Public reason accounts commonly claim that exercises of coercive political power must be justified by appeal to reasons accessible to all citizens. Such accounts are vulnerable to the objection that they cannot legitimate coercion to protect basic liberal rights against infringement by deeply illiberal people. This paper first elaborates the distinctive interpersonal conception of justification in public reason accounts in contrast to impersonal forms of justification. I then detail a core dissenter-based objection to public reason based on a worrisome example (...) advanced by Jonathan Quong. While we may be able to impersonally justify coercing the illiberal dissenter, public reason liberals must explain how we can interpersonally justify such coercion—meaning justify given the perspective of the dissenter. The two prominent strategies for dealing with dissenters involve idealization of reasoning and requiring liberal values; I show that these strategies do not succeed in a way compatible with the public reason project. That is, the prominent strategies leave public reason theorists with a dilemma between denying the legitimacy of using coercion to protect core freedoms against deeply illiberal people or abandoning the fundamental public reason project. I conclude by proposing a different answer to public reason liberalism’s fundamental question: what requires justification? On my account, it is not that coercion requires interpersonal justification for its permissibility, but that such justification is necessary as a constitutive element of a kind of moral community. (shrink)

Jonathan Quong’s book, Liberalism without Perfection, provides an innovative new defense of political liberalism based on an “internal conception” of the goal of public justification. Quong argues that public justification need merely be addressed to persons who affirm liberal political values, allowing people to be coerced without a public justification if they reject liberal values or their priority over comprehensive values. But, by extensively restricting members of the justificatory public to a highly idealized constituency of liberals, Quong’s political liberalism becomes (...) objectionably sectarian. Coercing citizens without a public justification if they hold non-liberal comprehensive views is no different from the sectarian perfectionist view that people can be coerced without a public justification if they hold false comprehensive views. Quong argues that some degree of sectarianism is unavoidable in formulating a conception of political liberalism. While this may be, I maintain that the internal conception is nonetheless excessively sectarian. To demonstrate this, I develop an attractive competitor conception, the convergence conception, which addresses public justification to a diverse, moderately idealized justificatory public. If convergence is a viable interpretation of political liberalism, I argue, then the internal conception is excessively sectarian. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt is often held that disagreement over non-normative facts is less significant to the project of public justification than disagreement over relevant moral norms. But this dismissal of non-normative factual disagreement is unjustified—an ad hoc attempt to save the ideal of public justification from the endemic actual disagreement that threatens it. Disagreement over norms is relevant to political legitimacy; so, too, is disagreement over facts. I draw two implications from this point. First, inasmuch as accounts of public justification typically involve (...) a unanimity condition, public justification should not be thought a desideratum of political legitimacy. Second, virtuous political praxis will often involve enforcing legislation in spite of unresolved non-normative factual disagreement. That is, with respect to legitimacy, there is nothing morally amiss about such legislation. Clearly these last claims presuppose some basis for legitimacy other than agreement; I will only gesture at what this might be. Assuming that much actual legislation is indeed legitimate, though—in spite of extant normative and non-normative disagreement—I go so far as concluding that such a basis, whatever it is, must exist. (shrink)

Rawls’s account of international toleration in The Law of Peoples has been the subject of vigorous critiques by critics who believe that he unacceptably dilutes the principles of his Law of Peoples in order to accommodate non-liberal societies. One important component in these critiques takes issue specifically with Rawls’s inclusion of certain non-liberal societies (‘decent peoples’) in the constituency of justification for the Law of Peoples. In Rawls’s defence, I argue that the explanation for the inclusion of decent peoples in (...) the constituency of justification is not, as is standardly assumed, that they are the kind of societies that ought to be tolerated in that way on some prior conception of which kinds of societies ought to be tolerated in that way. The real explanation appeals to a methodological principle underlying Rawls’s approach to political justification, according to which liberals owe justification, as a matter of liberal principle, to those who comply with liberal principles for political institutions that apply to them. If such liberal principles can be complied with by agents who nevertheless cannot accept fully liberal justifications for those principles, then liberalism itself requires liberals to seek justifications which they can accept. This approach gives us a new way to view decent peoples: as just such agents, who are therefore owed a justification for the Law of Peoples that they can accept. Decency is thus a concept that is internal to liberal political justification at the international level. Reading Rawls in this way permits a coherent and attractive defence of his strategy of toleration and of his international theory as a whole. (shrink)

I consider the problem of political pluralism for political liberalism: that not everybody agrees on fundamental political principles. I critically examine three defenses of liberal principles in situations of political pluralism—the realist defense, the pragmatic defense, and Gerald Gaus’ “justificatory liberalism”—all of which I find wanting. Instead, I propose a dialectical approach to justifying political liberalism. A dialectical approach is based on engaging contradictory positions through conceptual investigation of key concepts claimed by both sides. Through such dialectical engagement, I seek (...) a way to deal with contradictions between liberal and non-liberal philosophies as conceptual issues, rather than as antagonisms beyond reason. The ambition is to contribute to a more robust liberalism capable of defending itself in contexts of political pluralism. As an example, I apply this dialectical approach to the disagreement between political Islam and political liberalism on t... (shrink)

