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The Role of Public Reason*

Jonathan Quong
October 10, 2015

We disagree about how to live. We disagree, for example, about which God, if
any, to worship, about sexual morality, about recreational drug use, and about
whether certain artists work is obscene and should be banned. There are always
some people who aim to resolve these disagreements through the use of
coercion: they aspire to use the coercive power of the state to impose their views
about how we ought to live on those who disagree. Liberals typically reject this
approachthey hold that its wrong or impermissible to use coercion to impose
ones views about religion or the good life on those who disagree. Some believe
this liberal attitude is best explained by a particular view of public reason. In the
most general sense, public reason requires that the moral or political rules that
regulate our common life be, in some sense, justifiable or acceptable to all those
persons to whom the rules purport to apply. Some liberals appeal to a particular
version of this idea to explain the wrongness of coercively imposing ones views
about how best to live:

Coercion: Coercion (defined broadly to include conditional threats or the
actual use of physical force) is only permissible or legitimate when
exercised on the basis of reasons that the subjects of coercion can

I presented a version of this paper to Joseph Razs seminar at Columbia, and Im very grateful to
Joseph and all the other participants for their penetrating comments and questions. Thanks also
to Tom Sinclair and Rebecca Stone for detailed comments on an earlier draft.
*

reasonably be expected to endorse. Coercion is, in this way, specialother

methods of influencing people do not stand in need of public justification.

The role of public reason, on this view, is to regulate the use of coercion. Thomas
Nagel and Charles Larmore, among others, endorse versions of this principle.

But some think this principle doesnt go far enough. They argue for a

more expansive view of public reason as regulating all of social morality:

Social Morality: Moral demands only have authority over others when
made on the basis of reasons that the subjects of the demands can
reasonably be expected to endorse. All interpersonal moral rules or
demands thus stand in need of public justification.

Gerald Gaus is the main proponent of this more expansive view of public
reasons role.

I believe both these views are mistaken. The former is too narrow, while

the latter is too broad. Coercion is not the only thing that stands in need of public
justification, but public reason is not so expansive as to regulate the whole of
social morality. Instead I defend an alternative account of public reasons role.
Every well-functioning society depends on a set of widely accepted rules that
define the terms on which we interact with one another. These terms include an
account of individual rights and liberties, an account of how political power can
be obtained and exercised, and an account of how the distribution of property
and other advantages and disadvantages arising from our society is to be
determined. Although there may be many other social or moral rules, these basic
rules are typically recognized as having priority over other considerations, and
whatever differences there are between persons, these are the rules to which all

persons are expected to adhere. I argue that the role of public reason is to
regulate the content of these rules, that is, to define the terms of public or social
justice.
The paper is structured as follows. Section I briefly sketches some key
issues for proponents of public reason. Sections II and III analyze, respectively,
Coercion and Social Morality. Section IV presents my account of the role of public
reason, Justice, and section V addresses some objections.
But before turning to the main arguments, let me make a few clarificatory
remarks. First, the main topic of this paper is the role of public reason, by which I
mean the purpose or function of public reasonwhat its supposed to do. But,
unsurprisingly, any view about the role of public reason will have implications
for other closely related questions. For example, the role of public reason is very
closely linked to the scope of public reason, that is, the range of topics to which
the constraints of public reason must directly apply. Ones view about the role of
public reason is also likely to be tightly connected to the issue of public reasons
moral basis: the underlying justification for public reason.
Second, and relatedly, this paper does not provide a comprehensive
defense of the idea of public reason, nor does it address many of the other
important questions relevant to a full account of public reason. Of course I hope
that my account of public reasons role is helpful in showing why the idea of
public reason is compelling, and why certain prominent objections pressed
against it are not necessarily successful, but this paper doesnt aim to persuade
those who see the idea of public reason as fundamentally misguided.

I
The idea of public reason is rooted in a particular view of persons as free and
equal. We are free in the sense that no person is our natural ruler or moral

superiorno person is naturally in a position to command our obedience or tell

us how we must live. We are equal because we are each free in this way. How
then, can it ever be permissible or legitimate for some people to require that
others conform to some rule, or even use coercion to enforce particular rules? Of
course this question would not be difficult if we were always in agreement about
what to do and how to live, but in the face of deep and permanent
disagreement,1 how can any interpersonal rules (I use this term as a placeholder,
for now, in order to be neutral regarding the role of public reason) be consistent
with the freedom and equality of persons?

Proponents of public reason believe rules can be consistent with the

freedom and equality of persons when those rules are, in some sense, acceptable
or justifiable to all those to whom the rules purportedly apply. Exactly why rules
that meet this standard are consistent with the freedom and equality of persons
is the subject of dispute amongst proponents of public reason, and I will
postpone any further discussion of this question for now. Instead I want to make
a few brief observations about public reason that will be useful for the discussion
to follow.

First, proponents of public reason do not take people as they are. Real

people may make simple inferential errors, they may hold morally repugnant or
irrational beliefs, or they may be driven by narrow self-interest or prejudice.
Proponents of public reason thus always engage in a certain amount of
idealization. The constituency of persons to whom rules must be acceptable or
justifiable can be idealized epistemically, morally, or both. The challenge for

All accounts of public reason make some assumption about the permanence of pluralism or
disagreement regarding religious, philosophical, and ethical ideas. Proponents of public reason
also typically assume that this disagreement is reasonable in the sense of being the result of
sincere and conscientious efforts of reasonable and rational people to reach answers about
religion, morality, and ethics under free conditions, rather than being the product of prejudice,
irrationality, or narrow self-interest.
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proponents of public reason is not difficult to anticipate. The more one idealizes
the constituency of persons to whom the rules must be justifiable, the easier it
will be to get determinate results that also seem attractive, but this may come at a
steep cost: highly idealized accounts of the constituency may seem so detached
from what real persons are like that it may be unclear in what sense the resulting
rules are really acceptable or justifiable to the actual persons who are bound by
them. Alternatively, accounts of public reason that engage in very limited
degrees of idealization may seem to have greater application to people as they
are, but such accounts may struggle to yield any determinate rules that are
acceptable to everyone while also being consistent with minimal moral
standards. I will return to this issue in the concluding section.

