Public Reason: Deliberation or Delimitation? — Epoche B2
What Public Reason Excludes Is Not Religion The problem the idea was built to solve A modern democracy contains citizens who disagree, permanently, about what makes a life worth living. Some are Catholics, some utilitarians, some Kantians, some hold no systematic view at all. Rawls calls such systematic views comprehensive doctrines [1] , and calls the permanence of their disagreement the fact of reasonable pluralism . His claim in Political Liberalism is that this disagreement is not a defect to be corrected [2] . It is what free institutions produce, because the same faculties of judgement, exercised honestly, lead reasonable people to different conclusions. The reasons are what he calls the burdens of judgement : evidence is conflicting and hard to assess; even when we agree on the considerations we weigh them differently; our concepts are vague at the edges; our differing life histories shape how we assess evidence; and any complex question presents normative considerations on more than one side. None of these is a failure of rationality. So no comprehensive doctrine will ever win, and a state that enforced one would be coercing people on grounds they could reasonably reject. From this Rawls derives his principle of political legitimacy: the exercise of coercive political power is proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution whose essentials all citizens might reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles acceptable to their common human reason. Public reason is the reasoning that satisfies that condition. It draws on political values — equal liberty, fair opportunity, the general good understood politically — and on shared standards of inference and evidence, rather than on any one comprehensive doctrine. What the constraint binds, and what it does not Two limits on the idea's scope are often missed, and both matter for what follows. First, public reason governs a specific arena. Rawls calls it the public political forum: judges giving opinions, officials acting in office, candidates and their agents campaigning. It does not govern what he calls the background culture — churches, universities, newspapers, associations, conversation. A citizen may argue in any terms whatever in the background culture, and Rawls says so explicitly. The picture of public reason as a rule of etiquette policing all civic speech is not his. Second, and more importantly, public reason constrains justification , not discussion. Its subject matter is limited to constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice — the structure of government, the basic rights and liberties, who votes and on what terms — and its point is that coercive law on those matters must be justifiable to those it coerces. What is under discipline is the class of considerations that may be offered as grounds for using state power. Religion is admitted, on terms The dispute that dominates the literature concerns religious citizens, and it is worth seeing how much room Rawls in fact gives them. Under what he came to call the wide view of public political culture, comprehensive doctrines may be introduced into political discussion at any time, provided that in due course proper political reasons are also presented, sufficient on their own to support what the doctrine was said to support. That condition is the proviso. The proviso is a translation requirement, not an exclusion. A citizen who opposes a policy on scriptural grounds may say so, and must also be able to state a case in terms of political values. Rawls thought this was satisfied by the abolitionists and by the civil rights movement, and he says as much: their religious arguments were offered in circumstances where the political values they supported were not being honoured, and a society that had heeded them would have realised those very values. He designed the view partly so that it would return that verdict. So the boundary that public reason draws does not run between the religious and the secular. A religious premise crosses it with a translation. The question worth asking is what has no such route across. The clause that actually excludes The answer is in Rawls's account of what public reason may appeal to besides political values. In the lecture on public reason in Political Liberalism he specifies the evidential materials: the presently accepted general beliefs and forms of reasoning of common sense, together with the methods and conclusions of science — when these are not controversial. That final qualification is doing an enormous amount of work, and nothing in Rawls attaches a proviso to it. A religious premise may enter and be redeemed later by a political reason. A contested empirical premise has no equivalent path. If the science bearing on a question is disputed, the disputed part is simply unavailable as a ground for coercive law on constitutional essentials, and there is no translation that rescues it, because the problem is not the premise's provenance but its contestedness. Consider a genuine constitutional essential: whether a given system of campaign finance secures what Rawls calls the fair value of the political liberties, so that citizens of similar talent and motivation have roughly equal chances of influencing political outcomes irrespective of wealth. Rawls treats the fair value of the political liberties as a constitutional essential, so this is squarely within public reason's subject matter. But whether a particular regime of spending limits produces that result is a question of contested social science. The political value is shared; the causal claim needed to apply it is not. Under the constraint as stated, the disputed causal claim cannot be offered as the ground of legislation, and the shared value alone settles nothing. The same structure recurs across the questions where the stakes are highest. Public reason handles disagreement about the good far more gracefully than it handles disagreement about the fac