Public Justification Versus Public Deliberation: The Case for Reconciliation

Kevin Vallier has recently argued that the ideals of public justification and public deliberation should be separated. The link between the two, Vallier suggests, has been assumed without being properly defended. Once examined, the connection falls apart. In this paper, I argue that there is, in fact, a clear and convincing story available for why the two ideals should be treated as mutually reinforcing. Drawing on recent empirical evidence, I argue that the deliberative behaviour of citizens can have a clear and positive impact on the behaviour and policy choices of public officials.

Religious Reasoning in the Liberal Public from the Second-Personal Perspective

There is a constant dissent between exclusivist public reason liberals and their inclusivist religious critics concerning the question whether religious arguments can figure into the public justification of state action. Firstly, I claim that the stability of this dissent is best explained as a conflict between an exclusivist third-personal account of public justification which demands restraint, and an inclusivist first-personal account which rejects restraint. Secondly, I argue that both conceptions are deficient because they cannot accommodate the valid intuitions of their opponents. They either imply a violation of the integrity of religious citizens or they give room for cases where a religious majority can impose a political norm on a minority without having given this minority a reason to comply with the norm. Finally, I defend an inclusivist model of public reason liberalism which relies on a second-personal conception of public justification. I claim that this model breaks the impasse in favor of inclusivism because religious arguments can play a role in public justification, but they can never justify state action on their own in a plural society. Thus, the problematic cases that motivate exclusivism are excluded without having introduced a principle of restraint which violates the religious integrity of citizens.

Public Justification Analysis of Russian Renewable Energy Strategies

The Russian renewable energy industry has not yet succeeded in breaking through into the domestic market despite its potential, particularly in remote Arctic settlements. This article examines broad issues that influence national policy-makers and provides an analysis of the type of objectives that are emphasized in Russian energy policies. It can be assumed that the priorities behind these objectives have a more stable status than more concrete plans to boost the use of renewables, since they often fail to materialize. In order to discover these priorities, I analyze several relevant policy-making documents with the help of public justification analysis, a method developed to examine public claims made in favor of a certain cause, and the commonly known values that the claim-makers refer to in order to convince others. This paper reveals that Russian energy policy documents tend to emphasize concrete, technical tasks over more abstract, holistic goals. In addition, industrial needs dominate all policies, even those related to socio-economic or environmental issues. I conclude that the tendencies listed above may prevent fundamental structural change in the Russian energy industry, despite the potential of renewable energy, especially in the Arctic regions.

Public justification and expert disagreement over non-pharmaceutical interventions for the COVID-19 pandemic

A wide range of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) have been introduced to stop or slow down the COVID-19 pandemic. Examples include school closures, environmental cleaning and disinfection, mask mandates, restrictions on freedom of assembly and lockdowns. These NPIs depend on coercion for their effectiveness, either directly or indirectly. A widely held view is that coercive policies need to be publicly justified—justified to each citizen—to be legitimate. Standardly, this is thought to entail that there is a scientific consensus on the factual propositions that are used to support the policies. In this paper, we argue that such a consensus has been lacking on the factual propositions justifying most NPIs. Consequently, they would on the standard view be illegitimate. This is regrettable since there are good reasons for granting the state the legitimate authority to enact NPIs under conditions of uncertainty. The upshot of our argument is that it is impossible to have both the standard interpretation of the permissibility of empirical claims in public justification and an effective pandemic response. We provide an alternative view that allows the state sufficient room for action while precluding the possibility of it acting without empirical support.

The reasons of the unreasonable: Is political liberalism still an option?

In this study, we claim that political liberalism, despite harsh criticism, is still the best option available for providing a just and stable society. However, we maintain that political liberalism needs to be revised so as to be justifiable from the perspective of not only the “reasonable” in a Rawlsian sense (that we define as “fully” reasonable) but also the ones whom Rawls labels as “unreasonable.” To support our claim, going beyond Rawls’s original account, we unpack the concept of unreasonableness and identify three different subsets that we label as the “partially reasonable,” the “non-reasonable,” and the “unreasonable.” We argue that both the “fully” reasonable and the “partially reasonable” would be included into the constituency of public justification; more specifically, we claim that the latter would support liberal institutions out of their reasons: we define these reasons as mutually intelligible reasons and claim that they allow to acknowledge the importance of a convergence approach to public justification. As for the “non-reasonable” and “unreasonable,” we claim that they cannot be included in the constituency of public justification, but they nonetheless could be compliant with liberal institutions if political liberalism offers them some reasons to comply: here, we claim that political liberalism should include them through engagement and propose reasoning from conjecture as an effecting way of offering reasons for compliance. In particular, we claim that through reasoning from conjecture, the “non-reasonable” could find conciliatory reasons to comply with liberal institutions on a stable base. With regard to the “unreasonable” in the strict sense, we claim that through reasoning from conjecture, their unreasonableness could be contained and they could find reasons—even if just self-interested—for complying with liberal institutions rather than defying them. In our discussion, we consider the different subsets not as “frozen” but as dynamic and open to change, and we aim to propose a more complex and multilayered approach to inclusion that would be able to include a wider set of people. To strengthen our argument, we show that the need for a wider public justification and for broader inclusion in liberal societies is grounded in respect for persons both as equal persons and as particular individuals. In particular, we claim that individuals’ values, ends, commitments, and affiliations activate demands of respect and can strengthen the commitment to the liberal–democratic order. Through a reformulation of the role of respect in liberal societies, we also show a kind of social and communitarian dimension that, we claim, is fully compatible with political liberalism and opens it up to “civic friendship” and “social solidarity,” which are constitutive elements for the development of a sense of justice and for the realization of a just and stable society.

