Public Justification

The counterfactual assertion that the United States is economically victimized by its trade relationship with Canada rests on three serious compounding errors. The first is conceptual: "deficit" is a fiscal term properly applied to budgets or stock depletion. The attempt to apply it to voluntary exchange instantly results in a category error equally incoherent regardless as to whether the exchange in question is international or domestic, as all trades are—inherently and by definition—voluntary exchanges of equal value for mutual benefit, in (...) which two parties voluntarily and intentionally choose to exchange value in the form of that which they have for equal value in the form of that which they seek. Products are paid for with products. Every producer is a consumer. Economic exchange is anti-symmetric by construction and allows each party to provide a beneficial service to the other from which both parties gain. Were one side to be losing anything in a trade, or were one to believe that more or better of the same product could be found elsewhere, that side would simply decline to trade. Regardless of bilateral aggregate total imports vs exports, every single product was paid for upon purchase and delivered as per agreement. The second is statistical: aggregate bilateral flows are directly compared across economies differing by greater than a factor of eight in population and greater than thirteen in economy size and combined purchasing power (GDP). The third is arithmetical: the deficit figure of 200 billion dollars widely cited in public political discourse is dishonestly inflated by a factor of 5.6 even relative to official U.S. government statistics. We formally establish that bilateral balances are antisymmetric by construction and carry no welfare content. Applying a per-capita bilateral trade intensity measure to 2024 data, Canadians spend almost 11,000 American dollars per person on U.S. goods and services versus only about 1,400 dollars per American spent on Canadian output — a ratio exceeding 8:1, with Canada's intensity exceeding Mexico's by 3.5×, Japan's by 13.7×, and China's by 88×. Excluding energy, the U.S. runs a bilateral surplus exceeding 63 billion dollars with Canada. A two-country Armington–CES model calibrated to the actual tiered tariff regime (0% USMCA-compliant, 10% energy, 25–35% other non-USMCA) yields a total annual cost to the United States of approximately 41 billion dollars— welfare losses, deadweight destruction, and export revenue lost to Canadian retaliation — attributable entirely to a bilateral imbalance equal to 0.12% of U.S. GDP. We document the fabrications animating the tariff regime: the 200 billion dollar deficit claim; the fentanyl emergency declaration, during which under 0.2% of all seized fentanyl crossed the Canadian border per CBP's own data; and the Section 301 forced-labor investigations launched March 2026 to replace IEEPA tariffs struck down 6–3 by the Supreme Court in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (607 U.S. ___, 2026) — investigations that named Canada despite its 2023 enactment of legislation prohibiting forced labor imports. These findings are situated within an ~60-year bipartisan record of American presidential testimony on the bilateral relationship, from Kennedy's declaration in the Canadian House of Commons in 1961 that choosing Canada's prime minister to be the first of the leaders of other lands to be invited to call upon his council "an act of faith—faith in your country, in your leaders", through Reagan's warning against "demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends," to Obama's final address to Parliament in 2016 in which he warned the parliament and people of Canada directly, in all but name, about Trump and the coming threat to international cooperation that the rising swell of Trump-aligned ideological fear-mongering and epistemic echo-chamber grooming then potentially represented, and now represents. Given the wild misalignment between mathematical fact and Trump's claimed justifications to wage economic warfare, disrespect, betray and threaten—the real reasons that a sitting president would fabricate such desperate and obviously unfair, made up and manipulated arguments just in order to abuse their relationship with their own people's biggest customers and most committed allies—and paid for by the American taxpayer—themselves deserve to be questioned, analyzed more deeply and identified in future work because they confer no obvious benefit to any party save Putin and the have led to the likely intentional estrangement of the alliance and subversion of NATO solidarity. The intensive use of outright fabricated and conflated economics concepts, empirical data and mathematical method, along with the innumerable other outright lies, we well as attempts to use international cooperation as manipulation, are alarming especially in the fact they come with no logically or empirically valid benefit for anyone, including Trump himself, unless something almost unthinkably nefarious lies below the surface of the public facing mask of Donald Trump and his administration. The resultant unanimous conclusions of the specific analyses demonstrated in this work are specifically that the claim of U.S. victimhood in its economic relationship with Canada is false and fabricated on every factual and analytical level, and that the conduct it entailed toward America's most commercially committed bilateral partner and its closest, most voluntarily integrated and heavily invested democratic ally represents a repudiation of everything the United States has formally declared across more than half a century about what that relationship means. (shrink)

According to a widespread interpretation of John Rawls’s Liberal Principle of Legitimacy, political legitimacy requires justifiability to all reasonable citizens, but not to the unreasonable. A highly influential attempt at justifying this exclusion of the unreasonable – one first formulated by Jonathan Quong, and later endorsed by many others – is to appeal to the project of solving the problem of inherent stability. Since this is a problem that arises in a just and well-ordered society, and such a society is (...) populated by reasonable citizens only, it is only these citizens, so the reasoning goes, that are relevant for questions of legitimacy. In this paper, I show that this justification of the exclusion of the unreasonable depends on an implicitly assumed connection between stability and legitimacy. We have good reasons, I argue, to doubt that there is this kind of connection. Stability does not determine to whom justification is owed, but it might contribute to determining what is justifiable to citizens. (shrink)

Aumann’s theorem states that no individual should agree to disagree under a range of assumptions. Political liberalism appears to presuppose these assumptions with the idealized conditions of public reason. We argue Aumann’s theorem demonstrates they nevertheless cannot be simultaneously held with what is arguably political liberalism’s most central tenet. That is, the tenet of reasonable pluralism, which implies we can rationally agree to disagree over conceptions of the good. We finish by elaborating a way of relaxing one of the theorem’s (...) axioms that arguably lends itself to a coherent account of political liberalism, namely the condition of indexical independence. (shrink)

