the critique of so-called ‘acceptability’ requirements proposed by Christopher Eberle, Religious Convictions in Liberal Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.198–233.

  35. Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, p. 106. Intelligibility has also been endorsed by Gaus, The Order of Public Reason; and by Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier, ‘The Roles of Religious Conviction in a Publicly Justified Polity’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 35, no. 1–2 (2009): pp. 51–76.

  36. The convergence view has also been criticized because it relies on a controversial relativist conception of justification (Quong, Liberalism without Perfection, pp. 261–273); because it fails to guarantee assurance among citizens (Stephen Macedo, ‘Why Public Reason? Citizens’ Reasons and the Constitution of the Public Sphere’, unpublished manuscript, p. 2; subject of a response by Brian Kogelmann and Stephen Stich, ‘When Public Reason Fails Us: Convergence Discourse as Blood Oath’, American Political Science Review 110, no. 4 (2016): pp. 717–730); and because it allows most laws and policies to be defeated by merely intelligible reasons (Christopher Eberle, ‘Consensus, Convergence, and Religiously Justified Coercion’, Public Affairs Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2011): pp. 281–303, at 300-1). While these debates are important, they are tangential to the core theme of our paper.

  37. Vallier, ‘Against Public Reason Liberalism’s Accessibility Requirement’, pp. 380–385; and Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, pp. 116–119.

  38. Vallier, ‘Against Public Reason Liberalism’s Accessibility Requirement’, pp. 375 and 376, respectively.

  39. Vallier, ‘Against Public Reason Liberalism’s Accessibility Requirement’, p. 376.

  40. Michael Beaney, ‘Analysis’, in E. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Summer Edition, 2018), available at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/analysis/.

  41. Peter Byrne, Kant on God (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 19–56.

  42. Sylvia Walsh, Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianity in an Existential Mode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 51–79.

  43. Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, p. 784.

  44. Robert Audi, ‘Religion and the Politics of Science: Can Evolutionary Biology Be Religiously Neutral?’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 35, no. 1–2 (2009): pp. 23–50, at 24.

  45. Audi, ‘Religion and the Politics of Science’, pp. 24–30.

  46. http://sciencecouncil.org/about-us/our-definition-of-science/.

  47. Michael Ruse, ‘Methodological Naturalism under Attack’, South African Journal of Philosophy 24, no. 1 (2005): pp. 44–60, at 49–50.

  48. Thomas Kuhn, ‘Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice’, in The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 320–39, at 321–322.

  49. Kuhn, ‘Objectivity’, p. 331.

  50. Kuhn, ‘Objectivity’, p. 331, original emphasis.

  51. Kuhn, ‘Objectivity’, p. 331.

  52. Kuhn, ‘Objectivity’, p. 333.

  53. Catriona McKinnon, Climate Change and Future Justice: Precaution, Compensation and Triage (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 21.

  54. Jønch-Clausen and Kappel, ‘Scientific Facts and Methods’, p. 126.

  55. Kent Greenawalt, ‘Establishing Religious Ideas: Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design’, Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy 17, no. 2 (2003): pp. 321–397, at 337. For the idea that many creationists do not dispute the epistemic force or the field of application of the methods of evolutionary biology, see also Kent Greenawalt, Does God Belong in Public Schools? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 96–97.

  56. This is the case even when, as we will show in Section VII, conclusions that religious believers consider scientifically sound, based on evaluative standards they also share, clash with their broader religious views.

  57. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. xxxix, emphasis added.

  58. John Rawls, Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 324.

  59. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 224.

  60. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 225. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this comment. However, it should be noted that in the same place, Rawls also states that such complex economic theories may be excluded from public reason if they ‘are in dispute’, thus leaving it unclear whether it is their complexity or their controversial character that justifies ruling them out. If the latter, Section VII will also provide a response to this point. Moreover, we will discuss the implications of accessibility for the social sciences more extensively in Section VI.

