Abstract

Robert A. Carleo III takes issue with Sungmoon Kim’s reconstruction of liberal public reason for a culturally Confucian democratic society. He argues that while Kim intends this to facilitate the effective collective self-government of democratic Confucian citizens, the way he formulates Confucian public reason endangers the free and equal nature of that self-government—and therefore the very democratic character of his proposal. Carleo points out that Kim explicitly revises John Rawls’s liberal public reason in a way that removes its instantiation of equality among free citizens, refashioning it instead as a tool for negotiating between liberal democratic institutional principles and Confucian cultural values. Doing so allows for infringements on equal basic protections in the name of traditional norms and values. Hoping there may be a better way to reconcile and integrate liberal principles with Confucian values, the paper concludes by suggesting alternative ways of approaching Confucian public reason that may better uphold its democratic quality: applying liberal public reason with greater sensitivity to the substantively Confucian nature of the citizenry, or constructing basic principles of public reason from a Confucian-democratic rather than liberal-democratic viewpoint.