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ABSTRACT
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.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the editor and two anonymous referees at this journal for their valuable feedback. I am also grateful to Eric Mack and Gerald Gaus for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Notes
1. Different theorists propose different sorts of caveats on this, some of which will be discussed below.
2. Micah Schwartzman is another leading defender of a principle of sincerity. Schwartzman, however, explicitly assumes that public justification requires public reasons and points readers to Quong’s arguments for a preliminary defense of that assumption (Schwartzman Citation2011, 378, 386 fn. 33).
3. As discussed in Section 3, Quong’s advocacy for a public-reasons-only (PRO) restriction is ultimately based on an argument from respect for persons. However, other consensus theorists have argued for a PRO restriction on different grounds. Perhaps the most popular alternative approach is to attempt to ground a PRO restriction in concerns for stability or harmony. Eberle (Citation2002, 152–186) provides an admirable account of the challenges faced by such an approach. See Weithman (Citation2010) and Hadfield and Macedo (Citation2012) for recent developments of the approach along with related criticisms advanced by Thrasher and Vallier (Citation2015), Kogelmann and Stich (Citation2016), Billingham (Citation2016), and Pallikkathayil (Citation2017).
4. This formulation is intentionally broad and underdeveloped in order to take account of the fact that public reason liberals of various stripes qualify the constituent elements of such a requirement in various ways. For example, for Rawls, only constitutional essentials and other matters of basic justice would fall within the scope of a requirement of public justification (Citation1996, 137). Moreover, while Rawls expects these instruments to be justified only to rational individuals, other theorists may idealize members of the public in alternative ways. My intention is not to engage in these related debates here, but only to make a claim about what types of reasons should be permitted to count as justificatory reasons whatever one’s view is regarding how individual members of the public should be idealized (if at all) or what sorts of coercive instruments should fall within the scope of such a requirement. For other generic formulations of such a requirement see Gaus (Citation2010, 21), Vallier (Citation2014, 24), and Pallikkathayil (Citation2017).
5. Public reason is the view that the rules and principles that govern our social and political life are to be rationally justifiable (on the basis of reasons) to all citizens subjected to them. Of course, what it means for social and political principles to be rationally justifiable to all needs explanation. While some accounts of public reason incorporate the notion of ‘public’ or ‘shared’ reasons, public reason (the view) does not require that reasons be ‘public.’ As such, one might defend an account of public reason without appeal to ‘public’ reasons or, at any rate, without an exclusive appeal to public reasons (Cf. Freeman Citation2007, 385). That is, public reason with non-public reasons remains a possibility.
6. I will set aside momentarily worries about manipulation, but will address that concern towards the end of this section.
7. If the mere act of demanding falls short of an act of coercion unless the demand is backed by force or the threat of future harm, one might dispute the idea that an act of mere demanding constitutes a failure to treat another as free and equal. I shall nevertheless proceed as if there is at least something morally problematic with the practice. For if the offering of non-public reasons does not amount to demanding – much less coercion – then the claim that offering non-public reasons is morally problematic appears implausible.
8. Such an act may even encourage B to reflect upon his or her own reasons.
9. Kogelmann and Stich (Citation2016) also argue that permitting citizens to appeal to non-public reasons may promote stability.
10. We must be careful not to construe a requirement of public justification as requiring both unanimous and actual consent. Public reason liberals drop the actual consent requirement in favor of the unanimity requirement, though they certainly disagree regarding the scope of such a requirement (i.e. should it apply only at the constitutional level, or apply to everyday laws as well?). Public reason liberals typically invoke the unanimity requirement when noting that coercive laws (or at least a certain subset of them) must be ‘endorsed by the reasons of all’ (Gaus Citation2011, xv-xvi; Cf. Rawls Citation1996, 137).
11. (1) is the result of what Gaus calls ‘the division of epistemic labor’ (Citation2010, 26). The idea is that Sara may justify p to Jack on the basis of religious reasons, while Sal justifies p to Becky on the basis of considerations found, for example, in the writings of Kant. Others may appeal to religious reasons that are different than those offered by Sara, while yet others may appeal to the works of John Stuart Mill, James Madison, and so on. Gaus’ point is that ‘many different reasons from many different perspectives may converge’ together – the end result of a division of epistemic labor – in order to justify p (Citation2010, 26).
