The insularity of the reasonable: Why political liberalism must admit the truth

Ethics

Volumn 108, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 252-275

  Estlund, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0242599530     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/233804     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 104 (hereafter PL).
2. Rawls, PL. Some other authors who influentially espouse such a theory are Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987),
3. The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
4. Thomas Nagel, "Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy," Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (1987): 215-40. I concentrate in this paper mainly on the more elaborately articulated and defended theory of Rawls.
5. PL, p. 116. See also PL, pp. xx and 94, for similar statements.
6. Ibid., p. 10.
7. I discuss this question in "The Survival of Egalitarian Justice in John Rawls's Political Liberalism," Journal of Political Philosophy 4 (1996): 68-78.
8. Let arguments to the effect that something is unjustified fall within the scope of "justification." This is one version of AN as stated below. It is essentially what Rawls calls the "liberal principle of legitimacy," without certain Rawlsian specifics. See PL, p. 137.
9. Rawls advances two closely related doctrines that use the idea of acceptability to all reasonable citizens: the liberal principle of legitimacy and the ideal of public reason. The liberal principle of legitimacy is the more basic of the two and asserts that at least on fundamental matters political power is only justifiable by reference to principles and ideals acceptable to all reasonable citizens (PL, pp. 137, 217). He adds a natural corollary, that citizens are obligated not to exercise political power except in ways they believe could meet this test (PL, p. 241). This is the ideal of public reason, which Rawls conceives as a duty of civility that is recognized by all reasonable comprehensive doctrines. The difference between the principle of legitimacy and the doctrine of public reason consists mainly in the fact that a law or constitutional provision might be legitimate even if those who enacted it violate the constraints of public reason and act without regard to whether their guiding principles are acceptable to other reasonable comprehensive views. The regime might be entirely justified, even if its agents have misbehaved in this way. As noted earlier, in speaking about the admissibility of a doctrine into political justification, I leave the doctrine of public reason aside and concentrate on Rawls's liberal principle of legitimacy. There is no question that, according to Rawls, the acceptance of reasonable citizens is required for the admissibility of any doctrine into political justification (at least on fundamental matters).
10. It should not be thought that since the principle limits its application to questions of constitutional essentials, therefore, since it does not address any constitutional essentials, it does not apply to itself. This principle is part of an account of the justification of the tenets of justice as fairness, Rawls's theory of constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. Many things plainly fall under this principle of legitimacy even if they do not themselves address specific constitutional matters or principles of justice, such as metaphysical conceptions of the self, theological doctrines, or philosophical theories of the nature of morality. Rawls explicitly acknowledges the principle of legitimacy's application to these three matters at pp. 29 ff., 9-10, and Lecture III (passim), respectively. The quotation is from PL, p. 137.
11. I note a similar issue for comprehensive moral constructivism in Section III below.
12. Some theories might apply such constraints only to justification regarding certain matters. Rawls pays special attention to "constitutional essentials" and "matters of basic justice," remaining agnostic on whether similar constraints apply more widely. No position on these matters is required for the purposes of this article, and for simplicity I speak, of "political justification" without differentiating.
13. For text suggesting this, see PL, pp. 102, 112, 121 ff., 225. Rawls may mean to preclude appeal to truth only in the case of moral doctrines, though I suspect this would be too permissive to fit with the larger view. Note that whatever limitation there may be on appeal to truth, RAN apparently applies to doctrines of all kinds. A somewhat different area of uncertainty about the availability of truth claims concerns the idea that not everything is constructed. See PL, pp. 103-104, the context of this article's epigraph.
14. To say that P is required for admissibility is, here, to say that not-P is a conclusive reason for exclusion (the existence of a conclusive reason for exclusion also materially implies exclusion; it is excluded for at least that reason). A sufficient condition for admissibility is a conclusive reason for admissibility (also materially implying admissibility). The logic of these concepts does not follow material implication. The conjunction of "Q is a necessary condition for P" and "Q if and only if R" implies "R is a necessary condition for P" (P→Q↔R, so P→R). But, in this article, to say that Q is required for P would mean that not-Q is a conclusive reason for not-P. It would not follow from that and "Q if and only if R" (in the material sense) that R is a requirement for P. It might be something that just happens to covary with a certain requirement for P, namely, Q. The kind of implication involved in these notions of requirement and decisiveness is stronger than either material or strict implication, but is some form of "relevant" implication. For some discussion of these varieties of implication see Susan Haack, Philosophy of Logics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 36-37.
15. David Lyons, "Principles of Constitutional Interpretation and Original Meaning," Social Philosophy and Policy 4 (1986): 75-101, p. 89.
16. I am grateful to Tim Sommers for calling this point to my attention.
17. The Branch Davidians are a religious cult many of whose members perished in a well-publicized battle with federal authorities in Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993.
