In From Rationality to Equality, James Sterba argues that the non-moral, and non-controversial, principle of logic, the principle that good arguments do not beg-the-question, provides a rationally conclusive response to egoism. He calls this “the principle of non-question-beggingness” and it is supposed to justify a conception of “Morality as Compromise.” Sterba’s basic idea is that principles of morality provide a non-question-begging compromise between self-interested reasons and other-regarding reasons. I will focus, first, on Sterba’s rejection of the alternative Kantian rationalist justification (...) of morality, and second, I discuss the logical principle of non-question-beggingness and I argue that Sterba is wrong to assume that there is a formal, logical requirement that a rational egoist must provide a non-question-begging defense of egoism. I argue that, like the Kantian, Sterba needs a more substantial conception of practical reason to derive his conclusion. My third focus is the problem of reasonable pluralism and public reason . The Rawlsian principle of public reason is analogous to Sterba’s principle of non-question-beggingness. Sterba recognizes that public policies should respect competing perspectives and that a public conception of justice must be justifiable to all reasonable people. The problem is that that reasonable people disagree about fundamental moral questions. Rawls calls this the fact of reasonable pluralism. I argue that an intercultural conception of justice is necessary to provide a response to reasonable pluralism and a shared basis for public reason. (shrink)

Deliberative theories of democracy place the legitimacy of the use of coercive political power in democratic procedures and outcomes produced through a process of fair, equal, and reasoned deliberation. Under debate is whether mutual respect requires the use of ‘public reasons’ rather than ‘the whole truth’ in democratic deliberations. Many deliberative democrats have rejected the public reason requirement as too exclusionary and unfriendly to reasonable pluralism, opting instead for an epistemic theory of democracy that places legitimacy in the epistemic (...) function of democratic deliberation. For instrumental, outcome-based epistemic theories, legitimacy resides in the ability of democratic deliberation to determine ‘correct’, ‘likely true’, or ‘best’ solutions to social problems, while utilizing a procedure-independent standard, such as a common good, to gauge the epistemic success of deliberation. However, the procedure-independent standard may fall prey to the same objection from reasonable pluralism as public reason – it is a requirement that can be reasonably rejected. In this essay, I briefly outline several outcome-based epistemic approaches, highlighting the disagreement over the common good as a procedure-independent standard for correctness. I argue that due to fact of reasonable pluralism, the most promising path forward for outcome epistemic democracy is to abandon the procedure-independent standard entirely. I propose that the pragmatist epistemic democracy offers the best balance of including and utilizing diverse viewpoints with the truth-tracking, problem solving ability of group deliberation towards a common good. (shrink)

The potential conflicts between morality and self-interest lie at the heart of ethics. These conflicts arise because both moral and prudential considerations apply to our choices. A widespread assumption in philosophical ethics is that by weighing moral and prudential reasons against each other, we can compare their relative weights and determine what we ought to do in the face of such conflicts. While this assumption might seem innocuous and fruitful, a closer examination suggests that it lacks both justification and the (...) necessary content that would allow it to do the normative work it promises. In this book, Mathea Slåttholm Sagdahl grapples with these cases of conflict, but argues that there may be no simple answer to the question of what we ought to do all things considered. Sagdahl argues against the assumption of comparability and defends an alternative pluralist theory of normativity where morality and prudence form two separate and incommensurable normative standpoints, much like in Henry Sidgwick's "Dualism of Practical Reason." This type of view has tended to be quickly dismissed by its opponents, but Sagdahl argues that the theory is in fact a well-motivated theory of normativity and that the typical objections that tend to target it are much weaker than they are usually thought to be. (shrink)

This paper maintains that objectivism about practical reasons should be combined with pluralism both about the nature of practical reasons and about action explanations. We argue for an ‘expanding circle of practical reasons’, starting out from an open-minded monist objectivism. On this view, practical reasons are not limited to actual facts, but consist in states of affairs, possible facts that may or may not obtain. Going beyond such ‘that-ish’ reasons, we argue that goals are also bona fide practical reasons. This (...) makes for a genuine pluralism about practical reasons. Furthermore, the facts or states of affairs that function as practical reasons are not exclusively natural or descriptive, but include normative facts. That normative facts can be reasons justifies a pluralism about reason explanations, one which allows for what we call enkratic explanations in addition to teleological ones. (shrink)

What role does and should religion play in the legal sphere of a modern liberal democracy? Does religion threaten to create divisions that would undermine the stability of the constitutional order? Or is religious disagreement itself a force that works to create consensus on some of the core commitments of constitutionalism--liberty of conscience, toleration, limited government, and the rule of law? This essay explores these questions from the perspectives of contemporary political philosophy and constitutional theory. The thesis of the essay (...) is that pluralism--the diversity of religious and secular conceptions of the good--can and should work as a force for constitutional consensus and that such a consensus is best realized through commitment to an ideal of public legal reason instantiated by the practice of legal formalism. The case for these claims is made in six parts. After the introduction, Part II, The Fact of Pluralism in the Context of Contemporary Religious Division, explores the idea of religious division in light of an important notion in political philosophy--the idea that John Rawls calls the fact of reasonable pluralism. Part III, Public Legal Reason, argues that the fact of pluralism has important normative consequences for the foundations of normative legal theory and argues for an ideal of public legal reason. Part IV, Legal Formalism, contends that this idea is best realized in constitutional practice through a formalist approach to constitutional interpretation--one that deliberately eschews direct reliance on religious and secular comprehensive conceptions of the good. Part V, Feasibility and Positive Theory, discusses the question whether this ideal of public legal reason and corresponding conception of constitutional formalism are realistic, given the constraints imposed by democratic politics under contemporary conditions. Finally, Part VI, Religious Division Revisited: From Pluralism to Formalism, brings the discussion to a close. (shrink)

