On justificatory liberalism

Politics, Philosophy and Economics

Volumn 9, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 123-149

  Wall, Steven ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

Author keywords

Adjudication; Coercion; First person standpoint; Interference; Justification; Moral reasons; Public reason; Rationality

Indexed keywords

EID: 77951903039     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: 17413060     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X09345677     Document Type: Article

References (91)

1. See Gerald F. Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
2. Gerald F. Gaus, 'Reasonable Pluralism and the Domain of the Political: How the Weaknesses of John Rawls' Political Liberalism can be Overcome by a Justificatory Liberalism', Inquiry 42 (1999).
3. Gerald F. Gaus, Social Philosophy (London: M.E. Sharpe, 1999).
4. Gerald F. Gaus, 'Liberal Neutrality: A Radical and Compelling Principle', in Perfectionism and Neutrality, edited by Steven Wall and George Klosko (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
5. Gerald F. Gaus, 'On the Diversity of Comprehensive Liberalisms', in The Sage Handbook to Political Theory, edited by Gerald F. Gaus and Chandran Kukathas (London: Sage, 2004).
6. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)
7. John Rawls, 'The Idea of Public Reason Revisited', University of Chicago Law Review 64 (1997).
8. As Gaus has explained, the Rawlsian distinction between 'political' and 'comprehensive' doctrines is both misleading and elusive. See Gaus, 'On the Diversity of Comprehensive Liberalisms'.
9. For an excellent overview of the different characterizations of public justification in the recent philosophical literature, see Fred D'Agostino, Free Public Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
10. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 580-1.
11. On this point, see Gaus's well-considered rejection of 'populist theories of public justification'. See Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism, pp. 130-6.
12. This enables Gaus to respond to the indeterminacy problem concerning public justification. There are multiple conceptions of public justification (which articulate competing and incompatible standards for justified political power). An appeal to a particular conception of public justification, accordingly, looks to be a covert appeal to contested political preferences. But if background considerations about the nature of justification and moral reasoning can be relied on to favor one conception over the others, then the problem can be overcome.
13. See ibid., pp. 4-5.
14. Ibid., p. 165.
15. An alternative formulation of the principle, from Joel Feinberg, states that 'Liberty should be the norm; coercion always requires some special justification.' Gaus occasionally refers to this principle simply as the 'Liberal Principle'.
16. See, for instance, Gaus, Social Philosophy, pp. 117-9.
17. These include, among others, Joel Feinberg, Harm to Others (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)
18. Stanley Benn, A Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
19. Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism, p. 323 n. 22.
20. Ibid., p. 180.
21. Gaus, 'Liberal Neutrality', p. 143.
22. See Nagel's discussion of the distinction between these two kinds of moral reasons. See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 164-6.
23. Gaus, 'Liberal Neutrality', p. 143. (Note that I have substituted x for the Greek letter used by Gaus.)
24. For a defense of externalism, so conceived, see Derek Parfit, 'Reasons and Motivation', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary 71 (1997).
25. A note on terminology is in order here. Gaus characterizes his preferred conception of justification as 'weakly externalist'. It is externalist since it is committed to open and not closed justification. That is, on Gaus's view, a person can have an unjustified belief even if the belief is justified by reference to his current beliefs, provided that if some new information were added to his current beliefs, the belief would not be justified.
26. See Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism, pp. 32-5.
27. But Gaus also makes it plain that, on his view, justification must take its point of departure from a person's current system of reasons and beliefs. Applied to reasons for action and not merely to reasons for belief, this view fits well with Williams's influential account of internal reasons; namely, that for a person to have a reason for action, there must be a sound deliberative route from the person's subjective motivational set to the consideration which purportedly provides the reason to act. That is why I describe Gaus's view of moral reasons as 'internalist'.
28. Actually, the split is possible even if one rejects internalism about reasons. But externalist views of moral reason, one might say, allow for a greater split.
29. Thomas Nagel, 'Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy', Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (1987): 229.
30. See especially Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism, pp. 154-6.
