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The success of political liberalism depends on there being an overlapping consensus among reasonable citizens—including religious citizens—upon principles of political morality. This paper explores the resources within one major religion—Christianity—that might lead individuals to endorse (or reject) political liberalism, and thus to join (or not join) the overlapping consensus. I show that there are several strands within Christian political ethics that are consonant with political liberalism and might form the basis for Christian citizens' membership of the overlapping consensus. Nonetheless, tensions remain, and it is not clear that Christians could wholeheartedly endorse the political conception or give unreserved commitment to political liberal ideals.

Lori Watson and Christie Hartley's excellent book Equal Citizenship and Public Reason: A Feminist Political Liberalism has two main aims.1 The first is to develop and defend a distinctive version of political liberalism, grounded in a particular conception of liberal democracy. The second is to show that this view constitutes a feminist political liberalism, since it is able to realise a range of central feminist goals. In this paper I consider how successfully Watson and Hartley achieve both of these aims. After outlining the main features of the authors' political liberalism, I challenge both their general defence of this view (and the arguments regarding feminism. With respect to the latter, I particularly focus on their claim that all reasonable political conceptions of justice must endorse policies that seek to combat the gendered division of labour, both through labour market reforms and by combatting social norms that steer men and women into different roles. My discussion throughout raises questions about the conceptualisation of reasonable disagreement, so in the final section I note some further ways in which reasonable disagreement about justice creates internal tensions within Watson and Hartley's theory.

In Chapter 5 of Liberalism's Religion, Cécile Laborde considers the freedom and autonomy of religious associations within liberal democratic societies. This paper evaluates her central arguments in that chapter. First, I argue that Laborde makes things too easy for herself in dismissing controversies over the state's legitimate jurisdictional authority. Second, I argue that Laborde's view of when associations' 'coherence interests' justify exemptions is too narrow. Third, I consider how we might develop an account of judicial deference to associations' 'competence interests'.

'Transformative liberals' believe that the state should use its non-coercive capacities to counter hateful speech and practices, by seeking to transform the views of those who hold hateful and discriminatory beliefs. This paper critically assesses transformative liberalism, with a particular focus on the theory developed by Corey Brettschneider. For Brettschneider, the state should engage in 'democratic persuasion' by speaking out against views that are incompatible with the ideal of free and equal citizenship, and refusing to fund or subsidise civil society groups that hold such views. My critique has five parts. I first rebut two central justifications for transformative liberalism, regarding complicity and the undermining of equal citizenship. Second, I show that some of the central policies that Brettschneider advocates are in fact coercive. Third, I raise concerns about the nature of the complex and contestable judgments that transformative liberalism requires the state to make. Fourth, I argue that Brettschneider's view has various troubling implications. Finally, I argue that many of these problems derive from his adoption of a thick conception of free and equal citizenship, resulting in an overly broad definition of hateful viewpoints and of hate speech. A defensible version of transformative liberalism would use a significantly narrower conception.

Liberal justifications of exemptions for religious groups appeal to the rights or interests of individuals. Individuals' interests in freedom of re-ligion and association are said to be served through religious groups being granted a level of autonomy from state control, which includes their enjoying exemptions from certain otherwise applicable laws. All such justifications face a significant problem, however, which is that religious groups invariably contain dissenters, who object to the group's decisions, policies, or current exercise of an exemption. It is un-clear how these internal dissenters' interests are served by the group being granted exemptions. This chapter explores, and seeks to resolve, this problem. I show that three standard liberal responses—appealing to the religious groups' own decision-making procedures, to implied consent, and to exit rights—contain important insights, but do not provide a satisfactory solution. I then argue that liberal political theo-ry nonetheless has the resources to justify exemptions for religious groups in the face of internal dissent, by highlighting the way in which dissenters' own interest in freedom of religion can be protected and promoted through religious group autonomy. This enables liberal theorists to justify internally contested exemptions for religious groups.

According to Christine Sypnowich, theorising about equality is in a bad way. The ideal of equality has come under sustained attack from theorists of 'difference', who focus on claims arising from the particularities of identity and culture, and view equality as a homogenising doctrine based upon a false universalism. Defenders of equality, meanwhile, have become "mired in odd debates and concerns" (221) about welfare for surfers, expensive tastes, and the precise distinction between choice and luck. To make matters worse, liberal political theory is dominated by neutralism, an "aberrant" view that is "at odds with the tradition of conceiving social justice with reference to ideas of wellbeing, the public good, and community that are so central to the ideal of equality and the hope of its realisation" (212). These various developments all conspire to leave equality beleaguered. The key to its renewal, Sypnowich argues, is a return to a focus on human flourishing or wellbeing, recasting egalitarianism in an unapologetically perfectionist vein. "It is the task of the egalitarian state to enable citizens to live worthwhile lives" (7). Sypnowich thus endeavours to defend flourishing as the proper metric of equality, responding to various objections to perfectionism along the way, and to show that this conception of equality both enables a persuasive response to theorists of difference and illuminates contemporary debates about topics such as responsibility, multiculturalism, the public good, and global justice.

