What Would Public Justification Actually Look Like?

 I've been commenting on the odd sociology of the public justification theorists. The striking feature of their work is that they almost never engage in public justification. Now, I recognize that their work on the epistemology of public reason might not need to be accessible or publicly justified--that depends on whether the theorist in question believes that the principle of public justification applies to itself or not. But oddly, you don't see public reason theorists doing what they take themselves to be doing--they basically never try to show that the liberal order is accessible and defensible in light of the reasons slightly idealized people have, and they don't talk much to the public. Instead, they try to convince each other than their theory justifies liberalism. 

How might public reason liberalism go if the public reason liberals (PRLs) stuck to the motivations behind their project? Something like this, I think:

First, you'd see the PRLs survey, say, 20,000 or so randomly selected people from all one the world to determine their values. These carefully crafted surveys would need to include questions which demonstrated the relative weight people assign to various principles, including what trade-offs they are willing to make. 

You'd also want to do robustness checks. A problem with such surveys is that people don't like to say they don't know, and many of their political positions are just parroting what their neighbors happen to say at the time. So you'd want to administer the same surveys (with questions randomized in order) to the same people over and over to ensure they actually believe what they say. If we get the results that Converse got in his studies (see Converse 1964), where there was basically zero correlation among subject's responses between surveys, we'd suspect as Converse did that they were innocent of real opinion.

Further, we'd probably want to operationalize our conception of "reasonable". We might do various psychological exams to see if the people can follow basic chains of evidence, or are subject to severe bias, and so on. We could even presume that "reasonable" = "agreeing with John Rawls" and test to see who accepts his ideas and who doesn't. 

We'd probably want to collect demographics, too, to see how that affects opinion. 

With all this in place, we could then determine whether, for instance, reasonableness is correlated or anti-correlated with various views, all while controlling for confounds. We could statistically determine, using enlightened preference methods, whether reasonableness as an operational variable leads to various kinds of convergence or not. Most importantly, we could then see what range of values reasonable people have and actually determine what their values converge on, what their values reject, and so on. Because our surveys give weights to their values and their trade-offs, we could then determine which sorts of compromises and the like they would in fact make. 

You might then expect some "experimental philosopher" PRLs to try to convene various kinds of deliberative fora in which real citizens (perhaps those who qualify as reasonable by our operationalized definition) are brought in, and the theorists try to convince them of the conclusions which we revealed to be justified by public reason.

What we probably wouldn't want to do, if we cared about public justification, is create a largely insular academic community where we make relatively standard liberal philosophical arguments and standard social scientific arguments for this and that, but then specify that we regard our project as distinctly different from what other liberals and other social scientists are doing. 

UPDATE: Maybe this is what Klosko was up to here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2939045.pdf?fbclid=IwAR267eIhOwyDlBA16nZBao7NPYVtrHjqYUllYtleDzaHngo2L8397Z7PE9I&seq=1

Public Reason Liberalism Is Not the Great Savior

 Kevin Vallier writes this in response to my recent posts. Gonna post the whole thing. Emphasis added.

Imagine you’re in a tough marriage. You disagree with your spouse about many issues of great importance, like how to raise the kids, how to spend money, and so on. Imagine that, after all your efforts, you just can’t agree. But you don’t want to get divorced. The goods of life together are too great, and divorce would be messy, costly, and probably not make either party any happier. So you decide to go to a marriage therapist. The marriage therapist is another human being, just like you, and has her own parochial concerns, just like you, and she is a member of a profession which disagrees pretty seriously about the best and most effective forms of marriage therapy.

The therapist helps you to see that your arguments aren’t going anywhere and that you’re going to have to find some way to get along before the relationship is destroyed and your concern for one another is depleted. The therapist offers you compromises, ways of living where you don’t have to resent one another, where your hurt and pain can be brought into a manageable state, even if you have to readjust your expectations for having a good marriage. Eventually you find a way you can live together. You’re disappointed. You mourn the marriage you always wanted, but you continue to live your life with the one you love.

