According to the democratic interpretation of public reason, political justification ought to appeal to the tacit dimension or common sense of society's actual historical moment. This article claims that a consequence of this interpretation is that religious reasons can be stable public reasons. More specifically, it claims that religious reasons can be public reasons in pervasively religious communities that are democratic, even in circumstances of ongoing social secularization. Three theoretical consequences are derived from this claim: first, democratic public reason assumes more social integration than other interpretations of public reason; second, religious reasons are not always inaccessible to non-believers; and third, religious reasons, when public reasons, can have normative force upon non-believers. Additionally, the following practical implication is made explicit: while justification of state power can appeal to religious reasons only, the law cannot be written in religious terms.
This dissertation looks at the linked issues of justification and public reason – under what conditions do political authorities count as legitimate, and what is the appropriate mode of reasoning together in the public sphere? The main contender in the field currently is Rawls's political liberalism. His conception of justification gives a key role to the justifiability of political power to each citizen, based on shared (because mutually acceptable) reasons. This approach to justification affects how we reason in the public sphere – in discussing certain fundamental issues, Rawlsian public reason requires limiting our reasons to public ones (viz., those which others could reasonably endorse), and bracketing those based on disputed conceptions of the good. How we think about justification thus has concrete implications for how we live together in political society. Rawls's political liberalism is commonly pitted against comprehensive liberalism. The disagreement tends to be cast as being about comprehensive liberals rejecting the need for justifiability. I argue that this is mistaken, and that Rawls shares more than we might think with the comprehensive liberal. Taking Raz as the modern champion of comprehensive liberalism, I show that both Rawls and Raz are deeply committed to justifiability, and trace the disagreement between the two to a metaphysical dispute about how to conceive of the project of justifying the implementation of political principles. In light of their shared commitment to justifiability, the question becomes whether justifiability requires shared reasons. I propose a heuristic reading of Rawls's requirement of mutually acceptable reasons, which explains how Rawls's and Raz's views on justification can be brought together without needing to bracket the truth of the principles of justice. This proposed reconciliation leads to a mode of reasoning in the public sphere that does not require setting aside non-public reasons in order to proceed.
We consider ourselves to be rational beings. We feel that our choices, decisions, and actions are selected from a flexible array of possibilities, based upon reasons. When we vote for a political candidate, it is because they share our views on certain critical issues. When we hire an individual for a job, it is because they are the best qualified. However, if this is true, why does an analysis of the direction of shift in the timbre of the voice of political candidates during an exchange or debate, predict the winner of American presidential elections? Why is it that while only 3% of the American population consists of white men over 6′4″ tall, 30% of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are white men over 6′4″ tall? These are examples of "instinctual biases" affecting or modulating rational thought processes. I argue that existing theories of reasoning cannot substantively accommodate these ubiquitous, real-world phenomena. Failure to recognize and incorporate these types of phenomena into the study of human reasoning results in a distorted understanding of rationality. The goal of this article is to draw attention to these types of phenomena and propose an "adulterated rationality" account of reasoning as a first step in trying to explain them.
This book focuses on three problems: In what way are rules normative, and how do they differ from ordinary reasons? What makes normative systems systematic? What distinguishes legal systems, and in what consists their normativity? All three questions are answered by taking reasons as the basic normative concept, and showing the distinctive role reasons have in every case, thus paving the way to a unified account of normativity. Rules are a structure of reasons to perform the required act and an exclusionary reason not to follow some competing reasons. Exclusionary reasons are explained, and used to unlock the secrets of orders, promises, and decisions as well as rules. Games are used to exemplify normative systems. Inevitably, the analysis extends to some aspects of normative discourse, which is truth – apt, but with a diminished assertoric force. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1265/thumbnail.jpg
One aspect of deliberation is giving reasons to support a position. In this article, I explore how citizens engage in this activity by developing a framework that breaks down reason-giving into component parts, applying it to a set of eight National Issues Forums. Deliberators typically provided evidence (usually in the form of factual statements) to support their conclusions, but frequently did not tie them together with an infrastructure of logical and causal connections. Deliberators engaged in reason-giving by presenting evidence but did not explicate the underlying logic of their positions. This suggests that deliberative research should focus greater attention on understanding the conditions that encourage and facilitate the effective use of evidence to support conclusions, as well as how patterns of reason-giving influence deliberative quality.
How should we deal with noncompliance in the context of the Paris Agreement? After having delimited the scope of noncompliance as a motivational issue, I will argue that two kinds of reasons can motivate agents to comply, moral and prudential reasons. Then, I will show that moral and prudential reasons can motivate compliance, although in different ways, as moral reasons require the institutions, whereas prudential reasons are thought to be self-sufficing. Prudential reasons come with the assumption that they have ample motivational force to elicit compliance. I will contend that, for what concerns climate treaties, this assumption does not hold. To do so, I will argue that, from an interest-based perspective, reasons for agreeing on a treaty rarely conflate with the reasons that motivate agents to complying with it, so, if we want to ensure compliance, the international climate regime should establish institutions to oversee compliance when prudential reasons fails to motivate.
