In this article I analyze Rawls' and Habermas' accounts of the role of religion in political deliberations in the public sphere. After pointing at some difficulties involved in the unequal distribution of deliberative rights and duties among religious and secular citizens that follow from their proposals, I argue for a way to structure political deliberation in the public sphere that imposes the same deliberative obligations on all democratic citizens, whether religious or secular. These obligations derive from the ideal of mutual (...) accountability that is supposed to guide political deliberation in a deliberative democracy. The main advantage of this proposal is that it recognizes the right of all democratic citizens to adopt their own cognitive stance (whether religious or secular) in political deliberation in the public sphere without giving up on the democratic obligation to provide reasons acceptable to everyone to justify coercive policies with which all citizens must comply. (shrink)

This paper explores the epistemological impact of the idea of post-secularism on the concept of public reason. It does so by examining a strand of the Rawls-Habermas debate on the role of religious beliefs within public reason. The paper identifies a difficulty in the liberal solution that depends upon the unwillingness to challenge the proviso-like conception of public reason and contends that this difficulty is overcome neither by Habermas’ “institutional” version of proviso nor by Cristina Lafont’s version of “mutual accountability” (...) proviso. Once acknowledged this blind spot in the theory of public reason, the paper proceeds to show that a pragmatist-based conception of public reason can overcome this shortcoming as it grants to religious beliefs a role that does not compromise the liberal ethics of citizenship while at the same time does not frustrate the communitarian and religious call for a less restrictive conception of the public sphere. The conclusion this paper brings home is that a proviso-free public reason is necessary for tackling the theoretical challenge of defending liberalism in a post-secular society. (shrink)

A number of phenomena have lent a new complexity to the long-standing challenge of constructing a legitimate and stable political order. I contend that both legitimacy and integration under contemporary conditions ultimately hinge upon a form of public practical reasoning that departs considerably from the ones proposed by John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas and several deliberative democrats. I argue that the generalizability test that constitutes the cornerstone of most contemporary neo-Kantian theories of public reason should be abandoned as a rule of (...) public argumentation and be replaced by a norm of civic responsiveness towards minority claims. I not only suggest that a wider variety of reasons, motives and genres of speech needs to be admitted within the purview of public reason, but more fundamentally that generalizability cannot cogently be seen as anything more (or less) than a civic virtue. The underlying point of this article is that neo-Kantian theories of public reason work with a problematic conception of practical reason. I conclude by providing reasons, against some radical and agonistic democrats, why the language of public reasoning needs to be retained and renovated. Key Words: acknowledgement • agonistic democracy • deliberative democracy • generalizability • Habermas • pluralism • practical reason • public reason • Rawls • social integration. (shrink)

Philosophers who hold that religious considerations should play some role in public debate over fundamental issues have criticized Rawls’s ideal of public reason for being too restrictive in generally ruling out such considerations. In response, Rawls has modified his ideal so as to explicitly allow a role for religious considerations in public debate (others, such as Robert Audi, have also offered accounts of public reason along similar lines). Nevertheless, some critics of Rawls’s ideal of public reason, such as Nicholas Wolterstorff, (...) remain unsatisfied. In this paper, I will argue that once Rawls’s ideal of public reason is correctly interpreted, it will be possible to reconcile that ideal with much of the role its critics want religion to have in public debate. (shrink)