12. Moreover, it is doubtful that any consensus theorist would say that any instance of Ari’s offering of a non-public reason for consideration by Sky constitutes Ari’s deliberate manipulation of Sky.
13. To be sure, Rawls and other consensus theorists do provide space for citizens to express their genuine comprehensive beliefs. For example, Rawls’ famous proviso says that we may ‘introduce into political discussion at any time our comprehensive doctrine, religious or nonreligious, provided that, in due course, we give properly public reason to support the principles and policies our comprehensive doctrine is said to support’ (Rawls Citation1999, 144). It is unusual that the proviso is not objected to on the grounds that it allows for citizens to engage in insincere argumentation (as Quong would construe it). Perhaps it is the case that the ‘in due course’ condition staves off such an objection. But it is not obvious that it should (from the perspective of consensus theorists that is). After all, if P does not have public reasons to offer at time t1, why think P can sincerely claim that he or she will have them at t2 (Audi Citation2011, 64)? If P has no reasonable grounds for believing that public reasons will become available, then Quong’s argument, if it is right, would show that Rawls’ proviso allows for citizens to disrespect one another in a way that consensus theorists want to eliminate.
14. In addition to the following discussion of Eberle’s position, see North (Citation2012).
15. We might add that the conscientious engager will acknowledge that the arguments which he or she finds reasonably persuasive may differ from the arguments which others find reasonably persuasive. I thank Eric Mack for this point.
16. For a criticism of Eberle’s argument, see Boettcher (Citation2012, 171ff).
17. For example, within the context of a majoritarian system, the majority can limit the freedoms of certain minority groups (with some constitutional restrictions). These cases are especially problematic when the reasons offered by the majority are often rooted in comprehensive beliefs. Consider, for example, the same-sex marriage debate in the U.S, where some states have, in the past, put the issue to public vote. Within a majoritarian system, do those who support a ban on same-sex marriages disrespect (in a morally salient way) same-sex couples when it is known that same-sex couples cannot support such a law and, moreover, that such a law causes same-sex couples significant emotional distress? The case for answering in the positive has to be stronger within the context of the majoritarian system than it is in a system that endorses a public justification requirement. After all, in the former, the subjects to be coerced – same-sex couples – are at the mercy of the beliefs of the majority – who are not restricted from appealing to their comprehensive views – whether reasonable or not. But even here, a ban on non-public reasons serves as an ad hoc patch for the undesirable consequences of a majoritarian system.
18. Within the public reason structure, voting serves as one way to determine whether a proposed law is in fact justified. I take A’s voting in favor of p to be an instance of A registering, through a political mechanism, her agreement with p.
19. Perhaps the scope of the principle would also cover cases in which A deliberately misrepresents his beliefs to B, yet (for whatever reason) does not intend to manipulate B.
20. Freeman has framed Rawls’ guidelines of inquiry as the ‘formal and procedural rules of argumentation and justification, including shared standards of evidence and reasoning (rules and standards of inference in deductive, inductive, and probabilistic reasoning, for example)’ (Freeman Citation2007, 387).
21. Some standards will arguably be society dependent (Tyndal Citation2016). I leave open the question of which, if any, standards could properly be construed as transcending societal norms, and hence be agent-neutral in a more robust sense.
22. As elaborated below, one may have standing to criticize some of C’s epistemic holdings on the basis of C’s own evaluative standards.
23. Freeman’s last point is important. Though public reasons are often described as ‘shared,’ it is not the case that all public reasons will in fact be shared by all actual citizens. Even more, that R is in fact shared by all actual citizens is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for that reason being considered ‘public.’
24. When deliberating about some particular law L, the mere fact that a reason R is based on one or more shared political values does not necessarily make R a good or sufficient reason for L.
25. Vallier clarifies that the intelligibility requirement does not require shared evaluative standards (Citation2014, 124). But this of course means that it could permit them. What makes Vallier’s position unsettling is that he maintains that his view does not require any shared evaluative standards, yet he implies that, as a contingent matter, it will be the case that at least some standards are shared (particularly standards of inference). Yet, given the commitments of his view, it must be the case that if a citizen does not recognize, for example, the rule of modus ponens, then that citizen cannot be expected to reason in accordance with that rule.
26. Quong argues that ‘[a]rguments and reasons may be intelligible without being justifiable, and thus merely seeing someone else’s position as intelligible does not entail that one must see that other person’s position as justifiable’ (Citation2011, 270 fn. 42).