In this paper, I focus on the postmodern feminist criticism of reason. I argue that postmodern feminism is in part a response to political concerns over valuing womens' differences but that the philosophical ideas it propounds cannot fully address these political concerns. Moreover, postmodern feminism branches into two directions, partly in the face of criticisms directed at it. The one becomes a form of intellectual play, the other becomes imbued with ethic of care assumptions. I recommend that feminism of sameness may provide a better vehicle than either postmodern or ethic of care feminism for addressing the `masculinist biases' of Western reason.
The paper considers an influential current in contemporary philosophy: the notion that judgments are formed as a consequence of emotive reaction. Philosophers such as Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum argue that moral and political principles such as universal human rights, and inherent human dignity, owe their persuasiveness to emotional responses of natural compassion and pity. Reason is accorded a secondary place as a justificatory apparatus for sentience. The paper aims to demonstrate both the incoherence and the political danger of this philosophical approach to judgment.
Traditional explanations for the existence of barter trade have only very limited explanatory power. In particular, barter trade can neither overcome liquidity shortages nor make up for marketing deficiencies. It is argued that barter trade makes sense only in the presence of interventions in national and international markets. Owing to its opaque and selective character, this archaic and highly inefficient form of trade enables a certain degree of flexibility in rigid situations to be regained which are maintained for various political reasons. Barter trade may help to unload surplus production, caused by domestic price controls; it can act as a selective devaluation, when the domestic currency is overvalued and windfall profits can be obtained via barter by underpricing of a cartel's official price. Finally, barter trade enables the evasion of taxes and tariff liabilities. Hence it follows that this form of trade may be regarded attractive for decision-makers, given the underlying distortions as a parameter.
The Rawlsian model of public justification is proposed for the assessment of politics of moral enhancement, in alternative to the neo-republican model proposed in these debates by Robert Sparrow. The central idea of the Rawlsian model of public justification is represented by the liberal principle of legitimacy, although it is extended in relation to the domain that Rawls sees as proper for its application (constitutional essentials). The liberal principle of legitimacy in its extended application requires that a law or public policy be justified on the base of reasons for which we can reasonably expect that other citizens can accept as free and equal citizens. The application is extended to children as prospective agents, as well. From the standpoint of the liberal principle of legitimacy, valid public reasons put forward in the moral enhancement debate are represented by the assessment of whether emotional modulation is progressive or regressive in relation to the capacity of moral judgment. The conclusion is that, at the actual stage of the debate, there are no victorious reasons to endorse any of the two proposals. Consequently, this is a domain of reasonable pluralism. Compulsory moral enhancement is ruled out, but mandatory moral enhancement is allowed. Usages of public funds for researches that concern moral bioenhancement are proper matter of democratic decision making.
Public reason theorists argue that it is permissible for the state to enforce political norms, such as laws or constitutional principles, when those norms are acceptable to "reasonable people." Reasonable people are neither actual people, with all their flaws, nor are they perfect people; they are rather a partially idealized group – realistic in some ways and idealized in others. Each of the major public reason theorists – John Rawls, Gerald Gaus, Jonathan Quong, Joshua Cohen – idealizes reasonable people to a different degree, but they all share two claims: 1) Reasonable people hold diverse views of the good life. Nevertheless, 2) Reasonable people can all accept basic liberal political norms grounded in freedom and equality. My dissertation begins by arguing that theorists are not free to choose any level of idealization, but are constrained in this choice by the justifications of their theories. In particular, idealization is constrained by one essential part of public reason's justification, which I call the "diversity argument." The diversity argument explains the first element of reasonable people: why do they disagree about the good? The answers, I argue, attributes certain realistic qualities and tendencies to reasonable people, which therefore constrains how much we can idealize them. In chapters on the major public reason theorists, I argue that they all offer a diversity argument that does not match the level of idealization that they employ. As a result, they are unable to show that liberal norms are acceptable to reasonable people, appropriately idealized. In the final chapter, I argue that the mismatch in these theories goes even deeper, which we can see when we ask why we must accommodate disagreement at all. The answers that philosophers have given us – reasonable disagreement is the inevitable result of human reasoning, human psychology, or free conditions – also apply to irrational disagreement. Irrational influences such as implicit bias and motivated reasoning are also inevitable results of who we are and how we live, which means we must accommodate these realistic tendencies in political justification.So, if public reason theories must now accommodate disagreement among reasonable-but-sometimes-irrational people, what could be acceptable to all such people? I conclude by suggesting a new direction for public reason theories. People who disagree about the good life, but recognize their common biases, can still justify their views to each other by supporting institutions that mitigate those biases, such as non-discrimination laws and deliberative institutions. This requires a new kind of social contract theory – one that is grounded in the shared recognition of our limitations, rather than our shared reasons.
