Reasonable Pluralism,Interculturalism, and Sterba on Question-Beggingness

In From Rationality to Equality, James Sterba (From rationality to equality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) argues that the non-moral, and non-controversial, principle of logic, the principle that good arguments do not beg-the-question, provides a rationally conclusive response to egoism. He calls this “the principle of non-question-beggingness” and it is supposed to justify a conception of “Morality as Compromise.” Sterba’s basic idea is that principles of morality provide a non-question-begging compromise between self-interested reasons and other-regarding reasons. I will focus, first, on Sterba’s rejection of the alternative Kantian rationalist justification of morality, and second, I discuss the logical principle of non-question-beggingness and I argue that Sterba is wrong to assume that there is a formal, logical requirement that a rational egoist must provide a non-question-begging defense of egoism. I argue that, like the Kantian, Sterba needs a more substantial conception of practical reason to derive his conclusion. My third focus is the problem of reasonable pluralism and public reason (Rawls in Political liberalism. Columbia University Press, New York, 1996; The law of peoples with the idea of public reason revisited. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1999). The Rawlsian principle of public reason is analogous to Sterba’s principle of non-question-beggingness. Sterba recognizes that public policies should respect competing perspectives and that a public conception of justice must be justifiable to all reasonable people. The problem is that that reasonable people disagree about fundamental moral questions. Rawls calls this the fact of reasonable pluralism. I argue that an intercultural conception of justice is necessary to provide a response to reasonable pluralism and a shared basis for public reason.     

Science as Public Reason: A Restatement

According to John Rawls, the methods and conclusions of science—when these are non-controversial—constitute public reasons. However, several objections have been raised against this view. This paper focuses on two objections. On the one hand, the associational objection states that scientific reasons are the reasons of the scientific community, and thus paradigmatically non-public in the Rawlsian sense. On the other hand, the controversiality objection states that the non-controversiality requirement rules out their public character when scientific postulates are resisted by a significant portion of the citizenry. The paper replies that both objections miss their mark. To the associational objection, it replies that the relevant test for a reason to be public is whether the reasons have been construed under the rules and constrains of a public frame of thought. Insofar as scientific methods and conclusions correspond to the principles of reasoning and rules of evidence that liberals understand as public, their associational origin is secondary. To the controversiality objection, it replies that the standard for a scientific argument to be regarded as non-controversial should refer to its degree of intra-scientific consensus, since ordinary citizens accept or reject scientific pronouncements conditioned to their particular comprehensive views. Nonetheless, a wide extra-scientific agreement on the epistemic virtues of the scientific method will be needed. The paper concludes that there is a good case to think about scientific reasons as public to the extent that scientific reasoning is a mode of inquiry that mirrors a central aspiration of Rawlsian political liberalism: having a public way of thought and an impersonal standpoint to adjudicate between competing claims.     

Shared intentions,public reason,and political autonomy

John Rawls claims that public reasoning is the reasoning of ‘equal citizens who as a corporate body impose rules on one another backed by sanctions of state power’. Drawing upon an amended version of Michael Bratman’s theory of shared intentions, I flesh out this claim by developing the ‘civic people’ account of public reason. Citizens realize ‘full’ political autonomy as members of a civic people. Full political autonomy, though, cannot be realised by citizens in societies governed by a ‘constrained proceduralist’ account of democratic self-government, or the ‘convergence’ account of public justification formulated recently by Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier.     

Incentives, Inequality and Self-Respect

Rawls argues that ‘Parties in the original position would wish to avoid at almost any cost the social conditions that undermine self-respect’. But what are these social conditions that we should so urgently avoid? One evident candidate might be conditions of material inequality. Yet Rawls seems confident that his account of justice can endorse such inequalities without jeopardising citizens’ self-respect. In this article I argue that this confidence is misplaced. Unequalising incentives, I claim, jeopardise the self-respect of those least advantaged—at least under a Rawlsian schema—by undermining the very processes by which Rawls hopes to make distributional inequalities and self-respect compatible. I begin by setting out Rawls’s distinct account of self-respect before moving to describe how Rawls expects the difference principle to support citizens’ in this regard. I then draw upon GA Cohen’s distinction between ‘strict’ and ‘lax’ interpretations of the difference principle to argue that the presence of unequalising incentives undermines both the direct and indirect support that the difference principle can offer to citizens’ self-respect. As such, I claim that Rawls must either weaken his endorsement of unequalising incentives, or risk violating his ‘prior commitment’ to avoiding social conditions harmful to citizens’ self-respect.     