18. For example, PL, pp. 101 ("These conditions suffice for a reasonable conception of justice"), 116, and 127-28 ("With that done, the political conception is a reasonable basis of public reason and that suffices").
19. I only consider AS as a political doctrine rather than a comprehensive or metaphysical doctrine.
20. Below, I distinguish this from unqualified NTN.
21. American Heritage Dictionary gives as its second definition of 'tolerance' "a. Leeway for variation from a standard, b. The permissible deviation from a specified value of a structural dimension." Rawls too speaks of the "leeway" within comprehensive views, though he means their indeterminacy on certain matters within certain bounds. Thus, "a reasonable ... political conception may bend comprehensive doctrines toward itself, shaping them ... from unreasonable to reasonable" (PL, p. 246). That kind of leeway allows one to make any of a certain range of views actually a part of the comprehensive view. That is entirely different from the virtue of not insisting on the exact truth, even where one has a definite opinion as to what the exact truth is. There are other places where Rawls's language might be read as endorsing what I call "No Sticklers." See, e.g., his talk of "narrowing" differences (PL, p. 120) and "similarity" (PL, p. 112). He never lays out a No Sticklers principle, though it might be congenial.
22. Nagel pursues this surprising idea in "Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy."
23. I borrow the phrase from Rawls, "Justice As Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1988): 223-51. See also Rawls, PL, p. 127: "Political constructivism does not criticize, then, religious, philosophical, or metaphysical accounts of the truth of moral judgments and of their validity."
24. PL, p. 128.
25. In PL, Rawls never commits himself to TN even as a comprehensive view. At the end of Lecture III, however, where he supports the comprehensive view that at least one of the views in an enduring reasonable overlapping consensus is highly likely to be true, he suggests that in his own comprehensive view he regards this as an important fact.
26. For example, others are obligated, and may be coercively compelled, not to discriminate against the acquitted person in certain ways that would be permitted if he were convicted. For example, he may not be denied the right to vote or to own a firearm.
27. Even if political liberalism may not take a side, the proceduralist view faces serious difficulties. I believe they roughly parallel the difficulties I pose for nonepistemic proceduralist accounts of democratic deliberation in "Beyond Fairness and Deliberation: The Epistemic Dimension of Democratic Authority," in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 173-204.
28. PL, p. 129. See also Nagel, "Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy."
29. See Thomas Scanlon, "Contractualism and Utilitarianism," in Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 103-28.
30. PL, p. 95.
31. Ibid., p. 129.
32. Rawls says that political principles are moral, at PL, p. 11. For further discussion of truth and moral statements, and references, see Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, "The Many Moral Realisms," and other papers in Essays on Moral Realism, ed. Sayre-McCord (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).
33. For a spirited exchange on the normative implications of noncognitivist and truth-minimalist analyses of normative language, see Ronald Dworkin, "Truth and Objectivity: You'd Better Believe It," Philosophy and Public Affairs 25 (1996): 87-139; and the symposium on that article on Brown Electronic Article Review Service (BEARS) in Moral and Political Philosophy (http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/bears/ homepage.html), edited by James Dreier and David Estlund, especially the articles by Simon Blackburn, Nick Zangwill, and the reply by Dworkin.
34. I am therefore not committing political liberalism or noncognitivists to a minimalist or "deflationary" conception of the concept of truth. Paul Horwich recommends this to (so-called) noncognitivists in "Gibbard's Theory of Norms," Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993):67-78. (That name would cease to be appropriate if they took his advice, as he notes.) One kind of constructivist view might hold that truth and falsity do not apply to political principles, although other standards of correctness do. Truth in the minimal sense does not offend against this view any more than it offends against noncognitivism.
35. I am grateful to Ernest Sosa and the editors and referees of Ethics for formulating this useful challenge.
36. In principle, an authorizing doctrine may be used without being put forward as true, if it is authorized by some higher-order doctrine. I see no candidate for such a thing in the case of political liberalism's acceptance criterion, and so I proceed on the assumption that it must stand on its own as true or correct.
37. PL, p. 116. See related passages at pp. xx and 94.
38. See PL, p. 127: "Reasonableness is [political liberalism's] standard of correctness." The quotation is from PL, p. xx.
39. Rawls is not just distancing political liberalism from truth in favor of some other standard of correctness, all things considered, as Larmore argues that he is (Morals of Modernity, pp. 147-48). (If he were, of course, he could allow that doctrines used in justification need not be true in the minimal sense, that is, correct all things considered.) Rawls notes (PL, p. 126, n. 34) that contractualism might take reasonableness rather than truth as its standard for the correctness of moral and political judgments, but he plainly does not let political liberalism adopt this view, since it would then contradict rational intuitionism, a reasonable alternative view about the basis of the validity of moral and political principles. Rawls evidently means that political liberalism need not use any idea of a doctrine's being correct all things considered. This is what I deny in this article.
40. Joseph Raz, "Facing Diversity: The Case of Epistemic Abstinence," Philosophy and Public Affairs 19 (1990): 3-46.
41. Philosophy and Public Affairs Ibid., p. 15.
42. "[Justification] of moral and political values depends in part on the way they can be integrated into a comprehensive view of human well-being" (Raz, p. 23).