In this Lecture I shall discuss the reasons that officials and citizens should rely upon in American politics. In recent years, various theorists have claimed that people in liberal democracies should rely in politics on "public reasons," reasons that are accessible to all citizens. Others have objected that such a counsel is unreasonable, if not incomprehensible. I shall concentrate on two facets of this issue. First, does the law exemplify a structure of public reasons – that is, do judges deciding cases draw on a stock of public reasons that is narrower than all the reasons one might give for a particular result? My second inquiry concerns the status of natural law – long claimed by adherents to be a source of reasons of universal power, reasons whose persuasiveness does not depend on theological judgments. Are natural law arguments exemplars of public reasons or not? These two inquiries help us to understand the dimensions of claims about public reasons, and to evaluate their comprehensibility and persuasiveness. They also raise the question whether many reasons are not better seen as lying along a spectrum of publicness rather than as being public or not. My position is that various recommendations to rely on public reasons are comprehensible, but on examination, they are far more complex than they may first appear. The law is a domain of public reasons, but that point is also less obvious than a first glance suggests. A counsel to rely on public reasons is persuasive for what officials, and would-be officials, express about particular political issues; it is not persuasive for citizens or for all the reasons that motivate officials. Natural law arguments fit uncomfortably with modern ideas about public reasons; some natural law arguments are public in the required sense, but others are not. Our examination of natural law arguments suggests that, in respect to many reasons for decisions, it may be wiser to talk of degrees of publicness, rather than public or not.
The article argues for a conception of the justification of punishment that is compatible with a modern, politically liberal regime. Section I deals with what some have thought are the obvious social interests society has in punishing criminals, and tries to develop those possible interests somewhat sympathetically. Section II suggests that many of those reasons are not good ones if punishment is regarded (as it should be) from the perspective of political philosophy. Social responses to bad things happening to people cannot be grounded in controversial metaphysical views about what is good for people or what people deserve, but many reasons proffered for punishment are in fact grounded in such views. This constraint, accordingly, limits what individuals can expect in terms of a societal response to crime. Section III develops the appropriate reasons for punishment in a modern, liberal regime. Here the article relies on a— largely undefended—conception of public reason as the most plausible theory of what reasons for punishment are available to liberals. Section IV offers some closing thoughts on why people might adopt a politically liberal view about punishment as their own, personal view about how they should relate to others.
In this article, I propose a reading of the book Razones Públicas by Andrés Rosler. The aim of the text is to rise some methodological questions about the definition of political theory the author uses. In order to do so, firstly, I ask about the way of working on history in relation to the non-historical and the judgment. Secondly, I ask how to define republicanism and its contingent character. Finally, I ask about the relationship between a republican political theory as the one Rosler puts forward and the political present. I hope this piece may serve to open a debate on ways of defining and working in political theory. ; En el presente artículo realizo una lectura del libro Razones pú- blicas de Andrés Rosler. El objetivo del texto es presentar algunas preguntas metodológicas en torno a la definición de teoría política que aparece allí. Para ello, en primer lugar, indago sobre el modo de trabajar sobre la historia en relación a lo no-histórico y al juicio. En segundo lugar, me pregunto por el modo de definir el republicanismo y su carácter contingente. Por último, me pregunto por la relación entre una teoría política republicana como la propuesta y el presente político. Me interesa, ante todo, que el texto sirva para abrir el debate sobre modos de definir y trabajar en teoría política.
In light current multiple crises, authoritarian movements gain new strength. Claiming that globalization and especially migration is endangering social cohesion and national sovereignty, they call for a strong state. Along the lines of those claims, they revise what Helmut Dubiel called the "cultural selfinterpretation," meaning the understanding of the political superstructure of their community. Doing that, liberal values and concepts are re-interpreted, as can be seen with the "rule of law". From its intrinsic value of strengthening individual claims against the state's rule, they turn into a concept of state power, interpreting the "rule of law" as the rule of a mythical legitimized sovereign. Those re-interpretations — and legal constructs referring to them — will be analyzed in this essay. Authoritarian politics and their roots will be regarded in their contradictory relation to (neo-)liberalism as they appear as a critique at first glance. Yet, taking into account early Critical Theory and its analysis of authoritarianism, the article aims to show that those tendencies emerge from liberal ideas and ideals. Seen from this perspective the article promotes the view that rather than a pure defense of liberalism, a materialist examination of liberalism's inner contradictions is necessary to understand and criticize authoritarianism.
