Civic Friendship, Public Reason

For conversations or written comments concerning this paper, thanks to Paul Billingham, Mark Budolfson, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Luara Ferracioli, Sarah Hannan, Ben Miller, Blain Neufeld, Lachlan Umbers, Han van Wietmarschen, Chad Van Schoelandt, two anonymous editors at Philosophy and Public Affairs, and the students in Neufeld’s "Justice as Fairness: Justification and Application" seminar at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 1. This principle is broadly Rawlsian, characterized by its demand that citizens premise their political decisions on considerations that are deliberative common ground among their reasonable co-citizens (even if the conclusions reached by reasoning from these premises are sometimes controversial). I use “political liberals” to refer to theorists who understand the principle in this general way. Classic statements of political liberalism include Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1996); John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” University of Chicago Law Review 64, (1997): 765–807. For more recent systematic interpretation and defense, see Jonathan Quong, Liberalism Without Perfection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Paul Weithman, Why Political Liberalism? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Other theorists of public reason have endorsed competing understandings of mutual justifiability, often ones demanding that political conclusions be ones we could expect reasonable citizens to converge in accepting, regardless of whether these conclusions are supported by considerations drawn from reasonable citizens’ deliberative common ground. See, for instance, Gerald Gaus, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); Kevin Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation (New York: Routledge, 2014). My focus here is on offering a defense of political liberalism, so I don’t discuss these alternative views here. Subsequent talk of “public reason” should be interpreted as referring only to politically liberal understandings of the principle.