This issue of idealization is closely connected to what it means for a

proposed rule to be acceptable or justifiable. If the constituency of persons to

whom our rules must be justifiable is sufficiently idealized, then public reason
may entail that all successful justifications are unanimous; if a rule has been
justified to one member of the constituency it will be justified to all since all
members have been idealized to the point where they share the same set of
beliefs and priorities. But accounts of public reason that engage in less
idealization may not have this featureif each real person to whom some rule
applies is only moderately idealized, then a given rule may be justifiable or
acceptable to some members of the constituency, but not others.
Relatedly, accounts of public reason that engage in less idealization are
more likely to allow for convergence forms of public reason. Some rule, R, has
been justified via convergence when R is acceptable or justifiable to different
members of the constituency for entirely different and non-shared reasons. For
example, R might be justifiable to A on the basis of As Catholicism, whereas R
might be justifiable to B on the basis of her utilitarianism, and so on. Consensus

accounts of public reason, by contrast, are those that require the reasons in
support of a given rule to be ones that all members of the constituency recognize
as sound considerations that are, at a minimum, plausibly sufficient to justify R.
The issues Ive just described are by no means the only areas of dispute
amongst those who favor some version of public reason, but they are central
areas of disagreement, and their relevance will hopefully be apparent in the
discussion that follows.

II
Lets return to the first view about the role of public reason:

Coercion: Coercion (defined broadly to include conditional threats or the
actual use of physical force) is only permissible or legitimate when
exercised on the basis of reasons that the subjects of coercion can
reasonably be expected to endorse. Coercion is, in this way, specialother
methods of influencing people do not stand in need of public justification.

This view can explain many core liberal convictions, in particular, why it
is wrong to use the coercive power of the state to enforce particular moral or
religious views on dissenting minorities. Coercion might also appear consistent
with our attitudes towards non-coercive behavior. For example, though it would
be wrong for me to coerce you on the basis of religious beliefs that you do not
share, it does not seem similarly objectionable for me to refuse to marry you on
the basis of religious beliefs that you do not share, or for me to give my money to
charitable organizations that share my religious convictions and refuse to give it
to those that do not. Because the latter actions are not coercive, I can legitimately
be guided by my own controversial religious views in deciding what to domy

actions do not need to be grounded in reasons that others can reasonably be

expected to endorse.2
But while Coercion may cohere with many liberal convictions, it faces a
number of serious problems.3 What these objections demonstrate is not that
coercion does not stand in need of public justification, but rather: (i) coercion is
not the only thing that stands in need of public justification, and (ii) proponents
of Coercion have failed to identify a compelling and coherent rationale for
restricting the role of public reason to coercion.
To begin, there are various examples where Coercion has apparently
troubling implications.4 Suppose our country has a state-run lottery, and the
profits from the lottery are used to subsidize the Catholic Church and Catholic
charities. The rationale offered for this policy is that Catholicism is the one true
religion. The funds are not coercively obtained, but I think many of the same
liberals who object to the coercive imposition of religious views will find this use
of the lottery funds to be seriously objectionable, even if less troubling than
outright coercion. Or imagine a society where laws are debated and determined
democratically, but all citizens always internalize and voluntarily comply with
the rules issued by the government even when they believe them to be deeply
mistaken or lacking a coherent rationale. They do so because they believe they
are required either as a matter of justice or legitimacy to comply with a
democratic governments demands. Since these rules will be followed as a result
of internalization rather than via the threat of coercion (there is no police force or
penal system), proponents of Coercion must deny that the fundamental

My actions might still, of course, be open to criticism, even if they are permissible.
For other critiques of Coercion see Colin Bird, Coercion and Public Justification, Politics,
Philosophy, & Economics 13 (2014), 189-214; or Andrew Lister, Public Reason and Political Community
(London: Bloomsbury, 2014), chapter 3.
4 These examples are from my On the Idea of Public Reason, in A Companion to Rawls, Jon
Mandle and David Reidy, eds. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 272-273.
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institutions, rights, and laws in this imagined society ought to be regulated by

the idea of public reason.
I think these examples provide reasons to doubt that Coercion is correct,
but such examples are not decisive. Proponents of Coercion can respond by biting
the bullet, and insist that public reason does not apply in these cases. They might
also argue that other moral principles can explain whats wrong with the
governments behavior in the first case, or why our imagined non-coercive state
ought to abstain from passing laws that depend on controversial moral or
religious rationales. I have my doubts about these replies on behalf of Coercion,
but since I think there are deeper problems, I wont pursue this line of argument
further.
A second problem emerges when we try and identify which acts or rules
qualify as coercive, and why there should be a presumption that such acts or
rules are impermissible unless publicly justified.5 Consider the following cases:

Albert Gets a Date: Albert tells Betty that unless she agrees to go on a
date with him, he will destroy a painting that belongs
to Betty, a painting that she loves very much, but
which has no market value.

Carl Gets a Date:

Carl tells Debra that unless she agrees to go on a date

with him, he will destroy a painting that belongs to
Carl, a painting that Debra loves very much.

I originally developed this objection in an online commentary I offered on a paper by Kevin
Vallier and Gerald Gaus. See: http://publicreason.net/wp-content/PPPS/Fall2008/JQuong1.pdf
5

Most will agree that Alberts action is coercive: threatening to destroy someone
elses property unless they do something that they otherwise would not do
seems like a paradigm case of coercion. But what about Carls behavior? I suspect
that many people will deny that Carls behavior is coercive in the same way. If
Carls attempt to get a date with Debra is not coercive in the way that Alberts is,
this seems to show that our beliefs about whether a given action is coercive
depends on our prior beliefs about rights or justice. If Carls action is not
coercive, it must be because Carl, unlike Albert, is acting within his rights. He is
only in threatening to destroy his own painting, not someone elses. Determining
whether or not someone is acting within his rights thus might seem to be one of
the variables necessary to decide if an act is coercive.
This pair of examples poses a dilemma for proponents of Coercion. On the
one hand, a proponent could agree the first case is an instance of coercion, and
the latter is not, and thus only the former is regulated by public reason. This
response effectively concedes that coercion is a moralized notionthat we
cannot know whether something is coercive until we already have a substantial
set of background beliefs about justice and individual rights. But to make this
concession seems fatal to Coercion since it precludes public reason from playing
any role in determining the content of all those individual rights and principles
of justice that are prerequisites for understanding whether a given act or rule is
coercive. On this view, public reason would seem to arrive far too late in the
justificatory process to play the sort of substantive role attributed to it by
proponents of Coercion. Any apparently coercive policy could be justified by
appeal to a controversial religious or ethical doctrine, and declared exempt from
the standards of public reason by virtue of the fact that the policy determines