31. We also could say that Jill has a personally justified, but false, belief that the wrongness of voluntary euthanasia can be publicly justified. But I am assuming that Jill has no such belief. She does not believe that her view could be publicly demonstrated in the specific sense of public demonstration specified by the public reason principle.
32. This way of putting the point fits the statement of PRP, which explicitly mentions coercion. However, in Justificatory Liberalism, Gaus claims that 'when making moral demands on others, personal justification is not sufficient; such demands must be publicly justified'.
33. See Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism, p. 12. This suggests that it is moral demands as such (and not only moral demands backed by coercion) that must be based on shared or impartial reasons.
34. Gaus, 'Reasonable Pluralism and the Domain of the Political', pp. 274-6.
35. Gaus, 'Liberal Neutrality', pp. 156-8.
36. In point of fact, the issue may be less clear cut than this suggests. See Gaus's discussion of the conflicting empirical evidence on the extent to which seatbelt restrictions actually save lives.
37. See Gerald F. Gaus, 'Why All Welfare States (Including Laissez-Faire Ones) are Unreasonable?', Social Philosophy and Policy 15 (1998).
38. Gaus terms proposals justified in this way 'weakly publicly justified', as opposed to proposals that can be conclusively justified to all rational persons, which he terms 'strongly publicly justified'.
39. Gaus emphasizes the radical implications of PRP for state policy in 'Liberal Neutrality'.
40. Gaus, Social Philosophy, p. 119.
41. See Gaus, 'Liberal Neutrality', pp. 139-41.
42. See the discussion in Samuel Scheffler, Human Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 17-28.
43. Gaus himself defends a modest good Samaritan duty, a duty to be a 'minimally decent Samaritan'. In addition, he argues that such a duty can be publicly justified. See Gaus, Social Philosophy, pp. 193-5.
44. I argue for this point in more detail in Steven Wall, 'Neutrality and Responsibility', Journal of Philosophy 98 (2001).
45. Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 100.
46. Nagel makes it plain that the same point applies to a range of noneconomic state policies as well. In general, see his discussion of negative responsibility and state action.
47. See ibid., pp. 99-102, 166-7.
48. It is sometimes claimed that coercion has a special significance due to its symbolic meaning. Coercive acts express disrespect toward the coerced person. Symbolic meanings are conditioned by contingent social facts. It is doubtful that in modern societies there exist social conventions that invest coercive acts as such, as opposed to certain instances of coercion, with this kind of symbolic significance.
49. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
50. Admittedly, this is a little too quick. On some possible moralized construals of coercion, there may be no instances of failures to intervene that are prima facie morally wrong. Working with such construals, one might be able to ground an asymmetry between coercive interventions and failures to intervene. To nail down the point expressed in this paragraph, therefore, I would need to show that no such moralized account of coercion is compelling. This is not a task I can undertake here.
51. Assume here, if one likes, that the costs to me of intervening are very small or nonexistent.
52. Scanlon defends a version of the principle in T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 363-73.
53. Three caveats are in order. First, Scanlon holds that reason judgments in general, not just those pertaining to morality, are universal. For present purposes, I limit the principle to apply to judgments of moral reasons. Second, Scanlon allows that some reason judgments have subjective conditions. Third, Scanlon does not think that what I here refer to as a principle is aptly characterized as a principle. It is, he suggests, better thought of as a formal consequence of making judgments about reasons.
54. UP is extremely plausible, but not unchallengeable. In discussing Peter Winch's version of moral particularism, Raz presents an interesting argument that suggests that UP needs qualification. Suppose two people are in the same circumstances. In addition, suppose that the relevant moral considerations, judged impersonally, underdetermine whether one should do x or y in these circumstances. Further suppose that one of the persons has a moral character that makes it true of him that he must do x and not y. If he were to do otherwise, we can assume, it would compromise his integrity. Here, Raz claims, the person has a moral reason to do x that the other person with a different moral character may not have. Thus, moral reasons do not universalize in all cases.
55. See Joseph Raz, Engaging Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 239-45. Since adding the qualification suggested by Raz's argument would not affect the points I wish to press in this section, I shall not explore this complication further.
56. This is assuming, of course, that he judges that his fellow citizens are in circumstances sufficiently similar to his own to warrant the inference.
57. Gaus, 'Liberal Neutrality', pp. 143-4.
58. This sense is the sense in which rationality is understood in terms of responsiveness to reason.