Now imagine that you’re a peace negotiator in a bloody and brutal war. The two sides can’t seem to conquer one another, and they’re nearly to the point of exhaustion. You represent one side, and you meet with the negotiator on the other side. The two of you have a strong bias, but you also recognize that peace is the best path forward. Of course, you start off by offering different kinds of peace treaties, and indeed hail from different schools of thought in military negotiation. But eventually you’re able to hit on a peace agreement that will stick and allow people to get on with life. An equilibrium that is not optimal from anyone’s point of view, but that everyone can accept.

There is nothing at all confusing or hypocritical or dishonest about these jobs. Being a therapist or a treaty negotiator builds on our capacity to take the perspective of others and come to some resolution of our disputes, which we do all the time. Of course, we all have our biases, and of course we may not have the best theory of resolving marital or martial conflicts. But at least we’re trying. There is a role in any culture for peace-makers, and we usually have lots of institutions devoted precisely to that task.

For whatever reason, Jason Brennan thinks that any political philosophy that tries to play this role in ideological conflict isn’t just wrong. It’s bullshit and wastes the profession’s time.

It is revealing that, in his most recent post, Brennan actually identifies two roles that approximate the relationships I’ve described: constitutional interpretation and biblical interpretation. People have fought quite a bit about what the constitution means, and so people develop theories of what the constitution means in order to resolve disputes. Of course, their theories are imperfect, but this meta-discourse is better than having everyone operate on their own private judgment about what the constitution means or not having a constitution at all. Similarly, biblical interpretation is a gigantic part of how Christians, Jews, etc. figure out how to associate with one another and worship together; they choose (not often enough) to engage one another in respectful dialogue rather than just declaring everyone who disagrees with them heretics. Brennan is suspicious of both practices on the grounds that they just ratify what the interpreter already believed, but I don’t see any reason to think this extreme degree of suspicion is warranted.

There is nothing more fake, hypocritical, or dumb about what the public reason liberal is trying to do than what the therapist or the treaty negotiator is trying to do. Brennan’s alternative seems to be just to duke it out and hope you win. I think the alternative of pursuing public justification is the better way to go.

I appreciate Vallier's patience with me, and I want to note that what I like about Vallier's work is that he's genuinely trying to make the project work. Some public reason liberals weaponize the theory to dismiss others without argument. Vallier is actually trying to make the theory inclusive.

But that said, I don't think he's taking the criticisms seriously, or he seems to miss the point. As you can see above, public reason liberals can conceive of themselves as being like negotiators or therapists trying to solve conflicts. Of course they can. But so can fascists, utilitarians, deontological liberals, deontological libertarians, consequentialist virtue theorists, and so on, also care about cooperation and resolving conflicts and also offer theories about how to to do so. Just like the public reason liberals, they can accept that reasonable people disagree, and can offer various kinds of principles for compromising. Just like the public reason liberals, they can be more inclusive or more exclusionary. They can load up their principles or have less restricted versions of them. 

There is indeed nothing dumb about what the public reason liberal is trying to do in the abstract. What's mean about public reason liberals is that they incorrectly and unfairly think they're the only ones trying to do it. Everyone is trying to do it. And, just as public reason liberals try to get compromise by getting everyone to agree to their preferred set of values, that's what utilitarians and others do. It's nothing special. It's simply another parochial theory, and its theory of compromise and dispute resolution is simply another parochial theory like everyone else's. 

Indeed, I'm worried public reason liberalism is especially bad when it comes to this stuff. Imagine you and your spouse have very serious substantive complaints. Or imagine you and the warring enemy have serious and substantive complaints. What you'd want is a negotiator or therapist who addresses and resolves these complaints. You wouldn't someone who just shouts out big concepts like "compromise", "reasonable", "fair", "cooperative", "reciprocate!" and whatnot, and then tells you you're behaving badly if you don't then accept the therapist's or negotiators' preferred solution. (I'm borrowing the ideas in this last paragraph from someone else who might not want me to post their name here.)

Further, with the marriage example, what if there is actually a true answer to how to raise the kids? Or spend the money? For example, your spouse says he doesn't want to permit your gay son to date other boys. You think he's a homophobic bigot. What should you do? Well, your spouse is wrong and acting badly, so he should concede your side entirely. The compromise should be: you win and he loses.

Same with war: If you are not fighting a just war, stop fighting. It's that easy. As for uncertainty, that;'s easy too: You should not kill people unless you are very sure they have it coming, etc. If you think you might be justified, you almost certainly aren't. Pessimistic induction, after all.