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what rights individuals possess, and thus is not coercive in the relevant
moralized sense.6
On the other hand, the proponent of Coercion could insist that the two
examples are in fact analogous; that Carl, just like Albert, is guilty of trying to
obtain a date via coercion. On this view coercion could be defined by reference to
the severity of the harm (physical, psychological, financial) that the coercer
threatens to impose, regardless of whether or not the coercer has the moral right
to impose this harm. Since (we can assume) the harm Carl threatens to impose on
Debra is equivalent to the harm Albert threatens to impose on Betty, then if
Alberts act is coercive, so is Carls.
Even if we set aside any doubts about the plausibility of this account of
coercion, this latter reply will not serve as an effective defense of Coercion. The
problem with this reply is that its not plausible to suppose that Carls act ought
to be subject to the same justificatory burden as Alberts. Because the painting
belongs to Carl, he surely ought to be able to decide what to do with the painting
without having to publicly justify his decision. Consider a different case.
Suppose I have justly acquired some wealth, and I now make the following
threat to my local pastor: stop condemning same-sex marriage in your sermons,

6
A proponent of Coercion might try to blunt the force of this first horn of the dilemma by
conceding that although coercion is a moralized notion, it can be defined relative to a fairly
minimal view about natural rights against physical force. Since most political rules do involve
threatened transgressions against individuals natural rights against physical force (there is
always the threat of criminal sanction lurking in the background), there will thus still be a large
role for public reason to play. This response, however, does not seem promising for two reasons.
First, it ties the proponent of Coercion to a particular view about natural rights against force, and
thus disputes about whether this view of individual rights is sound cannot be resolved by appeal
to public reason. Second, the proponent of Coercion seems committed to the view that coercive
acts stand in need of public justification because such acts threaten the natural rights of persons.
But then its open to opponents of Coercion to argue (plausibly) that the natural rights of persons
include more than claims against physical force, they also include positive rights to be provided
with urgently needed aid when its easy to do so, in which case failures to aid would also stand
in need of justification, regardless of whether they are coercive.

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or I will leave my small fortune to the local animal shelter rather than your
church. If we adopt the non-moralized account of coercion, my threat is coercive,
but it seems very strange to insist that I cannot threaten my pastor in this way
unless I my threat can be justified to him on the basis of public reasons.
But lets set aside this concern about the formulation of coercion and turn
our attention to the main Kantian rationale offered for Coercion. Charles Larmore
says that to respect another person as an end is to require that coercive or
political principles be as justifiable to that person as they presumably are to us.7
Conversely, if we try to bring about conformity to a rule of conduct solely by
the threat of force, we shall be treating persons merely as means, as objects of
coercion, and not also as ends, engaging with their distinctive capacity as
persons.8 Similarly, Thomas Nagel says that if you force someone to serve an
end that he cannot be given adequate reason to share, you are treating him as a
mere meanseven if the end is his own good, as you see it but he doesnt. In
view of the coercive character of the state, the requirement becomes a condition
of political legitimacy.9
I think there are at least two problems with this rationale. First, I do not
think its true that whenever you coerce someone to serve an end he cannot be
given adequate reason to share, you treat that person as a mere means, if by
mere means we mean an object that has no moral claims or standing of its
own. As Derek Parfit has shown, we can coerce or harm otherseven when
those others lack sufficient reasons to share our endsand yet still treat those we
coerce or harm as much more than mere means.10 Suppose, for example, I force
you to help me rescue a boy that I believe to be the incarnation of the Buddha,

Charles Larmore, The Moral Basis of Political Liberalism, Journal of Philosophy 96 (1999), 608.
Ibid., 607.
9 Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 159.
10 Derek Parfit, On What Matters: Volume I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 222-223.
7
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and this rescue costs you your leg, but further suppose that I am going to lose my
own life in this rescue. I could save my life if I imposed further harm on you (say
the loss of another leg), but I dont do this because I believe doing so would be a
wrongful imposition on your freedom; I think you can be forced to sacrifice your
leg for a God, but not for a regular person like me. It does not seem right to say I
treat you as a mere means, as a mere object to be used however I see fit, since I
recognize significant moral constraints on the ways I may permissibly treat you.
A proponent of the Kantian rationale for Coercion may reply that this
objection misunderstands what she means by treating someone as a mere
means. She does not literally mean treating a person as if he were an inanimate
object; rather, she means forcing someone to serve an end that he does not have
adequate reason to share. But if this is what it means to treat others as a mere
means, the rationale becomes an empty tautology: whenever you coerce someone
to serve an end he cannot be given adequate reason to share, you coerce someone
to serve an end he cannot be given adequate reason to share.
But even if we set this objection aside, the proposed Kantian rationale also
fails to establish that coercion uniquely stands in need of public justification.
Coercion, we can assume, involves either threats made with the aim of getting
another person to perform or refrain from performing some act, or else the use of
violence or force against others. But suppose, for example, that I live upstream
and you live downstream along a river.11 We both rely on fishing the river to
survive. I construct a net that catches all the fish upstream and prevents any of
the fish from reaching you many miles downstream. I have no intention of
getting you to do anything, nor do I use violence or force to take anything from
you: Im just trying to catch as many fish as I can. But doing so means you will