What could philosophical or justice perspectives contribute to climate (and other applied philosophy) policy discussions? This question is important for philosophers on government policy committees. This article identifies two novel concerns about such contexts (which I call ‘contingent selection’ and ‘committee deference’) and systematizes some potential methodologies before arguing for a previously unrecognized methodology that focuses on disciplinary convergence. After supporting this methodology by providing several justifications, the Appendix explains how to apply it when evaluating a carbon budget. This methodology (...) and its application are meant to be of interest to both theorists and practitioners. [Open access]. (shrink)

Researchers and Institutional Review Board members often disagree about the permissibility of some parts or all of the former’s proposed research. At least sometimes, this disagreement is reasonable. This is often because there are competing values and no clear solution as to how to balance these values. Arguably, given that there are multiple reasonable ways in which these values might be balanced, IRBs are subject to an asymmetric public justification requirement. This requirement implies that IRBs should defer to researchers when (...) the disagreement is reasonable. After briefly defending this claim, this paper examines its implications with respect to three questions that IRBs face. We argue that IRBs should not impose a strict limit on payments to participants, that they should take a more expansive view of what types of research are authorized by broad consent forms, and there should be no hard cap on risks participants might choose to undergo. (shrink)

Der Kodex, mit dem sich die Produzenten des universellen Wissens in der Gelehrtenrepublik identifizierten, befindet sich während des 18. Jahrhunderts im Wandel. Dies entnehmen wir einer bekannten Studie von Goldgar (1995), die unter anderem von der Ausbreitung der Zeitungspresse handelt. Zum Teil war dieser Umstand durch die Erfordernisse zeitgenössischer Höflichkeits- und Zivilitätskonzepte bedingt, aber auch den ökonomischen Aspekten eines stoßkräftigen Verlagsmarktes geschuldet, der sich aus dem damaligen Aufstieg der sogenannten Papierzeitungen ergab.

John Rawls and those sympathetic to his views defend a moral principle called the criterion of reciprocity. Some argue that the moral reasons for complying with the criterion of reciprocity are derived from civic friendship, a valuable relationship of collective agency that one can sustain with one's fellow citizens. In this article, I pose what I call the knowledge problem for civic friendship. I argue that citizens have only limited information about whether others are complying with the criterion of reciprocity. (...) Furthermore, I argue that this fact means that citizens only have weak moral reasons to comply with the criterion of reciprocity. (shrink)

One of the problems faced by Cassirer's project in Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is the problem of the antinomy of culture, that is, that each dimension or sphere of culture tends to present itself and represent itself not only as part of human production in view of meaning but has pretensions of universality. As is evident in Cassirer’s thought, the problem of antinomy is at the heart of the concept of culture since it must be not only an empirical and (...) historical description of human spiritual products, but it is intended to be equally normative, insofar as a philosophically adequate conception of culture must provide a certain set of rules by which all cultural spheres must be able to articulate themselves in order to preserve the existence and certain validity of culture. each of them, without them mutually excluding or nullifying their particular validities. However, beyond the essentially theoretical dimension of the problem, the effects of the antinomy of culture are perceptible at the pragmatic level of real human interaction that occurs precisely through the plural articulation of these spheres. In other words, human agents decide based on the privilege granted to this or that sphere or cultural dimension in relation to the others. In the practical world of human actions, this means that resolving certain social or political problems involves the philosophical problem of how to exercise a meta-evaluation of the different postulations of importance or relevance of certain cultural spheres in the face of particular contexts or problems. Thus, the problem of the antinomy of culture is also included in the scope of the problems of public rationality. This article aims, therefore, to explain the problem of the antinomy of culture as a theoretical-pragmatic problem that is at the origin of both practical problems - social, ethical and political - and the metaphilosophical problem about the role and contribution of philosophy. (shrink)

Η δημόσια διοίκηση συχνά εγκλωβίζεται σε αυτό που θα μπορούσαμε να ονομάσουμε «παγίδες ισότητας». Πρόκειται για συστημικές παθογένειες όπου οι ίδιοι οι διοικητικοί μηχανισμοί, χωρίς πρόθεση, καταλήγουν να αναπαράγουν τις ανισότητες που υποτίθεται ότι έχουν σχεδιαστεί για να αντιμετωπίσουν. Ενώ η ακαδημαϊκή βιβλιογραφία έχει διαγνώσει εκτενώς το φαινόμενο και έχει αναλύσει τους μηχανισμούς που το προκαλούν, παραμένει προσκολλημένη σε στατικά, περιγραφικά μοντέλα. Δηλαδή, σε μοντέλα που απλώς φωτογραφίζουν την κατάσταση χωρίς να προσφέρουν ένα συνεκτικό πλαίσιο για την ενεργό αποφυγή και (...) την εξάρθρωση αυτών των παγίδων. Το παρόν άρθρο, μέσα από μια συστηματική βιβλιογραφική ανασκόπηση, αξιοποιεί συνθετικά τη θεωρία της Οργανωσιακής Δικαιοσύνης για να καλύψει αυτό το γνωστικό κενό. Η θεωρία αυτή εστιάζει στο πώς οι άνθρωποι αντιλαμβάνονται τη δικαιοσύνη μέσα σε έναν οργανισμό, όχι μόνο ως προς τα αποτελέσματα αλλά και ως προς τις διαδικασίες και την ανθρώπινη μεταχείριση. Βάσει αυτής, προτείνεται ένα συνθετικό και δυναμικό εννοιολογικό πλαίσιο που μετατοπίζει το κέντρο βάρους από την παθητική διάγνωση του προβλήματος στην ενεργητική πλοήγηση των λύσεων. Το πλαίσιο αυτό εξοπλίζει τους δημόσιους λειτουργούς με διαδικαστικά εργαλεία για να χαρτογραφούν τις εγγενείς διοικητικές εντάσεις, όπως η σύγκρουση μεταξύ ταχύτητας και δικαιοσύνης, και να ασκούν τη διακριτική τους ευχέρεια καθοδηγούμενοι από αρχές. Με αυτόν τον τρόπο, η ισότητα παύει να είναι ένας αφηρημένος στόχος και μετατρέπεται σε συνειδητή, καθημερινή διοικητική πρακτική. (shrink)