Over the last decade, Robert Talisse has developed a devastating argument against reviving John Dewey’s democratic ideal. In his book, A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy, and in other essays, Talisse has argued that Deweyan democracy fails to accommodate Rawls’ conception of “the fact of reasonable pluralism” because it is committed to a perfectionist conception of the good. In response, this article offers a Rawlsian rebuttal to Talisse by drawing on Rawls’ own characterisation of perfectionism to show that Dewey’s conception (...) of the good is not perfectionist on Rawls’ account and thus can reasonably accommodate the fact of reasonable pluralism. is article thus begins by exposing and explaining Talisse’s argument, before articulating Shane Ralston’s rejection of the Berlinian and Rawlsian fillters presupposed by Talisse’s argument. Then, it develops its central argument by showing that, even if we accept the Rawlsian filter, Deweyan democracy does not fail to accommodate the fact of reasonable pluralism, because it only relies on a thin (not a full) theory of the good, before considering some foreseeable Talissean objections. Ultimately, the article concludes by showing that these objections fail because Deweyan democracy does not rely on a ‘full’ theory of the good. (shrink)

Normative reasons for action are facts or considerations that contribute to the justification of an action. Sometimes, normative reasons for action conflict: one reason may favor doing something, while another may favor not doing it. These conflicts can be so radical that it seems difficult, if not impossible, to judge which reason should ultimately guide one’s actions. According to a theory of practical rationality known as reasons pluralism, there are some radical cases of conflict among normative reasons for action in (...) which there can be no fact of the matter about what one ought to do. This is because normative reasons fall into a plurality of types, and normative reasons of different types are incommensurable with one another. However, reasons pluralism is compatible with a principle that would enable us to judge when a normative reason of one type overrides a normative reason of another type. I will argue that this “Override Principle” is a facet of practical wisdom—an intellectual virtue. Practical wisdom, as Aristotle construed it, involves the ability to order one’s ends into a coherent system that allows for the attainment of a good life. The Override Principle is sure to be one criterion by which those endowed with practical wisdom would order their ends. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that solutions to normative challenges associated with autonomous driving, such as real-world trolley cases or distributions of risk in mundane driving situations, face the problem of reasonable pluralism: Reasonable pluralism refers to the fact that there exists a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive moral doctrines within liberal democracies. The corresponding problem is that a politically acceptable solution cannot refer to only one of these comprehensive doctrines. Yet a politically adequate solution to (...) the normative challenges of autonomous driving need not come at the expense of an ethical solution, if it is based on moral beliefs that are (1) shared in an overlapping consensus and (2) systematized through public reason. Therefore, we argue that a Rawlsian justificatory framework is able to adequately address the normative challenges of autonomous driving and elaborate on how such a framework might be employed for this purpose. (shrink)

Should scientific facts and methods have an epistemically privileged status in public reason? In Rawls’s public reason account he asserts what we will label the Scientific Standard Stricture: citizens engaged in public reason must be guided by non-controversial scientific methods, and public reason must be in line with non-controversial scientific conclusions. The Scientific Standard Stricture is meant to fulfill important tasks such as enabling the determinateness and publicity of the public reason framework. However, Rawls leaves us without elucidation with regard (...) to when science is and is not ‘non-controversial’ and more importantly, we are left without a justification for a stricture which excludes certain controversial beliefs and methods of inquiry from the realm of political justification. In this article, we offer what we deem to be the most plausible interpretation of Rawls’s Scientific Standards Stricture. We then use Rawls’s general theoretical framework to examine various potential justifications for privileging these ‘non-controversial’ scientific methods and conclusions. We conclude that no viable justification is available to Rawls. (shrink)

In this paper epistemic pluralism concerning knowledge is taken to be the claim that very different facts may constitute knowledge. The paper argues for pluralism by arguing that very different facts can constitute the knowledge‐making links between beliefs and facts. If pluralism is right, we need not anxiously seek a unified account of the links between beliefs and facts that partly constitute knowledge in different cases of knowledge. The paper argues that no good reasons have been put forward in favour (...) of believing in a unified maker of knowledge. It then appeals to the role of knowledge in order to argue that we have positive reason to embrace pluralism. (shrink)

