public reason

Jason Brennan (Georgetown) and I (Bowling Green) have put together a conversation on public reason/political liberalism and its treatment of religious contributions to public life (which would not have been possible without the help of the great folks over at Phil TV, especially David Killoren). In the video, I argue that there are relatively unexplored versions of public reason that are considerably friendlier to religious contributions to public life than public reason’s proponents and detractors believe. Jason presents me with a number of sharp challenges and observations.

Watch us here.

Overview of §22

Chapter VIII of Gaus’ book is entitled “The Moral and Political Orders.” Appropriately enough, it takes up the topic of the relationship between the moral and the political order. Section 22 deals with the place of political authority in a broader story about moral authority. Section 23 discusses coercion in relation to moral and political authority.

Section 22 (“The Authority of the State”) begins by contrasting Gaus’ position with that of the social contract tradition. The latter, Gaus argues, holds that “There is no role for social morality as a distinct and independent source of moral authority” (p. 450). In order to reject this position, Gaus examines what he calls the “Comparative Procedural Justification Principle,” which states that “If the Members of the Public have available two procedures for selecting from the optimal eligible set, O and P, and P is itself publicly justifiable, while O is not, P should be employed” (p. 450). This principle is weaker than the Procedural Justification Requirement, which he discusses earlier. The former, unlike the latter, does not demand a uniquely justified optimal principle; it just demands a publicly justifiable principle be used. Gaus agrees that certain institutional arrangements (basically, those of modern representative democracies) may be good ways to protect basic individual rights (p. 452). This is why “Constant included political rights among the rights of the moderns” (p. 452). But this is “insufficient to yield the justification of a system of governance,” because there are many possible institutional arrangements that might accomplish this goal (p. 455). Hence the Comparative Procedural Justification Principle “does not support political authority over informal social authority, for political authority too relies on informal social-moral authority—an evolution of a political-moral culture leading to the selection of one of a wide range of acceptable political systems” (p. 455).

Gaus then investigates the nature of political authority. Following Thomas Christiano, he distinguishes between three different ideas of political authority. The first, which Gaus endorses, recognizes that states have a blameless liberty to coerce people into obeying its rules. There are good reasons why reasonable people would endorse such rules. Any society will possess people who simply do not respond to moral rules (e.g., psychopaths). Such people can respond to strategic incentives, however, and so if the harms that violations of moral rules can produce are to be avoided, then the state ought to have permission to align incentives appropriately (through threats and, presumably, offers; p. 463). Second, the state has the ability to push people (i.e, through incentive alignment) to participate in a particular moral equilibrium. Gaus holds that in doing so, the state is doing more than just providing a focal point upon which people can coordinate. For “the authority of the state allows us to make the implicit claim that should there be controversy or uncertainty about our claim, there is an authoritative answer that we all have reason to endorse”—the answer provided by the state (p. 466). I’m not really clear on what Gaus is driving at here, but it seems to be a second-order claim that the dictates of the state in resolving conflicts about moral equilibria creates a distinct moral reason for endorsing the resolution. It’s not just that the equilibria would in fact be an equilibria, and that it seems to be the one everyone is moving (thanks to the state) to accept. In addition, there is a moral obligation to do what the state says when it tries to do this. Without this additional moral obligation, the state is serving merely as a focal point, for everyone except psychopaths unable to respond to moral reasons. The third notion of authority is the idea that states have a “right to rule” (p. 468). Gaus takes this idea to mean that when states create rules, people have obligations to the states themselves to obey them. Gaus rejects this idea, and claims that whatever obligations people have to obey moral rules is owed to their fellow citizens. This is compatible with my interpretation of Gaus’ second notion of political authority; one can believe both that it is morally wrong not to accept the moral equilibria generated by states, and that if I commit this moral wrong, I am wronging my fellow citizens, not the state itself.

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I summarized Section 14 in a previous post; here I raise some critical points about the question of whether public justifiability should include a shared reasons requirement, and how this relates to sincerity in public deliberation.

Gaus rejects the requirement that deliberators deliberate in terms of shared reasons. To be a bona fide moral rule, a rule must be endorsed by each and every member of the appropriately (i.e. partly) idealized public, each based on the total set of reasons he or she accepts. “Mutual intelligibility” requires only that these personal evaluative standards pass some threshold of plausibility such that they can be generally recognized as genuine moral perspectives. But members of the public will still think that many of the reasons their fellows appeal to are bad reasons. They also think that this use of bad reasons for the assessment of moral rules is appropriate. In intellectual argument each will criticize the other for accepting bad reasons, and argue that others ought to change their views. When it comes to determining what count as valid moral rules, however, everyone accepts that each will assess proposed rules based on his or her own evaluative standards, and that rules will count as valid only if they meet with the unanimous approval from these diverse perspectives.

