PPPS: “The Roles of Religious Conviction in a Publicly Justified Polity”

I hope this won’t interfere with replies to Jon Quong, but I thought I’d post some additional questions and comments:

1. What does it mean for a justification to be conclusive? Kevin and Jerry say that a conclusive justification is one that defeats all other competing considerations (p. 4). Is that the extent of it? If so, has Jerry abandoned a publicity condition as necessary for conclusive or victorious justification? In Justificatory Liberalism, he wrote, “Betty cannot have reasonable confidence that her proposed justification is victorious unless and until challengers have had ample opportunity to try to defeat it … Public justification, then, is public not only in the sense that it must show that each has sufficient reason to accept the justification but, additionally, in the sense that it must meet the publicity condition” (147, original itallics). I take it that Kevin and Jerry reject this claim as part of the “Principle of Politics as Public Reasoning.” On the view presented here, then, public justification does not have to satisfy a publicity condition. Is this a fair reading, or is a publicity condition still doing some work in this account of public justification?

2. It would be helpful to have some examples of how religious defeaters work to make coercion impermissible. What about the following cases:

(a) Suppose the state requires inoculation against some disease. A significant number of citizens seek exemption from this policy on religious grounds. If the exemptions are granted, there will be a significant increase in the risk of disease in the general population.

(b) The state requires that all children pass standardized tests for reading, writing, etc., through the age of 16. Some religious believers seek an exemption for girls, ages 12-16, on the ground that additional education will weaken their commitment to traditional gender roles, which are religiously mandated.

It seems clear enough how political liberals like Stephen Macedo would react to these examples. What about justificatory liberals who count religious beliefs as defeaters?

3. If political institutions generate public justifications, when and how do (religious) defeaters enter into the process? Is the idea to include some sort of constitutional requirement for religious accommodation?

4. The example of Arthur and Benedict doesn’t necessarily inspire confidence. Suppose Benedict responds to Arthur by saying, “You don’t know the first thing about my religious beliefs. In fact, they don’t at all support the political conclusions you claim they do. In rummaging around in my ’subjective motivational set,’ which is hardly subjective in my view, you fished out some beliefs that are useful to you. But they’re taken out of context, distorted, and completely misunderstood. And, in any case, who are you to make claims about what political conclusions follow from my religious views? You’re not my priest, not my bishop, and certainly not the Pope!” (Cf. the response to Nancy Pelosi’s comments on what Catholics believe about abortion.)

In some cases (as I’ve argued elsewhere, and as I think Jerry claims in JL), Arthur might be able to respond to these sorts of criticisms. He might be able to establish epistemic authority over Benedict. But that won’t be easy, especially when the sets of beliefs proliferate. Partly for that reason, it’s hard to see how the two-person convergence model carries over into multi-party or system-wide justification. If you have no agreement on inputs, how likely is it that you will agree that outcomes are conclusively justified, or that procedures for determining outcomes are justified?

5. In footnote 30, Kevin and Jerry claim that consensus justification has a stability problem, whereas convergence justification does not. There is a stability problem for consensus justifications because shared reasons may be defeated by non-shared reasons. But I think the same problem arises for convergence justifications. For example, if religious believers have (non-shared) religious reasons for seeking to coerce others, those reasons may weigh more heavily for them than reasons to value the public justification of coercion. When religious commitments conflict with the commitment to public justification, the stability problem will reemerge. Any theory of public justification is going to face this problem. I don’t see why it is unique to the consensus view.

6. Kevin and Jerry chastise political liberals (and Rawls, in particular) for not saying more about problems of institutional design. Rawls can certainly be forgiven — one can only do so much! Rawls aside, however, I don’t see why political liberals and deliberative democrats should be saddled with the claim that they only care about inputs, and not about procedures for generating outcomes. They can, and do, care about both. There is a substantial literature devoted to the implications of deliberative democracy for constitutional and administrative decision-making. Some of that literature is informed by public choice; some is highly critical of public choice approaches. But there is certainly plenty of thinking about questions of design.

Furthermore, although they emphasize constitutional structure, Kevin and Jerry are also concerned about the quality of inputs. After all, the minimalist proviso is a constraint on political justification (all the caveats of n. 33 aside). The “contingent facts about contemporary Western society” (which look rather like the fact of reasonable pluralism) aren’t going away any time soon. So justificatory liberals, like political liberals (and deliberative democrats), do indeed care about what reasons citizens and officials have for making political decisions. In that sense, justificatory and political liberals are all good Madisonians — they care about both public virtue andinstitutional design.

7. Last thought: Kevin and Jerry distinguish between convergence and consensus conceptions of public justification, and they associate political liberals like Rawls with the latter. But it’s worth noting that the Rawlsian view of public reason is a complex combination of convergence and consensus justification. First, an overlapping consensus is a convergence of different reasonable comprehensive views on a set of fundamental political ideas (including a conception of reasonableness, and perhaps also a family of political conceptions of justice, methods of reasoning, etc.). But, second, within the political domain, citizens may disagree about constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. Although they may begin reasoning publicly from a shared family of political values and methods of reasoning, citizens may disagree about which political conception or ordering of values is most reasonable. Given these differences, citizens may reach political agreements on the basis of different orderings of public reasons. Thus, even within Rawls’ view of public reason, there is room for convergence justifications. These will be nested convergences; in other words, they will take place within the limits of a broader moral and political consensus.

Thanks to Kevin for his detailed reply to me regarding the convergence conception of public justification. I’ll make a few further remarks here that hopefully will clarify my objection to the convergence conception.

One very small issue before I begin. I’d like to point out that what I’ve posted here (both the pdf and my comments) is nothing more than a commentary on someone else’s paper for a conference, and I’d prefer it be treated in the same way one would treat a discussant’s comments on a panel at the annual meeting of the APSA or a division meeting of the APA, that is, not to be quoted or cited without checking with me first.

I think the disagreement between Kevin and myself can be fairly summarized as follows. I think the convergence view is problematic since in a pluralistic liberal society it will be inconsistent with the requirements of a principle of justificatory sincerity (PJS). Since my version of the principle appears in Kevin’s comments I won’t repeat it here. Kevin expresses some doubts about the necessity of such a principle at the end of his comments, but he doesn’t argue against it, and his rejection of my position doesn’t depend on rejecting PJS, so we can take the requirement for PJS as given for the purposes of our discussion. I argue that the convergence view is likely to be inconsistent with PJS in the conditions of pluralism we face in liberal societies since citizens who do not share the same comprehensive doctrine will not believe that each other’s comprehensive doctrines can really provide sound justifications for embracing a given law. Roughly, if A and B adhere to different doctrines, and they each reject each other’s doctrine, and they each accept law X as justified only for reasons provided by their own doctrine, and there are no relevant shared reasons in favour of X, then I claim that A and B should each believe the other is unjustified in accepting X, and thus it would be inconsistent with PJS for either of them to support the imposition of X.