Parochial Public Reason: What Public Reason Liberals Have in Common with Con Law Theorists and Biblical Interpreters

Public reason liberals' self-conception differs from how others view them. 

Public reason liberals view themselves as inclusive theorists try to construct some sort of great compromise. People disagree about the good and the just. In order to promote peace, stability, and cooperation on fair terms all people inclined to cooperation can accept, we should...[insert their theory here].

But, as I've been arguing for the past few days, to everyone else this simply comes across as yet another parochial theory, but without the arguments. Everyone acknowledges that we disagree and that we should work together anyway, and every theorist has their own view about how to resolve this problem. Further, every theorist can say that their view accommodates some views and not others. Liberalism is a big tent--but so are other theories. Further, it's not antecedently given that being a big tent is good. Perhaps we are directed by God to instantiate the City of God on the hill and tolerate nothing else. If that's the correct theory, then public reason liberalism is not merely false but straight up evil. 

Here's further evidence that it's just another parochial theory: The public reason liberals disagree with each other about what public reason entails. So far, no surprise--that's true of every big political theory. But notice the shape of their disagreement. People who were classical liberal or libertarian before they go into public reason liberalism always conclude...wait for it...that pretty much only classical liberal politics can pass public justification. People who were left liberal, such as Rawls, conclude...you might want to to sit down for this...that left-liberal politics is publicly justifiable and other stuff isn't. Socialist liberals conclude...you may notice a pattern here...that socialist liberal politics is publicly justifiable and nothing else is.

What people do is take the basic concepts of the theory--such as reasonableness, justification, publicity, rationality, cooperation, coercion, and do on--and custom-tailor them to ensure that the final theory comes out defending and requiring what they antecedently believed. Rawls's 1996 Political Liberalism ends up arguing that a barely modified version of his 1971 A Theory of Justice would be the overlapping consensus of all reasonable people. When, say, Gaus or Vallier do the public reason project, they conclude instead that it has a classical liberal tilt. 

The public reason project is a bit like American constitutional law. Most lawyers and legal theorists accept that the Constitution is authoritative, but they also believe their own ideology is correct. So, to avoid conflict, they reverse engineer a theory of constitutional interpretation and constitutional law which makes it so that the Constitution fortuitously happens to allow what they want it to allow and forbid what they want it it forbid. They can't always make it work, but 90% of the time, they can come up with an account of why it turns out the Constitution says what they themselves thought justice required before they studied con law.

Something similar happens in Biblical interpretation. Christians believe the Bible is authoritative, and they also have their own private views of the good and the just. So, they reverse engineer a theory of interpretation which fortuitously makes it come out that God wants what they themselves want. If you are inclined to hate gay people, you take Leviticus very seriously. If you are inclined not to do so, you argue that Christ released us from various ceremonial restrictions on behavior or that this passage of Leviticus has been mistranslated or altered over time.

****

When I think of people who take public justification seriously, I think not of Rawls or Gaus, but Peter Singer. Singer writes for both a popular and elite audience. He doesn't beg the question in favor of his own theory or start by assuming his theory is correct. He begins with widely shared premises pretty much everyone accepts and then attempts to show how they lead to surprising conclusions.

Public Reason Liberal's Spirit of Dispute Resolution?: Nah, Just More Parochialism

Public reason liberals: What should we do?

Everyone else: The right thing!

Public reason liberals: And what is that?

Utilitarianism: What maximizes net utility!

Libertarians: Respect people's rights.

Perfectionist liberals: A liberal order that facilitates flourishing and virtue.

Conservatives: Defer to the authority of tradition and accept the third best because we can't do better.

Marxists: Murder all the rich people and take their stuff for ourselves.

Communitarians: Ensure we are all in community with one another.

Fascists: What that last dude said but I mean like really, really in community with one another.

Christian and Islamic fundamentalists: Instantiate the City of God.

Public reason liberals: Whoa! Whoa! Hold up! You see the problem here, right?

Everyone else: Yes, the rest of you are wrong about what's right.

Public reason liberals: So what should we do about that?