The concept of the "tipping point," a critical threshold where a minor change precipitates a disproportionately large and often irreversible systemic shift, has become increasingly central to public administration. However, the academic literature reveals a fundamental conceptual dichotomy, analyzing tipping points either as external threats to be averted or as internal opportunities to be leveraged. This article contributes a novel conceptual framework derived from a Structured Literature Review (SLR) that systematically synthesizes the literature to resolve this tension. By analyzing the (...) conceptual evolution of the "tipping point" through the lens of Complex Adaptive Systems and Resilience Theory, we develop an integrated framework: Tipping Point Governance. This framework unifies two core functions: strengthening system stability to avert negative tipping points (Threshold Resilience Management) and strategically orchestrating interventions to induce positive, transformative change (Transformation Orchestration). This dualistic approach provides a coherent analytical tool for public organizations. (shrink)

The concept of the tipping point, which describes abrupt and non-linear changes in complex systems, is gaining increasing importance in public administration. However, the relevant academic literature remains fragmented, examining the phenomenon through isolated lenses of system dynamics, governance, or conceptual framing, which hinders a holistic understanding. This article bridges this gap by synthesizing these different approaches through a narrative literature review. As its main contribution, it develops the "Integrated Tipping Point Governance Framework", a new multi-level diagnostic model. The framework (...) posits that the path to a tipping point is not a simple linear process but the result of the interaction of three levels: "Systemic Entrapment" (macro-level structural pressures), "Organizational Inertia" (meso-level institutional lock-ins), and "Cognitive Capture" (micro-level dominant narratives). This framework offers a deeper explanation for the mechanisms that create resistance to change, complementing descriptive theories like Punctuated Equilibrium and providing the necessary diagnostic foundation for applying normative models like Adaptive Governance. Ultimately, the article provides a valuable conceptual tool for analyzing and managing abrupt changes in public policy. (shrink)

The traditional account of the criminal trial holds that its fundamental purpose is to search for the truth—that is, the truth of whether the accused factually committed the alleged crime. However, purely truth-seeking accounts, as well as more nuanced side-constraint and pluralist accounts, fail to adequately explain the relationship between the epistemic principles and those of political morality shaping the criminal trial. In response, this article proposes that we understand the criminal trial first and foremost in terms of its purpose (...) as a public procedure concerned with the legitimate use of coercive state powers against a particular person. Specifically, the criminal trial is a procedure that calls upon the state to provide a public justification for exercising its criminal law powers to convict and punish the accused. This account preserves the importance of establishing factual guilt because doing so is an essential part of the state’s justificatory burden. (shrink)

Public evidence plays a central role in the justification of scientific theories—but does its importance extend beyond science, for instance, to political or religious belief? To address this question, we first need a clear account of public evidence. This paper de- velops such an account, characterizing public evidence as non-experiential evidence that meets the non-factive epistemic conditions for common knowledge. I argue that public evidence not only underwrites the justification of scientific theories but also constrains how experience can justify belief (...) more generally. The result is a novel account of public evidence with broad applicability across domains of inquiry. (shrink)

Science advising committees are an integral part of many public policies and, therefore, affect the political legitimacy of such policies. The role of science advising in the policymaking process is complicated by the fact that science and science policy advising are value-laden. Thus, an account of what values are appropriate for use in science policy advising is needed so that the final advice helps ensure that public policies are politically legitimate. One leading approach to solving this problem is using a (...) deliberative democracy account of political legitimacy. In this paper, I build on existing objections by Soazig Le Bihan ( 2024 ) and Kristina Rolin ( 2021 ) and argue that this approach is underspecified and fails to adequately prevent the marginalization of knowledge and values of oppressed and minority groups in the science policy advising process. I explore how a different account of political legitimacy, public reason, addresses the problem of value-laden science policy advising. I then argue that Lori Watson and Christie Hartley’s () feminist account of public reason provides more detailed criteria for appropriate value influence in science policy advising, thereby better preventing marginalization. Specifically, their account requires the absence of domination and the provision of the social conditions necessary for recognition respect. Finally, I argue that these two criteria of feminist public reason can be achieved in practice if science policy advising committees adopt a combination of Helen Longino’s ( 1990, 2002 ) critical contextual empiricism and Sandra Harding’s ( 2015 ) strong objectivity. (shrink)

If the legitimate exercise of political power requires justifiability to all citizens, as John Rawls’s influential Liberal Principle of Legitimacy states, then what should we say about the legitimacy of institutions and actions that have a significant impact on the interests of future citizens? Surprisingly, this question has been neglected in the literature. This paper questions the assumption that it is only justifiability to presently existing citizens that matters, and provides reasons for thinking that legitimacy requires justifiability to future citizens (...) as well. Further, it is argued that the presently dominant interpretation of Rawls’s principle is unable to take future citizens into account in an adequate way. Therefore, the inclusion of these citizens among those to whom justifiability is owed gives us good reasons to reject this interpretation, and to adopt a different understanding of the view. (shrink)

Many institutions and organizations now delegate important decisions to algorithms. These algorithms promise greater predictive accuracy, at a lower operating cost than the human decision-makers they replace. But they also have the distinct disadvantage of being “black boxes”: we lack intelligible explanations of why they arrive at the decisions they do. Those adversely affected by these decisions, it seems, may reasonably object to the opaque nature of the decision-process. My aim in this paper is to explain the moral basis of (...) this objection. The account I develop centers on the moral right to a justification. I motivate this view in part by criticizing two rival accounts, one based in the interest in self-advocacy, the other in the requirement of public reason. (shrink)

