Why Isn't Public Justification Trivial and Easy to Satisfy?

 The public justification principle, central to public reason liberalism:

The Public Justification Principle (PJP): A coercive law L is justified in a public P if and only if each member i of P has sufficient reason(s) Ri to endorse L.

A billion contradictory and incompatible papers have been written trying to flesh this idea out. After all, it leaves open all of these questions, which Vallier lists:

1. What makes a reason “sufficient”?
2. How fine-grained is the specification by L of the conduct which is permitted or prohibited for members of the public?
3. What types of justificatory reasons R do we recognize?
4. How are the parties to public justificatory arguments idealized?
5. What is the scope of the public?
6. What are the modalities of public justification? Or: by which process is public justification achieved?
7. Must we publicly justify anything other than coercion?

I often wonder, though, why isn't PJP easy to satisfy.

Consider this dialogue:

Utilitarian: We should do X.

PRL: Nuh-uh. Some people disagree.

U: Lots of people disagree about lots of things. For instance, I think PRL is a terrible, vacuous theory and the entire corpus of work has been a distraction.

PRL: Well, we can't force people to do X unless we can justify it to them!

U: Uh, I guess so. But I did justify it. Here you go, here is a philosophy book justifying my normative theory and here are 600 econ papers proving X works. What else could you possibly need?

PRL: But that's not accessible to everyone!

U: What do you mean? Like they don't have copies of the books and papers? I can't recall any law ever being passed where the government first sent out all the papers and books proving the law works to the people.

PRL: No, I mean they might not understand the reasons.

U: Okay, I rewrote it everything at an eighth-grade reading level. Are we good? I mean, surely you don't mean to say that a coercive law is justifiable only we can explain it at an even lower reading level. Maybe some justified laws are a bit complicated, no?

PRL: Ok, no, I mean that the people upon whom the law will be imposed have to be able to accept the reasons behind it.

U: But now you're just gain-saying me. As I said, here are the papers justifying the law. Here. Right here. Look. You can't keep invoking PRL and the mere possibility of reasonable disagreement. If you have a substantive disagreement, name it. 

PRL: You see, people might have good objections you haven't defeated.

U: Well, do they? What's are the objections? These books and papers are pretty thorough and we answer every major and minor objection we've seen in the press and elsewhere. It seems like instead of saying people might have a disagreement or objection, you should simply say that reason the law isn't justified is that there is in fact an important objection. Tell us what the objection is, and then let's see if we can overcome it.

PRL: Ok, but some people don't agree with your argument.

U: Are you saying mere disagreement renders the law illegitimate? Like if the Nazi disagrees with...

PRL: No, only reasonable disagreement.

U: What makes someone reasonable?

PRL: That they accept my theory.

U: So, if, say Robert Nozick rejects property-owning democracy because of the reasons offered in ASU, does that render it wrong? Also, why can't I say, as you do, that laws have to be justified to reasonable people, but then just say only utilitarians are reasonable people? Why can't Nazis say that a person is reasonable if and only if they Nazis? It seems like you jump back and forth between platitudes about reasonableness (accepting evidence, processing evidence in a scientific way, etc.) and substantive commitment to your parochial theory, as it suits you. Which is it? I mean, utilitarians are all about giving reasons for their actions, and we make our reasons clear. When Singer explains why eating meat is wrong, he justifies it on the basis of widely accepted premises all people other than sociopaths share, while when Rawls tries to justify his theory, he mostly cites obscure ideas and half-baked arguments which apparently no one understands. (After all, if you all have to spend 2,000 papers+ trying to decode his work, it's apparently not accessible.)

PRL: No, no, no. Nozick isn't reasonable. Utilitarians aren't reasonable. Nazis aren't reasonable. 

U: Uh, hmmm, ok. But back to X. I've given a sound argument, based on clear and almost universally accepted premises, in favor of X. I've done all the work showing that X works and that all the objections I could think of against X are bad. What more could you ask for?

PRL: You have to add "...and therefore all reasonable people could accept X" and then I guess we're good. 

U: But what work does that do? What more does that add?

PRL: It helps me keep my job. 

The Liberalism of 600 Channels

In 2009 Reason ran a debate about cultural libertarianism. Kerry Howley wrote an entry for that debate that I still really like. Howley writes,

Libertarians for whom individualism is important cannot avoid discussions of culture, conformism, and social structure. Not every threat to liberty is backed by a government gun. Convention creates boundaries as thick as any border wall and ubiquitous as any surveillance state...A door is as good as a wall if we cannot imagine walking through it. It ought to seem obvious that a philosophy devoted to political liberty would concern itself with building a freedom-friendly culture. But the state-wary social conservative flinches when his li

bertarian friends celebrate the power of culture itself to liberate: the liberty of the pill, of pornography, of 600 channels where once there were three. The social conservative will refer to these wayward anti-statists as "cultural libertarians," by which he means libertines. And it will always be in his interest to argue that the libertarian, qua libertarian, should stay mute on issues of culture.

Culture and social norms are still overlooked in libertarian thought, but also in political philosophy more generally. Part of it is structural-- political philosophy is focused on politics, and people think of politics as constrained by the state, so they focus on states. Part of it is also probably because there is a concern that people will hear libertarians saying "people should do X" as "people should be legally required to do X" or concern that commenting on cultural issues is excessively moralistic or paternalistic in some way. But these concerns are unpersuasive, for reasons Howley describes: 

 As it turns out, all libertarians are cultural libertarians. We just don't share the same agenda. Some prefer to advance their agenda by pretending it doesn't exist: that social convention is not a matter of concern for those who believe in individual liberty. But when a libertarian claims that his philosophy has no cultural content—has nothing to say, for instance, about society's acceptance of gays and lesbians—he is engaging in a kind of cultural politics that welcomes the paternalism of the mob while balking at that of the state.

I think the core of libertarianism/anarchism is the belief that the state isn't morally special-- public officials should live by the same standards of permission and obligation as the rest of us. But that argument is only a first step. We should also ask, by what standards should the rest of us live?