Kevin thinks I am guilty of relying on ‘an excessively simplistic’ model of how citizens may hold different reasons and yet view one another as reasonable. Although Kevin criticizes me on a number of points, I think it’s fair to say that Kevin’s central complaint is that he believes I am confusing truth with justification, and once this confusion is cleared up, my objection to the convergence view will no longer seem plausible. According to Kevin (I think this is the right interpretation of his view), even if A and B believe that each other’s doctrines are false or untrue, they may continue to believe that the other person is justified in holding the views they do, and thus A and B may plausibly believe that the other is justified in accepting X even though they reject each other’s doctrines as false. Kevin rightly points out that it is common in epistemology to describe people who have been exposed to different evidence as being justified in holding different beliefs. If Alf has no evidence that his wife is cheating on him then he would be justified in thinking she is faithful, even if it is in fact the case that she is cheating on him. Betty, however, has plenty of evidence of Alf’s wife’s infidelity, and thus she has a justified and true belief. Kevin wants to apply this distinction between truth and justification in defence of the convergence model. So long as we can view one another as justified in holding different doctrines, then we can also view each other’s comprehensive or otherwise nonpublic reasons as justificatory even though we don’t accept those reasons ourselves.

As I said, I think this a fair summary of the disagreement between Kevin and myself, but I don’t find Kevin’s reply persuasive. Although I may have been sloppy or imprecise with my use of certain terms in my commentary, the objection to the convergence view that I presented does not depend on that sloppiness or imprecision, nor does it depend on confusing truth with justification. My central objection can be formulated (or re-formulated) as follows. In order for A’s comprehensive doctrine CDa, to generate a sound justification for A to accept law L, it must be the case that A is justified in believing CDa. If CDa were unjustifiable for A to believe (suppose CDa were ‘I should always do whatever the little birdie outside my window tells me’), then it would also be unjustifiable for A to rely on CDa in justifying his acceptance of L. The same will hold for person B with regard to his doctrine CDb. Thus, in order for the convergence model to be consistent with PJS, it must be the case that all the members of the justificatory constituency view one another’s comprehensive or nonpublic doctrines as justifiable for their adherents to believe. I continue to think this requirement is problematic.

First, this seems to me to presuppose a view about epistemology that many citizens can and do reasonably reject. Let me be clear what I mean by that. I do not mean that such citizens deny the possibility that people can sometimes be justified in holding false beliefs. I am sure almost everyone will agree there can be some circumstances where that will be the case. My claim is that citizens can and do reasonably reject the thesis that these circumstances obtain with regard to the diversity of comprehensive beliefs in a pluralistic liberal society. Many citizens (both secular and religious) do not think that doctrines that conflict with their own are justifiable. They view those other doctrines as both false and unjustifiable. Many people (again, both secular and religious) believe that the truth about religion and human flourishing is rationally accessible to anyone who takes the trouble to carefully think things through, and they believe that people who adhere to different doctrines are usually making a mistake in doing so - they are failing to weigh the relevant evidence or reasons appropriately. Such people will not view others as justified in adhering to different comprehensive doctrines, and this means such people cannot sincerely support any law which is being justified to others purely by appeal to a comprehensive or nonpublic doctrine which they reject. This is the sense in which PJS is inconsistent with the convergence model of justification. The objection, as formulated above (hopefully more carefully than I did in my original commentary) does not depend on any confusion of truth and justification.

Here’s another way of putting the point I’m making. The convergence model requires that we draw an epistemic distinction between reasonable and unreasonable doctrines. If Alf is wondering whether law L can be legitimately imposed on Betty purely by appealing to the nonpublic reasons which Betty believes justify L, Alf must decide (if he is to act consistently with PJS) if he thinks Betty is justified in holding the nonpublic views she does. If Alf thinks Betty’s nonpublic views are unjustifiable (e.g. she thinks she should always do what the little birdie outside her window says) then Alf cannot impose L on Betty if those nonpublic views are the only candidate grounds for her to accept L. If, on the other hand, Alf believes Betty’s nonpublic views are justifiable for her (even though he thinks they are false), then he can permissibly support the imposition of L. My concern, stated in the most general terms, is that whatever theory of epistemic justification we use to draw this distinction, it will be one that we cannot reasonably expect many free and equal citizens to accept.

It might seem my objection requires denying the central assumption of most theories of public justification or public reason, namely, the fact of reasonable pluralism or disagreement, but on a careful reading it does not. Following Rawls, I think we can believe that circumstances are such as to make it reasonable for other people to disagree with us, while nevertheless believing those people are unjustified or mistaken in holding the views they do. For Rawls, the reference to reasonable disagreement does not imply that we must view those who disagree with us as justified. It only implies that, given the burdens of judgement, we must expect that the exercise of human reason under conditions of liberty will always produce disagreement about certain matters such as religion and human flourishing. Others disagree with us, and we recognize their disagreement need not be ‘rooted solely in ignorance or perversity, or else in the rivalries for power, status, or economic gain’ (Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 58). Instead we accept that others may disagree with us simply because reasoning about such complex matters is hard, and vulnerable to various difficulties. The world is a complicated place and thus, for example, I recognize that people may embrace religions that I reject, not as a result of one of the pejorative causes mentioned in the quote from Rawls, but rather out of a sincere effort to exercise their reason in difficult circumstances. But that doesn’t entail that I must believe they are justified in holding the views they do. Again, to quote Rawls, we might count ‘many familiar and traditional doctrines – religious, philosophical, and moral – as reasonable even though we could not seriously entertain them for ourselves, and we think they give excessive weight to some values and fail to allow for the significance of others’ (Ibid., p. 60). Reasonable pluralism, for Rawls, thus does not entail any particular thesis with regard to what comprehensive doctrines other people are justified in believing. Rather, reasonable pluralism alerts us to the fact that free and equal people, sincerely exercising their powers of reason under liberal conditions, will always disagree about certain issues. Thus, if we want to justify laws only by appealing to reasons we can reasonably expect all our fellow citizens could accept, we must appeal to only those reasons we all share qua free and equal members of the public.