This article proposes an Inferentialist Model of Epistemological Approach (IMEA) to address the normative conditions under which religious reasons may be legitimately used in public justification practices. Drawing on Robert Brandom’s inferentialist pragmatics, the article advances a model of rationality grounded in the social practice of giving and asking for reasons, emphasizing concepts such as epistemic entitlement, scorekeeping, and logical expressivism. In this view, the legitimacy of a reason does not rest on its neutrality or universal acceptability but on its (...) intelligibility–understood from an inferentialist perspec-tive–that is, whether it can be rationally understood and assessed by others within a shared discursive space. Religious reasons, therefore, are not excluded a priori but must meet the inferential demands of public reasoning. The IMEA framework challenges traditional foun-dationalist or evidentialist standards in public reason theories and offers a robust account of rational pluralism. Ultimately, the article argues that IMEA enables a more consistent and inclusive treatment of religious reasoning within public justification, without undermining the rationale of public reason. (shrink)

Das tagesaktuell brisante und zugleich philosophische Buch analysiert die aktuellen Krisensymptome, die sich in vielen westlichen Demokratien zeigen. Dafür unterscheidet der Autor grundsätzlich zwischen Republik und Demokratie und zeigt, dass im Prinzip der Republik Tendenzen angelegt sind, die sich gegen die Demokratie wenden können. Das Buch zeigt zugleich, was getan werden kann, um die Demokratie in der modernen Republik lebendig zu halten, ohne dass die Republik im Populismus einer angeblichen Volksherrschaft zerstört wird.

Political liberals typically hold that reasonable citizens should not form political associations (e.g., political parties) with unreasonable citizens. This is because unreasonable citizens are unlikely to conform to the duty of civility—the duty to be able, and willing, to use public reasons in their public political deliberations. Here I argue that a general prohibition on political associations with the unreasonable can undermine the fair value of their political liberties. This is because unreasonable citizens can grow up in epistemic environments that (...) make it difficult to be reasonable, and so to direct citizens to not associate with them can deprive citizens from certain social backgrounds the equal opportunity for political influence. I propose instead that political liberals should distinguish between unreasonable citizens who are disposed to support de re publicly justifiable laws and policies and unreasonable citizens who support illegitimate laws and policies. Reasonable citizens may form political associations with the former group, but not the latter group. (shrink)

The Book of kOA lays out a manifesto and a systems design for a global, open, and merit-based civic platform—Konnaxion—that turns knowledge into a public utility and translates agreement into action. Grounded in principles such as radical lucidity, transparency in governance / privacy of person, inclusive social mobility, ecological responsibility, and cooperation before competition, the book specifies a modular architecture with four interoperable modules: KonnectED (open education), keenKonnect (collaborative development), Ethikos (merit-weighted deliberation and voting), and Kreative (cultural commons). A cross-cutting (...) backbone, EkoH, provides multidimensional merit, certification, and legitimacy across modules. Use-cases include education reform, justice and prison rehabilitation kiosks, open-knowledge “Kristal Farms,” and governance pilots that combine public participation with expertise via weighted votes. The work argues that when information is open and merit is visible, collaboration outperforms zero-sum competition, enabling ethical, resilient progress at scale. This is both political philosophy (institutional design, legitimacy, equity) and philosophy of technology (AI governance, platform ethics), offering a design-level response to contemporary fragmentation and institutional drag. (shrink)

This paper argues that moral philosophers can have a special role in helping members of society come to choose which moral theories to believe. Importantly, the argument does not depend on the idea that moral philosophers (more) reliably have true moral beliefs (or are “Strong Moral Experts”). Instead, the argument is that moral philosophers are well-placed to develop understanding of moral theories by drawing out valid implications (they are “Weak Moral Experts”). By developing valid moral arguments, and by making the (...) relevant implications accessible to society, moral philosophers can help people understand the costs and benefits of various moral theories, allowing them to make more informed choices. This does not imply that everyone will agree; there is room for disagreement about the weight to put on various theoretical costs and benefits. But it does give a metaphilosophical picture of the role of moral philosophers, justify certain kinds of public philosophy, and explain the value that moral philosophers can add to society at the philosophy-public interface. [Open access]. (shrink)

Scholars of trust and misinformation typically assume that the only two poles of legitimacy are democratic pluralism and scientific technocracy. This paper examines Singapore’s response to Covid-19 to argue that this nation-state instantiates an alternative ideal: political technocracy. Singapore’s ruling party of sixty years, the People’s Action Party (PAP), has long positioned itself as a long-term steward, whose authority rests on the trust it has cultivated among citizens, which it attributes to governmental transparency. We present a taxonomy of the state’s (...) rhetorical strategies – ontological, moral, and statistical – to highlight the government’s active role in shaping public perceptions of national problems and the aptness of its policies. This taxonomy elucidates how Singapore’s political technocracy differs from scientific technocracy, while still highlighting the state’s strategic deployment of the rhetoric of science and ad hoc experts for legitimacy. In so doing, we invite further consideration of the relationships between science and public trust in illiberal authoritarian states. (shrink)

The term “Northeastern Renaissance” carries a dual meaning: on the one hand, it represents an artistic movement that emerged in the late 2010s in the three Northeastern provinces of the People’s Republic of China (as well as the eastern regions of Inner Mongolia), bearing a manifesto-like quality; on the other hand, it is also ironic, as the Northeastern provinces have long been perceived as a region that was historically beyond the reach of China’s traditional elite culture, thus having little to (...) revive or restore. This duality is reflected in the audio-visual works of Northeastern post-industrial culture, particularly in their depiction of sex and violence. These works exhibit an ambiguous attitude toward sex and violence—both critical and humorous. Building upon the absurdist foundation of Northeastern post-industrial culture, as discussed in the author’s 2024 academic presentation, this paper further explores the dual nature of sex and violence. The structure of the paper is as follows: The first section reviews my 2024 discussion on the absurdity in Northeastern post-industrial audio-visual works. The subsequent chapters focus on Drifting Away, a crime drama that aired in 2025, whose narrative elicited polarized reactions from the audience—some fervently idolized the four butcher-like serial killers, while others found the moral implications deeply unsettling. Finally, the author will analyze this contrast through the lens of the duality in Northeastern post-industrial culture, demonstrating how the intersection of Northeastern migrant culture and post-industrial conditions has given rise to a satirical art form that challenges traditional Chinese moral values. (shrink)

