On Actualist and Fundamental Public Justification in Political Liberalism
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On Actualist and Fundamental Public Justification in Political Liberalism Thomas M. Besch 1,2 Received: 18 September 2019 / Accepted: 10 March 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Public justification in political liberalism is often conceptualized in light of Rawls’s view of its role in a hypothetical well-ordered society as an ideal or idealizing form of justification that applies a putatively reasonable conception of political justice to political matters. But Rawls implicates a different idea of public justification in his doctrine of general reflective equilibrium. The paper engages this second, more fundamental idea. Public justification in this second sense is actualist and fundamental (rather than ideal or idealizing and conception-applying). It is actualist in that it fully enfranchises actual reasonable citizens. It is fundamental in that political liberalism qualifies conceptions of political justice as reasonable to begin with only if they can be accepted coherently by actual reasonable citizens. Together, these features invite the long-standing concern that actualist political liberalism is objectionably exclusionary. I argue that the exclusion objection, while plausible, is more problematic in own right than it seems if actualist and fundamental public justification hypotheticalizes and discursive respect is compatible with substantive discursive inequality. This leaves proponents and critics of political liberalism with deeper questions about the nature of permissible discursive inequality in public justification. Keywords John Rawls . Charles Larmore . Political liberalism . Public justification .
Reflective equilibrium . Discursive respect . Discursive equality
* Thomas M. Besch [email protected]; [email protected]; https://whu–cn.academia.edu
1
School of Philosophy, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072 Hubei, China
2
Department of Philosophy, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
Philosophia
1 Introduction Recent discussions of public justification in political liberalism often adopt a perspective that John Rawls foregrounds in his account of a well-ordered society at the second stage of his theory, Justice as Fairness (or JF):1 they discuss public justification with a focus on the stability of an idealized social order, while conceptualizing public justification in ideal terms and as applying a putatively reasonable conception of justice to political matters (I elaborate on this below). But a different idea of public justification is in play in Rawls’s doctrine of general reflective equilibrium. This discussion explores this second, arguably more fundamental idea of public justification. I focus exclusively on first-generation, Rawls-type political liberalism (as advanced by Rawls and political liberals like Stephen Macedo or Charles Larmore),2 interpret its idea of public justification in light of the doctrine of general reflective equilibrium, and address limits of the idea so understood. On the reading suggested here, public justification, in one role,
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