Now I realize that Kevin and Jerry are not trying to develop a Rawlsian account of public justification – they are developing their own theory, and so it might seem beside the point to show that their conception doesn’t square with Rawls’s view of reasonable pluralism. But I’ve stressed the difference between the two views for two main reasons. First, I think Kevin and Jerry’s model requires that citizens accept an unnecessarily strong account of reasonable pluralism – one that requires we view other people’s doctrines as justified for them to adhere to. I think citizens in a pluralistic and reasonably well-ordered liberal society can reasonably deny that other people’s doctrines are in fact justifiable for their adherents, and thus I think Kevin and Jerry are asking citizens to accept an epistemic thesis that they shouldn’t have to accept. Second, even if we stipulate that people can only be members of the justificatory constituency if they accept Kevin and Jerry’s view about reasonable pluralism, I think this means their approach (and by implication the convergence model) doesn’t really apply to the world that we live in, or even to a well-ordered liberal society. It means that we cannot view others as reasonable unless we also believe they are justified in holding the views they do. As I said in the original commentary, I think this is an unnecessary and undesirable shrinking of the constituency of public justification. We ought to (and I believe we can) engage in public justification with those people whose views we reject as false and unjustified. I think that many religious adherents are not merely adhering to false doctrines, I also think they are unjustified in doing so. But this need not prevent me from treating them as reasonable citizens, free and equal members of the justificatory constituency who are owed justifications for the laws that bind them.

Just a small aside. First, I did not mean to say (and I regret the misleading impression created) that justification requires true premises. The term I generally relied on in my commentary was that justification requires sound premises. My intention in the example of Alf, Betty and the sandwich, perhaps poorly conveyed, was to describe a situation where Alf not only rejects Betty’s premises himself, but he also believes her premises to be unsound in the sense he does not think she can justifiably rely on them either. The point of that example was to try and illustrate that there is a difference between viewing someone else’s reasons for belief or action as intelligible, and thinking that those intelligible reasons can ground a valid justification for belief or action.

On convergence and consensus

Unlike Jon, I don’t see that the convergence model has a problem with sincerity. It is possible to sincerely believe that others have reasons to endorse a proposal even when you do not share their reasons. The relevant contrast seems to me to between the following two situations:

1.
i. A supports X for reason Ra rather than for reason Rb, since A believes Rb to be false.
ii. B believes Rb instead of Ra.
iii. A believes that Rb does not support X, i.e. that if Rb were true then X would not be supported.

2.
i. A supports X for reason Ra rather than for reason Rb, since A believes Rb to be false.
ii. B believes Rb instead of Ra.
iii. A believes that Rb does support X, i.e. that if Rb were true then X would be supported.

For A to argue that B has reason to support X in situation 1. would be insincere, I suppose, but I don’t see why the same argument in situation 2. is insincere at all. We sincerely say things like, “by your own lights, you should support blah blah blah …” This has nothing to do with different properties of reasonableness in justification, soundness, and so on. It’s simply the difference between believing a premise to be false, and believing a putative implication from that premise to be false.

In this context, I don’t think we are looking for all things considered justification at all. We’re not looking to assess whether the entirety of a person’s philosophical commitments are well-supported. Instead, we should take their comprehensive commitments as a given – as neither true nor false, but just as part of the background of public deliberation. Within that background, it seems perfectly sensible and sincere to say that there is a very good justification stemming from a comprehensive premise, taken as a given, even when, once we look from outside the scope of public deliberation, we would not think the entire justificatory thread well-grounded.

Where I think the convergence model has a problem is with redundancy. I don’t see that it adds anything to the consensus model, once the asymmetry position is rejected. If we assume a person whose moral commitments extend to only those value commitments contained with a political conception of justice, then there will be no convergence between this person and anyone else on any moral conclusion that does not follow from the political conception of justice.

On symmetry

The distinction between supporting reasons and defeating reasons is interesting, but I do not think that it does the work that GG and KV seem to intend it to do, at least taking what KV says in comment 2 about exemptions as evidence:

For we can accommodate the standard liberal practice of accommodating religious exemptions while also not allowing religious considerations to justify coercion against those reasonable persons who do not share the religion the considerations derive from. A consensus conception of reasons makes religious exemptions difficult to accommodate because justificatory liberalism is committed to rejecting coercion based solely on religious reasons. If consensus applies, then symmetry likely applies (depending on the common standards) and if symmetry applies, then religious exemptions based on religious reasons will be off the table. One bit of evidence for this connection is that Quong himself rejects both convergence and religious reasons as defeaters. In comments to Jerry, Steve Macedo has made similar remarks. Nonetheless, Jerry and I think that accommodating religious exemptions is part of respecting reasonable pluralism and so count this role for religious reasons as a benefit of the conception.

I don’t think this is right. Defeating reasons defeat all sorts of public policies. If successful, my understanding is that they imply that those policies should not be implemented at all.

Reasons for exemptions from public policies are not like this. First, they leave the policy intact generally. Other people still have to do stuff in accordance with the policy.

Second, the reason for exemptions need not be unshared. Since part of the public political culture is a recognition of the importance of liberty of conscience, it is not implausible (although I don’t endorse this) to argue that individuals have a pf entitlement not to be directly implicated in activities that violate their consciences. The religious conviction is not itself the sole reason for the exemption. Rather it triggers a separate political value that supports the exemption. Again, I don’t really buy this story, but if one wants to accept conscientious exemptions from general public policies, I don’t see why that story could not be plausibly made out in Rawlsian political liberal terms. Rawlsian public reason does not require uniform treatment of everyone, and one of the relevant differences between people, along with e.g. handicaps, may be a difference in conscientious conviction at some deep and profound level. It might be that you can’t argue for the importance of conscientious exemptions without some comprehensive commitment to the value of moral integrity, or suchlike, but this is a different point. It is certainly in principle possible to identify differences in conscientious conviction and then justify treating that as a relevant difference for political reasons.

Third, an exemption is itself a public policy, albeit one that modifies a more general policy. This needs to be supported since there is a pf unfairness in allowing some people not to be burdened by a generally applicable regulation.

So I don’t think the support/defeat asymmetry is well motivated by intuitions about conscientious exemptions. If, on the other hand, the asymmetry idea is motivated by a default condition of liberty, then I think Jon’s arguments are right on point. Why start with an absence of coercion as the default?

Hi Simon,

I just have a quick reply to your comment on consensus and convergence (I’m in agreement, I think, with what you say about symmetry).

There are two different kinds of sincerity that we might be worried about. You are right to say, with regard to your situation 2, that there is a sense in which A is being perfectly sincere. There is nothing misleading or manipulative about saying, ‘I don’t accept your premises, but since you believe the premises that you do, you really ought to be committed to this particular conclusion’. I agree that A can say this and their statement can be perfectly sincere.

The problem is that this is not the particular kind of sincerity that is at stake in my PJS (versions of which are espoused by both Jerry in Justificatory Liberalism and Rawls in Political Liberalism). The kind of sincerity that I’m interested in is this: can A sincerely believe that law L can be legitimately imposed on B purely by appeal to the nonpublic reason that B believes? If A thinks that B is not justified in holding the nonpublic premises that yield their “reasons” to endorse L, and if there are no other relevant considerations that would justify L for B, then A cannot sincerely support the imposition of L on B.