Everyone else: We should do what's in fact right. Obviously, the fact that some people dispute what rights and wrong is isn't a good reason not to do what's right or to do what's wrong. Morality doesn't work like that. It's not voluntarist. 

Public reason liberals: But the problem is we all disagree.

Everyone else: Well, here are my arguments.

Public reason liberals: But we still disagree!

Everyone else: Ok, why don't you tell us your view. We know you're itching to do so.

Public reason liberals: Great, finally. Thanks. OK, so here's the problem. You're all offering first-order reasons for substantive theories of justice and whatnot. But what we need to do is find a way to work and live together without violence when we disagree. We can't have no norms at all--chaos! But we can't just ram our views down other's throats. At the very least, they'll fight back. But, further, isn't it part of respecting people to justify yourself to them?

Everyone else: Well, we did justify ourselves--we gave arguments. Here they are again, in case you missed them.

Utilitarians: What it means to respect people is to maximize utility! 

Libertarians: No, it's to respect their rights.

Christian and Islamic Fundamentalists: No, it's to treat them as children and servants of God. 

Public reason liberals: Never mind that. What I think we should do is instead ask what we could all agree to if we accepted that we can't convince others our views are correct, but we still want to live and work together. So, why don't we start by assuming that everyone is free and equal and that all coercion has to be justified according to the following sets of standards which everyone committed to a fair and reasonable society could be...

Utilitarians: Hey, wait, hold on! You're not solving the problem any more than I am. All you're doing is saying that when people disagree, we should accept your substantive theory of justice. You're saying we should assume a bunch of controversial stuff about people's status, about which reasons count and which don't, about coercion vs freedom, and so on. You sound like the deontological liberal, the libertarian, and the perfectionist liberal. The only difference is that they say their view is correct and you say your view is special kind of compromise given that we can't convince each other...but then you basically say we should compromise by assuming a bunch of stuff you like and not stuff you dislike.

Fascists: Yeah, why don't we just instead assume that we should do whatever is right, according to the true standard of ethics, whatever that is?

Deontological liberals: Yeah, what the fascists said. 

Communitarians: Seriously, public reason liberals, it's like you just said, "Everyone, since we disagree, I suggest that we compromise or resolve our disagreements by instead agreeing to my own personal substantive theory."

Public reason liberals: But it's not a first-order substantive theory! I'm not saying it's true!

Everyone else: We agree with you that your theory isn't true. 

Why Don't Public Reason Liberals Engage in Public Justification?

The difference between A) Marxists, libertarians, utilitarians, perfectionists, communitarians, authoritarians, subjectivist contractarians, hedonists, or intuitionist liberals, and B) public reason liberals is that the former, group A, care a lot about public justification while the latter, group B, rejects it.

How do we know?

Well, when you read work by group A, what you see is people who offer reasons for their views, in public, and try to convince others they are right. Group B, in contrast, provides self-serving reasons why they won't bother argue for what they like and won't bother argue against what they dislike.

So, pretty much everyone is engaged in public deliberation and public justification in philosophy...except the public justification theorists.

What Should We Do When People Disagree?

 Following up on my last post:

My last post asked whether PRL is superfluous and trivial, or instead question-begging. But it had us imagine that, say, utilitarians had kick ass argument for X. 

In reality, though, most of the time, the arguments we have for this policy or that aren't all that great. Should we have lockdowns? Should we force people to wear masks? Should we make people pay for public schools administered by the government? Should we force citizens to fight in WWII? 

In these cases, the evidence on either side is far from overwhelming, the people on either side producing the evidence are ideologically motivated and flawed, the people making arguments are often dishonest or self-interested, people in three of the cases are acting out of fear and on short notice, and so on. That's not to say all sides are equal, but to say that reasonable people could have serious doubts. So what should we do?

The public reason liberal proposes that in a situation like this, we can impose coercive policies only if we meet their internal standards, whatever those are. But, then again, so do the deontological libertarian, perfectionist liberal, communitarian, deontological Marxist, theocrat, fascist, and utilitarian. Each of them say that when we have reasonable public disputes about what to do, we may nevertheless do certain things and must forbear from doing others, where what determines this is...the internal standards of their particular theory. Public reason liberalism is just another parochial theory with its own parochial views about how to handle disagreement. It's nothing special.