I borrow the basic form of the example from Kok-Chor Tan, Justice, Institutions, and Luck: The
Site, Ground, and Scope of Equality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 162.
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starve to death. Or suppose that in order to construct a temple to my God, I use

chemicals that seep into the ground under the temple, and eventually affect the
soil you use for farming, rendering it infertile, which leaves you facing
starvation. I foresee this consequence, but I am not trying to get you to perform
any particular act, and it seems a stretch to say that I use force or violence against
you.12 I find it difficult to see why the injunction not to treat others as mere
means should not apply in these cases as well. Its true that in these cases
harming you is not instrumentally useful to me, but I may still treat you as an
object with no substantial moral standing. These cases seem sufficiently similar
to cases of wrongful coercion where the coercion cannot be justified to those who
are coerced: in my examples you are treated in ways that do not seem justifiable
to you, and which result in serious and (lets stipulate) easily avoidable harm.
Of course the proponent of the Kantian rationale can insist that my cases
are differentthat the special wrongness of treating others as mere means is
restricted to instances where you use force to get others to act in particular ways.
Its the attempt to bend a persons will to your own that is uniquely subject to the
requirement of public reasonnot more general instances of harming or
negatively affecting others. But I think this response depends on a very specific
and controversial ethical doctrineone that makes our wills or the maxims on
which we act of special moral importance, perhaps the only thing that grounds
our moral worth or status. This is a Kantian view, but many reasonable people
do not accept this account of our moral worth. Insofar as one of the main aims of
public reason is to provide an account of interpersonal justification that
reasonable persons can all be expected to endorse, it seems self-defeating for

Of course one might insist these cases do involve coercion by appealing to a moralized baseline
to determine what counts as force or violence (i.e. perhaps I am stealing or damaging your
property and thus using force against you) but this will not be of much help to the proponent of
Coercionthe same problem arises here as it did in the examples involving Albert and Carl.
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proponents of public reason to rely on such a narrow account of what is morally

important about persons. But without this narrow account, the appeal to the
wrongness of treating others merely as a means will not vindicate a unique focus
on coercion.
In sum, Coercion seems deeply flawed. It has counterintuitive implications
about the exercise of political power when that power is not coercive, it does not
look plausible regardless of whether we adopt a moralized or non-moralized
account of coercion, and its Kantian rationale does not seem successful.

III
Gerald Gaus has recently offered a very different picture of the role of public
reason.13 He begins with this question: can social moralitys alleged authority be
reconciled with a conception of others as being free and equal interpreters of
morality; as each having equal standing to decide what is true or false with
regard to moralitys requirements? As he puts it,

Because we recognize other moral persons as free and
equal, having authorityperhaps we should say
moral sovereigntyto interpret their own moral
obligations for themselves, our claims to have
standing to command that they comply with our view
of the demands of morality appears to manifest
disrespect for them as equal interpreters of morality.14


13
Gerald Gaus, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and
Bounded World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Ibid., 17.

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Given pervasive disagreement about morality, how can we engage in the

practice of moralitythe regular practice of making demands on others and even
enforcing those demandsin a way that also manages to respect others as free
and equal interpreters of morality? Gauss answer is that a justified social
morality will only make demands of us when we already have sufficient reasons
to act in accordance with its demands, that is, when the demands of social
morality can be justified to us. This is how we can treat each other as free and
equal interpreters of moralitys demands. Indeed, on Gauss account, public
reason is an implicit and essential feature of our everyday moral practices.15 In
particular the main reactive attitudes associated with interpersonal morality
including blame, indignation, and resentmentonly make sense when the moral
demands we make of others can be justified by appeal to reasons that those
others have; that is, to reasons a moderately idealized agent would endorse from
within the evaluative perspective of the person to whom the demand is made
(throughout the rest of this section, following Gaus, this is what I shall mean
when talking about the reasons a person has). Gaus thus endorses

Social Morality: Moral demands only have authority over others when
made on the basis of reasons that the subjects of the demands can
reasonably be expected to endorse. All interpersonal moral rules or
demands thus stand in need of public justification.

Gaus theory of public reason is very rich and complex, and my aim here is not to
evaluate his whole account, or even his account specifically.16 Rather, I focus on

Ibid., 184.
I offer a brief critique of one of its central elements in, What is the Point of Public Reason?
Philosophical Studies 170 (2014), 533-545.
15
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two reasons to doubt that an expansive account of public reasons role, like Social
Morality, is correct.
First, Social Morality seems implausibly broad. When adherents of a
religious community hold each other to account for failing to live up to their
religions requirements, the members of the religious community treat these
requirements as being authoritative, but not necessarily because the
requirements pass some test of public reason. The religious requirements are, by
their nature, controversial and not grounded in public reasons.
A proponent of Social Morality might respond that this misunderstands
how the demand for public justification operates. When a moral demand is made
of everyone, then its justification must eschew controversial religious or ethical
doctrines and appeal only to public or shared reasons,17 but when a moral
demand is made only of some sub-set, like the members of a particular religious
community, then the demand only needs to be justifiable to the members of the
community, and thus controversial or sectarian rationales for moral demands are
perfectly appropriate within particular religious or ethical communities.

I dont find this response persuasive. I think it misconstrues the way the

members of the community can understand the basis of their religious or moral
requirements. Members of particular religious and ethical communities do not
necessarily understand their practices of interpersonal moralityblaming,
resentment, indignation, holding accountableas being dependent on any
notion of public justifiability even when the constituency of persons to whom the
rules must be justifiable is restricted to members of the group. Rather, the
members of many such communities may see it as appropriate to hold each other

Proponents of convergence forms of public reason will protest that shared reasons are not
required even in these cases, but I set this worry aside for now.
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accountable to Gods commandments, or religious truth, as each person sees it,

regardless of whether others see it in the same light.