When considering this latter type of sincerity we can’t take people’s comprehensive commitments as given if we believe in the idea of public justification. We cannot impose laws on others unless we believe that imposition is justified to the person in question, and thus we must ask ourselves whether they are justified in holding the comprehensive commitments they do, if it is those comprehensive commitments that allegedly provide the only possible justification for the law that might be imposed on them (as is the case in the convergence model).

Hi Jon

It’s tricky to argue this point because I don’t see much space between convergence and consensus accounts once the full range of reasonable pluralism is taken into account. It’s also tricky for me, since I am no longer on board with the idea that public policies must be justified to individuals, where that justification must be sensitive to the content of their moral beliefs, in either a PL or JL manner (except possibly in some isolated cases). So I am not committed to what gets called public justification here (although I do have a commitment to a much weaker notion of public justification).

Nevertheless, I’m not convinced that a Rawlsian political liberal necessarily accepts the PJS as you set it out and interpret it. I do think the Rawlsian political liberal is committed to there being political justifications of public policies (either only fundamental policies or more generally), but I think this is because without a political justification there would be no way we could expect an overlapping consensus on a liberal regime to be stable, once the full range and force of reasonable pluralism is taken into consideration. Sooner or later there will be some or other reasonable comprehensive doctrine that lies outside the area of convergence of the other doctrines. So we end up forced to look for shared premises that we can expect reasonable doctrines to endorse.

But put this problem aside. Let’s assume two comprehensive views in a society as an enduring fact, and a consensus on a conception of justice X but not on any political liberal reason Rp for that conception of justice. A believes that Rb is false, but that if it were true it would support X, and vice versa for B. So A sincerely believes that that B has a good justification for X taking Rb as given. Your objection is that this is not enough for public justification, since A must sincerely believe that B has a good justification for X tout court, no ifs, buts, or taking premises as given.

But I’m not sure why we should accept that. A can think that the project of public justification is important because we must ensure that no individual has grounds to object against a political system in his or her own right. Contractualists believe that utilitarianism’s aggregative feature fails to take seriously the idea that individuals get to object to terms of association because of how it may unfairly impact their individual material conditions. I take it that one of the intuitions behind the project of public justification is to extend this idea to include reasonable moral beliefs in some way. Individuals can object to the coercive exercise of political power when it is not in some appropriate sense acceptable to them given their moral beliefs. When it is not reasonably acceptable to them, they have grounds to object in their own right.

But I don’t think that A will think that B has grounds to object against X just because A thinks that B’s premises are false, and hence don’t justify X tout court. The situations are different, but recall the discussion of the intolerant in TJ 35 — the intolerant have no title to complain about intolerance against them because one has title to complain only insofar as one’s complaint is compatible with principles one endorses oneself. If the putative complaint against X is that since Rb is false, the all-things-considered or unconditional justification of X via Rb must fail, then this is simply not a complaint that B is in a position to make. B must take responsibility for his own premises.

So this is the rough idea: If B fails to have a chain of beliefs that constitutes a sound argument for X, that is not A’s problem unless it provides B with grounds for complaint. But B’s belief that his premises do provide a sound argument for X removes those grounds. A can sincerely endorse X, and expect B to do so, because A can sincerely believe that there is a valid argument from Rb, etc., to X.*

*Ignoring the obvious truth that moral justification is not a matter of deductive validity.

I take it that a default presumption is the condition we think justified in the absence of some other policy being justified. Thus, if these policies fail to meet a burden of justification, then we revert to the default presumption. This may be too crude, but my understanding of the liberty principle is that it specifies a default presumption, such that if any coercive public policy fails to meet the very high standard of conclusive public justification, then we revert to a default assumption of liberty.

Now this is not an essential commitment of liberalism at all. A liberal theory must include, somewhere along the line, an important role for liberties, and accord those liberties a great deal of weight relative to other kinds of values (whether that amounts to lexical priority or not). But the liberty principle is much stronger than this.

Instead of the liberty principle serving to specify a default presumption, we could argue that nothing acts as a default presumption at all. Whatever the final set of arrangements, whether anarchy or command economy socialism or something in between, that set of arrangements must satisfy whatever the operative standard of public justification is set to be. Thus, no alternative should win because all the other alternatives lose. If every conceivable arrangement fails to satisfy the standard of public justification, then either we relax that standard of justification or we are left with an indeterminacy thesis of some sort. In contractualist stories, we’re not left with the state of nature as a baseline, but non-agreement.

Hi Kevin,

Thanks again for your detailed reply to my initial commentary. I have a few very brief comments in response, but I’d like to start with a small apology. We’ve just begun the first full week of term here in Manchester, and so I might not be able to find the time over the next few days for continued participation – I just didn’t want you or anyone else to think I was ignoring what has been a terrific conversation thus far. I’m also going to use this as my excuse for the very brief and tentative comments below. I’ll take your points in order.

1. First, you strongly caution against moralizing the notion of coercion. But I don’t think I’m the one moralizing the notion of coercion: you and Jerry are doing that. If we declare there is a strong presumption against some form of action, X, then X is a moralized concept since we’ve declared that it’s something not to be done except under unusual circumstances. I don’t think one can say there is a moral presumption against doing X, and maintain that X is not a moralized notion.

You also warn that if we moralize the concept of coercion then we are undermining the project of public justification. Public justification, you point out, is supposed to justify moral and political norms, but if we rely on already moralized concepts, then it seems like something other than public justification is playing a determining role in setting the moral and political norms. I don’t disagree with this point. As I see it, public justification does determine (at least) political rules. Only once we have these prima facie rules in place can we know what constitutes coercion. Any act that then appears coercive would stand in need of justification. Consider the following simple example. Until we know who owns that bit of property over there, we cannot know whether my statement ‘I’m going to destroy that bit of property unless you do as I say’ is a coercive threat or not. I agree that we must rely on the idea of public justification to determine who owns that bit of property, and I also agree that if the statement turns out to be a coercive threat, we must declare there is a presumption against the threatened action unless there is some further decisive public justification that can be provided.

2. I suppose I don’t think we can defend a presumption in favour of liberty on the grounds that it makes political decisions easier. If there is a presumption in favour of liberty in some domain or with regard to some set of actions, it must be because we have already weighed all the reasons that will usually be pertinent to that domain and decided that liberty looks to be the decisive value. You can’t get away from the problem of trade-offs or weighing values by stipulating a presumption in favour of one value since that presumption must itself have been justified by weighing all the relevant reasons.

3. You worry that if we abandon a unique presumption in favour of liberty then we might not have a liberal theory at all, but I don’t think we need to worry about that. We could have, for example, a theory where liberty, equality, and reciprocity were all important moral values, and that doesn’t mean the resulting theory won’t be liberal, rather it might be a form of liberal egalitarianism. To say that there must be a unique presumption of liberty in order to have a liberal theory sounds too strong to me. I think Rawls’s theory is egalitarian, for example, but there is no unique presumption in favour of equality in his theory.