59. Alternatively, I might allow that full rationality is captured by the idealizations in 1 and 2 and reject PRP in favor of a principle that refers to full reason responsiveness as opposed to full rationality. But this is merely a terminological issue.
60. At times, Gaus appears to offer a conceptual argument in favor of internalism about moral reasons that links moral demands to the appropriateness of responses such as blame or guilt.
61. See Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism, pp. 122-3. See the Appendix below for discussion of this issue.
62. Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism, p. 129.
63. Ibid., pp. 151-2.
64. Here it should be noted that Gaus's internalist account of moral reasons plays a pivotal role in his rejection of the view, espoused by William Galston (and myself), that it is possible to justify a moral view to someone if one presents what one takes to be valid reasons for the view. As Gaus points out, this position makes sense on an externalist, but not an internalist, account of moral reasons.
65. See Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism, pp. 140-1.
66. It goes without saying that if one is wrong in one's assessment of the balance of reasons, then one will not succeed in justifying the policy.
67. Scanlon likewise describes contractualist morality in terms of the value of the relations between persons that it establishes. 'This relation, much less personal than friendship, might be called a relation of mutual recognition.'
68. See Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, p. 162. (Scanlon's account of contractualist morality includes, but is broader than, the requirements of political justice.).
69. The view, crudely formulated here, bears some resemblance to the position Habermas has defended in a series of publications. But I do not purport to represent his views.
70. For a good, recent discussion, see Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 42-3.
71. Note that this is why Rawls downplays the original position argument, viewing it now as a mere illustrative device.
72. Gaus, 'Liberal Neutrality', p. 154.
73. See the discussion in Alan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 178.
74. This claim, while substantially correct, may need to be qualified in various ways. I here pass over a number of difficult issues concerning the epistemic significance of disagreement.
75. On this topic compare Thomas Kelly, 'The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement', in Oxford Studies in Epistemology I, edited by Tamar Gendler and John Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
76. with David Christenson, 'Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News', Philosophical Review 116 (2007).
77. That is, in my judgment, Gaus is right to view the mechanism for settling political disagreements as primarily adjudicative, rather than one that aims to mediate disputes.
78. See Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism, pp. 271-4. The point of the procedures is to reach a verdict as to what citizens collectively take to be in the public interest or for the common good of their society.
79. Ibid., pp. 5-6.
80. Alternatively and less dramatically, one may be drawn toward the politics of Thoreau-like disengagement from political life.
81. Such decisions may be accepted as legitimate, but not necessarily just. It is true that over time citizens might come to value the adjudicative procedures for intrinsic reasons. (On this point, see Rawls's interesting discussion of the transition from constitutional politics to an overlapping consensus.).
82. I discuss the extent to which it is rational for citizens to do so in Steven Wall, 'Democracy and Restraint', Law and Philosophy 26 (2007).
83. Consider, for example, the 'legal point of view'. This is an artificial point of view, since it does not correspond with the first-person moral convictions of any citizen. This holds true on either legal positivist or natural law views.
84. This claim does not commit me to denying the obvious point that evaluative concepts are shared. The fact that they are shared explains why it is not surprising for people who reason first-personally to converge on many evaluative judgments. The claim also does not commit me to denying the epistemic value of rational discussion with others on evaluative issues.
85. In Gaus's words, 'the epistemic theory on which the public justification of liberal principles rests is not itself publicly (conclusively) justified'.
86. See Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism, p. 175.
87. Bernard Williams, 'Internal and External Reasons for Action', in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
88. See also his subsequent contribution, that is, Bernard Williams, 'Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame', in Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
89. Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism, p. 129.
90. This is, roughly, the position that Scanlon takes on the issue. See Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, pp. 277-90.
91. See also the interesting discussion of the issue in John Skorupski, 'Internal Reasons and the Scope of Blame', in Bernard Williams, edited by Alan Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).