A proponent of Social Morality can insist that there is a second-order sense

in which the notion of public justification or shared reasons operates in such

cases. All the members of the community agree (at some level of idealization)
that members of the community can hold each other to account by appealing
directly to religious truth or Gods will, and so while the first-order rationale for
some alleged requirement may not meet the test of being justifiable to others, the
more general framework is justifiable to each member of the community, and
this is what vindicates the authority of the more specific requirements or
commands.
This explanation strikes me as dubious, however, at least when presented
as an account of how members of religious or other ethical communities
necessarily understand their own moral practices. Of course a proponent of Social
Morality might insist that regardless of whether the members of a community
understand their moral practices in this way, their practices must have this
characteristic in order for some member A to properly blame B or hold B to
account. In other words, if some higher order norm such as Gods commands
are the sole basis of authoritative moral requirements is not justifiable to each
member of the community, then community members are not engaged in
legitimate instances of blaming or holding accountable when they invoke Gods
commands as the basis of blaming others or holding others to account. But this
seems a very large bullet for the proponent of Social Morality to bite.18 I dont
think the best account of public reason should be committed to the view that

Perhaps particularly for Gaus, who emphasizes the importance of taking the actual practices of
social morality seriously when developing our philosophical theories of morality. See for
example Gaus, Order of Public Reason, 174.
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members of particular religious or ethical communities cannot legitimately or

properly hold each other to account or blame each other unless their particular
communitys moral standards are justifiable to each member of the community
this imposes the idea of public justification on aspects of our moral or ethical
lives where it doesnt necessarily belong. Some of our everyday moral practices
do not depend upon or presuppose public justification; rather they seem to
depend on other forms of justification, including direct appeals to religious or
moral truth.

The preceding objection focuses on the way public reason may not

necessarily regulate the moral claims we make on each other within certain
religious or ethical communities. But I also think public reason does not regulate
many of the moral claims that cross sub-group boundaries. Consider, for
example, the debate that two people from different religious communities might
have about pre-marital sex. Ernest is from an Evangelical Christian family, and
believes pre-marital sex to be morally wrong. Felicity is a liberal atheist, and
believes sex between consenting adults is not wrong, and more strongly, she
believes its a very good thing if most adults have pre-marital sex. One way to
characterize their dispute is that they disagree about the scope of social morality:
Felicity thinks self-regarding choices that do not harm others are essentially
outside the scope of social morality, whereas Ernest holds a different view. But of
course they hold different views about the scope of social morality because they
hold different views about the underlying grounds of moral wrongdoing: Ernest
thinks the underlying basis is Gods will, whereas Felicity thinks moral
wrongdoing must be explicable by reference to some setback to the interests of
persons. Ernest blames Felicity for engaging in and encouraging activity he sees
as wrongful, and Felicity blames Ernest for holding what she sees as narrow-
minded and Puritanical views.

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How can a proponent of Social Morality make sense of their disagreement,

and the reactive attitudes they hold? If we assume that Felicitys views depend
on an ethical framework that Ernest cannot reasonably be expected to endorse
(and vice versa) then the proponent of Social Morality must believe that Ernest
and Felicity cannot rightfully hold each other accountable or blame each other
such behavior is inconsistent with showing due respect for others as free and
equal interpreters of moralitys requirements.

This conclusion seems hard to believe. A significant part of moral life

consists in disagreements like the kind Ernest and Felicity are having. We often
disagree with others about the scope of social morality, as well as the underlying
basis of moral wrongdoing and rightness. When we have these disagreements,
and when we hold others accountable for acting on and holding what we take to
be false and morally pernicious views, we do not necessarily treat others
disrespectfully, nor threaten their status as free and equal interpreters of
moralitys requirements. Ernest need not deny that Felicity has the standing to
make her own judgments about moralitys requirementsI dont think he needs
to be acting in a way that ought to trigger public justification. Rather, we can
imagine Ernest saying, Of course you are [in some sense yet to be defined] at
liberty to make up your own mind about sexual morality, but I think you are
terribly mistaken in the judgments youve reached, and in reaching those
judgments and acting on them you show yourself to be, at least in one sense, a
bad person who acts wrongly, and I blame you for that. And Felicity may take a
similar view of Ernest. This kind of moral disagreement is an essential feature of
social morality in a pluralistic society, and yet because it involves foundational
disagreements about the underlying basis of morality, it cannot be regulated by
public reason.

20

Not all moral demands and reactive attitudes invoke the particular kind of

demands that should be the appropriate object of public reason. Ernest can hold
Felicity accountable for her (as he sees it) pernicious views, he can blame her, and
even shun her, while still respecting Felicity status as free and equal, as someone
who has the standing to make her own determinations about sexual morality. He
may think she is a bad person who violates moral requirements in a way that
merits criticism and condemnation, but if he recognizes that his judgment
depends on an evaluative perspective Felicity can reasonably reject, and thus
recognizes that this judgment should play no part in determining Felicity basic
rights, claims over property, and other matters of basic justice, then I submit that
Ernest shows the appropriate respect for Bettys status as free and equal. On this
accountwhich I develop and defend in the following sectionsmoral
judgments and demands only need to be publicly justified when they invoke the
special status reserved for justice.

IV
Lets begin with the circumstances that give rise to the problem to which I
believe public reason is addressed. The circumstances are familiarthey are the
circumstances of justice. These circumstances are characterized by a conflict as
well as an identity of interests. As Rawls famously explains, there is an identity
of interests since social cooperation makes possible a better life for all than any
would have if each were to live solely by his own efforts. There is a conflict of
interests since persons are not indifferent as to how the greater benefits produced
by their collaboration are distributed, for in order to pursue their ends they each

21

prefer a larger share to a lesser share.19 These circumstances give rise to the
special problem of social justice:

A set of principles is required for choosing among the
various social arrangements which determine this
division of advantages and for underwriting an
agreement on the proper distributive shares. These are
the principles of social justice: they provide a way of
assigning rights and duties in the basic institutions of
society and they define the appropriate distribution of
the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.20

This is the problem of social justice. To live together in a way that will be
mutually beneficial, there must be rules, generally accepted as binding, which
allocate individual rights and duties, and determine the rightful division of
advantages and disadvantages, particularly given moderate scarcity of resources
and the fact that persons are not purely altruistic, but rather have their own
distinct ends they wish to pursue. A conception of justice provides a common
point of view from which competing claims can be adjudicated; one may think
of a public conception of justice as constituting the fundamental charter of a well-
ordered human association.21
But a conception of justice must do more than provide a commonly
recognized set of rules for allocating rights and resources. After all, authoritarian
societies ruled by tyrants might also have a publicly recognized set of rules that

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4.
Ibid., 4.
21 Ibid., 5.
19
20

22

perform this function that most people accept as binding. Instead, we want our
conception of justice to be one that is congruent with our status as free and equal:
we are each equally free, not naturally subject to anyone elses authority. And so
a conception of social justice, Rawls suggests, should be something that can be
shared by citizens as a basis of a reasoned, informed, and willing political
agreement.22 Rules that are simply imposed with force, but that make no claim
to the reasoned allegiance of persons, cannot successfully serve as the public
charter of a society of free and equal persons.

