Public Reason, Coercion, and Overlapping Consensus

Abstract

The idea of public reason involves a standard of legitimacy that requires that laws and institutions be acceptable to all reasonable people, regardless of their conceptions of the good. Many philosophers have argued that public reason should be understood as an answer to the question of how to justify state coercion. However, some authors have criticized this traditional account because it overlooks noncoercive state actions that seem appropriate topics of public reason. More recently, some philosophers have defended the traditional account against that objection. In this paper, I argue that these approaches cannot effectively deal with that objection and offer a different version of the traditional account that can do so. This version rests on the ideas of overlapping consensus and stability. According to this version, the point of public reason is preserving an overlapping consensus on a coercive system of laws and institutions and achieving a stable society.