On Gaus section 19
I should preface these remarks with the proviso that I am simply a guest blogger for this section, filling in for someone who dropped out, and have been unable to follow the earlier discussion in the online reading group. For that reason, I am not as intimately familiar with the rest of the book as most of the other participants, so I fear that my remarks will reflect my poor grasp of the overall architecture of this most intriguing, but often forbidding, book. I also apologize in advance if I raise any issues that have already been thoroughly hashed out in earlier discussion.
Overview:
As I read it, section 19 attempts to lay down one of the foundation stones for GG’s larger effort to reconcile two apparently opposed ways of thinking about the authority of moral rules:
(1) the ‘instrumentalist’ (Hobbesian, Humean, Gauthierian) view that ‘social morality is necessary for human cooperation and social life’ and
(2) the ‘deontological’ (Rousseau, Kant, Strawson, Rawls, Darwall) view that moral requirements are irreducibly constituted by relations among agents who recognize their mutual standing as free and equal persons.
Earlier in the book, GG has said that ‘both are correct’ (193): social morality is both a ‘device’ of social coordination and a body of rules deriving its authority from its consistency with respect for the freedom and equality of all agents. In this section, GG starts to explain how they are integrated and, moreover, why both are necessary. According to GG, taking (1) more seriously than contemporary Kantians often do is the key to overcoming the threat of ‘indeterminacy’ that hangs over the public reason idea.
The ‘indeterminacy’ involved arises because there are, in principle, many alternative sets of moral rules that are consistent with the ‘rights of agency’ and the ‘abstract’ idea of ‘jurisdictional rights’ GG has defended in earlier chapters. Even if these general entitlements can be publicly justified, agents must still settle on a scheme of rules that all can regard as having requisite moral authority. Without such a settlement, it will be impossible to reach agreement on how exactly the more general entitlements of ‘free and equal’ persons should be interpreted in particular cases. Each of these more specific schemes of moral expectations is publicly justified, yet so far no one has sufficient reason to accept any of them as uniquely publicly justified.
One is tempted to suggest here that a uniquely publicly justified scheme can be identified only if it is selected by a collective decision rule that is itself publicly justified. The main point of this section is to deny that this ‘Procedural Justification Requirement’ (392) is necessary. This is good news, according to GG, because he appears to believe that that requirement is impossible to satisfy without resorting to highly artificial – and hence reasonably rejectable – redescriptions of the choice situation (as with Rawls’s Original Position).
In the body of the section, GG attempts to explain how it is possible for a uniquely justified set of social/moral rules to emerge automatically through interaction between agents who are at all times acting only on reasons that reflect their own commitments. To establish the possibility of such a solution, GG relies on a series of game-theoretic coordination models. These are intended to illustrate how the bare, even random, fact of convergence (within iterated interaction) on one of a pair of alternative moral schemes can be (1) an equilibrium solution and (2) in large N-person cases generate a bandwagon effect. As a result of iterated interaction, players in these games find themselves in situations in which they acquire sufficient reason to accept schemes of rules just because others have already opted for them; as more and more do so, we reach a point at which everyone has sufficient reason to go along with the option around which convergence is occurring.
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