If this is the role of a conception of social or public justice (I will use these

terms interchangeably), public reason is an essential feature of a just society.

Without the constraint of public reason, a conception of justice could permissibly
draw on any reasonably contested religious, ethical, and philosophical views.
The resulting conception of social justice would not fulfill its role; it would not be
one that can serve as the basis of free, informed, and willing agreement amongst
persons, provided we assume that reasonable disagreement about religious,
ethical, and philosophical matters is a permanent fact of life. Instead, our
conception of justice should be constructed by appeal to public or shared
reasonsconsiderations that all persons (suitably idealized) can recognize and
be expected to endorse. Only when a conception of justice is regulated by the
idea of public reason can it successfully serve as an appropriately shared
perspective from which decisions about individual rights, duties, and
entitlements can be fairly made. In sum, I believe we should endorse:

Justice: Demands of social or public justice should only be made on the
basis of reasons that the subjects of the demands can reasonably be

Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 9.

22

23

expected to endorse. Conceptions of social or public justice thus stand in

need of public justification, but this is not necessarily true of other moral
demands.

This view has clear advantages over Coercion. That view, recall, had
implausible implications in cases that did not involve coercion, but which did
involve matters of basic justice, for example, a government lottery to allocate
resources to one religious group rather than another, or a government which had
the ability to impose duties on citizens without the use of coercion. If public
reason regulates anything, it surely must regulate the basic rules that determine
how resources will be allocated in society.
Justice also has advantages when compared to Social Morality, since it does
not implausibly expand the role of public reason to cover every moral demand
that we make of each other. But this comparison to Social Morality may also be
puzzling. What is special about the demands of justice when compared to other
moral demands? Two features of our public conception of justice provide the
answer to this question.
First, we expect others to give priority to the demands of justice. You and I
may have deep religious, ethical, or philosophical disagreements, and these
disagreements may lead us to think badly of each other, to blame each other, and
to denounce each other as vicious or immoral. But these disagreements do not
trump claims of justice. I do not share your religious beliefs and I think its
morally wrong for you to raise your children to hold these beliefs, and morally
wrong for you to donate charitably to your Church. But justice demands of me
that I recognize your right to make these moral mistakes, and I must give this
right priority over my other moral judgments. What, exactly, does it mean for
justice to take priority in this way? Of course it meansas proponents of Coercion

24

will be quick to point outthat I am duty-bound to refrain from using coercion

to interfere in these choices of yours that I believe are wrong. But the priority of
justice involves much more than this restriction on the permissible use of
coercion. Most obviously, I am duty-bound to obey the accepted rules of public
justice that apply to me, regardless of whether these rules accord with my
religious, ethical, or philosophical convictions. I am also duty-bound to take
reasonable steps to protect your rights against those who might try and infringe
them, even when I share the moral judgments of the would-be infringers. I
should also support measures to compensate you if your rights are infringed
regardless of my personal views about the immorality of your choices. The
priority of justice also entails that I must set aside all of my beliefs that are not
reasonably acceptable to others when I exercise my political power on matters of
social justice (e.g. when I vote). Furthermore, although I may try to overturn laws
that I believe are unjust (even engage in civil disobedience) I should not try and
overturn laws I recognize to be just, but which conflict with my religious beliefs
or conception of the good.23
The second feature of social justice is its role as a framework of rules that
apply to societies characterized by the fact of reasonable pluralism. As I mentioned
earlier, pluralism is reasonable when we assume that persons disagree about
religious, ethical, and philosophical matters not as a result of self-interest,
ignorance, prejudice, or irrationality, but rather as a result of the sincere efforts of
reasonable and rational people, living under free conditions, to decide how to
live and what to value.

We may wish to add the caveat that the claims about priority described in this paragraph only
apply when the requirements of justice meet the further condition of being legitimate. I return to
this point in section V.
23

25
These two features, priority and reasonable pluralism, combine to explain

why the demands of social justice are special when compared to other moral
demands, and unlike other moral demands, stand in need of public justification.
Without the fact of reasonable pluralismif there were complete agreement
about religious, ethical, and philosophical issuesthe requirement for public
justification would be superfluous. Alternatively, if justice did not have the sort
of priority described in the penultimate paragraph, then the demands of justice
wouldnt call for public justification even assuming the fact of reasonable
pluralism. Whats special about the demands of justice is that we expect others to
give them priority over their reasonable religious, ethical, or philosophical views,
and others expect the same of us. Consider this way of expressing the priority of
justice: I know you think I am acting wrongly, and I know your judgment arises
as a result of your sincere and reasonable efforts to determine moral truth, but
nevertheless you must accord priority to my right to act wrongly (as you see it).
In order for the must in this sentence to be plausiblefor it to be consistent
with treating the person to whom the sentence is spoken as a free and equal
member of our societythe right in question must be justified by appeal to
shared values or reasons that others can reasonably be expected to endorse.
Unless this condition of public justification is met, there would be nothing to
ground the priority of justice. If Alberts act of -ing appears wrong when
viewed from within Bettys religious or ethical doctrine, then he cannot require
her to respect his right to do wrong if the justification for that right is sectarian
and grounded in Alberts religious or ethical doctrine that Betty reasonably
rejects. This would amount to Albert demanding Betty give priority to his
religious or ethical doctrine rather than her own reasonable doctrine.
The rules of social justice are meant to provide a fair set of terms by which
those with different plans and different religious and ethical views can interact

26

with one another in cooperative and mutually beneficial ways. If each person
must give priority to these rules over their own religious or ethical perspectives,
then the fairness of the rules depends on the rules being justifiable by appeal to
shared political values alone. If the rules of public justice did not meet this
conditionif they were grounded in some reasonably disputed religious or
ethical viewpointthen some citizens would be required to give special priority
to the religious or ethical views of others, views which they reasonably reject.
This would not be a world where citizens stand as equals. This is what makes the
demands of justice special, and the appropriate focus of public justification.
Other moral demandsones that do not have the special priority we
attach to the demands of justiceare different. As I suggested in the previous
section, we can criticize and blame others by appeal to what we take to be the
whole truth about religion or ethics, but we respect others as free and equal so
long as we also recognize that our beliefs about religious, ethical or philosophical
truth are subordinate to principles of social justice.

