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Abstract
In his last works, John Rawls explicitly argued for an overlapping consensus on a family of reasonable liberal political conceptions of justice, rather than just one. This ‘Deep Version’ of political liberalism opens up new questions about the relationship between citizens’ political conceptions, from which they must draw and offer public reasons in their political advocacy, and their comprehensive doctrines. These questions centre on whether a reasonable citizen’s choice of political conception can be influenced by her comprehensive doctrine. In this paper I present two models of the relationship, which give contrasting answers to these questions, and defend the model that is more permissive with regard to the influence of comprehensive doctrines. This has important implications for our understanding of Rawlsian political liberalism, and reduces the force of objections that have been offered by theorists sympathetic to religion.
Acknowledgements
Versions of this paper were presented in Oxford and Warwick. Many thanks to all who attended on those occasions, and especially to Ian Carroll, Matthew Clayton, Tom Parr, Adam Swift, Anthony Taylor, Stuart White and Caleb Yong. Thanks also to Kevin Vallier and to two anonymous reviewers from CRISPP for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper.
Notes
1. For discussion, see Boettcher (Citation2005), Neal (Citation2009).
2. ‘Constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice’. Rawls restricts the scope of public reason to these areas. All references to ‘laws’ should be taken to mean laws that fall within the limited domain. Some political liberals reject this restriction of scope. For example, see Quong (Citation2011, pp. 273–289). I will not discuss that debate here. The question I discuss in this paper applies whether one endorses a broad or narrow scope.
3. As is hopefully clear, I am taking the Rawlsian framework as given for the purposes of this paper.
4. All unattributed page numbers in this article refer to Rawls (Citation2005). This version of Political liberalism includes ‘The idea of public reason revisited’.
5. Importantly, this is not simple pluralism but reasonable pluralism – a result of citizens’ exercises of practical reason (pp. 36–37).
6. It is important to note that when political liberals speak of ‘citizens’, they usually mean this to refer to agents who are ‘idealised’ in various ways. While I am agnostic here about what kinds of idealisation are and are not appropriate, all references to ‘citizens’ in this paper should be taken as referring to agents who are idealised in the appropriate ways.
7. At minimum, no reasonable comprehensive doctrine conflicts ‘too sharply’ (p. 40) with the political conception.
8. Quong’s (Citation2011, pp. 180–187) ‘alternative view’ of the overlapping consensus sees every reasonable political conception as an interpretation of the three general principles. Rawls simply requires that every conception contain these three principles, alongside other political values.
9. For Rawls, this is justice as fairness. Justice as fairness itself is perhaps not a single, well-defined, political conception, however. There are several plausible interpretations of its principles. For instance, primary goods can be weighed against each other in different ways. These differences can have important policy implications (Van Parijs Citation2003).
10. i.e. the exercise of political power is ‘fully proper’ (p. 137). This is a lower standard than justice, but a related one (pp. 427–428).
11. Quong’s view of the overlapping consensus is a version of the Restrictive Model, but could be amended to fit with the Permissive Model. For criticism of Quong’s view, see Zoffoli (Citation2012).
12. This points to a third model, under which citizens must form a political conception in a freestanding way, but can then move to a different conception if they find that it fits better with their comprehensive doctrine. It is likely that the political conception a citizen moves to in this case will be close to the first conception, so the stage of freestanding reasoning is still independently important. In effect, a citizen would narrow down to a subset of reasonable conceptions based on freestanding reasoning, and comprehensive considerations would then determine the precise conception she accepts. While this is a distinct model, it is closer to the Permissive Model in terms of its implications for the relationship between political conceptions and comprehensive doctrines. The arguments for and against the Permissive Model also apply to this third model, which seems to be endorsed by Macedo (Citation2010).
13. If you consider this implausible, then feel free to replace the example with an equivalent of your own. I sketch arguments for this claim later in the paper.
14. I am not endorsing this argument. My claim is simply that it appears reasonable, not that it is necessarily correct, or the best understanding of political values.
15. Or some other reasonable political conception that permits male-only priesthoods.
16. An even more permissive model could hold that it does not matter whether Betty accepts the freestanding justification for C2, as long as such a justification exists (and, perhaps, that she knows this), so that C2 is a reasonable political conception, providing public reasons. I think that Rawls would reject this model, however, due to his views of freestandingness, completeness and publicity. My ‘Permissive Model’ is the most permissive that Rawls would allow.
17. I was first led to think about the issues explored in this paper by a discussion between Kevin Vallier and Micah Schwartzman on the Public Reason blog: http://publicreason.net/2012/11/26/brettschneider-reading-group-chapter-5-religious-freedom-and-the-reasons-for-rights/. Schwartzman cites this passage as the key evidence for his view that Rawls favoured the Restrictive Model.
18. The Shallow Version only allows for the Restrictive Model. All reasonable citizens accept the same political conception, so a citizen’s comprehensive doctrine cannot affect her choice of conception.
19. Having said this, I think that the trajectory of Rawls’s thought, along with several of the pertinent comments in ‘Revisited’, means that he would endorse the Permissive Model. I lack space to defend this exegetical claim here.
20. This has clear similarities to ‘reasoning from conjecture’ (pp. 465–466), on which see Schwartzman (Citation2012).
21. I am indebted to Matthew Clayton and Adam Swift for discussion of the points in the following paragraphs.
22. This list of political values is formed using Rawls’s own examples (pp. 243, fn. 32; 474; 480, fn. 82).
23. Hollenbach (Citation2002, pp. 166–168) makes a somewhat similar argument.
24. Indeed, forming a complete political conception and applying it consistently across all fundamental political questions is itself very demanding.
25. This is reminiscent of Hollenbach’s view.
26. Hollenbach’s work is again a pertinent example.