Here's something to look at: last session we considered problems relating to the possible (and likely) controversiality of the conceptions that determine the criteria and the scope of public justification.
Of course this is to a large extend about the epistemological role of toleration -- seen as something that might have to be observed at the level of identifying and treating considerations as possible justifiers, or (public) reasons. Now, James Bohman, an advocate of deliberative democracy, i.e., the sort of issue we'll be looking at in class soon, writes:
"The debate about religion and the public sphere has largely focused on the wrong problem: the crucial issue in a reflexive and deliberative regime of toleration is not whether religious reasons are public or not, bu how it is that standards of public reason and toleration themselves can properly be challenged and widened with the expanding moral and political community." That's from his paper "Reflexive toleration in a deliberative democracy", in Catriona McKinnon, Dario Castiglione (eds), The culture of toleration in diverse societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 113.
This seems to be exactly on the lines of our diagnosis. That is, even if building normative constraints, such as (potentially exclusive) threshold tests of reasonableness of sorts, into the framework of public justification is unavoidable, given that public justification aspires to be a genuine form of justification (recall here Macedo's "dual aims"), we might want those constraints to be such that they can be revised by or from within public reasoning and justification. For Bohman, this asks us to adopt a requirement of "reflexivity" -- roughly, public reasoning becomes reflexive when is subjects its own framework conceptions to the scrutiny of public reasoning. And perhaps some such requirement of "reflexivity" is what we need to reconcile public justification's justificatory aspirations with what appears to be an inevitable element of dogmatism stemming from the fact that we cannot even start to form an idea of public justification as justification without supposing that public justification is subject to some important normative constraints, such as (potentially exclusive) threshold tests of reasonableness of sorts. Or so it might seem.
Bohman's notion of public reasoning/deliberation appears to be suggested from the point of view of an attempt to overcome exactly this kind of problem (if it is a problem). Thus, if you read the paper, here are two questions that might be worth bearing in mind:
(i) Is that what Bohman outlines still something that could plausibly be claimed to be justificatory?
(ii) How, if at all, could public deliberation a la Bohman allow for reasoned, non-arbitrary closure?
(You might think of the problems of Mill's account of freedom of speech in On Liberty here: the reasons we advance in advocating the opening and continuing of debate are not necessarily consistent with the reasons we would need to appeal to in order to defend the possibility of a legitimate closure of debate. But, it would at least intuitively seem, only if it can be legitimate to close allegedly justificatory debate on whether to accept or reject a prescription can it be legitimate to act on it.)