Drawing on James Tully’s dialogical reconstruction of political theory as a critical activity, this chapter proposes to take the disconnect between theory and practice as an occasion to loosen the grip of a particular image of disobedience holding both liberals and their critics captive. Liberal political thought approaches civil disobedience as a problem of justification: namely, as a challenge of reconciling conflicting obligations to conscience and obligations to law where injustice causes the two to diverge. Recent criticisms of the liberal (...) paradigm seek to expand the boundaries of justifiable dissent, or propose new grounds of justification, but seldom question the very paradigm of political theory animating the hegemonic liberal approach itself. The project of resolving practical conflicts of democratic politics by handing down authoritative rules and procedures constitutes a “monological approach” to the study of politics. It figures the theorist as an authority standing over and above the problems of demos. Such an approach mystifies the ways political theory’s pronouncements are context bound and often serve as unreflective idealization of the status quo. Through a survey of the diverse ways the language of civil disobedience is used, and conscientious lawbreaking is practiced, this chapter seeks to disclose some of the ways a monological approach to dissent remains complicit in a racialized politics of law and order it often claims to challenge. (shrink)

In public reason liberalism, equal respect requires that conceptions of justice be publicly justifiable to relevant people in a manner that allocates to each an equal say. But all liberal public justification also excludes: e.g., it accords no say, or a lesser say, to people it deems unreasonable. Can liberal public justification be aligned with the equal respect that allegedly grounds it, if the latter calls for discursive equality? The chapter explores this challenge with a focus on Rawls-type political liberalism. (...) I suggest that political liberalism’s commitment to equal respect can cohere with the standing of the unreasonable in public justification if that standing is not impermissibly unequal in discursive purchase. I then consider one candidate view of the permissibility of purchase inequality. On this broadly sufficientarian view, purchase inequality is permissible provided relevant people have standing of enough purchase to be able to avoid relevant bads. A plausible variant of this view suggests that political liberalism’s commitment to equal respect does not cohere with the discursive standing of the unreasonable. It emerges that where liberal public justification accords actual people discursive respect but relevantly idealizes at least around its fringes, the permissibility of purchase inequality must be a central concern. (shrink)

I pursue three interrelated goals. Firstly, through a Hohfeldian analysis of the concept of a right, I aim to clarify what we mean by attributing to political authority a general right to rule (through legal norms) and to the recipients of its decisions a general obligation to obey these norms, which is con¬tent-independent and preemptive. In this regard, careful differentiation between legal and moral rights and obligations appears crucial. Secondly, I argue that, in contrast to the standard approach in political (...) and legal theory interpreting the right to govern as a Hohfeldian claim and the obligation of obedience as a Hohfeldian duty, conceiving these positions as symmetrical and inseparable (“correlative”), it is more fitting to focus on the Hohfeldian power and the corresponding liability. This implies abandoning the assumption of the content-independence and preemptiveness of authority’s decisions. Thirdly, in contrast to the majority of con¬tributions, I emphasise that morality cannot remain a theoretical black box, the content and validity of which are simply assumed in discussions about legitimate authority, and I show how this can be circumvented. The paper seeks to find a stable theoretical position that does not slide either towards the acceptance of the “self-image of the state” as in the case of the standard approach, or towards the “nightmare” of philo¬sophical anarchism. (shrink)

Two central questions concerning the role that persistent disagreements about philosophical, ethical, and religious issues in liberal societies are raised in this paper: (i) whether the state’s authority may be justified on the basis of controversial views and (ii) whether the state may rely on controversial views when exercising authority. Many assume whatever motivates philosophers to respect disagreement in justifying the state—answering “no” to (i)—seems to also require the state to respect disagreement when it acts—answering “no” to (ii). Here I (...) defend the consistency of answering “no” to (i) and “yes” to (ii), a position I call “political perfectionism.” I argue, first, that one prominent reason for answering “no” to (i)—that citizens should be able to endorse the authority of the state—is consistent with answering “yes” to (ii) and, second, that the intuitions underlying why political liberals want citizens to be able to endorse the authority of the state can motivate answering “yes” to (ii). (shrink)

This work has two major goals. The first is to reframe the problem of political authority from its Conservative framing to a Reformist framing. This change creates a new benchmark for the success of a theory. Rather than justifying a pre-existing intuition, a theory can be successful if it could establish political authority whenever the state itself or an individual’s relationship to it changes. This change also shifts the focus from the state’s right to rule to moral housekeeping. In other (...) words, the main goal is not to see when the state can use coercion against its citizens but rather to determine what political obligations citizens could have under different scenarios so that citizens can more accurately keep track of their moral reasons for action. The second major goal is to call into question epistemic theories of democratic authority through a critical examination of David Estlund’s theory of normative consent. Normative consent cannot establish political authority. Even granting that it could, normative consent would bind individuals to epistemic procedures rather than democratic procedures given that epistemic procedures better solve the moral problems that generate normative consent. However, this then raises worries from the public reason perspective that epistemic procedures would impose a procedure on some citizens which they could reject from a qualified position. To overcome this worry, it is shown that epistemic procedures based on reducing the power of the ignorant rather than raising the power of the experts are not open to such qualified rejection, and democratic procedures in the real world will do no better than a coin flip at selecting correct policies. In the end, one branch of epistemic conceptions of democratic authority are proven untenable. (shrink)