Public Reason as a Form of Normative and Political Justification: A Study on Rawls’s Idea of Public Reason and Kant’s Notion of the Use of Public Reason in What is Enlightenment?

Abstract

This article explores the historical and philosophical backgrounds that inform the appropriation of the term “public reason” in liberal theory. Particularly, it studies the differing nuances attached to public reason by Kant and Rawls. The article suggests that, while Kant viewed the public use of reason as a conditio sine qua non for Enlightenment to take place within the Prussian society, Rawls’s notion of public reason in Political Liberalism serves a different purpose in our contemporary world. Rawls sees public reason as a tool, which would enable citizens of the pluralistic liberal state to unearth tolerable bases for coexistence, despite their trenchant and often conflicting ideological, cultural and religious differences. Moreover, Rawls’s notion of public reason aims at liberal legitimacy: the normative and political justification of the legal power of the state in liberal democracy.     

Public Reason, Objectivity, and Journalism in Liberal Democratic Societies

How should we understand the familiar demand that journalists ‘be objective’? One possibility is that journalists are under an obligation to report only the facts of the matter. However, facts need to be interpreted, selected, and communicated. How can this be done objectively? This paper aims to explain the concept of journalistic objectivity in methodological terms. Specifically, I will argue that the ideal of journalistic objectivity should be recast as a commitment to John Rawls’s conception of public reason. Journalism plays a vital role in the operation of all modern liberal democracies, functioning as the public watchdog, the fourth estate, or the conduit through which vital information flows to the citizenry. Journalism is, therefore, an institution that is best understood as part of the basic structure of society. In Political Liberalism, Rawls explicitly excludes media of any kind from the demands of public reason because he doesn’t think that they play a political role that is important enough to bring them under the official auspices of public reason. I will argue that overlooking the political significance of journalism is a mistake, but one that can be corrected while keeping within the spirit and most important elements of his theory. This revision will widen the scope for what counts as journalism beyond traditional outlets and forms of media but will impose the demands of public reason on anyone who intends to participate in the institution.     

Legitimacy, Democracy and Public Justification: Rawls’ Political Liberalism Versus Gaus’ Justificatory Liberalism

Public justification-based accounts of liberal legitimacy rely on the idea that a polity’s basic structure should, in some sense, be acceptable to its citizens. In this paper I discuss the prospects of that approach through the lens of Gerald Gaus’ critique of John Rawls’ paradigmatic account of democratic public justification. I argue that Gaus does succeed in pointing out some significant problems for Rawls’ political liberalism; yet his alternative, justificatory liberalism, is not voluntaristic enough to satisfy the desiderata of a genuinely democratic theory of public justification. So I contend that—pace Gaus, but also Rawls—rather than simply amending political liberalism, the claims of justificatory liberalism bring out fatal tensions between the desiderata of any theory of liberal-democratic legitimacy through public justification.     

