Abstract
Compared to standard liberal approaches to public reason and justification, the asymmetric convergence model of public justification allows for the public justification of laws and policies based on a convergence of quite different and even publicly inaccessible reasons. The model is asymmetrical in the sense of identifying a broader range of reasons that may function as decisive defeaters of proposed laws and policies. This paper raises several critical questions about the asymmetric convergence model and its central but ambiguous presumption against coercion. By drawing on the theory of structural coercion, a main conclusion of the paper is that the asymmetric convergence model ultimately encounters the very incompleteness problems that its proponents often associate with more familiar consensus models of public justification. The paper also develops an alternative, Rawlsian-inspired account of public justification that includes elements of both convergence and consensus but not asymmetry. The Rawlsian model enables us to understand how democratic decisions may possess a degree of procedural, but still morally significant, liberal legitimacy under conditions of pluralism even when citizens fail to agree fully about either the premises of or conclusions to their political arguments.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for helping to clarify this formulation.
In the case of largely secular societies, the model adopted by Gaus and Vallier recommends a “minimalist proviso” according to which “a citizen should not endorse a law which she or he believes has only a religious rationale” (Gaus and Vallier 2009: 61).
I continue to use the term “public justification” to refer to the justification of laws, policies, procedures, constitutional provisions, and other institutional arrangements. Rawls sometimes assigns a different and more specific meaning to the term when he refers to the “public justification” of a political conception of justice that is facilitated by a reasonable overlapping consensus (2005: 387).
I am grateful to Quong for identifying problems with an earlier formulation of this principle.
Of course, (PJ4) may seem difficult to operationalize, since it will be hard to know in any given case whether citizens have or would have satisfied requirements of public reason. But any such standard is bound to be imprecise in similar ways. It is likewise difficult to verify whether citizens have sufficient and intelligible reasons or whether institutions have actually issued publicly justified outcomes in accordance with (PJ1) and asymmetric convergence.
Wide acceptance is similar to what Sebastiano Maffetone calls “legitimation” (2010).
Vallier introduces a second example of reasoning based on religious testimony. I leave aside this example, which seems to concern judgments about the general reliability of testifiers rather than the accessibility of the justifications a citizen might inherit from them.
For helpful discussion, see Audi 2011: 81–4.
Both arguments in support of asymmetric convergence might be bolstered with the following example. Consider a religious group whose members engage in potentially self-harming conduct for religious reasons (e.g., ritualistic drug use). Others are unlikely to understand or perhaps even tolerate such conduct if they fail to enter into the group’s doctrinal framework and system of meaning. The worry is that other citizens would be entitled to coerce the group’s members for the members’ own supposed good, e.g., by banning the conduct, and might do so without even considering the most relevant reasons for the conduct. Yet this worry is allayed by the demand that all reasonable citizens recognize and prioritize the value of religious liberty as part of a reasonable political conception, even when they do not fully appreciate how that liberty is being exercised. The norm of religious liberty is the source of public reasons that would protect groups against interference and enable them to pursue accommodations such as exemptions from generally applicable laws. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this example and objection, even if this note does not fully address it.
My (Boettcher 2007) examines in more detail the issues of religious freedom, integrity, and respect for persons that motivate this argument and the subsequent one examined in the text.
Indeed this concern may seem to suggest that the asymmetric convergence model tilts not in the direction of classical liberalism but rather libertarianism, or even anarchism.
This insight is incorporated in the formulation of my PJ4 above, with its reference to reasonably acceptable and widely accepted procedures.
This is my own gloss on the meaning of structural coercion in Reiman 2012.
Indeed I do not ultimately endorse Reiman’s theory, though that’s not important here. For a similar account of the coerciveness of private property that does not employ the concept of structural coercion see Cohen 2011.
This paragraph relies in part on the survey of the coercion literature in Anderson 2011.
I thank Zuolo for this point.
Some Rawlsians reject a narrow interpretation of the scope of public reason and maintain instead that all decisions concerning coercive law and policy should be subject to requirements of public reason (Quong 2011: 274-298). While I presuppose the narrow interpretation here, the main arguments of the paper do not depend on it. The subject of public justification is the basic institutional structure and public reason can apply therein either narrowly or broadly.