Is this an impasse? No. Rather, it depends on what theory, if any, is actually correct. It depends on what justice actually requires. If the correct theory of justice is PRL, then we have to deal with reasonable disagreement they way they say, whatever that is. But if PRL is not the correct theory of justice, then their standards don't matter because they are false. They cannot point to the problem of reasonable disagreement as evidence of the truth of PRL; rather, how to deal with this problem and what the moral significance of the problem is depends on what the correct underlying theory is. 

Responding to Vallier's Defense of PRL

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?

**** 

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. 

****

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. 

Some Additions to the Philosophical Lexicon

Reasonable (adj.): Agreeing with whatever Rawls says for whatever reason. 

E.g., "There are lots of different conceptions of the good life and of justice, but all reasonable people would agree that what Rawls happened to endorse in 1972 is legitimate."

Unreasonable (adj.): Good at political philosophy. Capable of making arguments for conclusions. 

E.g., "Robert Nozick, Gil Harman, and Peter Singer are unreasonable because they are not Rawlsians, therefore we don't have to respond to their criticisms of Rawls."

Political Anti-Liberalism and the Overlapping Consensus on Twin Earth

Oh, no, my evil twin brother Jasper discovered I'm on a new blog. Damn it. Once again, mom is forcing me to share some blog space with him. The following is a guest post from Jasper. Please don't read it.

In Political Liberalism, Rawls argues that the exact theory he came up with in 1972 would be what an overlapping consensus of reasonable people would agree to. Reasonable people are defined by....well, ask 20 political liberals what makes someone reasonable and you'll get 40 answers. But in one way or another, reasonable people are committed to the idea of public reason itself--that all principles be in some way justifiable to the reasonable (damn recursion/reflexivity!) subject to those principles on grounds they can in some way endorse or recognize given their diverse epistemic and moral standpoints--and to the idea that politics must respect us as free and equal.

But over on Twin Earth, Twin John Rawls at Twin Harvard took a decidedly more Schmittean turn. (He ended up being a more consistent, less question-begging theorist as a result, if not closer to the truth.) On Twin Earth, Twin Rawls discussed how there might be an overlapping consensus of illiberal authoritarians. He called his book Political Illiberalism.

Liberals disagree about what exactly justice requires, what the good life is, and so on. But they agree that society should treat people as free and equal. 

Well, Twin Rawls points out that in the same way, illiberal authoritarians--such as tankies, Nazis, fascists, illiberal theocrats, and others--disagree about what exactly justice requires, what the good life is, and so on. But they also agree on lots of things. They agree that societies ought to be hierarchical. They agree that society takes precedence over the individual. They agree that what makes something legitimate is that it can be justified to, and be the subject of an overlapping consensus of, people committed to the idea that people are unfree and are unequal. On Twin Earth, for instance, when collectivist authoritarians, religious fundamentalists, and so on, disagree about many specific details of their politics, they often defer to reliable umpires to determine which kind of authoritarian, totalitarian, or intrusive politics they ought to have. 

On our Earth, John Tomasi at Brown published a book called Liberalism Beyond Justice. He describes people as falling into four categories from he standpoint of public reason theory. A-people are ethical and political liberals who value openness, individuality, and so on. Think Ayn Rand and John Stuart Mill. C-people are reasonable romantics and religious people who adhere to more conventional, traditional, and hierarchical ways of life, but who are nevertheless committed to the public reason project and so keep their religiosity out of politics. Think Kevin Vallier. B-people are the typical wishy washy people in between. Think Rawls himself. But then there are D-people, who reject the public reason project altogether in favor of imposing hierarchical, illiberal political policies, regardless of whether those positions can be justified on Rawlsian grounds, whatever that means. They are considered unreasonable and the system does not need to be justified to them. 

On Twin Earth, Twin John Tomasi at Twin Brown published a book called Illiberalism Beyond Justice, which also had a helpful alphabet soup characterization of people. Twin Tomasi's A-people are committed collectivist authoritarians. Think Stalin. His C-people are fairly individualist people who advocate as much liberalism for themselves as the theory allows, but who defer overall to the illiberal public reason project. Think Sartre. (Remember, Sartre was a tankie.) B-people are the wishy washy in-between people. D-people are political liberals who reject the overlapping consensus of illiberal public reason. They are considered unreasonable and the system does not need to be justified to them.

