Abstract
According to political liberalism, laws must be justified to all citizens in order to be legitimate. Most political liberals have taken this to mean that laws must be justified by appeal to a specific class of ‘public reasons’, which all citizens can accept. In this paper I defend an alternative, convergence, model of public justification, according to which laws can be justified to different citizens by different reasons, including reasons grounded in their comprehensive doctrines. I consider three objections to such an account—that it undermines sincerity in public reason, that it underestimates the importance of shared values, and that it is insufficiently deliberative—and argue that convergence justifications are resilient to these objections. They should therefore be included within a theory of political liberalism, as a legitimate form of public justification. This has important implications for the obligations that political liberalism places upon citizens in their public deliberations and reason-giving, and might make the theory more attractive to some of its critics, particularly those sympathetic to religious belief.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Bird (2014) criticises this ‘coercion-based’ account of political liberalism, but it remains the standard approach in the literature, so I will assume it here. Many of my arguments could be adapted so as to apply to theories that see something other than coercion as triggering the demand for public justification.
This qualification is assumed throughout. Precisely what is required for a citizen to be ‘reasonable’ is controversial. Such a caveat is necessary, but I take no position here on what it entails.
My formulation of PJP is based on Gaus and Vallier’s (2009, p. 53), but is more ecumenical than theirs. PJP is a necessary, not sufficient, condition for legitimacy. Other necessary conditions might include democratic enactment and constitutionality.
All future references to ‘laws’ should be taken to mean ‘coercive laws’. Some theorists believe that all laws are coercive. I take no position on this here. PJP applies to all coercive laws, whether or not every law is coercive.
This also applies to secular comprehensive reasons.
These reasons must be ‘conclusive’, or ‘sufficient’, as I explain below.
This term is from Stears and Humphrey (2012, p. 287).
Rawls’s (2005, pp. 462–463) ‘proviso’ is an example of this.
This is not to imply that every publicly justified law must be enacted, but that there will be some publicly justified laws which are not known to be so. Awareness that they could be legitimately enacted is lacking.
In the absence of further objections not considered here.
At least in cases where it is likely the law will then be enacted—see fn. 13. Even when the law is unlikely to be enacted, it would be insincere to claim that a law is publicly justified when one knows it cannot be justified to some fellow citizen(s). I put these complications to one side, since they do not affect my arguments.
This is based on Quong (2011, p. 266). I have amended (ii), however. Quong’s (ii) says that A must reasonably believe that B is justified in endorsing L. This is problematic, since citizens are unlikely to know whether every fellow citizen is justified in endorsing a law. Instead, the requirement should be that they shouldn’t support laws that they know cannot be justified to some fellow citizen(s).
Quong (2008, pp. 5–6) gives a similar example.
Eberle calls this one’s ‘evidential set’.
There is clearly ambiguity in terms like ‘easily attainable’ empirical information and ‘obvious errors’ in reasoning. Different specifications of these terms give different levels of idealisation. The precise specifications do not matter for my argument here.
At one point Quong (2011, p. 142, fn. 11) explicitly says that individuals can be justified in believing falsehoods, if they reason blamelessly but reach false conclusions due to their limited epistemic situation.
And if all other arguments against meat-eating are mistaken. I am not endorsing this view here.
i.e. Alf doesn’t have to believe that Rb would be accepted by a fully rational individual. Presumably Alf believes that his reasons are true in this sense, since he believes his comprehensive doctrine is true, but he cannot believe that reasons arising from others’ comprehensive doctrines are true in this sense.
As Vallier (2011b) writes, ‘only by embracing convergence can public reason liberals truly respect reasonable pluralism and individual liberty’.
This point can also be made using Swaine’s (2009, pp. 194–196) distinction between inaccessible and incomprehensible reasons. Inaccessible reasons are openly justified to another individual, but rely on experiences one lacks or premises one rejects. They are intelligible; one can see that they are openly justified to the other. Incomprehensible reasons are simply impenetrable; one cannot make sense of them. They are unintelligible. Appeal to another’s inaccessible reasons isn’t disrespectful; appeal to their incomprehensible reasons is.