In this chapter, I consider the claim for pluralism commonly advanced in political philosophy as a claim concerning the standards, methods, and norms for forming belief and judgment about certain kinds of facts, rather than concerning the nature of facts themselves. After distinguishing between descriptive and normative epistemic pluralism, I contend that, in this context, pluralism needs to rest on grounds that are stronger than fallibilism yet weaker than relativism in order to enjoy a distinct standing. The idea of (...) class='Hi'>reasonable pluralism seems to devise a variety of normative pluralism designed to meet this demand. I argue, however, that this is an unstable position and suggest that an epistemic view of deliberation may be better suited to making sense of political justification. The latter view, though, is bound to dispense with normative pluralism. (shrink)

Some philosophers have argued that evidence of underlying mechanisms does not provide evidence for the effectiveness of a medical intervention. One such argument appeals to the unreliability of mechanistic reasoning. However, mechanistic reasoning is not the only way that evidence of mechanisms might provide evidence of effectiveness. A more reliable type of reasoning may be distinguished by appealing to recent work on evidential pluralism in the epistemology of medicine. A case study from virology provides an example of this so‐called reinforced (...) reasoning in medicine. It is argued that in this case study, the available evidence of underlying mechanisms did in fact play a role in providing evidence in favour of a medical intervention. This paper therefore adds a novel and recent case study to the literature in support of evidential pluralism in medicine. (shrink)

Let’s start with compositional pluralism. Elsewhere I’ve defended compositional pluralism, which we can provisionally understand as the doctrine that there is more than one basic parthood relation. (You might wonder what I mean by “basic”. We’ll discuss this in a bit.) On the metaphysics I currently favor, there are regions of spacetime and material objects, each of which enjoy bear a distinct parthood relation to members of their own kind. Perhaps there are other kinds of objects that enjoy a kind (...) of parthood relation other than the ones enjoyed by material objects and regions of spacetime. Perhaps, for example, there are facts; I’ve been wavering over whether to embrace these entities for years now. However, I’m reasonably confident that if there are facts than the kind of parthood relation that facts bear to that which composes them is not the kind of parthood relation enjoyed by material objects or regions of spacetime. More on why I am reasonably confident later. (shrink)

According to Paul Boghossian (2006, 73) a core tenet of epistemic relativism is what he calls epistemic pluralism, according to which (i) ‘there are many fundamentally different, genuinely alternative epistemic systems’, but (ii) ‘no facts by virtue of which one of these systems is more correct than any of the others’. Embracing the former claim is more or less uncontroversial–viz., a descriptive fact about epistemic diversity. The latter claim by contrast is very controversial. Interestingly, the Wittgenstenian ‘hinge’ epistemologist, in virtue (...) of maintaining that rational evaluation is essentially local, will (arguably, at least) be committed to the more controversial leg of the epistemic pluralist thesis, simply in virtue of countenancing the descriptive leg. This paper does three central things. First, it is shown that this ‘relativistic’ reading of Wittgenstein’s epistemology is plausible only if the locality of rational evaluation (in conjunction with a reasonable appreciation of epistemic diversity) commits the Wittgenstenian to a further epistemic incommensurability thesis. Next, Duncan Pritchard’s (e.g., 2009; 2015) novel attempt to save the hinge epistemologist from a commitment to epistemic incommensurability is canvassed and critiqued. Finally, it is suggested how, regardless of whether Pritchard’s strategy is successful, there might be another very different way—drawing from recent work by John MacFarlane (2014)—for the hinge epistemologist to embrace epistemic pluralism while steering clear of epistemic relativism, understood in a very specific way. (shrink)

At its core, this study understands its central term, poiesis as the process of forming new styles of sense-making and multiple modes of thought. Such plural styles deserve notice so far as they give readers alternate ways of organizing experience and interpersonal relations: they provide new worlds, in fact. The epithet "New-world" poiesis, then, is in one respect redundant, since new worlds are revealed through the "poetic" process itself. But the title also refers to current and past historical encounters between (...) an "old-world" Anglo-American mindset and its "others"---encounters between worlds that over time have qualified, tested, strengthened, and fractured each other. ;Poets who generate and interweave new worlds provide a context for maintaining a central debate within discussions of complexity in contemporary U.S. poetics. Assuming that lyric poetry can reasonably be expected to represent and to some extent transform experiences and perceptions of reality, the question arises as to what kind of experiences and worlds should be represented and/or transformed. On one hand, critics find that the role of the contemporary lyric is expressive, that is, most suited to approaching the internal conscious states or the social conditions of a person or group. On the other hand, as a fragmentary, associative use of language, lyric poetry shows the workings of language itself, a system of meaning concerned mainly with its own, ongoing re-organization. ;This debate between poetic language as providing either coherence or change---a debate that currently enjoys critical esteem and claims an increasing amount of attention from critics, poets, and anthologists---assumes that as complexity increases in poetic experimentation, the capacity for the poem to represent social relations diminishes. Poems that examine the surface texture of language, its critics claim, dissolve most often into a "play of words." Gathered into rival camps that it seems could hardly disagree more radically, the terms of the argument appear in the form of a debate between social identity and complex meaning systems. ;Detailing more specific versions of this debate, my project investigates four intellectual environments into which plural-world poetries have introduced complex lyric treatments of experience in order to distort dominant, established views: subjecting historical; cultural; linguistic; and urban discussions to a "deep pluralism." What I've found is that in the richest instances, long lyric poems that provide plural worlds allow for both resonance and wonder, both coherent sources of personal expression or social affiliation and an ability to appreciate multiple styles and to move across identities and ways of naming the real. Each aspect to the other is usually said to be incommensurate, and yet, at the right level of abstraction, or plurality, meaningful social distinctions can be made with minimal exclusionary consequences. (shrink)