Social norms regulating carework and social reproduction tend to be inegalitarian. At the same time, such norms often play a crucial role when we plan our lives. How can we criticise objectionable practices while ensuring that people can organise their lives around meaningful and predictable rules? Gerald Gaus argues that only ‘publicly justified’ rules, rules that everyone would prefer over ‘blameless liberty,’ should be followed. In this paper, we uncover the inegalitarian implications of this feature of Gaus's framework. We show (...) that because a society without clear social norms for how social reproduction and care work ought to be organised would be so unattractive, inegalitarian rules would pass Gaus's test. They would pass this test since they would nevertheless be better than ‘blameless liberty.’ Those who are disproportionately burdened by a rule are faced with the daunting task of showing that they would be better off under no rule, instead of merely having to show that they would be better off with a different rule. (shrink)

Public reason liberalism demands that political decisions be publicly justified to the citizens who are subjected to them. Much recent literature emphasises the differences between the two main interpretations of this requirement, justificatory and political liberalism. In this paper, I show that both views share structural democratic deficits. They fail to guarantee political autonomy, the expressive quality of law, and the justification to citizens, because they allow collective decisions made by incompletely theorised agreements. I argue that the result can only (...) be avoided by changing public reason’s role in collective decision-making. Instead of incompletely theorised agreements, we should demand agreement both on the public reasons themselves and on the other premises that justify political decisions. In this way, it is always possible to point to a procedure-independent reason that justifies democratic decisions, and the reasoning of the state is public and contestable. Finally, I explain how this, in turn, implies that only political liberalism can be rescued—by accepting what I will call strong political liberalism. Modifying justificatory liberalism in the necessary way will inevitably open the door to an objectionable form of perfectionism. (shrink)

Many democratic theorists hold that when a decision is collectively made in the right kind of way, in accordance with the right procedure, it is permissible to enforce it. They deny that there are further requirements on the type of reasons that can permissibly be used to justify laws and policies. In this paper, I argue that democratic theorists are mistaken about this. So-called public reason requirements follow from commitments that most of them already hold. Drawing on the democratic ideal (...) of civic equality, I show that it can successfully explain why political decision-making must have the right sort of procedure-independent justification. However, contra standard accounts of public reason, I argue that laws and policies need to be justified with convergence accessible, not shared, reasons. Public reasons are those that are accessible in light of evaluative standards shared by all, or in light of every citizen’s private evaluative standards. Since this will make the set of public reasons wider, it makes the theory more palatable to sceptics while retaining the framework’s justificatory potential. (shrink)

Public reason liberals expect individuals to have justificatory reasons for their views of certain political issues. This paper considers how groups can, and whether they should, give collective public reasons for their political decisions. A problem is that aggregating individuals’ consistent judgments on reasons and a decision can produce inconsistent collective judgments. The group will then fail to give a reason for its decision. The paper considers various solutions to this problem and defends a deliberative procedure by showing how it (...) incentivizes information sharing and leads to outcomes most acceptable to the group members. (shrink)

I will argue that the natural law theory of morality, when extended into a political theory of justice, results in a picture of political justice much like that of public reason liberalism. However, natural law political theory, I argue, need not entail a natural law theory of morality. While facts about what societies ought to do supervene upon facts about what is good for human beings, there are distinct goods involved and distinct reasons for action. Rather, considerations taken from the (...) common good as guiding public policy results in a two-layer approach to public reasonability, resembling features of both consensus and convergence accounts of public reason. Consequently, the differences between natural law and classical public reason liberalism are significant but are not as significant as might have otherwise appeared. In fact, natural law political theory might be a more consistent development of the idea of a public reason than those of classical liberalism. (shrink)

Public reason liberalism is the political theory which holds that coercive laws and policies are justified when and only when they are grounded in reasons of the public. The standard interpretation of public reason liberalism, consensus accounts, claim that the reasons persons share or that persons can derive from shared values determine which policies can be justified. In this paper, I argue that consensus approaches cannot justify fair educational policies and preserving cultural goods. Consensus approaches can resolve some controversies about (...) teaching values in the educational system, such as curriculum choice. But they cannot determine which culture goods, e.g., architecture, artwork, or language ought to be preserved in the education system. Consensus approaches cannot fairly resolve competing claims about these kinds of disputes. -/- I propose that convergence accounts of public reason, which allow individuals to draw on their own comprehensive doctrines in limited ways, can remedy these weaknesses in the mainline public reason tradition. The convergence approach can justify a pluralist state that can advance valuable community goods. John Henry Newman’s advocacy of liberal arts education finds resonance in other cultures, notably among Confucians, illustrating that there can be a shared moral vision and inquiry into the good life across deep substantive disagreements about educational values and policies, once we expand our notion of justification to be more inclusive. (shrink)

This article discusses the growth of the populist radical right as a concrete example of the scenario where liberal democratic ideas are losing support in broadly liberal democratic societies. Our goal is to enrich John Rawls’ influential theory of political liberalism. We argue that even in that underexplored scenario, Rawlsian political liberalism can offer an appealing account of how to promote the legitimacy and stability of liberal democratic institutions provided it places partisanship centre stage. Specifically, we propose a brand-new moral (...) duty binding ‘reasonable’ partisans committed to pluralism. This duty establishes conditions where partisans must strategically transform society’s public reason (i.e. transform the visions for society their parties campaign on) in ways that promise to attract back support from illiberal and antidemocratic competitors. While this strategic behaviour might seem impermissible, we show that Rawls’ distinctive account of sincerity in democratic deliberation is uniquely placed to justify it as perfectly ethical. (shrink)

Some moral value is transparent just in case an agent with average mental capacities can feasibly come to know whether some entity does, or does not, possess that value. In this paper, I consider whether legitimacy—that is, the property of exercises of political power to be permissible—is transparent. Implicit in much theorising about legitimacy is the idea that it is. I will offer two counter-arguments. First, injustice can defeat legitimacy, and injustice can be intransparent. Second, legitimacy can play a critical (...) function in our practical thought, which sometimes requires intransparency. (shrink)