The literature on democracy and disagreement has argued that the principle of respect for judgement requires that disagreement within democracy is resolved by a democratic decision. This paper raises the question what the principle of respect for judgement requires when there is disagreement on democratic inclusion. The paper argues that not all, but some, disagreements on democratic inclusion must be resolved by a democratic decision. Three reasons for when it need not are distinguished, issue-related reasons, people-related reasons, and judgement-related reasons. (...) When parties disagree on democratic inclusion because they disagree on basic principles, the disagreement need not be resolved by a democratic decision, for issue-related or for people-related reasons. When, instead, parties disagree on democratic inclusion despite agreeing on basic principles, the disagreement must be resolved by a democratic decision if the judgements of the disagreeing parties are reasonable. (shrink)

This paper evaluates Jonathan Quong’s attempt to defend a version of political liberalism from the asymmetry objection. I object that Quong’s defence relies on a premise that has not been adequately supported and does not look as if it can be given adequate support.

Conventions and leaders are believed to be the two pillars of justice and order in society. This paper evaluates this proposition and draws attention to two intriguing ways in which these pillars can malfunction. The argument is constructed by creating two new games, Greta’s Dilemma and the Incarceration Game. An awareness of these problems can help us use our ‘moral intention’ to reexamine our own collective behavior and to design prior conventions, which limit the power of the leader.

In Democratic Authority, David Estlund argues that decision-procedures are to be judged solely by their tendency to generate morally superior decisions, but that because any relationship of authority must be acceptable to all qualified moral points of view, the epistemic benefits of less equal procedures must be evident beyond qualified objection. If all doctrines involved in political justification must be qualifiedly acceptable, however, the qualified acceptability requirement must itself be acceptable to qualified points of view. This article provides reasons for (...) doubting that this ‘insularity’ can be achieved, and explores ways of reformulating the principle so that it does not exclude itself. (shrink)

What is the justification or the ground of responsibility involved by global justice through global institutional reform? In other words, even if global justice seems to be defined as a specific aim given by what we normally think to be right or just solutions to the global human problems, this does not preclude the necessity of taking into account the difficulties and questions the operational level of global justice raises, institutionally and organizationally speaking. The cultural constraints, the diversity and the (...) nature of problems and so on and so forth, concerning the legitimacy and, also, the social impact of the adopted solutions, are another type of difficulties. My interest here is to analyse the reasons or grounds of the global modalities for solving problems of global justice. The reasons for this enterprise are twofold and, in my opinion, inevitably interconnected: on the one side, the fact that globalization of justice is by itself a difficult concept, and on the other side, that the understanding of global justice rather in an Occidental or democrat liberal way brings specific difficulties both of conceptual and operational nature, requiring further confrontations with other desiderata or other comprehensive doctrines and starting from this, consistent critical analyses. (shrink)

Contemporary political theory is characterised by a realistic critique of liberalism. Realist theorising is seen as avoiding foundational disagreements about justice mutating into second-order disputes concerning the justifiability of legitimate political institutions. In this sense, the realist critique challenges a key aspect of Rawls’ liberal project – that is, its justificatory constituency. McCabe’s Modus Vivendi Liberalism presents an interesting case of such a critique. Given the condition of deep pluralism that characterizes contemporary democracies, the liberal Justificatory Requirement (JR) should be (...) recast so to include those, illiberal or sceptical, who are excluded by Rawls’ justificatory constituency. This paper confronts McCabe’s modus vivendi justificatory project with Rawls view. It suggests that both views seem to endorse a practice-dependent account of political justice in which “politics is prior to morality”; yet the ways in which reasons are endorsed to justify the shared conception of political authority are significantly different in these two schemes. The paper shows that the most problematic aspect of McCabe contingent model is that it disconnects the idea of legitimacy from a conception of liberal political morality. On this account, political legitimacy that reflects the uncoercive character of extant institutions seems to be sufficient to meet the MVL JR. Yet, from a normative point of view, this might be not enough to ensure morally acceptable outcomes. In conclusion, the paper considers McCabe’s model as a version of ‘practice-independent’ moral theorizing committed to a transcendent view of ‘threshold morality’. This move, however, comes at the cost of sacrificing the theory’s premises of anti-perfectionism and realism. (shrink)

Across almost a decade, Desmond Tutu, Anglican cleric and chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, supported a model of civil resistance against the apartheid regime based solely on religious argument. Tutu is one of what Appleby (2000) calls the “religious militants for peace”: people of faith who use religious arguments to buttress resistance against unjust regimes and to support vital political change with regard to rights and justice. Yet the employment of religious arguments to justify political action seems (...) to contradict the liberal democratic requirements of public reason, particularly the duty of liberal citizens to provide reasons that others could reasonably endorse. If “religious militants” violate their duty of civility by appealing to their comprehensive doctrines, should liberal democracy exclude this form of religiously founded dissent as being unreasonable? Or, rather, should liberal democracy embrace and support the efforts of “religious militants” to enhance and/or restore political justice? (shrink)