V
In closing, lets examine a few objections to the preceding account of the role of
public reason.
First, consider two related worries about the scope of political authority
and public reason. One worry is that Justice offers an unduly narrow picture of
what our legal and political institutions may legitimately do. It might seem to
entail that the only permissible objective of the legislative and executive branches
of government is justice, and any policies designed to promote other objectives
are precluded. But this isnt entailed by Justice: this view of public reasons role is
compatible with a broader account of the role of government or political life, one
where the government pursues objectives apart from establishing and securing

27

justice (e.g. promoting artistic excellence, or increasing the funds available to

charitable causes beyond what justice requires). I endorse the view that the role
of government should be restricted to establishing and securing justice, but
further arguments are needed to establish this conclusion:24 it cant be derived
from the narrower thesis that the exclusive role of public reason is to regulate our
debates and decisions about justice.

A second worry is that Justice yields a view about the scope of public

reason that is unduly narrow. Consider the recent Supreme Court ruling in Town
of Greece v. Galloway.25 In this case, the Court ruled that opening town board
meetings with public prayers did not violate the Constitutions establishment
clause. Some constitutional scholars have endorsed this view, apparently
endorsing something like a close cousin of Coercion, whereby the establishment
clause only protects citizens from religious coercion by the state, but does not
prohibit religious expressions or affirmations by the state that are non-coercive.
But others worry that this interpretation of the establishment clause is far too
narrow: shouldnt the state be prohibited from religious affirmations, even when
non-coercive?26 A similar worry might be pressed against Justice. Suppose the
federal government put up billboards declaring that Jesus is the Lord Our Savior.
This seems like something that an account of public reason ought to condemn,
but it might seem that Justice lacks the resources to do so. After all, surely
symbols or expressions are not the stuff of justicejustice concerns individual
rights and liberties, and the distribution of burdens and benefits.

I try to provide some of these further arguments in chapters 2-4 of my Liberalism Without
Perfection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
25 133 S.Ct. 2388 (2013).
26 For discussion of this case along these lines see Micah Schwartzmans and Nelson Tebbes
article in Slate, A Prayer for Liberals.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/05/the_strange_liberal_argu
ment_that_thin_skinned_religious_minorities_should.html
24

28

The appropriate response is to deny the premise that government symbols

and expressive acts never have anything to do with justice. First, there is the
trivial point that government resources spent on symbols or expressive acts
could be spent in other ways (e.g. programs to improve opportunities for the
least advantaged) and thus at least many instances of government expression do
raise issues of the rightful allocation of resources. Second, setting this first point
aside, government expression may often affect the distribution of advantages in
society, and so government expression may be an appropriate object of social
justice. Consider, for example, a society with a history of racial injustice and
segregation where equality of opportunity for members of the minority, the
Greens, has not yet been achieved. Suppose the government were to issue public
statements such as, Greens are lazy and unmotivated, or Greens dont yet
possess the intellectual ability to compete for the best jobs. Such statements are
not merely racist; they are also unjust in light of the history of racial injustice in
our imagined society. Finally, individual citizens have a right, at the bar of
justice, to equal treatment under the law, and its not implausible to suppose this
right includes a claim that the government refrain from any acts of expression
that imply some members of society are worth less, or that the executive or legal
branches of government view their claims as having less weight. Whether any
particular instance of government expressionfor example the public prayer at a
town board meetinginfringes this right to equal treatment seems dependent on
historical and other contextual details, but theres no basis for holding that
government expression or symbolic acts are necessarily beyond the scope of
social justice.

Consider a third objection. As many critics of political liberalism and

public reason have pointed out, the fact of reasonable pluralism is not limited to
matters of religion and the good life: it extends to matters of justice as well.

29

Reasonable peopleon any plausible definition of that termdisagree about

free speech, abortion rights, taxation policy, immigration reform, and affirmative
action, to name just a few examples. But if reasonable people disagree so deeply
about justice, it might seem implausible that the role of public reason could be to
regulate conceptions of social justice. Perhaps we should expect something more
minimal from an account of public reason.27 Perhaps public reason is only meant
to provide an account of the permissible limits of political authority, by which I
mean roughly an account of which directives the state has the moral right to
issue and enforce without wronging those subject to the directives. Reasonable
persons may not agree about exactly what justice requires, but perhaps they can
agree that laws are only legitimate when certain democratic procedures are
observed, and when the laws in question do not violate certain minimal moral
standards (e.g. the laws do not involve religious persecution, or racial or sexual
discrimination, etc). On this alternative view, the role of public reason is not to
regulate the content of social justice, but rather to provide an account of political
legitimacy.

To evaluate this alternative view, we need to distinguish two different

ways public reason might be thought to contribute to an account of political

legitimacy. The first version begins with the following assumption: it is at least
presumptively wrong to restrict a persons negative liberty without explicit or
tacit consent. But, as we all know, the state regularly uses coercion to restrict our
liberty and it does so even though the vast majority of us have never explicitly or
tacitly consented to these restrictions. How, then, can the states coercive power
be legitimate? This is the puzzle of political legitimacy as framed by

Some point to the fact of reasonable disagreement about justice to press a different objection,
namely, that proponents of public reason posit an unjustifiable asymmetry between
disagreement about justice and disagreements about the good life. I address this objection in
chapter seven of Liberalism Without Perfection.
27

30

philosophical anarchists and voluntarists such as A. John Simmons. Some believe

the aim of public reason is to solve this puzzle: to reconcile the states coercive
power with the negative liberty of personsto show this power can be legitimate
because it is power to which we would, at some level of idealization, consent.
But skeptics argue public reason cannot succeed in this task since what it
offers is nothing like genuine consent.28 In order to yield determinate results that
are morally acceptable, the constituency of persons to whom political principles
and rules are justified must be significantly idealized, to the point where its
implausible to suggest that public justification establishes anything
approximating the consent of real persons. But if the philosopher of public
reason avoids too much idealization, and sticks fairly closely to what the actual
persons believe when constructing an account of which principles and rules can
be publicly justified, its unlikely the account of public reason yields determinate
or morally acceptable rules. As Joseph Raz argues:

It seems tempting to say that our duty to act only on
political principles to which the reasonable consent is
simply the duty to act on well-founded, valid
principles. For that is what the reasonable consent to.
This eliminates the independent role of consent.The
puzzle is how one can give consent a viable role,
without saying that only principles already agreed to
by all can be relied on. One must find a reasonable
interpretation of the intuitively appealing idea that
political principles must be accessible to people as

28
David Enoch, Against Public Reason, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy: V. 1 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 112-142.