On earth, when someone who is not a public reason liberal--e.g., a regular old liberal or libertarian--criticizes Rawls, Rawlsians are inclined to dismiss the person as unreasonable. The same thing happens on Twi Earth. For instance, if you complained that Twin Rawls's theory treats people as unfree, you'd be dismissed as unreasonable and your criticism ignored. 

I, Jasper, having read both liberal and illiberal Rawls defend exactly the opposite theories on what are almost identical grounds, can't find a particular reason to reject liberal Rawls as having a better argument than illiberal Twin Rawls. The theories are structurally identical and generate the opposite result. I guess people will just pick and chose Rawls over Twin Rawls because they like the conclusions, not because the theories are any better. Rawls starts with liberal assumptions and gets liberal conclusions. Twin Rawls starts with illiberal assumption and generates illiberal conclusions through a mirror-image but structurally identical theory.

I got bad news for you, folks. Not only is there Twin Rawls, but Triplet Rawls, Quadruplet Rawls, and more. Turns out you can recast Rawls's public reason project any way you want, with any political philosophy you want being the subject of an overlapping consensus of "reasonable" people suitably and plausibly defined. Oh well. 

Which Original Position?

Rawls argues that the correct principles of justice are whatever people would choose in the original position (OP). In the original position, parties come together to choose principles of justice which will be used to select the basic institutions of a society they will inhabit. These agents are presumed to be self-interested. They want to pick principles which will improve their own welfare. But they are also imagined to be ignorant of their own particular identities. They don't know whether their relative status or income, their race, ethnicity, and so on. They don't even know the distribution of such identities. Thus, when they choose selfishly, they choose for everyone. And that's what makes the principles good--they're what you would choose for yourself if you don't know who you are. The original position is supposed to force the parties to pick principles (which in turn select institutions) that are good for all.

Except not really.

Some big questions are: Who counts from the standpoint of justice? To whom and from whom are duties of justice owed? Who is part of justice and who is outside justice?

Rawls OP doesn't answer these questions so much as it presupposes answers. When Rawls constructs the OP, he more or less imagines capable, working adults who will live forever in a single nation state. Accordingly, when the OP doesn't generate principles of justice for foreigners, children, animals, or, unborn fetuses, that's not because the theory shows that they are outside justice, or are special cases, or are governed by different principles of justice generated through different means. Rather, it's simply because Rawls designed the OP a particular way. It's arbitrary fiat rather than an insightful or illuminating argument.

If we rewrite the OP to state that the parties could turn out to be, say, unborn fetuses, it would generate very different conclusions. (It would probably end up endorsing a much more pro-life position.) If we rewrite it to say that the parties are choosing principles to select a world order rather than a national order, or that they could turn out to be foreigners and resident aliens, they'd select different principles. If we rewrite it so that they could be animals, we get different principles. After all, the mechanism by which the OP makes the parties pick principles that improve the interests of various groups is that the parties could turn out to be members of those groups. If you make the possible range of identities narrower, the OP selects narrower principles. Make it wider, and the OP selects wider principles.

There is thus not one OP, but many possible OPs. What a Rawlsian-type theory says depends in great part on which OP we think is morally privileged or the "right" OP. Who the parties could turn out to be changes which principles the parties pick and to whom the principles apply. 

Rawls's theory ends up being nationalist not because Rawls has an argument for nationalism, but because he assumes nationalism in the design of his theory. His theory ends up endorsing a pro-choice over a pro-life position (I guess; he more or less asserts this in some footnotes but, in typical Rawlsian style, doesn't argue for it) because of what he assumes, not because of what the theory shows.

Similar remarks apply to Rawls's ideas of public reason. If you start by saying that what is legitimate is whatever could form the overlapping consensus of reasonable people in a society, you then have to specify what you mean by reasonable and what counts as a society. Rawls of course famously fudges "reasonable" to exclude brilliant critics like Robert Nozick but to include mealy-mouthed morons like your MSNBC-parroting dad, but he also assumes rather than proves that a society = the adult, human members of a nation-state.

