One objection to the principle of public reason is that since there is room for reasonable disagreement about distributive justice as well as about human flourishing, the requirement of reasonable acceptability rules out redistribution as well as perfectionism. In response, some justificatory liberals have invoked the argument from higher-order unanimity, or nested inclusiveness. If it is not reasonable to reject having some system of property rights, and if redistribution is just the enforcement of a different set of property rights, redistribution (...) is legitimate if chosen democratically. This article explores two problems with this response. First, there are different ways to describe the set of possible policies, and so different ways to specify the noncoercive default that obtains in the absence of conclusive justification. Second, if the coercive exercise of political power must be conclusively justified, policies that are more coercive ought to require conclusive justification as against policies that are less coercive. These problems about the baseline with respect to which we require public justification raise the question of how we measure coercion, and whether or in what sense there is a presumption against coercion. The article distinguishes and argues against three such presumptions. (shrink)

The right to private property is among the most fundamental in liberal theory. For many liberals the idea of the state is grounded in its role as a protector of private property. If the liberal state is justified by its ability to protect property, the modern welfare state is often justified by its ability to meet needs. According to a view commonly referred to as “welfarism,” the very fact that needs exist implies there is a moral obligation to meet them. (...) In this Article I appeal to Rawlsian contractualist justification, including the “criterion of reciprocity,” in developing a third manner of thinking about the relationship between property and welfare. I argue that welfare rights are necessary conditions for justifying a role for the state in enforcing the “right to exclude,” a fundamental element of private ownership. My Article thus aims to use Rawls’ account of justification, outlined in his later works, to theorize the notion of property-owning democracy from Theory of Justice. (shrink)

According to recently influential conceptions of public reasoning, citizens have the right to demand of each other ‘public justifications’ for controversial political action. On this view, only arguments that all reasonable citizens can affirm from within their diverse ethical standpoints can count as legitimate justifications for political action. Both proponents and critics often assume that the case for this expectation derives from the special justificatory burden created by the systematically coercive character of political action. This paper challenges that assumption. While (...) conceding that citizens who propose to deploy the coercive apparatus of the state to enforce controversial legislation owe their fellows a justification that overcomes the strong presumption against coercing agents, it denies that this consideration can explain why public justifications are also required. Having argued that the public justification requirement is not among the justification conditions for public coercion, the paper then proposes an alternative rationale for the expectation that political action be publicly justified. On this alternative, the case for the public justification requirement depends on democratic citizens’ standing as legislative co-authors, and not on considerations having to do with their liability as private individuals to coercion at the hands of the state. (shrink)

According to recently influential conceptions of public reasoning, citizens have the right to demand of each other ‘public justifications’ for controversial political action. On this view, only arguments that all reasonable citizens can affirm from within their diverse ethical standpoints can count as legitimate justifications for political action. Both proponents and critics often assume that the case for this expectation derives from the special justificatory burden created by the systematically coercive character of political action. This paper challenges that assumption. While (...) conceding that citizens who propose to deploy the coercive apparatus of the state to enforce controversial legislation owe their fellows a justification that overcomes the strong presumption against coercing agents, it denies that this consideration can explain why public justifications are also required. Having argued that the public justification requirement is not among the justification conditions for public coercion, the paper then proposes an alternative rationale for the expectation that political action be publicly justified. On this alternative, the case for the public justification requirement depends on democratic citizens’ standing as legislative co-authors, and not on considerations having to do with their liability as private individuals to coercion at the hands of the state. (shrink)

Reasonable individuals often share a rationale for a decision but, in other cases, they make the same decision based on disparate and often incompatible rationales. The social contract tradition has been divided between these two methods of solving the problem of social cooperation: must social cooperation occur in terms of common reasoning, or can individuals with different doctrines simply converge on shared institutions for their own reasons? For Hobbes, it is rational for all persons, regardless of their theological beliefs, to (...) consent to the sovereign's power. But for Locke, only Protestants with a shared theology could be party to the social contract. Rousseau thought that private reasons are not part of the general will, and in Kant's hypothetical contract, pure noumena reach common principles for the social order through the same reasoning process. In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls agreed with Rousseau and Kant: selecting the principles of justice requires modeling parties to the original position as having identical reasons. But in Political Liberalism, Rawls embraced the idea of an overlapping consensus, which accords distinct reasons justificatory force. (shrink)

The last several decades have witnessed a vibrant discussion about the proper political role of religion in pluralistic liberal democracies. An important part of that discussion has been a dispute about the role that religious and secular reasons properly play in the justification of state coercion. Most of the theorists who have participated in that discussion have endorsed a restrictive understanding of the justificatory role available to religious reasons. Most importantly, advocates of that restrictive understanding deny that state coercion that (...) depends for its justification on religious considerations is morally legitimate. This standard, restrictive view can be formulated in various importantly different ways. All versions affirm certain core claims—that we ought to respect each human being and that proper respect for each human being requires that state coercion be justified to the coerced. But thereafter advocates of the standard view disagree about how to fill in the details. In this paper, I will focus on one "detail" that is both central to the standard view and also a source of much disagreement among its advocates, viz., what makes it the case that state coercion is justified to the coerced? (shrink)