31

they arePolitics must take people as they come and

be accessible to them, capable of commanding their
consent without expecting them to change in any
radical way. But at the same time, justified political
principles may be controversial, and may fail to
command actual consent. Nagel and Rawls offer
interpretations of this intuition which aim to be both
coherent and attractive. Their failure suggests that the
underlying idea may at bottom be unstable and
incoherent. There may be no middle way between
actual (including implied) agreement and rational
justification.29

But I think the force of this objection depends on the assumption that

public reason is trying to solve the puzzle of political legitimacy as framed by the
philosophical anarchist or voluntaristthat the goal is to use public reason as a
proxy for consent so as to reconcile the coercive power of the state with
individuals negative liberty. On my view, however, this is not public reasons
role. Public reason is not a pale form of consent, intended to satisfy the
voluntarists worry about political legitimacy. Instead, public reason is a
condition on an acceptable conception of social justice. We cannot treat one
another justly unless decisions about justice are regulated by the standards set by
public reason. The point of public reason is to ensure that the rules that regulate
our interactions with others are reasonably fair or just, by ensuring the

Joseph Raz, Facing Diversity: The Case of Epistemic Abstinence, Philosophy & Public Affairs 19
(1990), 46.
29

32

justifications for the rules of justice are mutually acceptable to suitably motivated
parties.

But this leads to the second way public reason, more indirectly,

contributes to an account of political legitimacy. Instead of following voluntarists

like Simmons, and assuming that actual consent (or something that mimics
consent) is needed to establish political legitimacy, we might adopt a different
view, one where legitimacy is grounded in the duties of justice we owe to one
another. This is, of course, a well-known approach whose contemporary
exponents include John Rawls, Jeremy Waldron, and Christopher Heath
Wellman. Here is one way of formulating the duty-based conception of legitimacy:

One way to establish that a person has legitimate authority over
another person involves showing that the alleged subject is likely
better to fulfill the duties of justice he is under if he accepts the
directives of the alleged authority as authoritatively binding and
tries to follow them, rather than by trying to directly fulfill the
duties he is under himself.30

I will not rehearse the arguments in favor of this view here.31 Instead, I want to
assume this view is correct, and explain how it can address the fact of reasonable
disagreement about justice.32
Consider the following simple view: the exercise of political power is only
legitimate when it is perfectly just, where perfectly just means just according to
your preferred account of social justice. If each person endorsed this view, this

From my Liberalism Without Perfection, 128. This principle is deliberately adapted from Razs
influential normal justification thesis.
31 I offer a brief defense of the duty-based view in sect. 4.4 of Ibid.
32 The following is a condensed version of the argument I present in sect. 4.5 of Ibid.
30

33

would almost certainly have very bad consequences for promoting and securing
justice in our society. If each person believed laws were illegitimate unless they
conformed exactly with their own preferred conception of justice, then on many
issues no matter which particular policy the state enacted, most people would
view the policy as illegitimate, and this would presumably make effective state
action difficult, if not impossible. This will not be a good result from the
standpoint of justice. A world where we have an effectively enforced progressive
taxation policy that I believe to be unjust is nevertheless vastly superior from the
standpoint of justice to a world where there is no effective taxation policy at all
because any policy the state tries to enact is rejected as unjust and therefore
illegitimate by the majority of citizens.
But the duty-based account of legitimacy can offer a solution to this
problem. In a pluralistic society where reasonable people disagree about what
justice requires, we better fulfill our natural duty to promote and maintain just
institutions by accepting as legitimate any publicly justifiable views about justice
that all reasonable citizens could endorse as just even if there is in fact a great deal
of reasonable disagreement about what justice requires. We reasonably disagree,
suppose, about which policy from the set [P1, P2, P3, P4, P5] is required by
justice on some issue, but no one can reasonably deny that justice is better
promoted and maintained if some member of the set is chosen and effectively
implemented as opposed to any one of the obviously unjust alternative. This is
why one member of the set can be legitimately imposed even in the face if
reasonable disagreement about justice.
We now have in hand an explanation of the relationship between three
central concepts: public reason, justice, and political legitimacy. Public reason is a
constraint or condition on acceptable conceptions of social or public justice. Such
conceptions must be publicly justifiable to successfully serve as a framework of

34

binding rules that could be the basis of reasoned, informed, and willing
agreement amongst persons who reasonably disagree about religious, ethical,
and philosophical matters. There will be a plurality of publicly justifiable views
about social justice, any one of which might be the basis of legitimate political
authority, but political legitimacy is not derived directly from the idea of public
reason, rather it depends in addition on the duty-based conception of political
legitimacy. Notice that one might accept the justice-based view of public reason
while holding some alternative account of political legitimacy, and one might
accept the duty-based conception of legitimacy while rejecting the idea that
public reason is a constraint on acceptable conceptions of justice. My view is
distinctive in that I endorse both the duty-based view of legitimacy and the
justice-based view of public reasons role.
To return to the original worry, once we abandon the assumption that
public reason is an effort to mimic the normative role of consent as conceived by
anarchists or voluntarists, its no longer any sort of objection to point out that
public justification fails to look like consent. Public reason is not meant to
establish that each individual somehow consents to the coercive authority of the
state. Rather, its an attempt to construct a shared social perspective from which
reasonable people can reason together about the fair terms that will regulate their
interactions and determine their rights and duties with regard to one another.