4. Finally, with regard to Jerry’s position on the presumption in favour of liberty. I’ve heard Jerry talk about this, but I confess I’m still not sure I fully understand the distinction he’s driving at (this in no way implies that my lack of understanding is caused by Jerry’s lack of clarity. I’m sure my lack of understanding is my own fault!). Since I’m not sure I’ve yet got my head round the distinction, I think I’ll say very little about it right now. The only thing I will say is this. The presumption in favour of liberty does seem to work as a presumption within morality in your paper. The liberty principle, as it functions in your argument in defence of religious defeaters, means that a religious person can legitimately refuse to do what would be a demand of justice for a non-religious person, provided that religious person does in fact have a defeating reason within their belief-set. The presumption works in a way that means the moral demands on the religious citizen (Alf in the example from my commentary), are different (weaker) than the demands on a non-religious citizen who lacks any defeating reason. So I’m puzzled. But as I said above, I am also certain I’ve not yet grasped the full force of Jerry’s point here, so I’m sure there is more to this than I can see.

Thanks again for the thoughtful replies, and sorry that I might be out of touch for a couple of days.

***

Simon: thanks for your further thoughts on Rawls and the overlapping consensus. I’d like to briefly respond.

A key difficulty, I think, is that we have very differing views regarding the role of the overlapping consensus within Rawlsian political liberalism. I have to run off to class, so I’m afraid this will be far too brief, but I think the difference between us is that you are supposing the project of public justification applies to the task of securing an overlapping consensus on a political conception of justice. I, on the other hand, see public justification as applying only to the political discussions that occur between citizens who are already committed to certain fundamental political values and ideas (citizens as free and equal, society as a fair system of social cooperation, and the burdens of judgement). It is a commitment to those ideas (free, equal, fair, and burdens) that, for me, then activates the project of public reason within Rawlsian liberalism, and thus there is no public justification in the normal sense when we ask whether people should endorse those values in the first place. How people decide to become members of an overlapping consensus on those fundamental political values is not (in my perhaps unorthodox version of political liberalism) a matter of public justification, but rather a matter for what Paul Weithman calls ‘comprehensive public philosophy’ (see his paper ‘Liberalism and the Political Character of Political Philosophy). That stuff is, for me, something that falls outside the domain of public reasoning or justification within Rawlsian political liberalism. Obviously things are different in Jerry and Kevin’s theory, and that’s why they need to worry about whether people’s comprehensive doctrines are justified, but the sincerity requirement doesn’t apply in the same way within the Rawlsian framework.

Sorry, I realize that I probably haven’t managed to clarify my position there, but I have to run. Hopefully we can talk about it more later this week.

Hi Kevin,

Very interesting paper. I’m intrigued by the final section, the one that suggests that the public justifiability of laws is a criterion of institutional design but not a rule we want citizens themselves to apply. Do we have a name for this yet? indirect neutrality? Government house Kantianism? A bit disheartening, though, to discover yet another dimension of possible variation in conceptions of public reason.

I have a couple of comments, but I’m going to separate them into different posts. This comment is about consensus vs. convergence.

I’m not clear on the relationship between these two modes or models of public justification. Page 11: “To be sure, there is nothing wrong with a public justification built on consensus - that is one way a law might be publicly justified to all. But the aim of consensus tends to be frustrated…” This statement seems to suggest that convergence is the necessary general condition, and consensus the fortunate but not necessary special case. But that’s not right. Neither condition nests the other, because there can be consensus without convergence and convergence without consensus.

The way I see it, each approach makes a plausible objection to the other. The convergence objection to consensus focuses on a case in which we have convergence but no consensus. This is a case in which all qualified points of view converge for their various reasons on law L, but if one looks at the set of supporting premises they all accept, one can’t find a set of shared (i.e. public) reasons sufficient to justify L. So all reasonable people accept L, but because they do so for conflicting reasons, they can’t vote for L, on the consensus approach. That strikes me as counter-intuitive, despite Jon’s account of sincerity.

The consensus objection to convergence focuses on a case in which we have consensus but no convergence. That is to say, some qualified points of view reject L, but if one looks at the set of supporting premises all qualified views accept, there is a set of shared reasons sufficient to justify L. This strikes me as a counter-intuitive feature of the convergence view. Just because some reasonable comprehensive doctrine opposes L, we can’t vote for L, on the convergence view, even though there may be a good case for L based on premises that all qualified views accept.

This comment is about the issue of “religious defeaters”. First, I want to echo Simon’s point. The fact that I have a particular religious conviction may ground an exemption from a general law, but the religious conviction itself doesn’t justify the exemption. If a woman is asking for an exemption from a law demanding that she show her face (e.g. to vote), she may invoke the fact that she believe God wants women to cover up, and she does so as part of a claim of religious liberty. If the exemption was justified because God wants women to cover up, then a law forcing women to cover themselves would presumably also be justified.

That being said, I’m a bit puzzled at how this section fits with the general idea of convergence. Page 17: “Even if a secular rationale is necessary in our society for a publicly justified law, it can be defeated by a reasonable religious conviction without any secular backing”. The first part of that sentence refers to p.15: “[G]iven the contingent facts of contemporary Western society, if citizen Alf proposes L on purely reasonable religious grounds, for Alf to legitimately endorse L in the public sphere he must believe that there are grounds that plausibly justify L to reasonable non-religious members of the public” Isn’t the same true vice versa? If there are reasonable religious views and reasonable non-religious views, then all laws must have both religious and non-religious rationales; the religious are constrained to support only those laws that reasonable non-religious people support, and the non-religious are constrained to support only those laws that reasonable religious people support. Reformulating p.17, couldn’t we say ‘even if a religious rationale is necessary in our society for a publicly justified law, it can be defeated by a reasonable secular conviction without any religious backing’?

A final comment, about strict symmetry, on p.19, the beginning of 4.2. You are clearly right that we cannot require conclusive public justification for both action and inaction. If we demand conclusive justification, we need a default that obtains in the absence of such justification - a default that does not have to be invulnerable to reasonable objections, precisely because it is the option we default to when there are reasonable objections on either side. On a consensus approach, however, we could still insist that both reasons for and against action be public. Non public reasons against coercion are no more admissible than are non-public reasons for coercion, but if the balance of public reasons for and against is not so clearly in favour of coercion that it would be unreasonable to reject coercion, not-coercing wins, because it’s the default.

Hi Jon — I don’t know if your interpretation is unorthodox or not, because I don’t know if this particular point has received much elaboration in the literature. Probably there are some good papers I am forgetting.

