Public reason liberalism holds that laws and policies must be justifiable to all reasonable citizens. Recently, David Enoch has offered an impressive and influential argument against the epistemological commitments of public reason liberalism on the grounds that they are ‘highly controversial’. After setting out this argument (Sections I and II), I show how its central claim is ambiguous between two senses of ‘controversial’. This gives rise to a dilemma: either Enoch's claim is that the relevant epistemological commitments are controversial in (...) the sense of being subject to controversy amongst actual people, in which case this is true but not troubling for public reason theorists; or the claim is that the relevant commitments are controversial in the sense of being subject to controversy amongst reasonable people, in which case this simply begs the question against public reason theorists (Section III). I then defend each horn of the dilemma against objections (Sections IV and V). I conclude by generalizing this dilemma, showing how it defuses not just Enoch's argument but also a number of other arguments frequently made in the literature on public reason liberalism (Section VI). (shrink)

Explains the concept and conceptions of public justification found in the philosophy and political theory literatures.

If the legitimate exercise of political power requires justifiability to all citizens, as John Rawls’s influential Liberal Principle of Legitimacy states, then what should we say about the legitimacy of institutions and actions that have a significant impact on the interests of future citizens? Surprisingly, this question has been neglected in the literature. This paper questions the assumption that it is only justifiability to presently existing citizens that matters, and provides reasons for thinking that legitimacy requires justifiability to future citizens (...) as well. Further, it is argued that the presently dominant interpretation of Rawls’s principle is unable to take future citizens into account in an adequate way. Therefore, the inclusion of these citizens among those to whom justifiability is owed gives us good reasons to reject this interpretation, and to adopt a different understanding of the view. (shrink)

Rawlsian public reason liberalism holds that laws must be justified in terms of reasons that all reasonable citizens can accept. But who counts as a “reasonable” citizen? Rawlsians typically answer that reasonableness is conditional on acceptance of liberal values. But they do not typically defend this answer by explaining why the Rawlsian definition is superior to alternative possible definitions of reasonableness—for instance, libertarian reasonableness, perfectionist reasonableness, communitarian reasonableness, and so on. Once this full range of possibilities is set out in (...) plain view, it creates a novel challenge which I call the which‐reasonableness challenge. This is the challenge of showing that the Rawlsian definition of reasonableness is superior to all the alternatives. In this paper, I set out this challenge (Section 1) and consider potential ways to overcome it: namely, by arguing that the Rawlsian definition of reasonableness is superior to the alternatives on grounds of its free‐standingness and stability (Section 2), its implicitness in the public political culture (Section 3), its anti‐sectarianism (Section 4), its fidelity to the underlying motivations of the public reason project (Section 5), and its avoidance of triviality, ad‐hocness, shoehorning and related perils (Section 6). I argue that while these considerations narrow the range of possible definitions of reasonableness, they do not do so by enough to uniquely pick out the Rawlsian definition. Rawlsian public reason liberals thus face a pressing challenge stemming from the simple question: Whose public reason? Which reasonableness? (shrink)

Most significant policy issues facing humanity reach across national borders. Consequential political decisions with cross-national effects are frequently made by states, non-state organisations, and corporations. Under these circumstances, it is widely acknowledged that it is important to conduct deliberation at the global level. Below this shallow agreement, however, lies deep disagreement about a crucial question: how, if at all, is it morally permissible for deliberation to result in a set of international laws and rules that are imposed on a world (...) population which is deeply pluralistic in its moral and political attitudes? When the equivalent question is asked within the confines of a political community, one prominent answer is by reference to a standard of public reason. While there is a large literature about public reason at the domestic level, the literature on global public reason is comparatively underdeveloped. The paper addresses this lacuna in two ways. First, it motivates the global public reason project, and conceptualises the nature of the challenge that accounts of global public reason face. Second, it demonstrates that, by their own evaluative standards, existing accounts of global public reason are unable to satisfy both desiderata simultaneously, being either too ‘thick’ or too ‘thin’. (shrink)