Focusing on current efforts to persuade the public to comply with Covid-19 best practices, this essay examines what role appeals to religious reasons should (or should not) play in leaders’ attempts to secure followers’ acceptance of group policies in contexts of religious and moral pluralism. While appeals to followers’ religious commitments can be helpful in promoting desirable public health outcomes, they also raise moral concerns when made in the contexts of secular institutions with religiously diverse participants. In these contexts, leaders (...) who appeal to religious reasons as bases of justification for imposing Covid policies may seem to fail to show respect for the autonomy of those who lack the relevant religious commitments, and—especially when a leader herself rejects the religious commitments she makes reference to to persuade others—her appeals to religious reasons may seem to constitute ethically problematic exercises of manipulation. This essay draws on the resources of contemporary political philosophy to analyze and respond to these concerns and concludes that they are not sufficiently well-founded. To the contrary, it contends that there are good moral grounds for leaders to appeal to religious reasons as (partial) bases of justification for why followers should accept Covid policies. In the course of the argument, this essay also highlights how contemporary political theory can enrich discussions about the distinctions between coercion, manipulation, and leadership, and thereby give insight not only into the ethics of leadership but also—at least by the lights of central theories of leadership like that of James MacGregor Burns (1978)—into whether and how appeals to religious reasons can figure into genuine exercises of leadership, in contrast with mere instances of the wielding of social power. (shrink)

Recently, there have been attempts at offering new justifications of the Rawlsian idea of public reason. Blain Neufeld has suggested that the ideal of political autonomy justifies public reason, while R.J. Leland and Han van Wietmarschen have sought to justify the idea by appealing to the value of political community. In this paper, I show that both proposals are vulnerable to a common problem. In realistic circumstances, they will often turn into reasons to oppose, rather than support, public reason. However, (...) this counterintuitive result can be avoided if we conceive of autonomy and community differently. (shrink)

In recent years, leading public reason liberals have argued that publicly justifying coercive laws and policies requires that citizens offer both adequate secular justificatory reasons and adequate secular motivating reasons for these laws and policies. In this paper, I provide a critical assessment of these two requirements and argue for two main claims concerning such requirements. First, only some qualified versions of the requirement that citizens offer adequate secular justificatory reasons for coercive laws and policies may be justifiably regarded as (...) plausible liberal principles of public justification. And second, the requirement that citizens offer adequate secular motivating reasons for coercive laws and policies is untenable on multiple grounds. Public reason liberals should focus on assessing the justificatory reasons offered for and against coercive laws and policies rather than requiring citizens to offer adequate secular motivating reasons for such laws and policies. (shrink)

May the state try to promote the flourishing of its citizens? Some political philosophers—perfectionists—hold that the state may do so, while other political philosophers—anti-perfectionists—hold that the state may not do so. Here I examine how perfectionists might respond to a style of argument that anti-perfectionists give—what I call the legitimacy objection. This argument holds that considerations about flourishing are not themselves the right kind of considerations to justify state authority, and so if the state takes action to promote the flourishing (...) of its citizens, it is meddling in issues that are beyond the legitimate scope of its authority. I argue that this objection only shows that considerations about flourishing cannot themselves legitimate state action, but that they may still guide the state and state officials when they are deciding among policy options that are legitimate for non-perfectionist reasons. (shrink)

Women continue to be in charge of most childrearing; men continue to be responsible for most breadwinning. There is no consensus on whether this state of affairs, and the informal norms that encourage it, are matters of justice to be tackled by state action. Feminists have criticized political liberalism for its alleged inability to embrace a full feminist agenda, inability explained by political liberals’ commitment to the ideal of state neutrality. The debate continues on whether neutral states can accommodate two (...) feminist demands: to enact policies aimed at dismantling the feminization of caregiving, especially childrearing, and to compensate women for some of the disadvantages they incur by being primary care-givers. I contribute to this debate with three arguments in support of policies meant to de-gender care-giving and compensate care-givers. The first appeals to equality of opportunity to positions of advantage and justifies policies that prevent or mitigate statistical discrimination and implicit biases. The second draws attention to a possible causal relationship between the specialization of women in early childcare and misogyny; since the latter is incompatible with political liberal justice, it yields the conclusion that political liberals ought to further investigate the causal hypothesis with the aim of establishing or refuting it. The third argument concludes that legitimate childrearing prohibits adults from socializing children or, at least girls, into gender norms; it justifies duties of justice on the side of parents, educators, and economic agents, and state policies meant to offset foreseeable breaches of some of these duties. (shrink)

This essay undertakes a critical analysis of Kevin Vallier’s Principle of Convergent Restraint (PCR) within the framework of public reason liberalism. It begins by examining the first provision, intelligibility, arguing that Vallier’s formulation is at odds with the demands of public justification in liberal democracies. In particular, it contends that Vallier’s privileging of intelligibility over accessibility undermines the foundational commitments of public reason and pluralistic liberalism. The second section evaluates narrow restraint, asserting that a more precise understanding of public reason (...) liberalism accommodates diverse justificatory reasons without precluding the emergence of overlapping comprehensive doctrines. Finally, the essay critiques proposal restraint, rejecting Vallier’s position that justificatory constraints should apply only to public officials. It argues that the distinction between citizens and public officials is conceptually tenuous and that justificatory restraints must be applied universally, given the intricate interplay between public deliberation, political opinion, and legislative decision-making. (shrink)

In his insightful book, Trust in a Polarized Age, Kevin Vallier (2021) convincingly shows that the legitimacy and sustainability of liberal democratic institutions are dependent upon the maintenance of social and institutional trust. This insight, I believe, has value beyond the illustrious halls of post-Rawlsian, post-Gausian thought. Indeed, while I remain skeptical towards some of the premises of public reason liberalism, I am convinced that any liberal democratic political philosopher who takes the trust literature seriously and who has made their (...) (pragmatic or principled) peace with redistribution has good reasons to sympathize with the general outlines of the institutional palette that emerges out of his book. In this article, I will take for granted Vallier’s assumption that the erosion of social and institutional trust is a serious problem. This motivates investigating the trust-bearing attributes of the redistributive welfare state and the “principle of social insurance” that underpins it. I reconstruct and critically analyse Vallier’s case for a liberal democratic welfare state. I show that he makes a convincing public reason argument for universal social insurance but proceeds too hastily to exclude the principle of unconditionality from consideration. The rest of my paper consists of defending this claim by presenting two kinds of arguments— empirical and theoretical—that I think public reason liberals like Vallier, according to their own commitments, should be motivated to incorporate into their comprehensive discussion of the public justifications for and against basic income. They will show that Universal Basic Income (UBI), although it remains contentious, has some features that could appeal to a diverse citizenry, and thus tilt the balance of public reason judgments towards UBI. (shrink)