Public reason is central to John Rawls’s political liberalism, as a mechanism for citizens to discuss about matters of common interest. Although free and equal, reasonable and rational, citizens of a democratic society disagree on their understanding of truth and right, giving rise to the fact of reasonable pluralism. Thus, Rawls works out an idea of public reason which allows citizens to argue about political matters and yet remaining divided in their comprehensive doctrines. On the other hand, African (...) culture has developed the practice of palaver as way of dealing with social and political questions of the community. Usually held under a tree, scholars believe that the palaver is the African version of deliberative democracy. In this article, I elaborate the two ideas and compare them in order to see whether they are completely opposite or whether they can enrich each other. Thus, the first section focuses on Rawls’s idea of public reason, the second explores the palaver practice and the last section compares them. (shrink)

It is as if [W. J. T.] Mitchell, who in his stance as a literary theorist is willing to admit of a plurality of equally legitimate critical modes, were unwilling to extend this pluralism to the consideration of history itself. By this I do not mean that he would be unwilling to view the history of criticism as a cacophony or polyphony of contending critical positions, as a never=ending circle of critical viewpoints, with no one of them being able finally (...) to declare itself the winner for all time, but rather that he must feel that this is the only legitimate perspective on that history. Such a perspective on history has a name, and it is historicism—the perspective associated with Ranke and Goethe in Friedrich Meinecke’s great book on this subject, the perspective which, in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, is identified with the fate of literary realism in the West. Although the name given to this perspective by Meinecke suggests that it is the historical perspective, contemporary historical theory and practice deny it that claim. In point of fact, if we look at contemporary historical theory and practice, we must admit that there are as many perspectives on history as there are modes of critical practice in literary studies. And this for a very good reason: the referent of the term “history” is as indeterminable, is as much a matter of principled contestation, as the term “literature” itself. So that, if one wished to “correct” certain critical positions by reminding their proponents of the necessity of a proper “sense of history,” it would be just as legitimate to correct the corrector by reminding him that the history of historiography displays the same kind of confusion over the “sense of history” that the history of criticism displays over the “sense of literature.” When Mitchell characterizes the current schism in criticism as another enactment of the quarrel of ancients and moderns, he is surely right; but he fails to note that this reenactment takes place within an atmosphere made more murky by the fact that there is no generally agreed upon “sense of history” to which one can appeal in order to characterize the differences between the two camps. It is not as if the ancients and the moderns agree on some body of fact from which they draw different implications regarding the attitude that one ought to assume vis-à-vis modern as against ancient literature. For what is at issue is not the interpretation of the facts but the nature of historical factuality itself. Hayden White is Presidential Professor of Historical Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Historical Interpretation” , “The Narrativization of Real Events” , and “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”. (shrink)

It may seem a bit perverse to argue that pluralism is a kind of dogmatism, since pluralists invariably define themselves as antidogmatists. Indeed, the world would seem to be so well supplied with overt dogmatists—religious fanatics, militant revolutionaries, political and domestic tyrants—that it will probably seem unfair to suggest that the proponents of liberal, tolerant, civilized open-mindedness are guilty of a covert dogmatism. My only excuse for engaging in this exercise is that it may help to shake up some rather (...) firmly fixed ideas about dogmatism held by those who advocate some version of pluralism. Dogmatism, I want to argue, has had a very had press, some of it deserved, some of it based in misunderstandings and ignorance. Much of that bad press stems, I will suggest, from the dominance of pluralism as an intellectual ideology since the Enlightenment. If “dogmatism” is a synonym for irrationality, infelixibility, and authoritarianism, the fault lies as much with pluralism as it does with any actual dogmatism. I’d like to begin, therefore, with a definition of dogmatism that comes, not from its pluralist foes, but from a historian of religion who treats it as a fairly neutral term, describing a complex and ancient feature of social institutions. This definition comes from E. Royston Pike’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Religions:DOGMA . A religious doctrine that is to be received on authority—whether of a Divine revelation, a Church Council, Holy Scripture, or a great and honoured religious teacher—and not, at least in the first instance, because it may be proved true in the light of reason. Almost always there is associated with dogma the element of Faith. The term comes from the Greek word for “to seem,” and it meant originally that which seems true to anyone, i.e. has been approved or decided beyond cavil. In the New Testament it is applied to decisions of the Christian church in Jerusalem, enactments of the Jewish law, and imperial decrees, all of which were things to be accepted without argument. A little later it had come to mean simple statements of Christian belief and practice; and it was not until the 4th century, when the heretics were showing how far from simple the basic Christian beliefs really were, that it acquired the meaning of a theological interpretation of a religious fact. Then came the division of the Church into a Western and an Eastern branch, and never again was it possible to frame a dogma that might be universally held. The 39 Articles of the Church of England, the principles deduced from Calvin’s “Institutes” and John Wesley’s “Sermons,” and the items that compose the Mormon creed may all be classed as dogmas.1 W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is professor of English and a member of the Committee on Art and Design at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. (shrink)