Rhetoric, Legitimation, and Grand Strategy

Scholars associated with diverse research traditions have increasingly agreed that legitimacy is significant in the formulation and operation of grand strategy. Despite the field’s embrace of legitimacy, scholars of international relations have shown less interest in the role of legitimation—the public justification of policy—in creating and sustaining grand strategies. This oversight is puzzling. Grand strategy only becomes legitimate when leaders articulate the reasons why policies are justifiable, and only if audiences accept those claims. Empirically, moreover, leaders devote substantial time, energy, and resources to justifying their strategy to audiences at home and abroad. To overlook legitimation is to overlook much of global politics. This chapter makes the case for treating legitimation as central to the study of grand strategy. It explains what legitimation is, why it matters, and how it drives grand strategy at every stage, from the articulation of national interest, to the interpretation of threat, to the selection of instruments. The essay concludes with challenges to the legitimation of grand strategy in contemporary international politics.

Against Public Reason’s Alleged Self-Defeat

Mainstream political liberals hold that state coercion is legitimate only if it is justified on the grounds of reasons that all may reasonably be expected to accept. Critics argue that this public justification principle (PJP) is self-defeating, because it depends on moral justifications that not all may reasonably be expected to accept. To rebut the self-defeat objection, I elaborate on the following disjunction: one either agrees or disagrees that it is wrong to impose one’s morality on others by the coercive power of the state. Those who disagree reject PJP, they understand politics as war. Those who agree accept PJP, they understand politics as competition. Political competitors abide by PJP to avoid politics as war, by enforcing PJP on political combatants they engage in a war that is unavoidable. In both cases their exercise of political power has a justification that is reasonably acceptable to all.

Does Convergence Liberalism Risk Anarchy?

Public reason liberals argue that coercive social arrangements must be publicly justified in order to be legitimate. According to one model of public reason liberalism, known as convergence liberalism, this means that every moderately idealized member of the public must have sufficient reason, of her own, to accept the arrangement. A corollary of this Principle of Public Justification is that a coercive social arrangement fails to be legitimate so long as even one member of the public fails to have sufficient reason to endorse the arrangement. This high bar for justification has led many critics, most notably David Enoch, to argue that convergence models are incapable of vindicating liberalism. They argue that in a sufficiently diverse society, there will always be someone for whom an arrangement is not justified, and therefore convergence liberalism leads to anarchy – the view that no law or coercive social arrangement is legitimate. Other critics accept that convergence liberalism could vindicate core liberal institutions but nothing more, and thus argue that the view makes libertarians effective “dictators”. In either case, critics hold that this objection is sufficient to reject convergence liberalism, either in favor of alternative public reason views or as a means of rejecting all public reason views. In this paper I argue that convergence liberalism can overcome this anarchy objection. I show that the objection largely rests on misinterpretations of convergence liberalism, and thus clarify aspects of the theory. However, I also show that internal debate over the scope of public justification – what stands in need of justification – must be resolved in favor of a wide scope, encompassing both State-based and non-State-based coercion, in order to overcome the anarchy objection. Therefore, my response to the anarchy objection has implications for how convergence liberalism should be developed going forward.

The Ambition of Public Justification in Contract

This review of Peter Benson’s Justice in Transactions focuses on the book’s attempt to combine the juridical vision of contract with contract’s social role in providing a coherent framework for market relations. The combination is challenging because the juridical conception ignores particular interests, needs, purposes, and preferences of contracting parties, while the market is precisely a system for satisfying needs or obtaining substantive satisfactions. The review suggests that Benson’s treatment of the combination is open to two readings: one reading claims that contract as we know it actually succeeds in achieving public justification; the other reading claims that contract could potentially be a justified institution, but only if the background regime of rights was transformed so that juridical and substantive equality were more closely aligned.