The question as I see it is: what is it that makes public justification of a conception of justice in terms of public reason necessary in political liberalism? Why not settle for an overlapping consensus on a conception justice based on comprehensive premises? There are at least two different explanations of this necessity.

1. The first explanation is that there can’t actually be an enduring overlapping consensus from comprehensive premises on a conception of justice unless that conception of justice can also be justified in terms of public reason. Reasonable pluralism is just too broad and open-ended. We can always imagine some or other reasonable comprehensive moral doctrine that lies outside the proposed convergence, and sooner or later some reasonable citizen will espouse that doctrine. Since the conception of justice is to endure as the regulative conception of justice for a society across generations, we cannot rest content with a temporary convergence of the doctrines that happen to exist at the moment. One function of an argument for the conception within public reason is to demonstrate that all reasonable citizens have some reason to accept the conception, whatever their specific comprehensive doctrine may be.

I think this is a pretty good argument. If reasonable acceptability to each reasonable citizen is a requirement, if the asymmetry argument is not accepted, and if we are talking about a conception of justice that is to endure indefinitely, then I think we would need some sort of public justification cashed out in terms of something like public reason. (I don’t accept the first premise, but I think the rest of the argument works.)

2. Your explanation of the need for public justification in terms of political values is that an overlapping consensus from comprehensive premises would not be good enough as a justification of a conception of justice to each person. It would not be good enough since, even though they are reasonable beliefs, a whole bunch of those comprehensive premises would be false. Since they are false, they would not actually support the conclusion. Hence citizens who accept the conception of justice on the basis of those premises would not really be justified in doing so, and that triggers your sincerity concern. So a purely comprehensive overlapping consensus is in principle inadequate.

This second explanation is more demanding than the first, since it requires that there be actual, all-the-way-down, 100% genuine justification for each person to accept the conception of justice, and not simply that it be reasonably acceptable to reasonable citizens, whether or not they are genuinely justified, all the way down, in endorsing the conception.

But in addition to the grounds for objection issue I mentioned above, there is also the consideration that it may not be desirable to conceive of citizens motivating the project of public reason by appeal to the idea that the comprehensive doctrines of other citizens don’t really perform justificatory work. This seems to involve a presumption of mutual disdain at the level of comprehensive moral doctrines. This premises public reason on an essentially comprehensive moral claim, and one which will itself be controversial between comprehensive doctrines (imagine an ecumenical view that says that every reasonable comprehensive doctrine’s path to a liberal theory of justice is equally and entirely valid, and provides perfectly adequate justification for endorsement — I think you want to deny this view, but I don’t know if you can do that qua political liberal).

Simon, may I take you up on these two possible answers? I’m not sure that the answer you attribute to Jon accurately tracks his view as he’s given it in this discussion. And I think that Jon’s view (or one a bit like it if your attribution turns out to be accurate) may in fact escape your charges of demandingness and controversiality. (Jon, apologies if what I go on to say misrepresents you.)

What Jon has been contending, if I understand him, is that convergence models of public justification fall foul of a sincerity requirement (as expressed, for example, in the principle of justificatory sincerity). The requirement that public justification be articulated in terms of political values is not, then, grounded in the following supposition: that an overlapping consensus from comprehensive premisses would not be good enough as a justification of a conception of justice to each person because the falsity of some of those premisses would preclude their having justificatory power (this is the claim you attribute to Jon). It’s grounded instead as follows: that an overlapping consensus from comprehensive premisses would not be good enough as a justification of a conception of justice to each person because it’s not the case that each person in the overlapping consensus could sincerely believe that many of those premisses justified the imposition of the principles of the conception of justice on others, given her own comprehensive views.

Public reasons, intimately bound up with the “certain fundamental political values and ideas (citizens as free and equal, society as a fair system of social cooperation, and the burdens of judgement)” that Jon mentions, can by contrast provide justifications to each person, since each person in the overlapping consensus can sincerely believe that such reasons justify the imposition of principles of the supposedly justified conception of justice on others. Anyone offering such reasons in support of some conception is offering premisses which others take them to be justified in holding. This is so because the fact of the overlapping consensus guarantees that the fundamental political values and ideas which give rise to the conception of public reason are themselves shared by each person.

Now, you might worry that even if this solves the problem here, some version of the same problem will recur when we come to ask how the fundamental values and ideas are justified, since consensus members’ answers to this question will vary from comprehensive doctrine to comprehensive doctrine. How can one member of the consensus see another’s membership itself as justified? Another way to put the worry would be to say that it’s not clear that we can insulate justifications which start from the fundamental values and ideas from the justifications which get us to them in the first place.

I’m not sure what to say about these worries (I take Jon’s comment in #13 that this “is not … a matter of public justification, but rather a matter for what Paul Weithman calls ‘comprehensive public philosophy’” to be gesturing at one possible response), but in any case the position I’ve just outlined seems not to be at least obviously vulnerable to your charge of demandingness or to the objection that it presupposes mutual disdain among citizens.

It’s worth noting also this position is actually compatible with your first answer to the question why public justification in terms of public reason is necessary. It’s necessary because there can’t be the appropriate sort of stability (enduring stability for the right reasons) without it, as you say. But that seems to leave open a question about whether public reason should be conceived in terms of consensus justification or convergence justification. The point I take Jon to be making is that in fact this question isn’t left open: the need for public reason is a need for consensus justification, given the sincerity requirement. The convergence conception of justification doesn’t in fact give us a conception of public reason which will do the job at all.

Concerning sincerity, and the case in which A and B converge on law L for divergent reasons and disagree with each other’s derivation, i.e. A believes Ra and that Ra justifies L, while B believes Rb, that Rb justifies L, but that Ra does NOT justify L:

Doesn’t it make a difference whether B thinks the belief that Ra justifies L is unreasonable, or simply false? If A thinks B is unreasonable to think Ra justifies L, I can see a legitimate concern about convergence justification. Yes, we both agree on L, but A badly misunderstands the implications of his own view, and I (B) shouldn’t exploit that unreasonableness to put in place my own view. However, if B simply thinks {Ra justifies L} mistaken, but not unreasonably so, it would seem that in refusing to support L B is engaging in a kind of paternalism, a kind of substitution of judgment that A could object to, as Simon argued, along the lines of “It’s none of your business to decide for me whether my fundamental concerns support L. I think they do, and that should be good enough for you.”

Maybe the problem with convergence, as Kevin and Jerry articulate the idea, lies in its dependence on the existing range of views. Even if all existing reasonable doctrines support L, it may not be the case that all possible reasonable doctrines support L. Particularly if we’re designing the basic structure of society, which shapes aspirations as well as setting incentives, we may not be satisfied that no reasonable citizen currently objects; we may want to insist that no reasonable citizen could object, and I think this demand goes in the direction of the consensus interpretation that Jon favours.