Contemporary society involves a number of different persons, groups, and ways of life that are deeply divided and very often opposed on fundamental matters of deep concern. Today, many contemporary philosophers regard this 'fact of diversity' as a problem that needs to be addressed when assessing the principles employed to organize society. In this paper, I discuss the fact of diversity, as it is understood by the notion of reasonable pluralism, and explain why it is thought by some to (...) challenge the stability of a society's political morality. I examine the leading attempt to offer an account of the stability of a political morality and I argue that John Rawls's attempt to account for the stability of Justice as Fairness fails for reasons applicable to all political moralities because the very notion of a stable political morality is implausible. Diversity, as reasonable pluralism understands it, is not a problem that can be solved either by identifying a stable political morality or by modifying a political morality in some way that will make it more stable. Instead, the fact of diversity indicates only that disagreements on all aspects of society's organization, including its organizing principles and matters of value, is a permanent feature of social life that cannot be ignored, wished away, or solved. (shrink)

This paper argues that the diversity of conflicting comprehensive doctrines in liberal pluralist societies raises a problem of estrangement between citizens and the basic structure of society that Rawls' version of political liberalism does not successfully solve. 'Political estrangement' occurs when someone refuses to accept a political outcome that favors a comprehensive doctrine she rejects, based on what she imagines, correctly or incorrectly, to be true of her fellow citizens' comprehensive doctrines and their effect on political outcomes. Rawls argues that (...) the political conception of justice and the use of public reason ensure the incompatibility of our comprehensive doctrines will not undermine our willingness to to accept political decisions contrary to our own values. However, public reason does not guarantee this result. Imagination can allow us to see that the influence of some reasonable comprehensive doctrines can lead to oppressive political outcomes and public reason restricts us from addressing this fact. Yet, widening public reason to account for this problem is likely to increase the conditions that cause estrangement. The paper concludes that the political conception of justice and public reason may sometimes fail to adequately justify political outcomes in the sense Rawls hopes. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that there is an important structural similarity between the Liberal Pluralism of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice and Political Islam. This structural similarity, so I argue, showcases an important problem concerning what I call higher-order disagreement – a problem that plagues Rawls’ early version of Liberal Pluralism, a Liberalist understanding of Political Islam, as well as Rawls’ “later” political conception of Liberal Pluralism. I end by suggesting how Medieval Islamic Philosophy may have given us the (...) intellectual resources to solve this issue and towards articulating a “perfectionist” conception of Liberalism that is true to what the later Rawls calls “the fact of reasonable pluralism.” In short, then, it is from Islamic Philosophy where we can find the resources for fixing some of the conceptual problems with pluralism in the Rawlsian tradition. (shrink)

Political liberalism views a public policy as justified when reasonable citizens subject to it have sufficient reasons to endorse it. But this endorsement condition does not specify how reasonable citizens in democracies are to exercise their equal say in deciding which policies to support prior to enactment. Citizens may regard many policy options as reasonable but only one as truly just. The dominant view among political liberals, which I call _agnosticism_, takes no stand on how citizens ought (...) to rank these reasonable alternatives to determine which to support. Agnostics see all criteria for comparing reasonable policies as on a par, whether they be theories of justice or coin flips. I show how Quong’s (2011) analysis of reasonableness leads to agnosticism. I then develop the pluralist alternative, which holds that citizens should support the reasonable policy they regard as most just. What I call _pluralism_ sees multiple conceptions of justice as correct, or “most reasonable.” I show that pluralism offers a compelling alternative to agnosticism in that it can _both_ make sense of an individual citizen’s duty to support what they regard as just policy _and_ respect the fact that citizens reasonably disagree about what the most just policy is. (shrink)

The paper is an opinionated tour of the literature on the reasons for which we hold beliefs and other doxastic attitudes, which I call ‘operative epistemic reasons’. After drawing some distinctions in §1, I begin in §2 by discussing the ontology of operative epistemic reasons, assessing arguments for and against the view that they are mental states. I recommend a pluralist non-mentalist view that takes seriously the variety of operative epistemic reasons ascriptions and allows these reasons to be both propositions (...) and truth-making facts. In §3, I turn to consider what it takes for a consideration to be an operative epistemic reason, examining three conditions – the representational, treating, and explanatory conditions – that have been proposed. I offer a novel view about the explanatory condition. In §4, I discuss the special case of inferential operative reasons and examine attempts to understand them in terms of rule-following, sketching a competence-based spinoff of dispositionalism. Finally, in §5, I consider whether there are non-inferential operative reasons, observing that one needn't countenance them to be a foundationalist but then developing a view about what they are and how they do and don't differ from inferential reasons. (shrink)

