How should the state justify its coercive rules? Public reason liberalism endorses a public justification requirement: Justifications offered for authoritative regulations must be acceptable to all members of the relevant public. However, as a criterion of legitimacy, the public justification requirement is epistemically unreliable: It prioritizes neither the exclusion of false beliefs nor the inclusion of true beliefs in justifications of political rules. This article presents an epistemic alternative to the public justification requirement. Employing epistemological theories of argumentation, we demonstrate (...) how this approach enables assessing the epistemic quality of justifications of political rules, even when the truth is difficult to establish. (shrink)

This essay discusses the continued importance that religion holds in African life, not only in terms of numbers of believers, but also regarding the varieties of religious experience and its links with politics and the “public sphere(s)”. Coinciding with the wave of democratization and economic liberalization efforts since about 1990, a notable growth of the public presence of religion and its political referents in Africa has been witnessed; alongside “development”, religion will remain a hot issue in the future political trajectory (...) of the continent. Its renewed presence in public spheres has also led to new understandings of what religion means and how it figures into both “world-making” and identity politics. This will prolong the challenges associated with the role and status of religion in the “secular state model” found in most African countries. Can these states, while “besieged” by believers, maintain neutrality among diverse worldviews, and if so, how? The paper discusses these issues in a general manner with reference to African examples, some taken from fieldwork by the author, and makes a philosophical argument for the development of a new kind of “secular state” that can respect the religious commitments of African populations. (shrink)

Political philosophers have long disagreed on the issue of whether churches should exercise restraint in the appeal to religious reasons in public discussion and political mobilization. Exclusivists defend the restraint, whereas inclusivists reject it. Both sides, however, assume the existence of a democratic government. In this essay, I discuss whether churches should exercise restraint in a non-democratic, authoritarian society. I defend inclusivism and believe that churches should not restrain themselves, especially when doing so can promote democracy and prevent severe injustices. (...) First, I argue that two exclusivist arguments which justify the restraint cannot be applied in an authoritarian society. Second, I defend inclusivism because religious reasons are effective in cultivating active citizens that strengthen the democratic movement. Finally, I use the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong as an example to show how inclusivism can enhance democratic movements under authoritarianism. (shrink)

In Liberalism without Perfection, Jonathan Quong develops what is perhaps the most comprehensive defense of the consensus model of public reason – a model which incorporates both a public-reasons-only requirement and an accessibility requirement framed in terms of shared evaluative standards. While the consensus model arguably predominates amongst public reason liberals, it is criticized by convergence theorists who reject both the public-reasons-only requirement and the accessibility requirement. In this paper, I argue that while we have good reason to reject Quong’s (...) call for a public-reasons-only requirement, all public reason liberals should endorse at least some shared evaluative standards and, hence, an accessibility requirement. (shrink)

Commonplace among deliberative theorists is the view that, when defending preferred laws and policies, citizens should appeal only to reasons they expect others reasonably to accept. This view has been challenged on the grounds that it places an undue burden on religious citizens who feel duty-bound to appeal to religious reasons to justify preferred positions. In response, I develop a conception of democratic deliberation that provides unlimited latitude regarding the sorts of reasons that can be introduced, so long as one (...) is prepared to defend them against criticism. Moreover, I contend that religious citizens have a powerful incentive, based on their religious convictions, to be fully responsive to criticism. I defend this proposition by drawing on Robert Erlewine’s account of Hermann Cohen’s ‘religion of reason’. (shrink)

There is a constant dissent between exclusivist public reason liberals and their inclusivist religious critics concerning the question whether religious arguments can figure into the public justification of state action. Firstly, I claim that the stability of this dissent is best explained as a conflict between an exclusivist third-personal account of public justification which demands restraint, and an inclusivist first-personal account which rejects restraint. Secondly, I argue that both conceptions are deficient because they cannot accommodate the valid intuitions of their (...) opponents. They either imply a violation of the integrity of religious citizens or they give room for cases where a religious majority can impose a political norm on a minority without having given this minority a reason to comply with the norm. Finally, I defend an inclusivist model of public reason liberalism which relies on a second-personal conception of public justification. I claim that this model breaks the impasse in favor of inclusivism because religious arguments can play a role in public justification, but they can never justify state action on their own in a plural society. Thus, the problematic cases that motivate exclusivism are excluded without having introduced a principle of restraint which violates the religious integrity of citizens. (shrink)

Christopher Eberle has developed a powerful critique of justificatory liberalism. According to Eberle, justificatory liberalism’s doctrine of restraint , which requires religious citizens to refrain from publicly advocating for policies that can be supported only by their religious reasons, is illiberal. In this article, I defend justificatory liberalism against Eberle’s critique.

Broadly speaking, the principle of public justifiability requires that the exercise of political power be justifiable to each and every person over whom that power is exercised. The idea of being justifiable to every person means being acceptable to any reasonable or otherwise qualified person , without such persons having to give up the comprehensive religious or philosophical doctrine they reasonably espouse. Public justifiability thus involves a partly idealized unanimity requirement, or as I will say, a criterion of multi-perspectival acceptability. (...) The demand for public justifiability can be specified in different ways, depending on what exactly has to be publicly justifiable, who is supposed to apply the principle, who counts as reasonable or otherwise qualified, and so on. One of these dimensions concerns the notion of acceptability. Should we care about acceptability to each reasonable perspective, based on all of the reasons that perspective accepts, or should we care about acceptability to all, based on only those reasons that all reasonable perspectives accept? This choice has been referred to by the distinction between "consensus" and "convergence." Sometimes people agree about practical conclusions but for different reasons, in which case their reasoning can be said to converge from different moral or philosophical starting points. Other times, people agree about their moral or philosophical starting points, but reach different practical conclusions, based on different beliefs about the factual context, different rankings of shared concerns, or different judgments about how to apply these concerns to specific situations. (shrink)

It is often assumed that people of faith should not endorse a law for religious reasons, since such an endorsement is considered to be disrespectful. Such a position is increasingly opposed by scholars who argue that such demands unjustifiably force people of faith to compromise their religious ideals. In order to defend their opposition to such demands, some scholars have invoked thought experiments as reductio arguments against the claim that endorsing laws dependent on religious reasons is necessarily disrespectful. I argue (...) that these attempts have failed, and present an alternative thought experiment that demonstrates that such a law is not necessarily disrespectful. Because I conclude that previously proposed principles cannot defend this conclusion, I defend an alternative way of accommodating this intuition; a post-secular deliberative approach based on the principle of double effect. (shrink)

In this paper, I reflect on a number of issues raised in Kevin Carnahan’s “Religion, and not just Religious Reasons, in the Public Square: A Consideration of Robert Audi’s and Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Religion in the Public Square” and Eric A. Anderson’s “Religiously Conservative Citizens and the Ideal of Conscientious Engagement: A Comment on Wolterstorff and Eberle.” In response to Carnahan, I argue that recent discussions of the proper public role of religious reason do not depend on an objectionable conception of (...) religion. I also respond to Anderson's concern that my “ideal of conscientious engagement” is an insufficiently robust alternative to public reason liberalism. (shrink)