DEMOCRACY

Public reason & Democracy

Public reason & Democracy

Public Reason

Public reason is a moral ideal requiring that political decisions be reasonably justifiable or acceptable from each individual's viewpoint. Given the plurality of moral, ethical, and religious doctrines that characterize liberal democratic societies, public reason represents an attempt to develop a shared framework for our political deliberations that each person can endorse. Some philosophers argue that political regimes or laws that do not meet the standards of public reason are illegitimate or unjust for that reason. Leading contemporary theorists of public reason include John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and Gerald F. Gaus.

The constituency of public reason identifies the relevant set of people to whom we seek to justify a given decision. In one view, the constituency of public reason includes all those people who are governed or otherwise affected by a decision. But this inclusive conception poses difficulties—what about irrational, immoral, or otherwise unreasonable people? Some theorists respond to this worry by specifying an idealized constituency of people who meet certain epistemic and/or normative standards. A key debate is thus whether the demand for justification applies to people as we find them, or rather to people qua idealized rational and reasonable agents.

The scope of public reason delineates the set of issues to which the ideal applies. Some argue that all political power is ultimately coercive, and because it is wrong to coerce others on grounds they cannot reasonably accept, all our political decisions must be informed by public reason. Others claim public reason has a more limited scope and regulates only constitutional essentials or those decisions that affect the basic political framework of society. Democratic decisions that take place within that framework are then alleged to be free from the constraints of public reason. A related question is whether public reason should regulate the behavior of all citizens in the political arena, or whether it applies only to public officials, such as judges and legislators.

In considering content, theorists largely agree that public reason does not support decisions that can be justified only by appealing to some individual's or group's self-interest, or by appealing to controversial ethical, religious, or metaphysical beliefs. However, theorists disagree about why public reason has this content. Some claim public reason is a procedural ideal that regulates political discourse among citizens, whereas others insist public reason provides a substantive standard that ought to guide our political behavior. In the first view, public reason provides an ideal list of conditions that real political procedures would have to meet in order to ensure decisions are acceptable to each participant (e.g., conditions for inclusion, participation, and decision making). Those who favor the second view, however, argue the content of public reason is, at least in part, settled in advance of any actual discussion. The theorist determines which reasons or principles are publicly justifiable; real political deliberation is then regulated by this substantive standard.

How does it fits in Democracy

Before discussing how the concept of public reason fits into the model of democracy, we need ...