The fact of reasonable pluralism in liberal democracies threatens the stability of such societies. John Rawls proposed a solution to this problem: The different comprehensive moral doctrines endorsed by the citizens overlap on a shared political conception of justice, e.g. his justice as fairness. Optimally, accepting the political conception is for each citizen individually justified by the method of wide reflective equilibrium. If this holds, society is in full reflective equilibrium. Rawls does not in detail investigate the conditions under (...) which a full reflective equilibrium is possible or likely. This paper outlines a new strategy for addressing this open question by using the formal model of reflective equilibrium recently developed by Beisbart et al. First, it is argued that a bounded rationality perspective is appropriate which requires certain changes in the model. Second, the paper rephrases the open question about Rawlsian full reflective equilibrium in terms of the model. The question is narrowed down by focusing on the inferential connections between comprehensive doctrines and political conception. Rawls himself makes a demanding assumption about which connections are necessary for a full reflective equilibrium. Third, the paper presents a simulation study design that is focused on simplicity. The results are discussed, they fit with Rawls’s assumption. However, because of the strong idealisations, they provide a useful benchmark rather than a final answer. The paper presents suggestions for more elaborate study designs. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of what value pluralism tells us about the pursuit of moral coherence as a method of moral reasoning. I focus on the status of the norm of ‘systematicity,’ or the demand that our principles be as few and as simple as possible. I argue that, given certain descriptive facts about the pluralistic ways we value, epistemic ways of supporting a systematicity norm do not succeed. Because it is sometimes suggested that coherence functions in moral reasoning (...) as it does in scientific reasoning, my argument considers analogies and disanalogies between moral reasoning and scientific reasoning. (shrink)

This paper concerns the relation between two metaethical theses: moral naturalism and moral skepticism. It is important that we distinguish both from a couple of methodological principles with which they might be confused. Let us give the label “Cartesian skepticism” to the method of subjecting to doubt everything for which it is possible to do so—usually by introducing alternative hypotheses that are consistent with all available evidence (e.g., brains in vats). Let us give the label “global naturalism” to the principle (...) that requires of any item which we admit into our ontology that it “fits” (in some manner or cluster of manners to be specified) with our naturalistic scientific worldview. One might be both a Cartesian skeptic and a global naturalist, if the latter principle is something that has survived the former test procedure. Alternatively, one might have adopted global naturalism for some other reason, while having little patience for the Cartesian method of doubt. Moral naturalism is the metaethical view that moral entities (e.g., properties like goodness and evil) fit within the scientific image of the world. The moral naturalist will probably be a global naturalist, but need not be: It is consistent with allowing non-natural entities into one’s ontology that one happens to think that moral properties are of the natural variety. Moral skepticism denies that moral entities fit within our scientific worldview. One way of denying moral naturalism is to be a moral error theorist: to hold that our moral discourse attempts to make reference to moral properties, but these properties do not exist.1 Another way of denying moral naturalism is to be a noncognitivist: to hold that our moral discourse was never really in the business of referring to moral facts or properties in the first place, and ipso facto such facts or properties are not naturalistic. In this paper, the label “moral skepticism” denotes the disjunction of these two theses. Neither the error theorist nor the noncognitivist must be committed to global naturalism, but usually will be; indeed, this commitment will often be a motivating factor of their metaethical views.. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

There is an intuitive difference in how we think about pluralism and attitudinal diversity in epistemological contexts versus political contexts. In an epistemological context, it seems problematically arbitrary to hold a particular belief on some issue, while also thinking it perfectly reasonable to hold a totally different belief on the same issue given the same evidence. By contrast, though, it doesn’t seem problematically arbitrary to have a particular set of political commitments, while at the same time thinking it perfectly (...) reasonable for someone in a similar position have a totally different set of political commitments. This chapter examines three explanatory theses that might be used to make sense of this difference: (1) that practical commitments are desire dependent in a way that beliefs are not; (2) that there are reasons to be resolute in practical commitments, but not in beliefs; and (3) that compromise in the face of practical political disagreement doesn’t mitigate controversy, whereas compromise in the face of disagreement about mere beliefs does mitigate controversy. (shrink)

In modern democratic societies, the plurality of differing and conflicting moral doctrines stands alongside a commitment to resolve political disputes through the use of moral reasoning. Given the fact of moral pluralism, how can there be moral resolutions to political disputes? What type of moral reasoning is appropriate in the public sphere? These questions are explored through a close and critical analysis of the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Rawls. In this book it is argued that the anti-Enlightenment work of (...) Alasdair MacIntyre, along with post-modernists, fails on epistemological, ethical, and political grounds, while in contrast, Rawls's 'core conception of reasonableness,' which is a type of political reasoning carried out 'in the manner of' the Enlightenment, is better placed to successfully respond to the moral disputes of contemporary politics. The practical application of these ideas is also explored in discussions of civic education and global distributive justice. (shrink)

This paper addresses the problem of disputed cultural practices within liberal, deliberative democracies, arguing against the currently dominant view, advocated by Susan Okin among others, that such problems represent a fundamental tension between two liberal values: gender equality and cultural autonomy. Such an approach, I argue, requires the state to render normative judgements about conceptions of the good life, something which is both arbitrary and unfair in societies characterised by reasonable pluralism. Disputed practices, I claim, are defined by the (...) existence of reasonable disagreement over their legitimacy, which means they need to be resolved in a way that abstains from morally evaluating the religious or cultural doctrines of the group in question. The paper therefore articulates a cost-based approach to such problems. The cost-based approach focuses our conceptual attention on the sorts of publicly identifiable costs that any state decision will have on the various parties to a dispute. By restricting itself to public reasons, this method thereby avoids arbitrarily privileging certain conceptions of the good at the expense of others when determining the boundaries of reasonable pluralism. (shrink)