Public Justification for X- and Y-People

In a previous post, I wonder whether democratic realism shows that public reason is trying to solve an illusory problem. Kevin Vallier has a lengthy response to Achen and Bartels in his new book, but I think he's largely missing the point. The point isn't that the people lack justification for their beliefs; it's that most of them don't have the beliefs the public reason liberal thinks they do. They are ideologues without issues. People vote for who they are, not what they want. Most Americans are basically innocent of ideology, and even among those who claim to believe this or that, most are simply parroting their party's current platform without real commitment.

For the latter, consider an analogy. Suppose Jeff simply parrots whatever Steve says on TV. On Monday, Steve says he believes Christ is God. Jeff repeats that Christ is God when surveyed. On Tuesday, Steve says Jesus was not God, but just a nice man. Jeff, when surveyed, says the same thing. On Wednesday, Steve once again says that Christ is God. When surveyed, Jeff says the same. Suppose, on top of this, we find very strong evidence that Jeff receives various social benefits from saying whatever Steve says. Here, I'm inclined to say Jeff was not really a Christian on Monday or Wednesday, and I suspect Kevin would agree. The question of whether Jeff was justified is secondary. 

 

With that, here are some excerpts from a draft of the forthcoming paper. 

 

 

Kevin Vallier says: 

A core assumption of public reason liberalism, the political theory associated with the idea of public justification, is that people’s reasons for action and belief can differ substantially. Consequently, a reason must in some sense be relative to an agent’s beliefs, values and other commitments.

 

While public reason liberals dispute the exact details of this problem, we can state the problem as follows:

 

The public reason problem: For any potential political policy or moral rule P, how do we show individual reasonable citizens that they have sufficient reason to endorse P, in light of their current doxastic states? How do we show that P hooks on to what they already believe and endorse?

 

Public reason liberals dispute what counts as sufficient reason, which beliefs matter, and to what degree we may idealize actual citizens. They also dispute whether the arguments or reasons for P must be accessible or understandable to citizens, or whether the arguments must simply be grounded in premises the citizens already accept. But this is the basic framing.

The realist, however, introduces a new spin on the problem:

 

The realist version of the public reason problem: Most citizens lack sufficiently robust doxastic states upon which to “hook on” a justification for P. If citizens lack the right kind of underlying beliefs, how can we justify P to them?

 

 

Consider John Tomasi’s helpful “alphabet people” categorization of kinds of people among whom the public reason project is meant to facilitate compromise and consensus. Tomasi’s “A-people” value autonomy, creativity, and individuality; they are highly self-aware, reflective, deliberative, and ethicallyliberal. D-people (such as Nazis or theocratic citizens) are the other extreme; they are radically communitarian and authoritarian, reject political liberalism altogether, and wish to impose their comprehensive religious and/are secular views upon others through government coercion, regardless of dissent. D-people are considered “unreasonable” or “unqualified” in the public reason project, and so the liberal principle of legitimacy does not require that coercive principles be justified to them. Next to D-people are C-people. C-people may be “citizens of faith”  or “reasonable romantics”. They affirm comprehensive religious or traditionalist moral doctrines in which there are strong moral and status hierarchies, and may reject many ethically liberal ideas (e.g., by holding abortion is evil or that mothers should work at home). However, they are “reasonable” because they accept political liberalism and thus believe it is wrong to impose traditional moral rules or religious/communitarian ideas of personhood through politics. Finally, B-people are ideologically between the As and C. They have weaker commitments to their not quite liberal, not quite traditional views. They find elements of both ethical liberalism and ethical communitarianism/traditionalism plausible. Like the A- and C-people, they are also committed to the public reason project. Tomasi asserts that “the great sweep of citizens” in modern democracies are B-people.

 

The public reason project is designed to deal with A- through D-people. It has seemingly interminable intramural debates, of course: Who count as the D-people, the ones who get excluded from public justification? How and in what ways must we accommodate reasonable citizens of faith? Public reason liberals dispute the answers, but the theory is explicitly about such belief-filled people.

 

Realism complicates this picture dramatically. The realist contends that few people—maybe only about 10%--in modern democracies are A, B, C, or D-people, though many more people talk like they are. Instead, we must add at least two more categories of letter people:

 

X-people: Citizens who are largely non-ideological. They have few political opinions, and lack what Rawls would call comprehensive moral, religious, or political views. What few opinions they have are largely ephemeral and unstable. They may be attached to a particular party, but that merely reflects arbitrary historical connections between that party and their identity; they do not endorse their parties’ politics.

