When Public Reason Falls Silent

Public reason theorists argue that coercive state action must be justified to those subject to such action. Doing so requires citizens to give only those reasons that all can accept. These reasons, the chapter argues, include scientific and social scientific considerations. One ineliminable and arguably salutary property of the modern administrative state is that the coercive policies it produces can be justified only on the basis of extremely complex scientific and social scientific considerations. Many of these considerations are neither understood by most ordinary citizens nor agreed upon by experts. This means that the overwhelming majority of citizens do not accept the reasons justifying coercive administrative policies. As a result, public reason is inconsistent with the administrative state. There are deep implications to this result: if public reason is inconsistent with the administrative state, then it is also inconsistent with forms of social organization that presuppose it. This, the chapter argues, includes egalitarianism, which many proponents of public reason also endorse. Public reason theorists thus must choose: justification through public reason, or distributive equality?

The Limited Use View of the Duty to Save

This chapter defends the Limited Use View of our duties to save. The Limited Use View holds that the duty to save is a duty to treat oneself, and perhaps one’s resources, as a means for preventing harm to others. But the duty to treat oneself as a means for the sake of others is limited. One need not treat oneself as a means when doing so is either very costly or conflicts with one’s more stringent duties to others. This provides an agent-neutral account of the duty to save. When the cost of saving passes a certain threshold, one is permitted to fail to save, and it is impermissible for others to force one to save, if doing so will force one to incur an equal or greater cost. The chapter argues that the Limited Use View is to be preferred to agent-relative accounts of the duty to save, which hold that the limit on our duty to save is grounded in an agent-relative prerogative to weight our own interests (and those of special others) more heavily than other people’s interests.

The Philosophy of Work

This chapter identifies three domains of philosophical questions about work. First, an ontological issue: What is work? This question is both historical and conceptual, as questions in social ontology usually are. Second, an ethical issue: How does work fit into the good life? The hard problem here is to substitute, in new economic conditions, for the four main things a good job currently does: first, produce the goods and services we need, while also providing people with income, sociability, and significance. These are issues on which many popular writers on the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and on globalization have, of course, written for some time. But what’s lacking, the chapter claims, is serious organized reflection on the normative issues raised by these challenges. And that leads to the third cluster of concerns: How should law and other sources of normative authority be configured to allow work to contribute to the flourishing of workers, and how should the opportunities and rewards of work be shared?

An Autonomy-Based Argument for Democracy

Democracy uniquely respects an important set of persons’ autonomy claims. Along with standard first-order autonomy claims to act without interference, persons have second-order autonomy claims to authority over the social context of their choice. These second-order claims are grounded in the same ideal self-direction that grounds first-order claims. One triggers another’s second-order claims when one directs another’s will by shaping the context of her choice, or when one implicates another’s will by shaping the nature of her responsibility for her actions. When a basic structure exists in which individuals continuously direct and implicate one another’s wills, each person has a second-order autonomy claim to authority over the terms of that structure. Because each person is equally entitled to respect for her autonomy, each is equally entitled to authority over the basic structure. Political equality—the equal authority of each citizen over the terms of common life—therefore uniquely respects these autonomy claims of each citizen. We therefore have non-instrumental, autonomy-based reasons to support democratic decision-making.

Perfectionist Duties

It is a central tenet of much contemporary liberal theory that the state should remain as far as possible neutral between rival conceptions of the good life. By contrast, perfectionists hold that one function of the state is to encourage citizens to lead good or flourishing ways of life. But perfectionists have not generally been clear about whether they take perfectionist interventions to be permissible or mandatory. This chapter argues in favour of the stronger duty-based version of perfectionism. After introducing the distinction between duty-based and non-duty-based forms of perfectionism (Section 1), it makes a case for duty-based perfectionism by defending the idea of a right to the fair conditions of a flourishing life (Section 2). It then shows how the invocation of perfectionist duties can help perfectionists to rebut a number of powerful objections that have recently been levelled against their view (3). Finally, it defends duty-based perfectionism against the charge that it violates the public justification principle (Section 4).

Politics, Truth, and Respect

Some claim that comprehensive liberalism is exclusionary on the ground that it ignores false but reasonable views. They claim that, insofar as the political liberal state bases its policy on views for which it claims reasonableness but not truth, it respects citizens in a way that comprehensive liberalism does not. The chapter argues that this is false. It distinguishes between ignoring a false view and ignoring the fact that someone holds a view (that happens to be false). Comprehensive liberalism does the former, but this is far from committing it to the latter also. Due respect is paid to citizens by taking appropriate account of the fact that they hold views other than those endorsed by the state. The chapter suggests a variety of ways in which this might be done. It argues that the comprehensive liberal state may reject views as untrue while respecting those who hold them because its attitude towards citizens is premised on the understanding that we are all interested in what really is just, and we are all concerned in trying to find out what that is. None of us wants a false view to be accepted—because it is false. The state respects a person’s capacity for reason by occupying the same epistemic ground as she does on the question of her belief, taking her to be a sincere but fallible inquirer after the truth, rather than patronizing her by remaining neutral in a way that she does not.

Why Strict Compliance?

John Rawls defines ideal theory in terms of a strict compliance assumption. The standard interpretation of ideal theory is telic: the function of the strict compliance assumption is to help specify a realistic utopia as a telos for political decision making. The chapter defends an alternative, deontic interpretation of ideal theory, one based on the fundamental Rawlsian idea of society as a fair scheme of cooperation. It claims that the participants of a genuinely cooperative scheme are mutually accountable in that they have the standing to make demands of one another. It argues that the logic of these moral demands implies that the rules of any cooperative scheme must be justified on the basis of a strict compliance assumption. Since society as a whole constitutes a cooperative scheme in justice as fairness, the same conclusion holds of its principles of justice. The chapter also defends the possibility of a non-utopian ideal theory.

Political Epistemology and Social Critique

Under conditions of ideology, a standard model of normative political epistemology—relying on a domain-specific reflective equilibrium—risks status-quo bias. Social critique requires a more critical standpoint. What are the aims of social critique? How is such a standpoint achieved and what grounds its claims? One way of achieving a critical standpoint is through consciousness raising. Consciousness raising offers a paradigm shift in our understanding of the social world; but not all epistemic practices that appear to “raise” consciousness are warranted. However, under certain conditions sketched in the chapter, consciousness raising produces a warranted critical standpoint and a pro tanto claim against others. This is an important epistemic achievement, yet under conditions of collective self-governance, there is no guarantee that all warranted claims can be met simultaneously. There will be winners and losers even after legitimate democratic processes have been followed.