In recent writings, both John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas address how to ensure that all reasonable citizens have the capacity to live a good life when there exist in modern society a wide variety of competing conceptions thereof. Yet, according to James Bohman, both thinkers in fact fail to resolve this “dilemma of the good.” He offers a deliberative conception of democracy intended to make up for their shortcomings. I argue, however, that Bohman’s conception covertly relies upon moderately perfectionist (...) values that cause him to fall prey to what Bert van den Brink calls the “tragic predicament” of liberalism: he cannot articulate howa resolution to the dilemma of the good can (seem to) be achieved without defending ideals that let some doctrines of the good life appear more worthy of state promotion than others. But far from undermining Bohman’s conception, explicit acknowledgement of his moderate perfectionism can, ironically, serve to strengthen it. (shrink)

This paper aims to draw attention to the importance of John Rawls’ effort to integrate pluralism in the core of the liberal conception of justice. Rawls’ attempt to construct a political concept of justice compatible with the plurality of the doctrines on «good» is presented in contrast to the communitarians’ mere plea for respect of this plurality.

The popularity of conspiracy theories poses a clear challenge for contemporary liberal democracies. Conspiracy theories undermine rational debate, spread dangerous falsehoods and threaten social cohesion. However, any possible public policy response, which would try to contain their spread, needs to respect the liberal commitment to protect pluralism and free speech. A successful justification of such a policy must therefore: 1) clearly identify the problematic class of conspiracy theories; and 2) clarify the grounds on which the state is justified in acting (...) against them. This article argues that the prevailing epistemic approaches to conspiracy theorizing cannot fulfil these criteria. Defining conspiracy theories by their flaws in reasoning, questionable coherence or factual mistakes can neither sharply distinguish problematic conspiracy theories from other, non-problematic worldviews nor justify state action. Thus, we propose to understand conspiracy theories through their ethical unreasonableness. We hold that containment of conspiracy theories is justifiable insofar as they undermine the liberal-democratic ideals of mutual respect, freedom and equality. We then show that such ‘ethical’ criteria for conspiracy theories can be sufficiently robust and clear-cut so that they can serve as a useful guide for public policy. (shrink)

Normative judgments are typically subject to emotional reasons that cannot be justified by reference to facts alone. As a result, practical disputes sometimes go unsettled in ways that support James Lenman's view of moral inquiry as politics. An important consequence is that reasonableness is often preferable to truth as a criterion of good practical judgment. Although the role of emotions suggests metaethical expressivism as preferable to realism for analysing practical reasoning, reasonableness transforms expressivism from a form of noncognitivism into a (...) theory that recognizes cognitively rich forms of approval and disapproval. Defensible normative intuitions have good justifying reasons even when these reasons permit faultless differences of political opinion and ethical practice. Despite implying deep normative pluralism, however, a cognitivist form of expressivism explains how deliberative agents can construct and maintain reasonable moral communities. (shrink)

Robert Talisse charges as doomed the Berlinian effort to infer liberal politics from value pluralism, based on the observation that it unavoidably vio- lates Hume’s law and that the two in fact clash in their basic logic. In arriving at this diagnosis, however, Talisse relies on several problematic assumptions about practical reasoning as well as about value pluralism and liberalism. As a result, he fails to appreciate the practical nature of practical reasoning and also fails to see the negative aspects (...) of value pluralism and of liberalism. Once these misconceptions get straightened out there is an increased opportunity for the Berlinian inference to succeed. (shrink)

Reasonable disagreement is one of the most critical issues in contemporary political philosophy, especially within liberal-democratic constitutionalism. In emphasising the role of disagreement in the relationship between discourse and politics, many scholars such as Jeremy Waldron and Richard Bellamy – against the background of the Rawlsian idea of “reasonable pluralism” – defend the thesis of moral disagreement as the core of political deliberation. By refusing the idea of neutrality, these authors maintain that political discourse cannot be established by (...) simply removing our moral disagree- ment on political values. This essay engages the issue of “discourse and politics” by focusing on some relevant topics: the deliberative conception of democracy; the Rawlsian idea of public reason as a forum for deliberation and discourse; the fact of disagreement and its inuence on the deliberative process. In order to investigate such issues, the paper follows three ways. First, it aims at examining John Rawls’ idea of public reason, by presenting it as a tool to resolve reasonable disagreement in the context of constitutional essentials. The second section deals with reasonable disagreement from a liberal point of view, by trying to focus on some critical remarks which Bellamy raises against Rawlsian political lib- eralism. The third section briefly analyses Waldron’s arguments in defence of reasonable disagreement, as a critique of the deliberative model of democracy. From this perspective, Waldron presents deliberative democracy’s failure in considering political dissent and moral disagreement as two problematic aspects of democracy. (shrink)

