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Public Reason, Coercion, and Overlapping Consensus

  • Ezequiel Spector ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: February 8, 2024

Abstract

The idea of public reason involves a standard of legitimacy that requires that laws and institutions be acceptable to all reasonable people, regardless of their conceptions of the good. Many philosophers have argued that public reason should be understood as an answer to the question of how to justify state coercion. However, some authors have criticized this traditional account because it overlooks noncoercive state actions that seem appropriate topics of public reason. More recently, some philosophers have defended the traditional account against that objection. In this paper, I argue that these approaches cannot effectively deal with that objection and offer a different version of the traditional account that can do so. This version rests on the ideas of overlapping consensus and stability. According to this version, the point of public reason is preserving an overlapping consensus on a coercive system of laws and institutions and achieving a stable society.


Corresponding author: Ezequiel Spector, Facultad de Artes Liberales, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, 2640 Diagonal Las Torres Ave, Santiago, Peñalolén, Chile, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

I thank Blain Neufeld, Cristián Rettig, Javier Echeñique, José Antonio Errázuriz, Horacio Spector, Guillermo Eguiguren, Andrés Peñaloza, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

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Received: 2023-08-06
Accepted: 2024-01-13
Published Online: 2024-02-08
Published in Print: 2025-04-28

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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