Hi Tom

I was a bit sloppy and should rephrase my statement of Jon’s position. It isn’t that Arthur thinks that Benedict’s comprehensive premises are false, per se, but that he thinks they are unjustified for Benedict to hold. Since Arthur thinks Benedict is not justified in believing Rb, Arthur thinks Benedict is not ultimately justified in believing anything on the basis of Rb:

In order for A’s comprehensive doctrine CDa, to generate a sound justification for A to accept law L, it must be the case that A is justified in believing CDa. If CDa were unjustifiable for A to believe (suppose CDa were ‘I should always do whatever the little birdie outside my window tells me’), then it would also be unjustifiable for A to rely on CDa in justifying his acceptance of L. The same will hold for person B with regard to his doctrine CDb. Thus, in order for the convergence model to be consistent with PJS, it must be the case that all the members of the justificatory constituency view one another’s comprehensive or nonpublic doctrines as justifiable for their adherents to believe.

Since Arthur does not think that Benedict is ultimately justified in endorsing L on the basis of Rb (or “CDb” in the above), and since there is no other relevant consideration, the claim is that Arthur cannot sincerely believe that L is appropriately justified to each person. Instead Arthur must think that there is a good justification in terms of public reasons. Once there is some such justification, then Arthur can believe that Benedict is ultimately justified in endorsing L because Arthur can sincerely believe that each person is justified in endorsing the political values of public reason. This is my understanding of Jon’s objection.

The point I was making was not one about whether Benedict has good reason to accept the political values that serve as premises in a public justification. That’s a separate issue, albeit an interesting one. The point I was making concerns whether the deficiency in ultimate justification that Arthur believes characterises Benedict’s comprehensive argument for L is a good argument for thinking that consensus justification is necessary.

I’m not sure it is, for two reasons:
a. Arthur can sincerely believe that Benedict has no grounds to object to L, because L is perfectly compatible with, or even implied by, what Benedict reasonably believes. That Arthur thinks that Benedict is not justified in believing his wacky premises, and hence is not ultimately justified in endorsing L for those wacky reasons, does not imply that L is not reasonably acceptable to Benedict. Why should Arthur care whether Benedict does have a cogent ultimate justification for L though? One could think that what should matter to Arthur is whether Benedict has standing to object to L. If L is reasonably acceptable to him, arguably he doesn’t have grounds to object. Any further failure of ultimate justification is Benedict’s problem, not Arthur’s. Arthur doesn’t have a problem of sincerity with his view there because he doesn’t have to have a view there.

b. To defend a consensus account by appeal to the view that Arthur cannot sincerely think that Benedict has an ultimate justification for endorsing L because Arthur does not think that Benedict is justified in believing his comprehensive premises may presuppose a (disdainful) comprehensive view about the extent of justification within other comprehensive moral doctrines. I’m not sure about this reason though. It could be that the argument rests not on that disdainful view but simply on the claim that a reasonable person could endorse it, which is certainly possible. Nevertheless, it seems to me more political liberal in spirit to advance an argument that just says:

“Look, we have a bunch of reasonable doctrines around our society. Within the public sphere, it’s really none of our business whether other citizens endorse their comprehensive doctrines for justifiable reasons or whether they really are just plain wacky. That’s an after hours, private sphere sort of discussion. Instead, in the public sphere, we leave that issue off the table entirely, and simply ask whether any reasonable person, assuming their reasonable comprehensive moral doctrines as a given, is in a position to object to the laws or fundamental political arrangements of our society. If these laws and arrangements are implied by their comprehensive moral doctrines, then they are not. So an overlapping consensus from comprehensive doctrines would in principle suffice for stability for the right reasons, even if it does not thereby guarantee something that it is not our present business to worry about, i.e. each person’s ultimate philosophical justification for their endorsement of those laws. Boy, do we not want to go there. Our real problem is that since reasonable pluralism is so broad and since we are talking about an enduring arrangement here, we can only sincerely believe a stable overlapping consensus is possible if there is a public justification cashed out in terms of political values that we can expect reasonable citizens to endorse. Anything else would be a matter of luck, and luck will run out sooner or later.”

I’m not claiming that this sort of view is compatible with justificatory liberalism. Perhaps JL does involve the more demanding standard, in which case there may well be a sincerity problem there.

Hi,

This is just a very brief note to say that Tom has provided an excellent, and extremely helpful, re-statement and clarification of my reply to Simon.

Thanks Tom!

Kevin — you’re certainly right to point out that the religious accommodations in the two examples I gave impose costs on others. But I’m not sure why that should matter for you in either case, albeit for somewhat different reasons.

1. In the inoculation case, it’s true that the exemption imposes risks on third parties. But presumably, the religious believer would say: “I didn’t create the risk. It’s a natural risk of disease, and I’m simply unwilling to contribute to rescuing other people from it. I’m unwilling because it violates my deepest convictions to undertake medical care of this kind.” So I suppose I have two questions: (1) Does refusing to prevent risk to others count as coercing them? (2) If a public justification is victorious only when it defeats all other considerations, how can it do that here, when presumably nothing could defeat the religious objection, at least in the mind of the believer?

If the response to the second question is that religious believers must publicly justify imposing risks on others (or coercing them), what does the justificatory liberal say to the religious believer who rejects the Liberty Principle or the Principle of Public Justification (PPJ)? Although I’m not sure about this, stating that question leads me to think that justificatory liberalism presupposes something equivalent to an overlapping consensus on the Liberty Principle (and PPJ). There must be a consensus among all reasonable citizens on at least one shared premise, namely, that infringements on liberty must be publicly justifiable.

2. The second example is parental choice of education (which is suggested on p. 18-19 of your paper, including the reply to Macedo). I’m still not entirely sure how religious defeaters are supposed to factor into reasoning about this case. Why can’t parents raise religious objections to the state’s account of what is in their children’s best interests? Presumably, the state has a public justification for teaching children the skills they will need to participate in a democratic society, function in the market, etc. But on the asymmetry thesis, public justifications can be defeated by religious objections. If that’s incorrect, or if it’s displaced here by the demand for public justification when there is parental coercion against children, then I’m not sure where your paper was headed in the discussion of education. Maybe the thought is: we at least have to recognize the nature of the objection religious parents are making. We can’t claim they are being coerced for reasons they share, since they don’t share those reasons. They are being coerced for reasons that, on their view, are defeated. But that doesn’t seem like much consolation for them. Nor does it seem all that different from Macedo’s claim that those who would impose their religious views on others (including on their children) have to face up to the diversity of reasonable views in their society. And they have to do that by giving public justifications for their attempts to coerce others, including their children.