  61. James Bohman, ‘The Division of Labor in Democratic Discourse: Media, Experts, and Deliberative Democracy’, in S. Chambers and A.N. Costain (eds.), Deliberation, Democracy, and the Media (Lanham-Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), pp. 47–64, at 50-1. See also John Hardwig, ‘Epistemic Dependence’, Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 7 (1985): 335–349; and Harry Collins and Robert Evans, Rethinking Expertise (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007).

  62. Eberle, Religious Convictions, pp. 256–260.

  63. Willard Van Orman Quine, ‘The Scope and Language of Science’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 8, no. 29 (1957):1–17, at 2.

  64. Jonathan Quong, ‘Public Reason’, in E. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Summer edition, 2013), available at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/public-reason/.

  65. Eberle, Religious Convictions, p. 223.

  66. Gaus, The Order of Public Reason, pp. 232–260.

  67. Gaus, The Order of Public Reason, pp. 276–277; and Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, pp. 145–180.

  68. Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, p. 161.

  69. Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, pp. 162 and 161, respectively.

  70. Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, p. 161.

  71. Eberle, Religious Convictions, p. 256. See also the references to normal capacities in Rawls, Political Liberalism, e.g. p. 81.

  72. Brendan Clarke, Donald Gillies, Phyllis Illari, Federica Russo, and Jon Williamson, ‘The Evidence that Evidence-Based Medicine Omits’, Preventive Medicine 57, no. 6 (2013): pp. 745–747.

  73. Jeremy Howick, ‘Exposing the Vanities - and a Qualified Defense - of Mechanistic Reasoning in Health Care Decision Making’, Philosophy of Science 78, no. 5 (2011): pp. 926–940, at 927.

  74. Alexander Bird, ‘Thomas Kuhn’, in E. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Winter edition, 2018), available at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/thomas-kuhn/>.

  75. For example, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, ‘Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk’, Econometrica 47, no. 2 (1979): pp. 263–291; and Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

  76. There is also disagreement, within economics, regarding such diverse issues as macroeconomic forecasting, standard equilibrium theorizing, and the traditional approach used in the optimal taxation literature. We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting these examples.

  77. Bird, ‘Thomas Kuhn’.

  78. Leland and van Wietmarschen, ‘Reasonableness, Intellectual Modesty, and Reciprocity’, p. 741.

  79. Warren Pearce, Reiner Grundmann, Mike Hulme, Sujatha Raman, Eleanor Kershaw, and Judith Tsouvalis, ‘Beyond Counting Climate Change Consensus’, Environmental Communication 11, no. 6 (2017): pp. 723–730, at 727–728.

  80. John Beatty, ‘Masking Disagreement among Experts’, Episteme 3, no. 1–2 (2006): pp. 52–67.

  81. John Beatty and Alfred Moore, ‘Should We Aim for Consensus?’, Episteme 7, no. 3 (2010): pp. 198–214; and Andy Stirling, ‘Keep it Complex’, Nature 468 (2010): pp. 1029–1031.

  82. Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith, p. 108.

  83. Greenawalt, ‘Establishing Religious Ideas’, p. 337.

  84. We acknowledge, however, that for some agnostics, theistic arguments may provide some reason to think that God exists, but those reasons are overridden by other factors. We thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this point.

  85. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 224.

  86. Hanne Andersen and Brian Hepburn, ‘Scientific Method’, in E. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Summer Edition, 2016), available at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/scientific-method/.

  87. Carl Craver and James Taber, ‘Mechanisms in Science’, in E. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Spring Edition, 2017), available at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/science-mechanisms/.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2016 MANCEPT Workshop on Theories of Public Reason, at the UCL Religion and Political Theory (RAPT) Workshop, and at the Cambridge Political Philosophy Workshop. We are grateful to audiences at these events for their feedback. We would also like to thank Stephen John and Kevin Vallier for their helpful written comments as well as two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms and suggestions.

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  1. Department of Politics, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, UK

    Gabriele Badano

  2. Department of Politics and International Relations, School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Clayton Campus, Clayton, VIC, 3800, Australia

    Matteo Bonotti

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Badano, G., Bonotti, M. Rescuing Public Reason Liberalism’s Accessibility Requirement. Law and Philos 39, 35–65 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-019-09360-8

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