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Article Excerpt
Public justifiability is often regarded as a core commitment of liberal theory, perhaps the core commitment. (1) In the face of deep and pervasive moral and political disagreement, it is commonly supposed that the exercise of coercive power is legitimate only if it can be justified on the basis of arguments that cannot reasonably be rejected by those subject to it. This idea does not by itself entail that coercion can be legitimate only if the law or policy that sanctions it is the outcome of the exchange of public reasons, for laws and policies might be justifiable on the basis of arguments that cannot reasonably be rejected even if they have not passed any actual test in which they are subject to public scrutiny, or indeed even if some as a matter of fact reject these laws and policies. But if the requirement of legitimacy places public justifiability at the heart of liberalism, it will be difficult for liberals to avoid a commitment to institutions that give a key role to the exchange of public reasons, even though they may give varying accounts of the type of institutions required, their scope, and the kind of decisions they should make. If those institutions are to function effectively, citizens will have to possess a range of virtues that not only enable them to deliberate with others, but also dispose them to restrict the reasons they offer to ones that others too might reasonably accept, and there may need to be a form of civic education that nurtures these virtues. These conclusions, reached from the idea of legitimacy, are reinforced by further arguments that purport to show that respect for persons, or for fellow citizens, requires the exchange of public reasons, and that a willingness to engage in such a practice is a condition of being reasonable.
In order to assess the case for a practice of public reason, however, we need a clearer account of its scope and of the norms that are constitutive of it. I shall simply adopt Rawls's account of its scope, which maintains that the norms of public reason govern public debate over constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice, and in addition apply to voting decisions when these issues are at stake. (2) "Public debate" is a vague expression, however. Following Rawls again, I shall assume that it covers discussions that take place in the "public political forum," that is, the discourse of judges, political representatives, government officials, and candidates for public office, and, by extension, the discourse of citizens when they are debating what law and policy they think should be enacted. (3)
I shall also stipulate that a practice of public reason consists of three norms. First, the participants must give reasons for the laws or policies they favor. Giving reasons in the required way also involves being responsive to the objections of others, that is, defending the reasons given, in the face of criticism. Second, participants must attend to the reasons of others, that is, those engaged in the relevant kind of public debate must listen to what others have to say and try to understand its import, even if they are doubtful of its truth. Third, the participants must offer only public reasons, that is, reasons that it is reasonable to believe might reasonably be accepted by others, (4) except perhaps under restrictive conditions, for example, if they undertake to replace the reasons they do give with other reasons that meet this requirement later on. (5) Following other writers, let me call this the "reciprocity requirement." According to this requirement, citizens cannot, for example, offer inherently religious reasons as ultimate reasons for a law or policy even if these reasons are their main grounds for favoring that law or policy. When the relevant kind of public debate has each of the three components I have identified, it involves the exchange of public reasons, and constitutes a practice of public reason. (6) Each requirement has attendant virtues: the first component requires the ability, and disposition, to couch one's reasons in terms that are accessible to others, and to respond to criticism of those reasons; the second component requires the ability and disposition to make sense of what others are saying, insofar as that is possible; the third component requires a willingness to exercise self-restraint by limiting the reasons one offers to others.
But we might wonder whether a practice of public reason, so understood, is as important as much liberal theory would suggest, and whether the virtues required for participating in such a practice are as central to good citizenship as the theory would have us believe. In this article I explore the role of public reason in a polity subject to deep moral and political disagreement, and raise some doubts about its importance. I argue that the central virtues of good citizenship in a liberal democratic regime, under some circumstances at least, might be rather different from those required to engage in a practice of public reason. I consider in turn three main arguments for its importance: first, that the exercise of political power will be legitimate to the extent that the law or policy that sanctions it is the product of a practice of public reason; second, that respect for persons as citizens requires such a practice; third, that citizens are reasonable only if they are willing to engage in a practice of this kind. I conclude that what it is to be reasonable, or respectful toward fellow citizens, is more sensitive to context than claims such as these would imply. My aim is to deflate some of the more extravagant claims made on behalf of a practice of public reason (and those models of deliberative democracy that involve it) whilst leaving the door open for various outcome-oriented defenses of the importance of some or all of its elements in some circumstances.
1. Legitimacy
Some defend a practice of public reason by appealing to the value or importance of legitimacy. One of the most common accounts of legitimacy maintains that the exercise of political power (at least when it involves matters of basic justice) is legitimate if and only if it can be justified by appeal to principles or reasons that cannot reasonably be rejected by those subject to it. Let me call this the liberal conception of legitimacy, though it will become clear that I do not think it is the only conception of legitimacy that can be combined with liberalism. It seems just a short distance from here to the conclusion that, in practice, in a diverse society, the exercise of political power when it involves matters of basic justice will tend to be legitimate to the extent that it is justified by reasons or principles that emerge through a practice of public reason that is open to all. For it is plausible to suppose that publicly justifiable laws and policies will tend to emerge from such a practice, or at least that they are more likely to emerge from it than from any other.
The liberal conception of legitimacy can be challenged, however. The exercise of political power might be considered legitimate if it is sanctioned by legitimate procedures without needing to be justifiable by reference to principles that cannot reasonably be rejected. Of course, for this procedural approach to legitimacy to be plausible, we would need some account of what makes a procedure legitimate. Consider what I think is the most promising approach of this kind, which I shall refer to as the "inclusiveness account," which maintains that a procedure is legitimate if and only if it involves all citizens rather than just some subsection of the citizen body. According to the most demanding version of this account, a political process is legitimate if and only if citizens participate on equal terms in it or enjoy equality of opportunity to do so. But inclusiveness accounts can be made more plausible by formulating them so that they allow for degrees of legitimacy. Iris Young, for example, maintains that "the normative legitimacy of a democratic decision depends on the degree to which those affected by it have been included in the decision-making processes and have had the opportunity to influence the outcomes." (7) Although she couches the point in terms of democratic decision-making, it might be generalized across political procedures. (8) We might hold that a hierarchical society that contains what Rawls calls a "consultation hierarchy" (in which there is "a family of representative bodies whose role in the hierarchy is to take part in an established procedure of consultation" (9) but no genuinely democratic institutions) possesses some minimum degree of legitimacy even though it does not provide equality of opportunity to participate, whilst Young's ideal of an "inclusive communicative democracy" might be thought to offer the promise of maximum legitimacy because of its full-blown commitment to inclusion on equal terms.
But are inclusiveness accounts of legitimacy in effect derived from the idea that a procedure is legitimate if and only if it could not reasonably be rejected by those subject to it, which would seem to involve at least a partial endorsement of the liberal conception of legitimacy? It might be thought that a procedure cannot reasonably be rejected if and only if it is fully inclusive (that is, is such that citizens enjoy equality of opportunity to participate in it), which would lend some support to the idea that inclusiveness accounts (or some of them at least) are derived from a deeper account that treats public justifiability as the ultimate criterion of the legitimacy of procedures. But inclusiveness accounts need not be grounded in this way, and it seems to me that they can have independent appeal. Indeed, defenders of an inclusiveness account might allow that a person can reasonably, but...
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