Self-Respect or Self-Delusion? Tomasi and Rawls on the Basic Liberties

A central feature of John Tomasi’s ‘Free Market Fairness’ is the emphasis it places upon the good of self-respect. Like Rawls, Tomasi believes that accounts of justice ought to offer support for the self-respect of citizens. Indeed, this is a key way in which Tomasi aspires to engage with the ‘high-liberal’ tradition. Unlike Rawls however, Tomasi argues that this support is best provided by our treating a broader set of economic liberties as basic liberties. In this paper I raise two concerns about this latter claim. Firstly, I trace a number of significant ways in which Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect differs from that of Rawls. Whilst such divergences are not necessarily problematic, I argue that they serve to limit the purchase his account has on left-liberals. Further, I argue that the ideal of self-respect is more deeply ‘hard-wired’ into Rawls’s account of justice than Tomasi recognises. As such, Tomasi fails to address the full range of additional (and important) ways in which Rawls expects his principles of justice to support citizens’ self-respect. I argue that this also limits the force of Tomasi’s claims. Secondly, and more seriously, I argue that there are significant tensions between Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect and his most forceful argument (the ‘greater wealth thesis’) in favour of the market democratic model he proposes. I argue firstly that Tomasi’s account of when (and why) citizens’ self-respect is jeopardised does not allow us to readily distinguish between economic security born of systems of welfare and redistribution, and economic security born of market forces and historical contingency. And more troubling still, is Tomasi’s belief that self-respecting citizens must view themselves as a ‘central cause’ of their situation. Such self-conceptions, I argue, can only coexist alongside the greater wealth thesis if citizens engage in quite naked self-delusions about their causal power. I argue that theorists of justice have good reason to be suspicious of promulgating such delusions and, as such, that this poses a serious problem for a justification of market democracy which aspires to rest upon an appeal to self-respect.     

Unity with(in) Plurality: Rawls’s Idea of Public Justification Reinterpreted

Abstract

This paper explores and interprets Rawls’s idea of public justification by analysing the types of reasons that citizens use when engaged in public justification of a political conception of justice. In particular, I focus on the distinction between “consensual” and “distributive” modes of justification. Some critics have argued that Rawls is unclear whether he is relying on “consensual” or “distributive” forms of reasoning; others argue that Rawls shifts inconsistently between them. I attempt to clarify this puzzle. I show that consensual and distributive modes of public reasoning are not mutually exclusive to each other. On the contrary, they are introduced as necessary components of public justification in Rawls’s theory. Thus, his model is consensual-cum-distributive. I also suggest some reasons why this model can better account for the liberal idea of pluralism, and how it offers a more realistic moral and political psychology, giving the account greater epistemic virtue than its alternatives.     

Reasonable Pluralism and the Domain of the Political: How the Weaknesses of John Rawls's Political Liberalism Can be Overcome by a Justificatory Liberalism

Under free institutions the exercise of human reason leads to a plurality of reasonable, yet irreconcilable doctrines. Rawls's political liberalism is intended as a response to this fundamental feature of modern democratic life. Justifying coercive political power by appeal to any one (or sample) of these doctrines is, Rawls believes, oppressive and illiberal. If we are to achieve unity without oppression, he tells us, we must all affirm a public political conception that is supported by these diverse reasonable doctrines. The first part of this essay argues that the free use of human reason leads to reasonable pluralism over most of what we call the political. Rawls's notion of the political does not avoid the problem of state oppression under conditions of reasonable pluralism. The second part tries to show how justificatory liberalism provides (1) a conception of the political that takes seriously the fact that the free use of human reason leads us to sharply disagree in the domain of the political while (2) articulating a conception of the political according to which the coercive intervention of the state must be justified by public reasons.     

Scientific Misconduct: Three Forms that Directly Harm Others as the Modus Operandi of Mill’s Tyranny of the Prevailing Opinion

Scientific misconduct is usually assumed to be self-serving. This paper, however, proposes to distinguish between two types of scientific misconduct: ‘type one scientific misconduct’ is self-serving and leads to falsely positive conclusions about one’s own work, while ‘type two scientific misconduct’ is other-harming and leads to falsely negative conclusions about someone else’s work. The focus is then on the latter type, and three known issues are identified as specific forms of such scientific misconduct: biased quality assessment, smear, and officially condoning scientific misconduct. These concern the improper ways how challenges of the prevailing opinion are thwarted in the modern world. The central issue is pseudoskepticism: uttering negative conclusions about someone else’s work that are downright false. It is argued that this may be an emotional response, rather than a calculated strategic action. Recommendations for educative and punitive measures are given to prevent and to deal with these three forms of scientific misconduct.     