References
Anderson S (2010) The enforcement approach to coercion. J Ethics Soc Philos 5:1–31
Anderson S (2011) Coercion. In: Zalta E (ed) Stanford Ency Philos., http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/coercion. Accessed 9 Jan 2013
Audi R (2011) Democratic authority and the separation of church and state. Oxford University Press, New York
Bird C (2014) Coercion and Public Justification. Polit Philos Econ., doi:10.1177/1470594X13496073
Boettcher J (2007) Respect, recognition, and public reason. Soc Theor Pract 33:223–249
Boettcher J (2009) Habermas, religion and the ethics of citizenship. Philos Soc Crit 35:215–238
Cohen GA (2011) Freedom and money. In: Otsuka M (ed) On the currency of egalitarian justice and other essays. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp 166–192
De Marneffe P (1994) Rawls’s idea of public reason. Pac Philos Q 75:232–250
Eberle C (2002) Religious conviction in liberal politics. Cambridge University Press, New York
Eberle C (2011) Consensus, convergence and religiously justified coercion. Publ Aff Q 25:281–303
Gaus G (1996) Justificatory liberalism. Oxford University Press, New York
Gaus G (1997) Reason, justification, and consensus: Why democracy can’t have it all. In: Bohman J, Rehg W (eds) Deliberative democracy. MIT Press, Cambridge
Gaus G (2010a) Coercion, ownership and the redistributive state: justificatory liberalism’s classical tilt. Soc Philos Pol 27:233–275
Gaus G (2010b) On two criticisms of justificatory liberalism: a response to Wall and Lister. Polit Philos Econ 9:177–212
Gaus G (2011) The order of public reason. Cambridge University Press, New York
Gaus G, Vallier K (2009) The roles of religious conviction in a publicly justified polity. Philos Soc Crit 35:51–76
Hayek F (2006) Freedom and coercion. In: Miller D (ed) The liberty reader. Paradigm, Boulder, pp 80–99
Lister A (2010) Public justification and the limits of state action. Polit Philos Econ 9:151–175
Lister A (2011) Public justification of what? Coercion vs. decision as competing frames for the basic principle of justificatory liberalism. Publ Aff Q 25:349–367
Maffetone S (2010) Rawls: An introduction. Polity, Malden
Marx K (1994) [1844] On the Jewish question. In: Simon L (ed) Karl Marx selected writings. Hackett, Indianapolis, pp 1–26
Perry M (1997) Religion in politics. Oxford University Press, New York
Quong J (2011) Liberalism without perfection. Oxford University Press, New York
Quong J (2014) On the idea of public reason. In: Mandle J, Reidy D (eds) A companion to Rawls. Wiley, Polity, pp 265–280
Rawls J (2001) Justice as fairness: A restatement. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Rawls J (2005) Political liberalism. Columbia University Press, New York
Reidy D (2000) Rawls’s wide view of public reason: not wide enough. Res Publica 6:49–72
Reiman J (2012) As free and as just as possible: A theory of marxian liberalism. Wiley, Malden
Schwartzman M (2004) The completeness of public reason. Polit Philos Econ 3:191–220
Schwartzman M (2011) The sincerity of public reason. J Polit Philos 19:375–398
Vallier K (2011a) Against public reason’s accessibility requirement. J Moral Philos 8:366–389
Vallier K (2011b) Convergence and consensus in public reason. Publ Aff Q 25:261–279
Vallier K, D’Agostino F (2013) Public justification. In: Zalta E (ed) Stanford Ency Philos., http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/justification-public. Accessed 19 June 2013
Wertheimer A (2002) Liberty, coercion, and the limits of the state. In: Simon R (ed) The Blackwell guide to social and political philosophy. Wiley, Malden, pp 38–59
Williams A (2000) The alleged incompleteness of public reason. Res Publica 6:199–211
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
The author is grateful for extensive comments from the journal’s anonymous reviewers as well as to Jonathan Quong and Federico Zuolo for written comments on an earlier draft. Helpful feedback was also provided by an audience at the 30th International Social Philosophy Conference (2013).
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Boettcher, J.W. Against the Asymmetric Convergence Model of Public Justification. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 18, 191–208 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9519-7
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9519-7