Global Public Reason, Diversity, and Consent

Abstract

In this paper, I examine global public reason as a method of justifying a global state. Ultimately, I conclude that global public reason fails to justify a global state. This is the case, because global public reason faces an unwinnable dilemma. The global public reason theorist must endorse either a hypothetical theory of consent or an actual theory of consent; if she endorses a theory of hypothetical consent, then she fails to justify her principles; and if she endorses a theory of actual consent, her theory will lead to a highly unstable political system. On either side of the dilemma, global public reason faces untenable implications. Although similar criticisms have been advanced against domestic public reason, my argument is not repeating points made before me. My argument is new, in that it raises these objections specifically against global public reason, and in that it shows how, due to increased diversity of belief in the global arena, these problems are more pressing for global public reason than they are for domestic public reason.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Alison Jaggar, Brian Kogelmann, Gagan Sapkota, Mike Huemer, Attila Tanyi, and an anonymous reviewer at Philosophical Papers for their helpful comments on this paper. And, I'd like to thank Emily Erickson for her continued support.

Notes

1 As Williams (2016) says, ‘oddly, in the otherwise rich and rapidly expanding public reason literature, global public reason … is rarely discussed’ (1).

2 I borrow the terms ‘domestic’ and ‘global’ PR from Quong, (2013).

3 While this is the most accepted understanding of public reason, Van Schoelandt (2015) has recently argued that the project of public reason liberalism, so conceived, fails.

4 Gaus (2011, 263) refers to this as the ‘Basic Principle of Public Justification’.

5 The next two sections borrow heavily, sometimes verbatim, from the definition of public reason theories of justice that I developed in Director (2018). For purposes of clarity, I have borrowed from the definition section in my 2018 paper. None of the argument from that paper is used here.

6 Gaus (2011, 233) adds that these reasons cannot be simply reasons that, in the externalist sense, exist in the world; rather, ‘unless a person has the requisite beliefs and desires that would motivate her to ɸ, or she can deliberate her way to them, there is no reason for her to ɸ’.

7 For an argument that public reason should not include an accessibility requirement, see Vallier (2001b).

8 For a summary of these distinctions, see Vallier (2011b), 367.

9 As Quong says, ‘virtually all proponents of public reason favor an idealized account of the constituency of public reason.’

10 See Political Liberalism 48-61. My argument will apply to all versions of the reasonableness idealization.

11 See Rawls (1999); Cohen (2004), (2010); Reidy (2004). These GPR theorists have not used GPR to justify a global state, but they have argued for it as a theory of global justice.

12 For Rawls’ account of GPR, see the sections in Rawls (1999), 54–58; 121–128.

13 As Costa (2005, 58) says, for Rawls, GPR ‘has a role that is analogous to the public reason employed within a constitutional democratic regime’. See Rawls (1999), 122–123, for more on this point.

14 Smith (2011, 118) adds that ‘global public reason is a shared vocabulary that peoples must employ when … debating the design and decisions of global cooperative arrangements’.

15 In The Law of Peoples, Rawls (1999, 10; 30–34) models a two-step hypothetical Original Position.

16 As Thrasher (2017, 4) says, ‘public reason theories are highly abstracted versions of a kind of social contract argument’.

17 Nozick (1974), Dworkin (1973), Simmons (2001), and many more reject hypothetical consent theories. As Dworkin (1973, 501) famously put it, ‘a hypothetical contract is not simply a pale form of an actual contact; it is no contract at all’. For a recent defense of hypothetical consent, see Stark 2000. For Gaus’s discussion of hypothetical consent, see Gaus 2011, 264–267.

18 There is disagreement about whether the result of a hypothetical deliberation must be unique/determinate, leading to a single set of principles. Rawls thought that the deliberations of the parties in the Original Position would yield a single set of principles. Similarly, Thrasher (2014, 684) argues that ‘bargaining theories of justice require a unique solution to the bargaining problem, they require that there is one and only one rationally correct conclusion about how to divide the benefits and burdens of social life’. Gaus (2011, 43) disagrees and argues that ‘the most we can achieve … [is] a (nonempty, nonsingleton) set of optimal eligible proposals’.

19 On this point, Thrasher (2017, 3) says ‘simply showing that some idealized agents could choose or agree to some set of principles would hardly show that we have any reason to endorse or comply with those principles. There must be a relationship between the reasons of the representative choosers in the constructivist model and the reasons of real people’ (emphasis original).

20 Rawls (The Law of Peoples, 1999) disagrees with this and argues that representatives of non-democratic but ‘decent’ peoples can accept principles of justice on behalf of those who they purport to represent.

21 For a description of the methodology of this survey, see Kekic (2007), 8–11.

22 According to the Kekic (2007), there are 192 independent states in the world. If 85 are non-democratic, this comprises 44% of all countries.

23 Rawls (1971, 219) seems to agree with this.

24 For discussions of stability in the context of domestic PR, see Gaus 2013; Weithman 2010; Thrasher and Vallier 2015; Kogelmann 2018.

25 As a helpful referee comment made clear to me, this dilemma can also be rendered in Thrasher’s terms. As Thrasher (2017, 3) articulates it, public reason theories must satisfy three conditions: ‘constructivism, representation, and stability’. Rather than viewing my dilemma as one about consent, we could also understand my dilemma as claiming that GPR cannot satisfy all three conditions and that if it fulfills the constructivism condition, it fails to fulfill the representation and stability conditions.

26 I am thankful to an anonymous referee for raising both of these objections.