 

Y-people: Citizens who post-hoc rationalize and assert that they agree with their party politics, but whose ideological commitments are superficial. Like the X-people, these citizens have a sense of identity, and their identities are connected to particular political parties for arbitrary, historical reasons. Unlike X-people, Y-people later learn what positions their parties advocate, and will claim that they too advocate it. However, their apparent ideology and political beliefs are fleeting and shallow. When their party changes platforms, they will change “beliefs,” usually without any awareness that they have “changed their minds”. Like the X-people, they also lack normatively significant moral, religious, or political views, despite how loudly they seem to advocate such views. 

 

The main difference between the A, B, C, and D-people versus the X and Y-people is doxastic: A through D-people hold the kinds of beliefs which the public reason project regards as normatively significant. X and Y-people do not. They are, in Lilliana Mason’s (2018) apt description, “ideologues without issues”; they are strongly committed to their parties despite not advocating anything or sharing their platforms or values. The Y-people seem to hold political beliefs, but it turns out on further inspection that their expressed commitment to such beliefs is insincere and superficial. They express commitment to demonstrate membership in valuable social groups, not because they really believe what they say. Or, to paraphrase Robin Hanson (2018), for most people, politics is not about policy.

Y-people seem have political beliefs, but they hold their “beliefs” in a weird way. Their beliefs, if we can even call them that, do not reflect real commitments about the good or just, or about how the world works. Instead, expressing political “beliefs” is largely equivalent to wearing sports team colors; they are a form of conspicuous display intended to show membership in what are, for that voter, socially advantageous groups. For them, advocating a policy is like wearing the Patriots’ blue and silver or waiving the Steelers’ terrible towel.

Consider: Fans of the New England Patriots loudly proclaim that Tom Brady is the Greatest of All Time (GOAT), and loudly sneer at the Colts, Jets, Giants, or Bills. These conspicuous displays are part of Patriots fandom and demonstrate to others (and oneself) that one is indeed a fan. 

But now consider: While it seems like such fans are committed to certain beliefs and attitudes about the sport and their team, many of these commitments are superficial. For instance, if the Pats change their colors to green and purple, then (after some complaining), the fans will change their “favorite colors” too. If Brady quits and then signs with the Bills or Giants, many fans will immediately say Brady was always overrated, and will further claim they have always said that, forgetting that a month ago they said he was the GOAT. They are committed to the view that the Pats should win; most of their other proclamations and behaviors are just expressions of that view. [Note: I wrote this before Brady signed with TB, and in fact, I see just this behavior on the Pats fan pages.]

The realists say the same goes for most citizens in modern democracies. The identity “southern evangelical Christian” is (for largely arbitrary reasons) attached to the Republican Party; the identity “Jew” is (again for largely arbitrary reasons) attached to the Democratic Party. A proper subset of such citizens—the Y-people—become ideologically-expressive voters; they will claim post-hoc they share their party’s political beliefs upon learning what their party believes. However, their commitment is no deeper than Patriots fans’ commitments to blue, red, and silver; if the parties were to change policy platforms, most of their “ideological” voters would claim they agree with the changes, and some would claim they believed such views all along. Even apparent key issues, such as views for or against abortion, or for or against free trade, are largely expensive proclamations intended to demonstrate membership in the group

To illustrate, consider how many Republicans switched their “views,” seemingly without cognitive dissonance, on a wide range of economic subjects when Trump came to power. They went from pro-free trade to protectionist almost overnight, without awareness that they switched. 

On the realist view, when a typical Democrat or Republican expresses her “beliefs” about justice or politics, we should regard this not as evidence of reasonable pluralism about the good and right, but instead regard their behaviors as expressions of commitment to seeing their particular political team win, without any deeper commitment to what that team stands for. What seems like the expression of belief—and thus what seems like evidence of widespread doxastic disagreement and value pluralism—is instead the conspicuous display of party affiliation which generates external benefits for voters, by helping them form and maintain friendships, romantic attachments, and financial partnerships outside politics.