Respect for Persons and Public Justification

Gerald Gaus argues that respect for persons is not an independent ground for requiring that social morality must be publicly justified. Instead, respect is built into the structure of social morality, because social morality involves recognizing one another as sources of a moral summons to follow rules. So mutual respect for persons is a social achievement, not a requirement underlying morality. The authority of rules of social morality derives from this structural nature of social morality. But because one may face a gap between one’s individual moral reasoning and social morality, no particular rule of social morality, including rules about whether coercion is justified, necessarily overrides one’s own moral conclusions.

Rescuing Public Justification from Public Reason Liberalism

Public reason liberals from John Rawls to Gerald Gaus uphold a principle of public justification as a core commitment of their theories. Critics of public reason liberalism have sometimes conceded that there is something compelling about the idea of public justification. But so far there have not been many attempts to elaborate and defend a “comprehensive” liberalism that incorporates a principle of public justification. This chapter spells out how a principle of public justification could be integrated into a comprehensive liberalism, and it rebuts three objections: That the idea of public reason could not be sustained in a comprehensive liberalism, that public justification would lose its point (be it to provide stability, express respect, or form a community), and that the principle of public justification could not work on the right theoretical level. The chapter concludes that everything worthwhile about public justification can be extracted from public reason liberalism.

Shared intentions, public reason, and political autonomy

John Rawls claims that public reasoning is the reasoning of ‘equal citizens who as a corporate body impose rules on one another backed by sanctions of state power’. Drawing upon an amended version of Michael Bratman’s theory of shared intentions, I flesh out this claim by developing the ‘civic people’ account of public reason. Citizens realize ‘full’ political autonomy as members of a civic people. Full political autonomy, though, cannot be realised by citizens in societies governed by a ‘constrained proceduralist’ account of democratic self-government, or the ‘convergence’ account of public justification formulated recently by Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier.

The Value of a Non-Ideal

In The Tyranny of the Ideal, Gerald Gaus gives an extended argument on behalf of the “Open Society.” Instead of claiming that it is uniquely best from some privileged moral perspective, he argues for the Open Society by showing why it is acceptable to many perspectives. In this way, Gaus argues for a liberal market-based society in a way that treats deep diversity as a fundamental feature of social life. However, the argument falters at four important points. When taken together, these four problems significantly limit the significance of Gaus’s conclusions.

Arguing with the enemy

I consider the problem of political pluralism for (Rawlsian) political liberalism: that not everybody agrees on fundamental political principles. I critically examine three defenses of liberal principles in situations of political pluralism—the realist defense, the pragmatic defense, and Gerald Gaus’ “justificatory liberalism”—all of which I find wanting. Instead, I propose a dialectical approach to justifying political liberalism. A dialectical approach is based on engaging (ostensibly) contradictory positions through conceptual investigation of key concepts claimed by both sides. Through such dialectical engagement, I seek a way to deal with contradictions between liberal and non-liberal philosophies as conceptual issues, rather than as antagonisms beyond reason. The ambition is to contribute to a more robust liberalism capable of defending itself in contexts of political pluralism. As an example, I apply this dialectical approach to the disagreement between political Islam and political liberalism on the issue of public religion.

Too Much from Too Little

Chapter 4 remains on the offensive against liberal neutralism, as it contests the efforts by Gerald Gaus to ground his libertarian version of neutralism on supposedly thin and uncontroversial premises. As will be seen, those putatively thin premises in fact depend on a number of deeply controversial assumptions. Although at least some of those assumptions are very likely false, this chapter does not need to establish their falsity. Instead, the point will be to reveal that liberal neutralism in one of its most prominent and perceptive instantiations is fundamentally non-neutral. In addition, the chapter will expose the oddly asymmetrical reasoning through which Gaus argues against anarchism and in favor of private property.

Tethering II

Not all approaches to liberalism are equally so insistent about avoiding comprehensive foundations. This chapter examines two prominent examples: Gerald Gaus and Steven Darwall. Their chief problem is the direct politicization of ethics. Where with Nussbaum, Rawls, and Sen the tendency was to lose ethics in liberalism, here there is a tendency to lose liberalism in ethics. The result is the same, but it is necessary to do battle in both directions. Overall, the argument is that foundations matter, and Den Uyl and Rasmussen are working from, and offering one, that provides a viable alternative to standard models employed by Gaus and Darwall and others. Individualistic perfectionism is an alternative that does not require sacrificing either liberalism or ethics.