public reason

public reason, in political philosophy, a moral ideal requiring that political decisions be reasonably justifiable or acceptable from each individual’s viewpoint. Given the plurality of moral, religious, and political doctrines that characterize liberal democratic societies, public reason represents an attempt to develop a shared framework for political deliberation that each person can endorse. Some philosophers have argued that political regimes or laws that do not meet the standards of public reason are illegitimate or unjust. Leading contemporary theorists of public reason have included the American political philosopher John Rawls and the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas.

Theories of public reason can be differentiated on the basis of the constituency and scope they assign to public reason, as well as by their conceptions of the nature, or content, of public reason itself.

The constituency of public reason is the relevant set of people from whose viewpoints a given political decision must seem justified. According to one view, the constituency of public reason includes all those people who are governed or otherwise affected by a decision. But this inclusive conception poses difficulties: What about irrational, immoral, or otherwise unreasonable people? Some theorists have responded to this worry by specifying an idealized constituency of people who meet certain epistemic or normative standards. A key debate is thus whether the demand for justification applies to people as they are or rather to people as idealized rational agents.

The scope of public reason delineates the set of issues to which the ideal applies. Some theorists have argued that, because all political power is ultimately coercive, and because it is wrong to coerce others on grounds that they cannot reasonably accept, all political decisions must be justified by public reason. Others have claimed that public reason has a more limited scope and regulates only constitutional essentials, or those decisions that affect the basic political framework of society. Democratic decisions that take place within that framework are then alleged to be free from the constraints of public reason. A related question is whether public reason should regulate the behaviour of all citizens in the political arena or whether it applies only to public officials, such as judges and legislators.

Regarding the nature, or content, of public reason, some theorists have claimed that public reason is a procedural ideal that regulates political discourse among citizens, whereas others have insisted that it provides a substantive standard that ought to guide political behaviour. In the first view, public reason provides an ideal list of conditions that real political procedures would have to meet in order to ensure that decisions are acceptable to each participant (e.g., conditions for inclusion, participation, and decision making). Those who favour the second view, however, have argued that the content of public reason is, at least in part, settled in advance of any actual discussion. The theorist determines which reasons or principles are publicly justifiable; real political deliberation is then regulated by that substantive standard.