Political liberalism views a public policy as justified when reasonable citizens subject to it have sufficient reasons to endorse it. But this endorsement condition does not specify how reasonable citizens in democracies are to exercise their equal say in deciding which policies to support prior to enactment. Citizens may regard many policy options as reasonable but only one as truly just. The dominant view among political liberals, which I call _agnosticism_, takes no stand on how citizens ought to rank these (...) reasonable alternatives to determine which to support. Agnostics see all criteria for comparing reasonable policies as on a par, whether they be theories of justice or coin flips. I show how Quong’s (2011) analysis of reasonableness leads to agnosticism. I then develop the pluralist alternative, which holds that citizens should support the reasonable policy they regard as most just. What I call _pluralism_ sees multiple conceptions of justice as correct, or “most reasonable.” I show that pluralism offers a compelling alternative to agnosticism in that it can _both_ make sense of an individual citizen’s duty to support what they regard as just policy _and_ respect the fact that citizens reasonably disagree about what the most just policy is. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJames Woodward and John Allman [2007, 2008] and Peter Railton [2014, 2016] argue that our moral intuitions are products of sophisticated rational learning systems. I investigate the implications that this discovery has for intuition-based philosophical methodologies. Instead of vindicating the conservative use of intuitions in philosophy, I argue that what I call the rational learning strategy fails to show philosophers are justified in appealing to their moral intuitions in philosophical arguments without giving reasons why those intuitions are trustworthy. Despite the (...) fact that our intuitions are outputs of surprisingly sophisticated learning mechanisms, we do not have reason to unreflectively trust them when offering arguments in moral philosophy. (shrink)

Successful public justification of coercive policy in liberal societies relies on a solution to what I call the aggregation problem. Without a method of weighing and balancing shared reasons that is acceptable to all, no genuine consensus on the acceptability of a political principle or policy is possible. This is a serious problem for theories of liberalism that rely on public justification or public reason that has largely been ignored. I show the seriousness of this problem by using an example (...) from contemporary politics, abortion policy. Within the context of abortion policy, I consider three approaches to the aggregation problem and argue that none of them offers a promising solution. This result, I argue, generalizes beyond abortion policy and poses a problem for the entire project of public reason liberalism. Even in an idealized society where all deliberate from a shared standpoint, it may not always be possible to find a policy all citizens regard as acceptable: not because there is a diversity of reasons, but because there is no uncontroversial method of weighing and aggregating reasons. This doesn’t mean public reason is useless, though. Instead of being a standard for justifying coercive policy, I argue public reason should be seen as a procedural tool for managing and mitigating the inescapable political conflicts that will inevitably arise in a pluralistic democratic society. (shrink)

This contribution introduces key concepts and themes from Kevin Vallier’s Trust in a Polarized Age that play a role in the discussion by the four commentators Diana Mutz, Pierre-Guillaume Méon, Chandran Kukathas, and Paul Weithman. The discussion explains how Vallier uses the rich empirical literature on social trust to illuminate normative notions of legitimacy and public justification in liberal orders.

Landmark Supreme Court rulings determine American law by adjudicating among competing reasonable interpretations of basic political rights. Jeremy Waldron argues that this practice is democratically illegitimate because what determines the content of basic rights is a bare majority vote of an unelected, democratically unaccountable, elitist body of nine judges. I argue that Waldron's democratic critique of judicial review has implications for real-world reform, but not the implications he thinks it has. He argues that systems of legislative supremacy over the judiciary (...) are democratically preferable to the American one. I provide reasons why his argument is unsound and explain that, properly construed, Waldron's premises support implementing a system where ordinary citizens chosen by lottery participate in a deliberative mini-public to vote on which reasonable interpretation of a basic political right will become the law of the land. (shrink)