Kevin — on exemptions, the political liberal argument can go like this:

PL
1. A has a deeply held moral conviction that Xing is wrong.
2. People should not be forced to do things that contradict their deeply held moral convictions. Therefore:
3. A should not be forced into Xing.

Both of these premises can be shared by everyone. One states a fact about the world, in particular a fact about someone’s beliefs, and the other states a moral conviction that, arguably at least, could be part and parcel of a political liberal conception of liberty of conscience.

This PL argument is quite different from an argument that A might present:
A
1. Xing is wrong.
2. People should not be forced into doing things that are wrong. Therefore:
3. I should not be forced into Xing.

The reason why we should not cut out the middle man and go straight to the religious reason is because premise 1 may very well be false. If so, A’s a bad argument. (Not bad as in believed to be bad by the majority, rather just plain bad). But PL can still be a good argument.

On contractualism, what I find difficult to understand about the presumption of liberty is just what a world without coercion or authority would look like exactly. Is it a world where it’s ok if A walks into B’s living room, finds a book he wants to read, and then takes it off to read? Or is B allowed to use force to keep her front door closed? Who’s being coercive here? B pushing from the inside or A pushing from the outside?

As soon as we add much content to the story, I think we are going to end up specifying a regime of rights, e.g. “B is not the one using coercion because she’s the one who owns the book.”* That’s fine, it’s just that I don’t see why that particular regime of rights is not subject to the same demands of stringent public justification as any other regime. It shouldn’t get to win just because every other conception fails a public justification test. Hence I don’t think it’s odd to think of non-agreement as the default. Saying this does not imply that anyone has natural authority over anyone else at all.

*i.e. in short, what Jon said.

Hi Simon,

I think I understand Jon’s objection as you understand it, so we’re starting from the same point. You go on to say that you’re not sure that “the deficiency in ultimate justification that Arthur believes characterises Benedict’s comprehensive argument for L is a good argument for thinking that consensus justification is necessary”. I take this to be an elliptical summary of Jon’s argument, so just for clarity I set that argument out more fully as follows:

1. Arthur believes there to be a deficiency in Benedict’s ultimate, comprehensive doctrine-based justification for endorsing L—which justification would, on a convergence model, serve as part of a public justification of L (along with a bunch of other justifications based in other comprehensive doctrines).

2. Therefore Arthur can’t sincerely believe that L is justified to each person.

3. Every (reasonable) person has to believe sincerely that L is justified to each person if she is to endorse L herself (that is: it doesn’t suffice that her own comprehensive doctrine alone should give her grounds to endorse L).

4. Therefore Arthur can’t endorse L.

5. Since Arthur can’t endorse L, L isn’t justifiable to each person (to be justifiable to each person, presumably, a law must be such that each person can endorse it).

6. Therefore the convergence model of public justification fails to show that L is justifiable to each person; whereas a consensus model focused on public reasons, which will not fall foul of the sincerity requirement, may succeed.

Your first reason for thinking that even on a convergence model, Arthur can sincerely believe that Benedict has no grounds to object to L is that L is at least compatible with what Benedict reasonably believes—even though Arthur takes what Benedict reasonably believes here to be unjustified. That Arthur takes what Benedict believes here to be unjustified, you say, “does not imply that L is not reasonably acceptable to Benedict”. I agree with you about that. But I don’t think the question is about whether L is reasonably acceptable to Benedict. It’s about whether Arthur can see L as justifiable to each person. The contention is that he can’t if he takes of Benedict’s grounds for endorsement of L to be unsound in some sense.

You then offer (in the same paragraph) what I think is a different reason to suppose that convergence doesn’t threaten justifiability to each person, viz., that the sincerity requirement itself is too strong. You say:

Why should Arthur care whether Benedict does have a cogent ultimate justification for L though? One could think that what should matter to Arthur is whether Benedict has standing to object to L. If L is reasonably acceptable to him, arguably he doesn’t have grounds to object. Any further failure of ultimate justification is Benedict’s problem, not Arthur’s. Arthur doesn’t have a problem of sincerity with his view there because he doesn’t have to have a view there.

Funnily enough, this is the sort of thing that I’d be inclined to say with regard to ultimate justification for the fundamental political values and ideas. But I would be more reluctant to say it about public justification for laws and policies, because such justification needs shared frameworks for discussion and debate. It needs such shared frameworks because the public sphere is meant to be a place where society forges its path as a shared project, rather than a kind of huge ongoing compromise, and because of its role in shaping future generations. As I understand your picture of the convergence model, it doesn’t offer any such shared framework: rather, proposals are submitted and then vetoed or not vetoed, and that’s more or less the end of it (although presumably it’s permitted to point out when someone’s doctrine implies acceptance of some proposal although that person herself fails to see this).

It seems to me that roughly this objection to the convergence model is precisely what you offer at the end of your ‘more political liberal in spirit’ argument (from “Our real problem” onwards). That confuses me, because as I understand the first part of that argument (from “Look…” to “…do we not want to go there”) it’s entirely opposed to the picture that Jon and I are offering.

As for your official second reason for rejecting the anti-convergence argument—i.e. the worry about disdain—I’m not sure what to say. It’s just an aspect of the fact of reasonable pluralism that people who adhere to one reasonable comprehensive doctrine will take those who adhere to another to be mistaken, even if they’re reasonable. (That’s how an atheist, I take it, feels about a theist.) But if both sets of people are reasonable, that shouldn’t imply any disdain: the burdens of judgment explain how people can reasonably differ even though only one of them can, in many cases, have got the matter right. The problem with convergence justification is not that it involves public justification in terms of doctrines that are disdained by others, but that involves public justification in terms of doctrines that people who subscribe to competing doctrines just can’t see as capable of doing the justificatory work that’s required. To see them as so capable would be, in effect, to abandon the competing doctrines.

How does that sound?

In this discussion of the sincerity objection to the convergence account, we’ve been focusing on the case in which Arthur thinks Benedict’s reasons for supporting L don’t support L. Therefore Arthur can’t think L justified to Benedict, and so Arthur should not support L, contrary the convergence account. But consider a case in which Arthur and Benedict accept each other’s derivation of L from their respective comprehensive / non-public reasons, but do not share any reasons for L. Benedict supports L for reason Rb; Arthur rejects Rb, but recognizes that Rb supports L (and likewise for Benedict with respect to Arthur). Neither Arthur nor Benedict believes that there is a plausible justification of L based only on public reasons. But each recognizes that L is justified to the other given their respective comprehensive views. In this case, the consensus account says that Arthur and Benedict can’t support L, despite the fact that L follows logically from their respective doctrines. This may be an unrealistic or an infrequent example, where we have a convergence of conflicting comprehensive doctrines without significant shared reasons. But it is still a bit of a puzzle for the consensus view, I think, and an instance in which the convergence view seems to make more sense.