In my essay, I wish to consider Gauthier’s account of Public Reason and its justification; its Hobbesian underpinnings; his notion of the “internalization” by the reasonable, of the reasons of the Sovereign; and his use of “agency” to describe the role and function of the Sovereign. This I shall attempt particularly by comparison to (but not only to) Onora O’Neill’s account of Public Reason and its justification; its Kantian underpinnings from “public practical reasoning”; and the strengths of its basis in “maxims of communication”.
The O’Neillian/Kantian justificatory principle of “followability” and its relationship with “toleration” (as the grounding of reason) will be compared to the justificatory principles (if any) of Gauthier’s “limited Sovereign” model. (Considering also Ridge’s account of the Hobbesian [and Kantian?!] regress dilemma).
Both accounts seem to struggle with issues of the “emergence versus exercise” of Public Reason. Comparative discussion of (a) the importance of emergence to, and (b) the nature of proper exercise in, seems required in both accounts. In particular, explanations about the emergence of Public Reason in both accounts, and its impact on the requirement (or not) for reflexivity, will be of interest.
Finally I wish to spend some time on the suggestion that there may be a great gulf between the positions (and it will be suggested the personalities) in the area of “motivation to reason” (and its psychological implications), an area which clearly seems essential to any of the accounts of Public Reason, I have thus far considered. It is my intention to point out what appear to be very different underlying motivational psychologies in the two accounts I make central. From this standpoint I will consider the implications, for each of the accounts, of Aristotle’s “casual man” (from Postema’s account of the need for “sincerity”). This should also lead me to a few brief comments on issues pertaining to Liberal “presumptions” which identify the “reasonable”.
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2 comments:
I think this is an interesting and viable project.
Here are two things that come to mind re the distinction that you label "emergence versus exercise", given your project.
First, O'Neill-type public reasoning does not as such require an institutional framework -- though, of course, a collective exercise of followable thought might need, or at least be facilitated by, some such framework. Pursuing the goal of followable thought and identifying when thought is followable seems to be something agents are supposed to be capable of doing by themselves, without institutional support. After all, according to O'Neill, the attempt to think followably *is* the attempt to think in reasoned or reasonable ways.
Next, and closely linked to the first point, for O'Neill, arbitration -- especially in some institutionalized form -- does not enter the stage at the level of an account of the crietria of public reasoning, i.e., reasoning that is fully followable within it own scope, partly because she construes of publicness in terms that allow thought to both be fully public and not consensual. (Or so it would seems to me.)
That is, arbitration pursues the goal of deciding which of several, competing stretches of thought to accept or implement (e.g., to ensure peace, security, cooperation, and so forth). But arbitration does not, or not necessarily, pursue the goal of determining when thought may count as reasoned or reasonable -- in fact, arbitration might be constrained to selecting amongst stretches of thought that are identified as reasoned or reasonable on other grounds. Or at least this is what an philosophically innocent an unbiased understanding of the notion of arbitration would suggest.
This in effect relates to something which O'Neill does not properly elaborate on. If some stretch of thought, S, fully meets O'Neill's requirement of followability, then S is fully reasoned or reasonable. But S can have this merit while being the subject of persistent reasonable disagreement. And this is so since, given O'Neill's account of followability (see Toward Justice and Virtue chp. 2, esp. pp. 56ff.), thought is followable if it is such that it can coherently be accepted by all within the relevant domain. However, so long as both S and non-S are internally consistent, there is a way in which each of them could be claimed to be such that they could coherently be accepted by the relevant others. For, prior to further argument, it seems that "being capable of being coherently accepted" (by one person or many) simply means too little to rule out either S or non-S (given that both are internally consistent). Followability, then, is consistent with persistent actual disagreement.
This would suggest that the issue of arbitration does not arise since followability is directed at a thin modal goal of possible (coherent) acceptance, rather than actual or likely acceptance. To ensure that everyone actually accepts either S or non-S, there might be a need for an arbitrator. Especially if both S and non-S are construed of by their proponents as reasoned, and pass the threshold of followability. Yet if we are after followability, and not actual agreement, there is no such job left: after all, again, both S and non-S can be followable (even though, of course, they could not both be accepted at the same time within the same point of view).
Just to add, this touches on an issue Richard M. Hare has some time ago nicely clarified. Hare, in trying to follow Kantian ideas, distinguishes between rationality and objectivity (see the last chapter in his Moral Thinking (Oxford:OUP, 1981). Objectivity, on this view, consists (roughly) in rationality (or reaosnableness) *plus* convergence. E.g., S would be objective not only if it is followable (as O'Neill would put it) but also if S is endorsed by all reasonable people.
Here an Hobbesian/Gauthier-type arbitrator might indeed have a job to play to ensure something that goes beyond peace or coordination, namely, not the possibility of (publicly) reasoned thought, but of objectivity -- e.g., by selecting S out of the pool of all reasonable, of suitably followable, views.
Thanks. I hadn't considered the idea that both approaches may work concurrently or co-dependently.
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