Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Convergence liberalism has emerged as a prominent interpretation of public reason liberalism. Yet, while its main rival in the public reason literature—the Rawlsian consensus account of public reason—has faced serious scrutiny regarding its ability to secure equal citizenship forallmembers of society, especially for members of historically subordinated groups, convergence liberalism has not. With this article, we hope to start a discussion about convergence liberalism and its (in)ability to address group-based social inequalities. In particular, we aim to show that given the (...) core features of the viewandreal-world pluralism, the policies needed to secure gender equality and protect equal citizenship for women will not be justified. We make our case by considering various inequalities that are due to the gendered division of labor and potential convergence liberal responses. (shrink)

In recent years, leading public reason liberals have argued that publicly justifying coercive laws and policies requires that citizens offer both adequate secular justificatory reasons and adequate secular motivating reasons for these laws and policies. In this paper, I provide a critical assessment of these two requirements and argue for two main claims concerning such requirements. First, only some qualified versions of the requirement that citizens offer adequate secular justificatory reasons for coercive laws and policies may be justifiably regarded as (...) plausible liberal principles of public justification. And second, the requirement that citizens offer adequate secular motivating reasons for coercive laws and policies is untenable on multiple grounds. Public reason liberals should focus on assessing the justificatory reasons offered for and against coercive laws and policies rather than requiring citizens to offer adequate secular motivating reasons for such laws and policies. (shrink)

Political liberals argue that religious citizens should exercise religious restraint: they ought, at least as a rule, not to rely directly on religious reasons in public political debates, and should instead draw only from the contents of a ‘reasonable’, secular political conception of justice. Political liberals hold that direct religious reasoners’ who fail to follow this rule fail to be ‘reasonable’ (in a technical sense) and contend that liberal polities may thus dismiss their religiously-motivated objections to otherwise justified democratic laws. (...) However, I argue that political liberals’ own principles of ‘reasonability’ forbid such a dismissal. Those principles themselves, I argue, require liberal polities to offer direct religious reasoners who are reasonable in the basic, colloquial sense of being fair-minded and reciprocitous, deep reasons—that speak to their comprehensive religious doctrines—for why they should accept and reason from a ‘reasonable’, political conception of justice. I call the position which requires such deep justification of a ‘reasonable’, political conception of justice Deep Inclusivism, and draw on the work of Sayyid Qutb, an Islamic political thinker, to help illustrate what a fair-minded, reciprocitous religious reasoner might look like. (shrink)

The ‘convergence conception’ of political liberalism has become increasingly popular in recent years. Steven Wall has shown that convergence liberals face a serious dilemma in responding to disagreement about whether laws are publicly justified. What I call the ‘conjunctive approach’ to such disagreement threatens anarchism, while the ‘non-conjunctive’ approach appears to render convergence liberalism internally inconsistent. This paper defends the non-conjunctive approach, which holds that the correct view of public justification should be followed even if some citizens do not consider (...) enacted laws to be publicly justified. My argument sheds light on the fundamental structure of convergence liberalism. (shrink)

Un des problèmes persistants pour la philosophie pratique est de découvrir un procédé adéquat pour justifier des lois dont la finalité est de réguler le fonctionnement des démocraties constitutionnelles. Les libéraux partisans de la raison publique nient que cette justification puisse provenir de doctrines substantielles, étant donné que les lois doivent pouvoir être justifiées par tous les citoyens (raisonnables). La tradition de la loi naturelle offre un test utile quant à la plausibilité de cette thèse. L’article montre comment les deux (...) versions du libéralisme de la raison publique diffèrent quant à leur acceptation de raisons tirées du droit naturel, et pourquoi, étant donné l’influence de leurs points de départs disparates sur les critères normatifs par lesquels elles évaluent les lois, les partisans du droit naturel ont de bonnes raisons de les rejeter toutes les deux. (shrink)