An alternate view would be that deliberators accept that they are to deliberate only on the basis of the reasons they share. What is wrong with the shared reasons view? Gaus’s answer in Section 14.4 (d) comes in the form of a response to Jon Quong’s argument for the shared reasons view.¹ Quong’s argument is based on the requirement that public reasoning be sincere. I will explain the dispute, then briefly argue that the underlying issue isn’t really about sincerity.

Insincere deliberation may be justified in some circumstances, but it is pro tanto morally bad because it makes public reasoning into a form of manipulation. If I argue that your beliefs commit you to supporting a particular proposal even when I don’t think they do, then I am not respecting your capacity for rational moral agency; I am treating you as a thing to be moved, not a person to be reasoned with. Conversely, sincerity in public reasoning expresses respect, helping to sustain civic friendship. Quong formulates the idea of sincerity in public justification in terms of three conditions, involving persons A(lf) and B(etty) and a proposal X.

1. A reasonably believes he is justified in endorsing X,
2. A reasonably believes that B is justified in endorsing X (…)
3. A may only… offer arguments in favour of X to B that he reasonably believes B would be justified in accepting.²

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1. Jonathan Quong, Liberalism Without Perfection, OUP 2010, Chapter 9 “The Scope and Structure of Public Reason” [↩]
2. Gaus cites the first two of these conditions on 288. All my quotes from Quong are from Chapter 9 of from Liberalism Without Perfection [↩]

This post provides an overview of Section 14 and explains the relationship of this section with previous sections; I make some critical comments in separate posts linked below. I hope I haven’t gone overboard, in terms of the total length of the posts, but section 14 is important because it lays the groundwork for Jerry’s conception of public justification. At the same time, it is the conclusion of the previous 100 or so pages of argument about the moral emotions. So I want to summarize the main claims of section 14, but also explain how they follow from earlier sections. And of course I have some questions and criticisms.

Overview

Section 14 defines the “Basic Principle of Public Justification” (BPPJ) and lays out “the deliberative model” that specifies the principle. The BPPJ provides a necessary condition for a moral imperative to be authoritative. The assumption is that an imperative “?” is made in a particular context C based on a rule L. The condition is (1) that each normal moral agent has sufficient reasons to internalize L and hold that L requires ? in circumstances C, and (2) that moral agents do generally conform to L.

The BPPJ provides a rule-based standard for assessing particular moral demands in context, and so has as one of its components a criterion for determining when a rule counts as a bona fide moral rule; each and every normal moral agent must have sufficient reasons to internalize the rule. The idea of a normal moral agent (NMA) has figured in Gaus’s earlier discussions of moral psychology. A person is a moral agent if they have the capacity to understand and care about following social rules for its own sake; such an agent is normal if they have the cognitive capacities of a fully-functioning but still boundedly-rational human being. Thus some people do not qualify as NMAs, either due to lack of cognitive capacity (young children, severe mental disabilities) or lack of ability to internalize rules (young children, psychopaths). The reasons an NMA “has” are not the reasons there truly are, nor simply the reasons that agent thinks she has. On the one hand, Gaus argues that there is no point in saying that I “have” a reason if it is completely inaccessible to me, given my epistemic situation. On the other hand, he accepts that I have a reason not to cross the bridge in front of me even if I don’t think I have such a reason, if a reasonable amount of investigation and reflection would reveal the bridge to be unsafe (234-6). The reasons a NMA has are thus the reasons she would have if she engaged in a respectable amount of good reasoning based on what she currently believes (summarizing 250).¹

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1. For doubts about the idea that we have reasons that we would recognize if we deliberated more, see Alexander Moon’s comment to the previous installment of the discussion group [↩]

Hello all. I’ve recently published an article that may be of interest to readers of Public Reason, in particular those of you who are interested in questions relating to the normative status of political authority. I’m currently planning a sequel to the piece in which I expand upon some of the central arguments, so I would greatly appreciate some feedback, if any of you could spare the time. A brief summary follows.