Exploring tradeoffs in accommodating moral diversity

This paper explores the space of possibilities for public justification in morally diverse communities. Moral diversity is far more consequential than is typically appreciated, and as a result, we need to think more carefully about how our standard tools function in such environments. I argue that because of this diversity, public justification can (and should) be divorced from any claim of determinateness. Instead, we should focus our attention on procedures—in particular, what Rawls called cases of pure procedural justice. I use a modified form of the procedure “I cut, you choose” to demonstrate how perspectival diversity can make what looks like a simple procedure quite complex in practice. I use this to reframe disputes between classical liberal and contemporary liberal approaches to questions of public morality, arguing that classically liberal procedures, such as a reliance on the harm principle, can generate rather illiberal-looking outcomes when used in a morally diverse community. A seemingly less-principled approach, which simply balances burdens, appears to generate outcomes that look closer to what we would expect from classical liberalism. However, since both approaches are based on pure procedures that we can justify without reference to outcomes, it remains indeterminate which we ought to choose.     

Does Doxastic Justification Have a Basing Requirement?

The distinction between propositional and doxastic justification is the distinction between having justification to believe that P (= propositional justification) versus having a justified belief in P (= doxastic justification). The focus of this paper is on doxastic justification and on what conditions are necessary for having it. In particular, I challenge the basing demand on doxastic justification, i.e. the idea that one can have a doxastically justified belief only if one's belief is based on an epistemically appropriate reason. This demand has been used to refute versions of coherentism and conservatism about perceptual justification, as well as to defend phenomenal ‘conservatism’ and other views besides. In what follows, I argue that there is virtually no reason to think there is a basing demand on doxastic justification. I also argue that, even if the basing demand were true, it would still fail to serve the dialectical purposes for which it has been employed in arguments concerning coherentism, conservatism, and phenomenal ‘conservatism’. I conclude by discussing the fact that knowledge has a basing demand and I show why this needn't raise the same sort of problems for coherentism and conservatism that doxastic justification's basing demand seemed to raise.     

The Individualist? The autonomy of reason in Kant’s philosophy and educational views

Immanuel Kant is often viewed by educational theorists as an individualist, who put education on “an individual track,” paving the way for political liberal conceptions of education such as that of John Rawls. One can easily find evidence for such a view, in “Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’,” as well as in his more metaphysical, moral inquiries. However, the place of reason in Kant’s philosophy––what I call the “autonomy of reason”––spells out a negative rather than positive conception of freedom, from which stems a less individualistic or political liberal education than many presume. I cite both well known and lesser known works in the essay to demonstrate that Kant defended universal freedom only as a means towards developing the “autonomy of reason”, and I consider comparatively the education it entails with that spelled out by Rawls, despite the common conflation of the two.     

Rawls and the metaphysical tradition

Abstract

Political philosophers, like all philosophers, can be divided into roughly two camps. There are those who are principally metaphysical in their conclusions; feeling that there is something in the nature of things to find or locate to settle the disputes commonly considered to be political disputes, and those others who explicitly reject that type of formulation. Placing the work of John Rawls into one of these categories is, I think, rather challenging; crudely, Rawls can be seen as having made noises of both sorts. The attempt to situate Rawls’s A Theory of Justice both within and beyond the grand metaphysical tradition lies at the center of this paper’s ambitions. This paper also aims to reflect, more generally, on the strengths and weaknesses of Rawls’s Theory. While it will be argued that John Rawls’s early conception of justice is, for the most part, admirable, it will be shown that firstly, Rawls does not fully leave behind the metaphysical inclination that he, as a self-declared non-metaphysical philosopher, is adamant on setting aside, and secondly, although this is very much related to the first point, Rawls’s theory of justice is too heavily grounded in and dependent on the truth of liberalism and thus fails to be adequately mindful of historicism. An examination of the metaphysical flavors in the early articulation of Rawls’s Theory is significant for two main reasons (1) such an examination compels us to ask whether or not Rawls’s Theory was successful, given what we assume were Rawls’s non-metaphysical ambitions, and (2) that the legacy of John Rawls should probably be better off, philosophically speaking (ceterus paribus and by our present lights), if metaphysics were absent in his Theory.     

