Value pluralism and the problem of judgment: Farewell to public reason

Political Theory

Volumn 40, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 6-31

  Zerilli, Linda M G ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

Arendt; Democratic theory; Frederick Douglass; Judgment; Rawls; Wittgenstein

Indexed keywords

EID: 84856155904     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591711426853     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)
2. Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture," in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Penguin, 2006), 194-222.
3. For a more detailed account of Arendt's theory of judgment than the one I provide here, see Linda M. G. Zerilli, "'We Feel Our Freedom': Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt," Political Theory 33, no. 2 (April 2005): 158-188.
4. Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
5. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), xxvi. Hereafter cited in the text and notes as PL with page references.
6. For Rawls's discussion of the burdens of judgment, see PL, 54-58. These burdens, as Thomas McCarthy summarizes, concern the free use of reason and the "difficulties in assessing evidence and difficulties in weighing it, indeterminacy of concepts and conflicts of interpretation, experiential and normative divergencies, the diversity of values and variations in selecting and ordering them."
7. Thomas McCarthy, Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism: Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue, Ethics 105 (October 1994): 44-63; quotation is from p. 58.
8. Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical," Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 388-414; quotation is from p. 230.
9. "When attributed to persons, the two basic elements of the reasonable are first, a willingness to propose fair terms of social cooperation that others as free and equal might also endorse, and to act on these terms, provided others do, even contrary to one's own interest; and, second, a recognition of the burdens of judgment and accepting their consequences for one's attitude (including toleration) toward other comprehensive doctrines."
10. John Rawls, "Political Liberalism: Reply to Habermas," The Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 2 (March 1995): 132-180; quotation is from p. 134.
11. Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics," in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1993): 227-264.
12. I try to complicate interpretations of Arendt's view of truth in Linda M. G. Zerilli, "Truth and Politics," Theory and Event 9, no. 4 (2006).
13. For critiques of public reason in Rawls's work see Veit Bader, "Religious pluralism: secularism or priority for democracy?" Political Theory 27, no. 5 (1999): 597-633
14. Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006)
15. Jürgen Habermas, "Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls's Political Liberalism," The Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 3 (March 1995): 109-131
16. McCarthy, "Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism"'
17. Michael Sandel, Political Liberalism by John Rawls, Harvard Law Review 107: 1765-1794
18. Jeremy Waldron, "Religious contributions in public deliberation," San Diego Law Review 30 (1993): 817-848.
19. For a defense of Rawl's idea of public reason against these critics, see Samuel Freeman, Rawls (New York: Routledge, 2007)
20. Anthony Simon Laden, Reasonably Radical: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001)
21. Richard Rorty, "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 175-196.
22. Rawls calls political liberalism a "method of avoidance" insofar as it does not engage in traditional philosophical controversies about the nature of the good or the true. This same method then becomes the rule for what it means to engage in public reason.
23. Rawls, "Justice as Fairness," 395.
24. In The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, Rawls takes great pains to answer critics who claim that political liberalism suffers from a democratic deficit called public reason. Here he states explicitly: It is imperative to realize that the idea of public reason does not apply to all political discussions of fundamental questions, but only to discussions of those questions in what I refer to as the public political forum. This forum may be divided into three parts: the discourse of judges in their decisions, and especially of judges of a supreme court; the discourse of government officials, especially chief executives and legislators; and, finally, the discourse of candidates for public office and their campaign managers, especially in their public oratory, party platforms, and political statements.
25. John Rawls, "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," in The Law of Peoples with "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 131-180; quotation is from pp. 133-34.
26. Hereafter cited in the text and notes as IPRR with page references. "Political liberalism, then, does not try to fix public reason once and for all in the form of one favored political conception of justice" (IPRR, 142), writes Rawls. In this spirit, Rawls grants that there is such a thing as a "background culture," where the rules of public reason do not apply in any case; that nonpublic reasons made there and elsewhere can be made good in terms of public reason at a later date (the "proviso" exception (152); that "there are many liberalisms ... and therefore many forms of public reason" (141); that indeed "new variations [of public reason] may be proposed from time to time" (142) including ones that do not prioritize justice as fairness (141); and that this is important, "otherwise the claims of groups or interests arising from social change might be repressed and fail to gain their appropriate voice" (142). In fact, by the end of the essay it appears that the only criterion that is unassailable as far as political liberalism and public reason are concerned is "the criterion of reciprocity" (141, 173). This leads a rather exasperated Rawls to declare at the end of the essay: "I do not know how to prove that public reason is not too restrictive, or whether its forms are properly described. I suspect that it cannot be done" (179).
27. The exceptions here include Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion
28. Ronald Beiner, What's the Matter with Liberalism? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
29. Rawls, IPRR, 132-133.
30. Martha Nussbaum, "Political Objectivity," New Literary History 32 (2001): 883-906; quotation is from p. 896.
31. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), §307)
32. James Conant, "Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use," Philosophical Investigations 21, no. 3 (July 1998): 222-250.
33. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 211.
34. Conant, "Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use," 223.
35. Ibid., 239.
36. Ibid., 240.
37. Part of what Wittgenstein is questioning here is the distinction between meaning and intelligibility. This is the idea that we have, on the one hand, the meaning of a proposition and, on the other hand, the context of use in which that meaning is properly communicated and thus intelligible. On this view, propositions can be fully meaningful yet unintelligible: as sentences they have meaning but that meaning has not found a suitable context of use.
38. Ibid., 228.
39. The distinction between meaning and intelligibility is at work in Rawls's approach to comprehensive claims to truth. In his view, comprehensive claims (e.g., about God as the creator of human equality) are meaningful-his point is not to endorse skepticism about claims to truth. But when the generalized context of use is the "public political form," such claims are to be considered unreasonable, that is to say, unintelligible as legitimate political speech. We understand the words, but we cannot credit them as intelligible insofar as they make no political sense according to the public criterion of reasonableness. The semantic content of the assertion is in order but the context of its utterance is just wrong.
40. I discuss this point in Linda M. G. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), ch. 4
41. Linda M. G. Zerilli, "This Universalism Which Is Not One," Diacritics 28, no. 2 (August 1998): 3-20.
42. For Rawls, the example of slaves serves to support his argument that the view of the person as free and equal is a political conception. I agree that it is. But that is all the more reason to consider how it is that one comes to be seen as the originator of claims. Married women in mid-nineteenth century America could not vote, legally own property, make a will, sign a contract or, if employed, claim their own wages.
43. For an account of Douglass's speech that sets it in historical context and relates it to the struggle for women's rights, see James A. Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
44. I am using the Douglass text at www.historyisaweapon.com
45. George Shulman, "Thinking Authority Democratically: Prophetic Practices, White Supremacy, and Democratic Politics," Political Theory 36, no. 5 (October 2008): 708-734; quotation is from p. 721.
46. George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), esp. pp. 15-20.
47. Emphasis added. On this point see Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July, 33-34.
48. Douglass, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro."
49. Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 224.
50. Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press), 20.
51. I discuss Grassi's view of rhetoric more extensively in "'We Feel Our Freedom,'" 166-168.
52. Rawls, "Justice as Fairness," 394.
53. Frank, Constituent Moments, 218.
54. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, 171.
55. Frank describes what I am calling the predicative moment of politics a "constituent moment."
56. Ibid., 8.
57. Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July, 92.
58. Ibid., 92.
59. As Colaiaco explains, "Douglass put his pragmatism into practice. For national elections, he did everything in his power to advance the cause of freedom by supporting the platform of the Liberty Party, later known as the Radical Abolitionists, calling for the immediate abolition of slavery everywhere in the United States. But once the election drew near, recognizing that an abolitionist victory was unlikely, he prudently switched his support to those political parties, such as the Free Soil Party [which sought merely to contain rather than abolish slavery], and subsequently to the Republican Party, which had better chances of success."
60. Ibid., 94.
61. Likewise, Douglass transferred his support of the abolitionist Gerrit Smith to the Republican Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election, even though Lincoln's party advanced a strategy of containment rather than abolition.
62. See Michael Sandel's reading of the role played by morality in the 1858 debates over abolition between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglass. As Sandel argues, "The debate between Lincoln and Douglass was not primarily about the morality of slavery, but about whether to bracket a moral controversy for the sake of political agreement."
63. Sandel, Political Liberalism by John Rawls, Harvard Law Review 107: 1765-1794; quotation is from p. 1780. For Rawls's response to this critique, see IPRR, 174.
64. Rawls, IPRR, 133.
65. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965), ch. 5;
66. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, ch. 4.
67. Arendt, "Truth and Politics," 239, 240.
68. Ibid., 246.
69. I discuss this point in Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, ch. 4.
70. At the 1833 American Anti-Slavery Convention, Garrison argued: "All those laws which are now in force, admitting the right of slavery, are therefore before God utterly null and void."
71. Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July, 84.
72. Like Douglass, he drew on the natural law tradition to contest the validity of positive law; unlike Douglass, he used that tradition to denounce the Constitution as a pro-slavery document that, thanks to natural law, ought to be rejected as null and void.
73. As Rawls sees it, "given the fact of reasonable pluralism ... liberal principles meet the urgent political requirement to fix, once and for all, the content of certain basic political rights and liberties, and to assign them special priority. Doing this takes those guarantees off the political agenda and puts them beyond the calculus of social interests, thereby establishing clearly and firmly the rules of political contest" (PL, 161).
74. On this point, see Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion, 182-183.
75. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 57-58.
76. Ibid., 58.
77. Bader, "Religious pluralism: secularism or priority for democracy?" 618.
78. Rawls, IPRR, 142-142.
79. Rawls, IPRR, 178.
80. Ibid., 177.
81. Although "the idea of public reason" applies only to "the public political forum" (discussed in note 9 above), Rawls also describes "the ideal of public reason" as something that should be aspired to and can be "realized by citizens who are not government officials." In accordance with this ideal, "citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think most reasonable to enact." Thinking and acting in ways that are consistent with public reason is a "moral duty" of all citizens which clearly expands the normative claim of such reason way beyond the boundaries of the official public sphere. Rawls, IPRR, 135.
82. Arendt, The Human Condition, 182.