The Paradox of Public Reason: Undermining Legitimacy in Pluralistic Societies — Epoche B2
The Filter Before the Forum: Reasonableness, Public Reason and Legitimacy A complaint aimed at the wrong place The standard complaint against John Rawls's idea of public reason is that it silences people [1] . Citizens whose politics is shaped by a religious or philosophical doctrine are told that their deepest reasons do not count as public, must be translated into a thinner political idiom [2] , and thereby lose what mattered about them. If that is right, a device introduced to secure legitimacy would be corroding it. This essay argues that the complaint, as usually stated, is aimed at the wrong component of Rawls's theory, and that it survives only when re-aimed. The duty of civility and its proviso do not exclude anybody's reasons; the criterion of the reasonable does, and it does so before any question of public justification arises. The consequence is practical rather than merely tidy. Every remedy that critics propose — loosening the proviso, widening what counts as a public reason, sharing the labour of translation — operates on the duty of civility, and so cannot reach the citizens whose exclusion generates the alienation being complained of. Those citizens were filtered out one step earlier. The specific question is therefore: which part of Political Liberalism does the exclusionary work, and can the theory acknowledge that exclusion without conceding a legitimacy deficit? A Rawlsian can deny my answer, and the best denial is set out and answered below. What Rawls actually requires, and of whom Rawls's problem in Political Liberalism (1993) is set by a fact he takes to be permanent: free institutions produce reasonable pluralism, a plurality of conflicting comprehensive doctrines about the good and the true, none of which will disappear except by oppression. A political conception of justice for such a society cannot be built on any one of them. Public reason is his answer. It governs how fundamental political questions are settled, and it is much narrower than the complaint assumes in three ways that must be kept in view. First, in scope. Public reason applies to constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice — the structure of government, basic rights and liberties, the conditions of fair opportunity. It does not govern debate about agricultural tariffs or noise ordinances. Second, in place. In "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited" (1997) Rawls specifies the public political forum as three things: the discourse of judges, especially of a supreme court; the discourse of government officials; and the discourse of candidates and those who campaign for them. Everything else — churches, universities, associations, newspapers, ordinary conversation — is the background culture, where public reason does not apply at all. Ordinary citizens fall under the duty of civility only in the sense that when they vote on constitutional essentials they should be able to think of themselves as if they were legislators. Third, in what it demands. The wide view Rawls adopts in 1997 permits citizens to introduce their comprehensive doctrines into political discussion at any time, subject to a proviso: that in due course proper political reasons, and not comprehensive reasons alone, be given sufficient to support what the comprehensive doctrine was invoked to support. Rawls's own examples are the abolitionists and the civil rights movement, whom he says did not violate the ideal of public reason. Set against this, the picture of citizens forbidden to speak from conviction is not Rawls's view. A critic who attacks it is attacking a position the theory abandoned, and Rawls will simply agree that it would be objectionable. Where the exclusion is The real filter operates before any of this. Rawls's principle of legitimacy says that the exercise of political power is proper when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens, as free and equal, may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles acceptable to their common human reason. The justificatory debt is owed to reasonable citizens. Whether one is reasonable is settled by two conditions set out in Lecture II: a willingness to propose and abide by fair terms of cooperation given that others do likewise, and an acceptance of what Rawls calls the burdens of judgement. A citizen who fails these conditions is not answered by public reason; the theory owes her no justification she could accept, and her rejection of the constitutional settlement is not a defect in its legitimacy. That is not an oversight. It is what allows Rawls to claim that a well-ordered society is stable for the right reasons without having to satisfy everyone. Now notice what follows for the alienation objection. The citizen who feels dismissed because her convictions are unwelcome is, if she is reasonable, not dismissed: she may state those convictions in the forum, must supplement them in due course, and is under no constraint at all outside the forum. If, on the other hand, she holds that her doctrine's truth entitles it to be enacted whether or not others can reasonably endorse it, then she is unreasonable in Rawls's sense — and her exclusion is complete, prior, and untouched by anything the proviso says. The alienation the objection describes is real, but the duty of civility is not producing it. Why the relocation matters This is not a verbal point, because the two components have different remedies. Jürgen Habermas [3] , in his 2006 essay on religion in the public sphere, argues that Rawls's proviso imposes an asymmetric burden: religious citizens must split their reasons in two, while secular citizens carry no comparable load. His remedy is institutional — locate the translation requirement at the threshold of formal political institutions, and impose on secular citizens a corresponding duty not to dismiss religious contributions as irrational in advance. The remedy is well designed for the problem Habermas identifi