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.
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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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Special Section: Symposium on Longtermism; Guest Editor: Stefan Riedener
- Philosophy for the Long Run: Introduction to the Symposium on Longtermism
- Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism as a Metaethical Route to Virtue-Ethical Longtermism
- Capitalism and the Very Long Term
- Future People as Future Victims: An Anti-Natalist Justification of Longtermism
- Regular Articles
- Public Reason, Coercion, and Overlapping Consensus
- Act and Rule Consequentialism: A Synthesis
- The Doctrine of Sufficiency as a Contractualist Principle
- Rawls, Humanity and the Concept of Expression
- A Marketplace for Honest Ideas
- Writing the Other: The Ethics of Out-Group Representation in Art
- Carbon Pricing and Intergenerational Fairness
- Cooperation, Democracy, and Coercion: On the Grounds and Scope of Freedom of Movement
- Attempts at a Marxist Critique of Cancellation
- Defensive Kidnapping
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Special Section: Symposium on Longtermism; Guest Editor: Stefan Riedener
- Philosophy for the Long Run: Introduction to the Symposium on Longtermism
- Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism as a Metaethical Route to Virtue-Ethical Longtermism
- Capitalism and the Very Long Term
- Future People as Future Victims: An Anti-Natalist Justification of Longtermism
- Regular Articles
- Public Reason, Coercion, and Overlapping Consensus
- Act and Rule Consequentialism: A Synthesis
- The Doctrine of Sufficiency as a Contractualist Principle
- Rawls, Humanity and the Concept of Expression
- A Marketplace for Honest Ideas
- Writing the Other: The Ethics of Out-Group Representation in Art
- Carbon Pricing and Intergenerational Fairness
- Cooperation, Democracy, and Coercion: On the Grounds and Scope of Freedom of Movement
- Attempts at a Marxist Critique of Cancellation
- Defensive Kidnapping