As a reviewer rightly noted, there are difficult questions here about precisely when another’s beliefs are, or are not, intelligible. He/she offered a case where Betty bases a belief on ‘mystical perception’ of God’s commands (on which, see Eberle (2002, pp. 239–251)). I cannot offer a full reply to such cases, but the most important point to note is that intelligible open justification does not require that we believe others’ basic evaluative standards, or worldview, to be sound, or all-things-considered justified. Quong (2011, pp. 271–272) rightly argues that we should not expect this of citizens. Instead, intelligible open justification centres on whether we can recognise that others’ beliefs are justified to them on the basis of their evaluative standards. If Betty’s belief in mystical perception is part of a broader, reasonably coherent, worldview, then I think that it can be intelligible, even if Alf considers it misguided. Using Swaine’s distinction, the belief is inaccessible to Alf, but not incomprehensible.
In Lister’s (2013b) terms, Quong’s view applies the ‘unanimous acceptability requirement’ to the reasons for decisions, rather than to decisions themselves.
I will not note this idealisation every time, but take it as given.
Note that Erica is not here imposing her comprehensive doctrine on others, or arguing that it provides reasons for them, merely that it provides reason for her to reject L.
Gaus and Vallier (2009, pp. 62–65) call a refusal to allow religious reasons to act at defeaters the ‘error of symmetry’.
I am drawing on the internalist understanding of reasons that I defended in the previous section here. If Quong’s interpretation of the sincerity requirement was correct, then shared values would be necessary for public justification. My arguments in this section thus depend on the success of my arguments in the previous section.
I lack space to defend this claim here. The question of the implications of convergence political liberalism, given this understanding of conclusivity, is an area in which more work is needed from defenders of the view.
No theorist has endorsed this view, as far as I am aware.
And, perhaps, this public justification being publicly offered.
References
Audi, Robert. 1997. Wolterstorff on religion, politics, and the liberal state. In Religion in the public square: The place of religious convictions in political debate, ed. Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, 121–144. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Baccarini, Evlio. 2013. Having a reason and distributive justice in the order of public reason. European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 9: 25–51.
Bird, Colin. 2014. Coercion and public justification. Politics, Philosophy and Economics 13: 189–214.
Boettcher, James W. 2005. Strong inclusionist accounts of the role of religion in political decision-making. Journal of Social Philosophy 36: 497–516.
Boettcher, James W. 2007. Respect, recognition and public reason. Social Theory and Practice 33: 223–249.
Boettcher, James W., and Jonathan Harmon. 2009. Introduction: religion and the public sphere. Philosophy and Social Criticism 35: 5–22.
Bohman, J., and H.S. Richardson. 2009. Liberalism, deliberative democracy, and “reasons that all can accept”. The Journal of Political Philosophy 17: 253–274.
Eberle, Christopher J. 2002. Religious conviction in liberal politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eberle, Christopher J. 2007. Religious reasons in public: Let a thousand flowers bloom, but be prepared to prune. St. John’s Journal of Legal Commentary 22: 431–443.
Galston, William A. 1991. Liberal purposes: Goods, virtues, and diversity in the liberal state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gaus, Gerald. 2009. The place of religious belief in public reason liberalism. In Multiculturalism and moral conflict, eds. Maria Dimovia-Cookson and P.M.R. Stirk, 19–37. London: Routledge.
Gaus, Gerald. 2010a. Coercion, ownership, and the redistributive state: Justificatory liberalism’s classical tilt. Social Philosophy and Policy 27: 233–275.
Gaus, Gerald. 2010b. On two critics of justificatory liberalism: A response to wall and lister. Politics, Philosophy and Economics 9: 177–212.
