Reasonable Rejection and Redundancy

A paper due out any month now in the Journal of Political Philosophy by Tamra Frei has got me thinking about the redundancy objection to Scanlon’s contractualism. I haven’t followed this debate closely, but I understand that some rather sophisticated responses to the objection have been offered on Scanlon’s behalf, with Michael Ridge’s receiving much of Frei’s attention. So I may be a bit out of my comfort zone here. Nevertheless, Frei’s response, which is rather simple by comparison, strikes me as both successful and rather plausible as an interpretation of Scanlon. I also think her argument can be bolstered by pointing to a couple passages she unfortunately does not discuss. However, if this response does succeed, there will be some reason to avoid the common practice of using the language of reasonable rejection to describe Rawls’s political liberalism. I’ll touch on this at the end of the post.

Frei notes that there are several ways that the redundancy objection can be put, but here’s the one she settles on:

What is at issue is the relationship between the following three items:

[1] The reasons,…[e.g. that an act would involve a] death, harm, injury, etc…, that justify the claim that the contractors could not reasonably reject a principle that forbids action A.

[2] The fact that no contractor could reasonably reject a principle that forbids action A.

[3] The claim that action A is wrong.

The redundancy objector asserts that once [1] is specified, [2] is superfluous…According to the objector, Scanlon is committed to thinking [1] is necessary for the justification of [3], but is, importantly, not sufficient. [2] is needed as well, as an intermediary between [1] and [3], but the objector is not convinced. She asserts that [2] adds nothing to the explanation of what action A is wrong, maintaining instead that [1] is sufficient.

Another issue that is taken up by Frei, viz. the fact that actual agreement plays no role in Scanlon’s view, helps make the redundancy objection stronger. Since we do not look to what reasons any particular agent will or would marshal on her own behalf, the set of relevant reasons is produced through moral theorizing. This means that they can be identified independently of any particular person’s relying on them to reject a principle. But this seems to suggest that the reasons alone can do all the work needed to establish whether a principle is rejectable. Thus there is nothing left for “reasonable rejection” to do.

As I understand it, Frei’s response is to disarm the redundancy objection by arguing that, for Scanlon, the reasonable rejection of a principle simply consists in the determination through moral theorizing of whether the underlying reasons of special concern to him in fact support rejecting a candidate principle. According to Scanlon, “proper respect for [others’] distinctive value” (WWO, 169) involves restricting the reasons we rely on in moral argument to generic personal reasons, and then deciding whether such reasons can adequately justify the rejection of candidate principles by individuals occupying a variety of relevant standpoints. Frei’s thesis is that “reasonable rejection is not superfluous to what does the real work in Scanlon’s theory, namely the generic personal reasons,” and this is because the determination of which principles would be supported by these underlying reasons is “what reasonable rejection amounts to.” “Scanlon’s theory is not redundant, because his account of what reasonable rejection requires is his substantive answer to the question ‘in virtue of what is an action wrong?’.”

If I read it right, the response basically says that, in fact, Scanlon does not add a step to the objector’s preferred procedure, and so does not add a superfluous step. When the objector says we should go straight from [1] to [3], Scanlon can say, No problem! It’s just that whereas the objector refers to this as “seeing what the underlying reasons support,” Scanlon refers to it as “seeing whether the principle is reasonably rejectable.”

After scanning some of Scanlon’s writings, I think there is a lot to be said for this interpretation. There are two passages in particular that Frei does not quote—and which I have not seen quoted in the literature on the redundancy objection—that seem to lend support to her account. The first is from WWO:

[A] claim about what it is reasonable for a person to do presupposes a…certain range of reasons which are taken to be relevant, and then goes on to make a claim about what these reasons, properly understood, in fact support. (192)

This idea is reiterated and emphasized in Scanlon’s reply to Wallace, Dworkin, and Deigh (Ethics, April 2002):

A claim about what it is reasonable to do, or believe, presupposes a certain contextually specified body of information and a certain range of reasons, and makes a claim about these considerations taken together in fact support. (519)

On the understanding of reasonable rejection suggested by these passages, any moral view could bring it on board, since any view will first identify relevant reasons, and then go on to work out what those reasons “properly understood, taken together, in fact support.” What renders Scanlon’s view distinctive, then, is not that it relies on some distinctive notion of reasonable rejection, but that it relies on a distinctive understanding of the “range of relevant reasons” that bear on moral conclusions in this sphere of thinking.

Despite having some basis in the texts, this interpretation of Scanlon is admittedly in some tension with what seems to be his suggestion that what we owe each other is in part grounded in a substantive reason that we have “to live with others on terms they could not reasonably reject insofar as they are motivated by this ideal.” To this we could say that Scanlon should either stick with the relatively non-substantive account of reasonable rejection found in the passages above, or else make it clear that there are discrete versions of the idea of reasonable rejection, each of which is indexed to the specific sorts of relevant reasons emphasized by this or that particular moral theory.

Note that this account of reasonable rejection seems to permit our saying that others are not being reasonable when they reject true moral principles. (Or, perhaps better, that the dissenting positions they take are not reasonable.) Since my rejection of a true moral principle is not in fact supported by relevant reasons, my rejection of it is not reasonable.

Some commentators on Rawls have suggested that this is how the idea of reasonableness works in his political liberalism, too. For example, David Estlund has written that, on Rawls’s view, you would not be “as unreasonable to reject the difference principle as you have to be to reject the list of basic rights and liberties,” but that nevertheless the difference principle satisfies “the ‘no reasonable rejection’ requirement” (”The Survival of Egalitarian Justice in John Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” p. 75; my italics).

I must say that I can find little textual support for the claim that Rawls thinks dissent from the difference principle—or any fairly determinate principle of economic justice, for that matter—makes someone (or that person’s dissent) unreasonable (to any degree). I’d be grateful for pointers to texts that support this reading. (Perhaps we can discuss why I don’t think PL p.49n2 fills the bill in the comments, if you’re still awake at this point…) For now I’ll simply state my own view: In light of what Scanlon seems to mean by “beyond reasonable rejection” in the passages quoted, I think it would be an unfortunate mistake to see Rawls’s view as a political variant of Scanlonian contractualism.