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• Title: Public Justifiability, Deliberation, And Civic Virtue (Critical Essay)
• Author : Social Theory and Practice
• Release Date : January 01, 2007
• Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 234 KB

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Public justifiability is often regarded as a core commitment of liberal theory, perhaps the core commitment. (1) In the face of deep and pervasive moral and political disagreement, it is commonly supposed that the exercise of coercive power is legitimate only if it can be justified on the basis of arguments that cannot reasonably be rejected by those subject to it. This idea does not by itself entail that coercion can be legitimate only if the law or policy that sanctions it is the outcome of the exchange of public reasons, for laws and policies might be justifiable on the basis of arguments that cannot reasonably be rejected even if they have not passed any actual test in which they are subject to public scrutiny, or indeed even if some as a matter of fact reject these laws and policies. But if the requirement of legitimacy places public justifiability at the heart of liberalism, it will be difficult for liberals to avoid a commitment to institutions that give a key role to the exchange of public reasons, even though they may give varying accounts of the type of institutions required, their scope, and the kind of decisions they should make. If those institutions are to function effectively, citizens will have to possess a range of virtues that not only enable them to deliberate with others, but also dispose them to restrict the reasons they offer to ones that others too might reasonably accept, and there may need to be a form of civic education that nurtures these virtues. These conclusions, reached from the idea of legitimacy, are reinforced by further arguments that purport to show that respect for persons, or for fellow citizens, requires the exchange of public reasons, and that a willingness to engage in such a practice is a condition of being reasonable. In order to assess the case for a practice of public reason, however, we need a clearer account of its scope and of the norms that are constitutive of it. I shall simply adopt Rawls's account of its scope, which maintains that the norms of public reason govern public debate over constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice, and in addition apply to voting decisions when these issues are at stake. (2) "Public debate" is a vague expression, however. Following Rawls again, I shall assume that it covers discussions that take place in the "public political forum," that is, the discourse of judges, political representatives, government officials, and candidates for public office, and, by extension, the discourse of citizens when they are debating what law and policy they think should be enacted. (3)

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