Self-respect and public reason

Abstract

In A Theory of Justice John Rawls argues that self-respect is ‘perhaps the most important’ primary good, and that its status as such gives crucial support to controversial ideas like the lexical priority of liberty. Given the importance of these ideas for Rawls, it should be no surprise that they have attracted much critical attention. In response to these critics I give a defense of self-respect that grounds its importance in Rawls’s moral conception of the person. I show that this understanding of self-respect goes well beyond giving support to the lexical priority of liberty, also supporting Rawls’s still more controversial view of public reason. On my account, taking self-respect seriously requires the coercive enforcement of public reason. This is a novel argument for public reason, in that it grounds the idea in justice as fairness and mandates its coercive enforcement.

Keywords:

• liberalism
• free speech
• John Rawls
• public reason

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dan Brudney, Julia Driver, Colin Farrelly, Clarissa Hayward, Ben Hertzberg, John Inazu, Loren King, Andrew Lister, Frank Lovett, Ian MacMullen, John Patty, Andrew Rehfeld, Ron Watson, Kit Wellman, and the participants of the Washington University Workshop on Politics, Ethics, and Society for their useful comments and suggestions, as well as Richard Bellamy and two anonymous reviewers for the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy for their helpful comments and criticisms.

Notes

1. Robert Taylor has called this type of argument a ‘hierarchy argument’ (2003, p. 248), whereby principles are justified by appeal to the high importance of the interests they serve.

2. Quong's recent book offers a robust defense of political liberalism generally and public reason in particular (2011). His argument offers a compelling picture of political liberalism which attempts to avoid some of the perfectionist pitfalls alleged by Rawls's critics. Though Quong's argument, in its appeal to self-respect, does seem to successfully rebut such critics, it stops short of recognizing the full demands of those ideas – taking up those demands is thus a contribution of this paper.

3. This is subject to the constraint of principles of justice, such that the laws themselves may not be objectionably non-neutral in the sense that they seek comprehensive goods in treatment or effect (Patten, 2012, pp. 255–257). Rather, they will be seen as non-neutral in the justificatory sense which takes pride of place in the contemporary political liberal approach (for instance Barry, 1995; Gaus, 1996; Larmore, 1990; Rawls, 1985, 1993). Additionally, while citizens may think a law justified just so long as they can think of a justification which would have given suitably neutral grounding to a law, though no such reason is offered publically during or after deliberation on the issue, they are wrong to do so. But if we're to take justification seriously, we cannot, from an institutional standpoint, suggest that beliefs about the legitimacy of a policy will be independent of the policy's official justification.

4. This is Christopher Eberle's argument in his Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics, that we can show proper respect to citizens so long as we make a good faith effort to convince them of our reasons for coercing them (Eberle, 2002, p. 95). But Eberle's argument hangs on the (itself unargued for) contention that religious citizens coercing others on the basis of their faith doctrines do so justly so long as they meet his six conditions of conscientious engagement (pp. 104, 105). While such a deliberator would indeed seem conscientious, Eberle gives little reason to think that the outcome – coercion of citizens not belonging to the winning sect/interpretation – would appear to the coerced as respectful and status-upholding, or indeed, why those are the wrong yardsticks to decide the issue.

5. Public in the sense that it is made without the expectation of some amount of privacy, rather than the technical sense referring to the type of reason offered.

6. I don't develop this argument here, but it may be the case that this sort of accusation, if wrong, threatens to undermine self-respect if it rises to the level of questioning the accused's second moral power. As such, it too might be the subject of coercive intervention in some cases.

7. This is not to say that whether or not a given speech act is offered as a reason for some public policy is relevant in principle to whether or not it counts as something the state should act against. Rather, it is prima facie more likely that a given speech act will come to characterize a justification when the speech is in the context of justificatory debate.

8. Areas where my account departs from Rawls's more directly include his (empirically suspect) reliance on the Aristotelian principle as a component of citizens' self-respect, and more obviously, his hedging on the importance of public reason.