In this original post, I asked whether public justification is trivial and easy to achieve. If, say, a utilitarian has a good philosophical argument for X, written in a publicly accessible forum, using accessible language, with lots of strong social scientific papers using lots of different methods showing X work, and has taken care to consider and offer powerful rebuttals to every plausible objections, then what more could we possibly need? What additional work does public justification do that isn't done by, well, plain old argument and reasoning? (Actually, why doesn't that simply count as public justification?)
Here, Kevin Vallier tries to explain the problem using an example. In particular, he asks us to imagine that pretty much reads the utilitarian's defense of the policy and accepts the argument is sound, until the Sackville-Baggins family speaks up:
Sackville-Baggins: we don’t get it
Other Hobbits: we knew it
PRL: Damn it, everyone is ready to go. Sorry, U, but it’s no longer clear everyone can see the rationale.
U: smh I hate these Sackville-Bagginses so f-ing much. Hooligans in disguise, I tell you. What don’t you agree?
Sackville-Baggins: [conversing with themselves, obnoxiously] Kantian Contingent? We need your help.
Kantian Contingent: Sure! Nothing like a long-winded inquiry into whether we know anything that will end in obvious failure!
[Sackville-Bagginses and Kantian Contingent take forever]
S-Bs and Kantians Together: after much consideration, we have identified a defeater reason showing that, for the S-Bs, U’s proposed policy is inferior to having no policy governing the matter at hand. While the objections to U’s policy have been largely answered, we nonetheless have found that it places undue burdens on some.
PRL: well, U, looks like they’re not going to be convinced. And they really gave it ago. The Hobbits even enlisted the Kantians’ help. Time to pack it in and go to the bar. Oh, and please hand me your Rawls badge and your gun before you leave.
U: Go to hell. I’m buying a guitar.
Unfortunately, this is not very convincing.
The dialectic seems to go as follows: The utilitarian proposes policy X. Some people--the Sackville-Bagginses--claim that they have no "sound deliberative route" to the X and further assert that X imposes undue burdens on them.
Again, though, this is not in itself a serious objection. It is just the form of an objection. Anytime anyone proposes anything, I could assert that I have no "sound deliberative route" to something. If, say, Peter Singer shows me his paper which demonstrates how we seem to have no good grounds for eating pigs but not infants, I could simply pound the table and insist that I have no sound deliberate route to his conclusion.
But this insistence means nothing on its own. What matters is the substance: Do I actually have an substantively good objection to his view? Is there actually a big hole in or problem with his argument? Is his argument actually obscure and incomprehensible to me, even though I'm a smart person? If the answer to these three questions is no, then I am wrong to assert that I lack a sound deliberate route or that the theory imposes undue burdens on me. (That morality is burdensome is not itself an objection; what matter is whether the truth is that you should accept those burdens or not. Hitler might find it burdensome to have to forbear from murdering Jews. So what?) What matters is the substance of the argument, so long as the argument is written plainly and uses public evidence.
In my original post, I asked us to consider we need something "extra" on top of good arguments, clear language, and public evidence. Kevin asks us to imagine the Sackville-Bagginses have an objection or lack a sound deliberative route. But why are we entitled to imagine that? Isn't that simply gainsaying my original post or simply begging the question?
You can just point to some people and ask us to imagine that they have an objection. Kevin's dialogue simply contradicts the original assumptions I worked with. I asked readers to imagine the utilitarians had a sound argument for X, had written in clear language, had published the evidence in a clear way, and had considered and rebutted all the major objections to X in the same way. I asked, what more could you need? Here, Kevin says the Sackville-Baggins aren't on board. Well, either they have a good objection (including that the arguments are incomprehensible or we've hidden the evidence from them)--which thus contradicts my supposition--or they don't, in which case they are unreasonable, both in the sense of not following clear public evidence and not being willing to work on fair terms of cooperation.
Repeat this exercise for any argument for any theory:
A: Here's my argument for mandatory vaccinations.
B: Yeah, well someone smart might disagree!
A: So? If they have good grounds to disagree, let's hear them and see if they are any good. Otherwise, who cares?
Why can't the utilitarian claim instead that the Sackville-Bagginses are mistaken and they don't actually have a defeater? Why can't the utilitarian simply claim that the Sackville-Bagginses are being unreasonable, because they do not conform their beliefs to good arguments or good evidence? Or, taking a page from the public reason liberals (see below), why can't the utilitarian insist that a person is reasonable if and only they accept utilitarianism, but if they they don't, they are unreasonable and their objections don't matter? Why not say that that Sackville-Baggins are obligated to act for the greater good and accept fair terms of cooperation, and their insistence that they lack a substantive deliberative route or that they have a good objection is bunk--unless they actually have a good objection or can actually identify a hole in the original argument?
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Many public reason liberals do a kind of definitional slide. They start with "reasonable" meaning, well, reasonable. They then slowly turn it into something different, where "reasonable" means "willing to accept fair terms of cooperation". They then turn into something different, where "reasonable" means "willing to accept fair terms of cooperation, beginning with the assumption that all people are free and equal, and that politics must be democratic". They finally turn it into something different still, where they mean "a person is reasonable if and only if they are public reason liberal". Kevin, to his credit, doesn't got this far. He probably only goes to step 2.
Nevertheless, we can imagine that the public reason project went in entirely different ways. If Rawls hadn't bungled up Harsanyi so much, we might have had a utilitarian Rawls in 1996 who insistent that what it means to be reasonable is to accept fair and equal terms of cooperation, which means accepting whatever policies maximize average utility. This utilitarian Rawls would regard our real-life Rawls as unreasonable, as someone who rejects fair terms of cooperation on the basis of table-pounding their private ideology.
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