27. The issue is further complicated if it is the case that we cannot clearly distinguish between comprehensive and non-comprehensive doctrines (for a discussion of this worry, see Gaus Citation2003b, 180ff., Citation2004). Perhaps, then, what we should be most concerned with is whether our reasons and arguments meet certain standards of evidence and inference.
28. I assume, for now, that there is a symmetry between the epistemic standards that apply to the practice of agreeing to a proposal and the epistemic standards that apply to the practice of rejecting a proposal – namely, both practices are subject to the accessibility requirement. However, symmetry claims are controversial depending on which political practices are being compared. For example, Gaus and Vallier deny symmetry with respect to the practices of proposing a law and rejecting a proposed law (Citation2009, 64). See Boettcher’s criticism of the asymmetric convergence model (Citation2015) and Vallier’s reply (Citation2016).
29. Vallier, for example, characterizes models of public reason that incorporate an accessibility requirement as weak consensus models. Moreover, he explicitly states that one defining feature of convergence models is that they entail a rejection of any accessibility requirement (Vallier Citation2011b, 263).
30. It must be remembered, however, that religious reasons are not the only class of non-public reasons affected by a PRO restriction. Any reasons that are grounded in comprehensive doctrines – whether religious or not – are impacted by the PRO restriction.
31. It is of course the case that disagreement will arise regarding, for example, whether a reason R1 in fact defeats reason R2. As Audi notes, clearly articulating degrees of adequacy or justification is a complicated matter, but it is doubtful that any plausible political theory can dispense with the idea that there are varying degrees of adequate reasons (Citation2011, 68).
32. Vallier argues that an accessibility requirement would vindicate at least some religious reasons. For example, he believes that an accessibility requirement would affirm an anti-abortionist argument that relies both on the existence of God as well as the idea that ‘God gives each human body a soul that provides a human life with intrinsic worth’ (Citation2014, 114). However, while Vallier assumes such an argument will be epistemically justified, he says very little about what shared evaluative standards might be incorporated into an accessibility requirement. At times, Vallier appears to imply that if a belief is rationally grounded – i.e. it is grounded on some reason – then it qualifies as accessible. If this is the intended implication, it would ignore that an accessibility requirement may incorporate standards of evidence which govern belief formations. Until these standards are further clarified, it makes little sense to claim that belief in things like God-given souls will be vindicated by the accessibility requirement.
33. As Eberle stresses, religious believers are understandably critical of ‘wholesale restrictions on the justificatory role of religion, even religion that is manifestly liberal. Such wholesale restrictions will inevitably be objectionably arbitrary, because some religious convictions are no different in any normatively relevant respect than some of the claims on which some morally necessary coercive laws rely’ (Citation2011, 292).
34. James Boettcher remarks that ‘[i]f it turns out that some religious beliefs are accessible and ultimately separable from religious comprehensive doctrine, so be it. Religious premises would be to that extent permissibly included in political justifications’ (Citation2015, 200). Boettcher’s position is a step in the right direction. However, unlike the view outlined here, Boettcher endorses a PRO restriction which makes it unlikely that many religious beliefs will qualify as justificatory reasons.
35. For a discussion of how the constraints on legislators might be seen as more (normatively) demanding than that of citizens, see Gaus (Citation2010, 29ff) and North (Citation2012, 188ff.).
36. An account of public reason liberalism need not incorporate only a single mode of public reason. But each mode evokes different challenges. For example, if public officials engaged in top-down public reason are to appeal only to political values that all would accept, then they must be able to specify what the relevant political values are in order to know what public reasons there are – and they must be able to do this without relying on any comprehensive doctrines. But this may prove to be an overly-difficult task. Alternatively, while on the bottom-up mode of public reason it is citizens, and not officials, who ultimately determine whether a law is publicly justified, it remains to be seen how one can square the practice of idealization (even moderate) with the practice of voting. Public reason liberals are generally concerned with the reasons that citizens can be said to have, not the reasons they actually have. But if voting is a means of registering one’s actual preferences, it is difficult to see how we are to know that one’s vote is based on one’s moderately idealized reasons, and not one’s shortcomings in reasoning.
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Jason Tyndal
Jason Tyndal teaches philosophy at the College of Southern Nevada. His primary research interests are in ethics and political philosophy.