The article begins with an interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought that emphasizes his preoccupation with genealogy as a critical method and his insistence that modern forms of political authority pose a peculiar threat to the emergence of the sovereign individual. In the second section of the article, I distill these reflections into a theory about legitimate political authority. My argument is that there are certain requirements that govern the accounts that state officials may give in order to justify their decisions to citizens. I derive these requirements from a series of thought experiments and call them the requirements of legitimate political reasoning. They are: (1) the requirement of right reasons, that is, publicly offered reasons must track the reasons that were actually operative in the decision-making behind closed doors; (2) the requirement of procedural propriety, that is, the account must not appeal to reasons that are inappropriate or extraneous to the decision in question; and (3) the transparency of reasons requirement, that is, within reasonable limits, the account should consist of the full set of reasons that are appropriate to the decision in question, without any concealment of reasons for political purposes.

I then apply these requirements, by way of example, to several controversial political contexts: the Iraq war, Israel’s ground assault on the Gaza Strip known as Operation Cast Lead, and the recent reclassification of cannabis in the criminal law of the United Kingdom. The overall thrust of the argument is that when political decision-makers make public pronouncements in defense of their actions which do not conform to these requirements, citizens are entitled to resist the reasoning of the state as illegitimate. In such cases, what citizens discover is that the state is attempting to coerce them without proper authority. The theory is Nietzschean in spirit, since it takes seriously the threat to individual autonomy posed by the operation of the modern state apparatus itself, and is genealogical in orientation, asserting that an investigation into the origins of a political decision might help impugn it at an epistemic level. It thereby arms the citizen with a critical weapon with which to challenge the authority of the state.

The article, entitled “Nietzsche, Genealogy and Political Authority,” can be found in the January 2011 edition of the journal Polity. Click here.

In chapter 15 of The Idea of Justice, “Democracy as Public Reason,” Sen defends the idea that democracy is a universal value. Can democracy flourish outside the west? One reason for thinking it can’t is that it (supposedly) has never done so before. To answer this charge, Sen distinguishes between the “institutional structure of the contemporary practice of democracy,” which is “largely the product of European and American experience over the last few centuries” (pp. 322-323), and the political ideals that underlie it. By the former, Sen seems to have in mind the institutions of electoral conflict (competitive elections, secret ballots, political parties, etc.). But these institutions, Sen argues, are simply the latest effort to institutionalize certain fundamental ideals, ideals of “political participation, dialogue and public interaction” (p. 326). These ideals, Sen suggests, are well-nigh universal in their appeal. But once one sees that the institutions are of use primarily as means to the realization of deeper ideals, then one has reason to avoid running the former and the latter together. In particular, one should not assume that because a certain type of institutional structure is up and running (i.e., there are elections, the votes are counted properly, the loser concedes power to the winner) that a satisfactory level of democracy has been achieved. This has been done by many comparativists, such as Sam Huntington. To do this is to focus (once again) on niti to the exclusion of nyaya.

Sen believes that an overly-institutional focus on democracy has caused particular trouble at the global level. John Rawls and Thomas Nagel may be right that there are no democratic global institutions–indeed, no institutions at all comparable to states. But this need not mean that there is no way to realize democratic ideals such as public discussion internationally. There already exist tentative practices of global deliberation, and they are worthy of support and encouragement, whatever the proper scope and limits of international institutions.

Of course, globalized public deliberation is only conceivable if the ideal of public dialogue has universal appeal. Sen believes that this ideal does have deep roots all around the world, including in areas that have little experience with popular elections. Of course, Sen also suggests that the divide between western and nonwestern experiences with democratic institutions is not as clearcut as the democracy-is-a-western-value story would have it. India was inspired by ancient Greece to experiment with formal democratic institutions (at least on a local level) long before the barbarian tribes of northern Europe. But societies have undeniably assigned value to public reason–the ideal underlying these institutions–for a very long time, and virtually everywhere. Sen illustrates this point using the Indian experience. He also discusses the Middle East in this context.

Sen concludes the chapter with a few words about the role of the media in a democratic society. (The transition to this topic is a bit abrupt.) Obviously, to the extent that the idea of public reason underlies and democratic practice, the media matters quite a lot. Sen argues that a well-functioning free press 1) enables the free expression of ideas, which is intrinsically valuable; 2) spreads information and subjects it to critical scrutiny; 3) protects the weak by subjecting the strong to the gaze of the public eye; 4) facilitates the formation of common values by the public; and 5) contributes to the pursuit of justice (though this last contribution is not clearly specified).

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