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.

In his last works, John Rawls explicitly argued for an overlapping consensus on a family of reasonable liberal political conceptions of justice, rather than just one. This 'Deep Version' of political liberalism opens up new questions about the relationship between citizens' political conceptions, from which they must draw and offer public reasons in their political advocacy, and their comprehensive doctrines. These questions centre on whether a reasonable citizen's choice of political conception can be influenced by her comprehensive doctrine. In this paper I present two models of the relationship, which give contrasting answers to these questions, and defend the model that is more permissive with regard to the influence of comprehensive doctrines. This has important implications for our understanding of Rawlsian political liberalism, and reduces the force of objections that have been offered by theorists sympathetic to religion.

The 'convergence conception' of political liberalism has become increasingly popular in recent years. Steven Wall has shown that convergence liberals face a serious dilemma in responding to disagreement about whether laws are publicly justified. What I call the 'conjunctive approach' to such disagreement threatens anarchism, while the 'non-conjunctive' approach appears to render convergence liberalism internally inconsistent. This paper defends the non-conjunctive approach, which holds that the correct view of public justification should be followed even if some citizens do not consider enacted laws to be publicly justified. My argument sheds light on the fundamental structure of convergence liberalism.

Andrew Lister's Public Reason and Political Community is an important new contribution to the debate over political liberalism. In this article, I critically evaluate some of the central arguments of the book in order to assess the current state of public reason liberalism. I pursue two main objections to Lister's work. First, Lister's justification for public reason, which appeals to the value of civic friendship, fails to show why public reason liberalism should be preferred to an alternative democratic theory that does not include public reason restrictions. Second, there are several important ambiguities and tensions within Lister's view that he does not adequately resolve. His approach to them often takes public reason liberalism in directions that many of its advocates will reject. More work thus remains to be done by public reason liberals both to show why public reason restrictions are necessary and to resolve these tensions in a more satisfactory way.

Debates between political liberals and liberal perfectionists have been reinvigorated by Jonathan Quong's Liberalism Without Perfection. In this paper I argue that certain forms of perfectionism can rebut or evade Quong's three central objections – that perfectionism is manipulative, paternalistic, and illegitimate. I then argue that perfectionists can defend an 'internal conception' of perfectionism, parallel in structure to Quong's 'internal conception' of political liberalism, but with a different conception of the justificatory constituency. None of Quong's arguments show that his view should be preferred to this perfectionist internal conception. It can thus equally claim to achieve 'justification to all reasonable citizens'.

Proponents of public reason views hold that the exercise of political power ought to be acceptable to all reasonable citizens. This paper elucidates the common structure shared by all public reason views, first by identifying a set of question that all such views must answer and, second, by showing that the answers to these questions stand in a particular relationship to each other. In particular, we show that what we call the 'rationale question' is fundamental. This fact, and the common structure more generally, is often overlooked or distorted within the literature. As a result, we argue, several prominent argumentative moves made by both critics and defenders of public reason are unsuccessful. Our overall conclusion is that discussions of public reason views would be more fruitful if they made consistent use of the common structure we identify.

This paper presents a dilemma for Matthew Kramer's view, as defended in his Liberalism with Excellence. A central aim of that book is to critique existing liberal perfectionist theories, which he labels "edificatory," and to defend a different such theory, which he calls "aspirational." Edificatory perfectionism holds that governments ought to promote citizens' well-being directly by inducing them to live lives that are more wholesome, cultivated, or autonomous. Aspirational perfectionism, meanwhile, holds that governments ought to promote the conditions under which every citizen can be warranted in harboring a strong sense of self-respect, by promoting the occurrence of outstanding achievements within society. We first argue that Kramer's two central arguments against edificatory perfectionism, which appeal to the value of freedom and to moral integrity, fail to establish the impermissibility of edificatory policies. His critique could be salvaged by holding that the ambit of legitimate government activity is limited to the provision and distribution of primary goods. However, we argue, second, that Kramer's own aspirational perfectionism also runs afoul of this restriction, because his conception of warranted self-respect is not a primary good. Kramer is thus faced with a choice between upholding his objections to edificatory perfectionism and maintaining the coherence of his aspirational perfectionism.

In this introduction to the special issue on 'Hate, Offense and Free Speech in an Uncertain World', Billingham and Bonotti sketch the state of the debates on hate speech and offensive speech in political theory, in order to then locate the contributions of the articles in the special issue.