Gaus, Gerald. 2011. The order of public reason: A theory of freedom and morality in a diverse and bounded world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gaus, Gerald, and Kevin Vallier. 2009. The roles of religious conviction in a publicly justified polity: The implications of convergence, asymmetry and political institutions. Philosophy and Social Criticism 35: 51–76.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2006. Religion in the public square. European Journal of Philosophy 14: 1–25.
Klosko, George. 2003. Reasonable rejection and neutrality of justification. In Perfectionism and neutrality: Essays in liberal theory, ed. Steven Wall, and George Klosko, 167–189. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
Laborde, Cécile. 2013. Justificatory secularism. In Religion in a liberal state, eds. Gavin D’Costa, Malcolm Evans, Tariq Modood, and Julian Rivers, 164–186. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Larmore, Charles. 1999. The moral basis of political liberalism. The Journal of Philosophy 96: 599–625.
Larmore, Charles. 2003. Public reason. In The Cambridge companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman, 368–393. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lister, Andrew. 2013a. The classical tilt of justificatory liberalism. European Journal of Political Theory 12: 316–326.
Lister, Andrew. 2013b. Public reason and political community. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Macedo, Stephen. 1997. In defence of liberal public reason: Are slavery and abortion hard cases? American Journal of Jurisprudence 42: 1–29.
Macedo, Stephen. 2010. Why public reason? Citizens’ reasons and the constitution of the public sphere. SSRN e-library. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1664085.
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, state and utopia. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Quong, Jonathan. 2004. The scope of public reason. Political Studies 52: 233–250.
Quong, Jonathan. 2008. Three disputes about public justification: Commentary on Gaus and Vallier. www.publicreason.net/wp-content/PPPS/Fall2008/JQuong1.pdf.
Quong, Jonathan. 2011. Liberalism without perfection. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rawls, John. 1999. A theory of justice, revised ed. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Rawls, John. 2005. Political liberalism, expanded ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
Schwartzman, Micah. 2011. The sincerity of public reason. The Journal of Political Philosophy 19: 375–398.
Solum, Lawrence B. 1993. Constructing an ideal of public reason. San Diego Law Review 30: 729–762.
Stears, Marc, and Mathew Humphrey. 2012. Public reason and political action: Justifying citizen behaviour in actually-existing democracies. The Review of Politics 74: 285–306.
Stout, Jeffrey. 2004. Democracy and tradition. Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Swaine, Lucas. 2009. Deliberate and free: Heteronomy in the public sphere. Philosophy and Social Criticism 35: 183–213.
Vallier, Kevin. 2011a. Liberal politics and public faith: A philosophical reconciliation. PhD dissertation, University of Arizona.
Vallier, Kevin. 2011b. Consensus and convergence in public reason. Public Affairs Quarterly 25: 261–279.
Vallier, Kevin. 2014. Liberal politics and public faith: Beyond separation. Oxford: Routledge.
Wall, Steven. 2010. On justificatory liberalism. Politics, Philosophy and Economics 9: 123–149.
Weithman, Paul J. 1997. Religion and the liberalism of reasoned respect. In Religion and contemporary liberalism, ed. Paul J. Weithman, 1–37. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1997. The role of religion in decision and discussion of political issues. In Religion in the public square: The place of religious convictions in political debate, ed. Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, 67–120. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2007. The paradoxical role of coercion in the theory of political liberalism. Journal of Law, Philosophy and Culture 1: 135–158.
Acknowledgments
This paper originates from my MPhil and DPhil research, which were supported by an Arts & Humanities Research Council Studentship. For numerous helpful comments, I wish to thank my supervisor, Stuart White, and the audience at the Oxford Graduate Political Theory Workshop, particularly Franz Mang and Matthias Brinkmann. This essay was previously shortlisted for the Res Publica postgraduate essay prize 2014. I owe thanks to the anonymous reviewers both of the version of the paper that I submitted for the essay prize and of earlier drafts of this version.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Billingham, P. Convergence Justifications Within Political Liberalism: A Defence. Res Publica 22, 135–153 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-015-9278-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-015-9278-x