This article addresses the exclusivism–inclusivism debate about religious reasons in law within a justificatory liberal framework. The question of whether religious reasons have justificatory capacity for attaining public justification has increasingly been seen as a matter of how public justification is understood between two rival models: the consensus model being aligned with exclusivism, the convergence model with inclusivism. More recently, however, that alignment has been challenged with attempts to show that consensus can reach an equivalent degree of inclusivism as convergence. (...) Against this, I contend that the purported equivalence is misplaced. First, I identify a crucial ambiguity about public justification and two corresponding domains. Upon demonstrating these to be mutually independent and severable, I conclude that the moves to equalize the models are confined within the more narrow domain while, in the more fundamental domain, the choice of model continues to prove determinative as to the exclusivist or inclusivist valence of justificatory liberalism. (shrink)

In this chapter I focus on an analysis of ordinary practices for overcoming disagreement in nonidealized political settings. My goal is to show that compromises are the most common outcomes of public procedures of adjudication among disagreeing parties over political matters, rather than consensus-based decisions. If my analysis of the actual epistemic circumstances of democracy is convincing, it follows that wide-spread consensus over political decisions is an unrealistic goal for democratic settings in a pluralistic world. Against this backdrop, my analysis (...) will show that certain forms of political compromises do however rely upon normative commitments, even though in a less straightforward way than it is usually imagined for consensus-based political decisions. The normative dimension of compromise agreements rests on the quality of the intersubjective exchange; it is a matter of relational justice, since it demands that the parties involved reciprocally respect one another. Realistically, each party tries to get as much as it can from the negotiation. Yet, we can distinguish between a principled, mutually respectful way, to negotiate with others and a dynamic in which power relations and manipulative attempts are everything that counts. Since, however, it appears quite obvious that power dynamics can deeply affect compromise, in the last section of the chapter I introduce some cautionary remarks on the possibility that principled compromises can warrant an adequate response to structurally entrenched asymmetries of power and to stark differences in public visibility for members of different social groups. (shrink)

In writing this book, I had two fundamental purposes: (i) to propose a revised account of liberal legitimacy within a general paradigm of relational liberalism and (ii) to adequately clarify the different goals, methodologies and justificatory tasks that characterize the ideal and nonideal phases of a justificatory paradigm for democratic decisions. In this work I started my analysis from the assumption that these two purposes are strictly related, and my goal was to underscore that the ambitious justificatory project of liberalism (...) faces internal tensions and to propose a way out of these tensions. In order to solve these difficulties of the traditional accounts of liberal legitimacy, I have proposed a justificatory framework aimed at guiding actual decision-making processes and avoiding indeterminacy (guidance), defining standards that everyone has equal opportunity to fulfill (inclusion), and granting that citizens exercise their reflexive control over the whole democratic system (reflexivity). As I argue in this work, this framework relies on a dual justificatory strategy that involves both ideal and nonideal analyses. (shrink)

The main goal of this chapter is investigating the role that public reason can play within the justificatory paradigm that I defend in this work. Public reason is the notion, within the Rawlsian paradigm, that connects the justificatory enterprise with the less defined and always changing deliberative aspects of political decision-making processes. The practice of public reason requires that citizens, when discussing political matters, respect the constraints imposed by the loose normative framework of deliberation and by the ideal of equal (...) respect and, therefore, do not address other citizens with reasons that they know are inadmissible for the other party. Along these lines there are two main topics I want to address in this chapter: i. investigating whether the deliberative constraints imposed by the idea of public reason are in fact compatible with the liberal ideal of inclusivity; ii. clarify if and in what way the requirement of public reason can be satisfied in order to guarantee the legitimacy of coercive acts. To address these topics, in this chapter I first introduce Rawls’s analysis of public reason reinterpreting this debate along the lines of the epistemic framework that I have been outlining in this book. Then, in part 2, I introduce Steven Wall’s illustration of why the public justification principle cannot satisfy the reflexivity requirement, namely, that a theory of public justification should itself be publicly justified. Finally, in part 3, I discuss Gerald Gaus’s proposal for a justificatory version of liberalism. (shrink)

The analysis I develop in this chapter aims at illustrating in a technical sense the epistemic nonideal circumstances that characterize our social life as agents embedded in intersubjective settings. I defend a version of political liberalism that is willing to clarify its epistemic tenets, instead of supporting the Rawlsian strategy of epistemic abstinence. My goal is to show that there is something important to say, epistemically, about what the fact of entrenched disagreement normatively entails for agents involved in intersubjective deliberation. (...) The heart of this proposal is that given certain epistemic circumstances (i.e. the doxastic presupposition; a fallibilist clause; pervasive disagreement due to an opaque appraisal of evidence; our limited epistemic capacities), agents have good reasons for respecting a symmetric credibility constraint. Therefore, when sincerely engaged in a decision-making process, they must attribute some (even minimal) epistemic credibility to other parties’ perspectives. Finally, I connect this debate with an illustration of reasonableness as a virtue of liberal citizenship and claim that the epistemic dimension of this virtue has not been adequately investigated. I conclude that reasonable citizens, in accepting the limits of their epistemic abilities, should be ready to share political and epistemic authority with their fellow citizens. According to my paradigm, this characterization of democratic political agency is grounded in the analysis of the epistemic circumstances of politics and rests on the normative ideal of democratic co-authorship. (shrink)