Justice,Political Obligation and Public Reason: Rethinking Partisanship and Political Liberalism

In Partisanship and Political Liberalism in Diverse Societies I examine political parties and partisanship within the context of John Rawls’s (Political Liberalism, expanded edn. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005a) theory of political liberalism. I argue that parties and partisanship are vital to Rawls’s political liberalism, since they offer a distinctive and crucial contribution to the process of public justification that is central to it, which combines the articulation of public reasons with the channelling into the public political realm of the particular values and conceptions of the good emerging from parties’ specific constituencies. Furthermore, I argue, partisanship generates a special kind of political obligations, and this further contributes to state legitimacy under conditions of reasonable pluralism. In this paper, I respond to three commentators who have raised important criticisms against my argument. More specifically, Section 1 provides a response to Lea Ypi’s argument that my normative account of partisanship wrongly presupposes that existing liberal societies are reasonably just. Section 2 answers Daniel Weinstock’s concerns regarding the plausibility and internal consistency of my account of partisan political obligations. Finally, Section 3 addresses Kevin Vallier’s criticisms, which challenge my account of public reason and propose an alternative one.

     

Convergence Justifications Within Political Liberalism: A Defence

According to political liberalism, laws must be justified to all citizens in order to be legitimate. Most political liberals have taken this to mean that laws must be justified by appeal to a specific class of ‘public reasons’, which all citizens can accept. In this paper I defend an alternative, convergence, model of public justification, according to which laws can be justified to different citizens by different reasons, including reasons grounded in their comprehensive doctrines. I consider three objections to such an account—that it undermines sincerity in public reason, that it underestimates the importance of shared values, and that it is insufficiently deliberative—and argue that convergence justifications are resilient to these objections. They should therefore be included within a theory of political liberalism, as a legitimate form of public justification. This has important implications for the obligations that political liberalism places upon citizens in their public deliberations and reason-giving, and might make the theory more attractive to some of its critics, particularly those sympathetic to religious belief.     

The aimless rationality of science 1

It is usually attempted teleologically to demonstrate the rationality of the so‐called scientific method. Goals or aims are posited (and their specification defended) and it is then argued that conformity with some body of methodological rules is conducive to the realization of these goals or aims. A ‘ deontological’ alternative to this approach is offered, adapting insights of contemporary political philosophers, especially John Rawls and Bruce Ackerman. The ‘circumstances of method’ are defined as those circumstances in which it alone makes sense to seek some method for the resolution of disputed issues. It is then shown that individuals who find themselves in these circumstances have reason to conduct themselves in conformity with certain simple rules of argumentation—have reason, indeed, in the very fact that they do so find themselves and altogether without reference to any goals or aims which it might be hoped to achieve. These rules require non‐interference, responsiveness, relevance, and publicity, and are, arguably, the rules which define the concept (and which therefore provide a framework for various conceptions,) of scientific method.     

Of Nanochips and Persons: Toward an Ethics of Diagnostic Technology in Personalized Medicine

This paper proposes an ethical reflection on personalized medicine and more precisely on the diagnostic technology underlying it, including nanochips. Our approach is inspired by a combination of two philosophical frames of reference: first, John Dewey’s distinction between intuitive valuation and reflexive evaluation, second, John Rawls’ reflective equilibrium. We aim at what we call a ‘reflexive equilibrium’, a mutual adjustment between on the one hand, the intuitive beliefs scientists have about the ethics of the technologies they work on (‘valuations’ in Dewey’s vocabulary) and, on the other hand, the reflexive ethical assessment of these technologies (‘evaluations’). Our goal, in this paper, is to provide the first step of this process through a philosophical analysis of some valuations on individualized medicine. In order to apprehend the ethical values shaping the development of biochips, we present and analyze qualitative interviews with scientists involved in the conception and the development of biochips involving nanotechnologies. We then propose a critical assessment of the role of ethics in these scientific practices. Last, we suggest two distinct and complementary ways to solve some of the issues brought to light by the interviews, without aiming at any dogmatic or “ready-made” answer. The first of these perspectives gives a central role to the capability individuals could achieve through personalized medicine; the second approach analyses the ethical disruptions entailed by personalized medicine with a special focus on care.