My intention is to cast light on the characteristics of epistemic or fundamental research (in contrast to application-oriented research). I contrast a Baconian notion of objectivity, expressing a correspondence of the views of scientists to the facts, with a pluralist notion, involving a critical debate between conflicting approaches. These conflicts include substantive hypotheses or theories but extend to values as well. I claim that a plurality of epistemic values serves to accomplish a non-Baconian form of objectivity that is apt to (...) preserve most of the intuitions tied to the objectivity of science. For instance, pluralism is the only way to cope with the challenge of preference bias. Furthermore, the plurality of epistemic values cannot be substantially reduced by exploring the empirical success of scientific theories distinguished in light of particular such values. However, in addition to pluralism at the level of theories and value-commitments alike, scientific research is also characterized by a joint striving for consensus which I trace back to a shared epistemic attitude. This attitude manifests itself, e.g., in the willingness of scientists to subject their claims to empirical scrutiny and to respect rational argument. This shared epistemic attitude is embodied in rules adopted by the scientific community concerning general principles of dealing with knowledge claims. My contention is that pluralism and consensus formation can be brought into harmony by placing them at different levels of consideration: at the level of scientific reasoning and at the level of social conventions regarding how to deal with claims put forward within the scientific community. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the currently most popular argument for alethic pluralism, maintaining that the so-called scope problem provides no compelling reason for abandoning the traditional view that truth is one and the same (substantive) property across the various regions of thought or discourse in which it is ascribed or denied to the things we think or say. I disarm the argument by showing that the scope problem does not arise for a number of non-deflationary, monistic views of truth (...) that meet certain semantic and metaphysical constraints, for one can accept any of these views and provide a plausible account of the fact that mental and linguistic tokenings belonging to different regions of discourse involve radically different ways of engaging with reality? from detecting pre-existing facts to constituting them. (shrink)

In this article, Honneth’s Freedom’s Right is discussed with the intent to assess its potential for offering a view of justice, grounded in social freedom, more adequate than the theories of justic...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 115-121 [Access article in PDF] Instrumentality, Complexity, and Reason: A Christian Approach to Religions Terry C. Muck Asbury Theological Seminary I want to call into question The Paradigm, the threefold classification of Christian approaches to other religions as Exclusivism, Inclusivism, and Pluralism. I call this classification The Paradigm, with a capital T and a capital P, because it is the way we have categorized Christian (...) theological approaches to the other religions ever since 1982, when Alan Race proposed this "broad typological framework within which most of the current Christian theologies of religions can be placed," in his book Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions (Orbis Books). 1Race's was not the first attempt at such a paradigm. He was preceded by others, most notably Owen Thomas, who classified Christian responses to other religions under the headings of rationalism, romanticism, relativism, exclusivism, dialectic, reconception, tolerance, dialogue, catholicism, and presence. 2 But Thomas's categories have not stuck like Race's, perhaps because of the larger number and perhaps because they seem a mixture of apples and oranges, that is, a conglomeration of logical positions, emotive states, and simple demographics. Although this hodgepodge may be more true to the reality of the complex ways Christians relate to people of other faiths, Race's paradigm, simple and straightforward, has won out in the descriptive derby.I think it is time to question whether Race's paradigm should continue to be the primary way we classify the many ways Christian theologians and other Christians relate to the world's other religious traditions. I will describe why I think The Paradigm is losing its usefulness, make a proposal for a new way of looking at the other religions, and list both the losses/dangers and benefits of thinking in a new way. The Problem with the Paradigm The first sign that The Paradigm is showing its age is that very few people seem to really fit in any one of the three categories. I suspect that few of us here would be willing to say unambiguously, "I am an exclusivist," or "I am an inclusivist," or "I am [End Page 115] a pluralist." 3 And even if we were willing to identify with one or another of the options, then most likely we would in the same breath quickly say something like, "But let me tell you what I mean when I say I am an exclusivist (or inclusivist or pluralist)." That is, we quickly define the words in qualifying ways that address the objections that have been raised in reference to each of the positions:Exclusivists, for example, struggle to counter the charges of being inhumane, 4 or of making God seem inhumane, 5 or of being narrow, or of being misinformed, 6 or of being unscholarly. 7Inclusivists, for their part, struggle to counter the charges of being Christian exclusivists in disguise, 8 or of being offensive to non-Christians, 9 or of being pluralists in disguise, 10 or of holding a philosophically unstable position.Pluralists, in turn, make sure we know they are not relativists, 11 that they are not necessarily universalists, 12 that being a pluralist does not mean they are a-religious or that they consider themselves above the fray of common religious commitment. 13I don't think that this problem has just to do with the fact that the paradigm is what Max Weber called an ideal-type paradigm, where we set up ideal types as a way of clearly delineating logically possible positions vis-à-vis a presenting issue as a heuristic device. 14 Were that the case, it seems to me that we could still embrace The Paradigm as a way of talking about interreligious interchange and explicitly/implicitly acknowledge to one another that we recognize the ambiguity of the categories when it comes to applying them to complex individual adherents of complex religious traditions. 15I think dissatisfaction with The Paradigm goes beyond frustration with it as an ideal-type typology. The Paradigm has come to stand for... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religious Identity and Openness in a Pluralistic WorldRita M. GrossIn our final sessions after twenty years of working together, we have been asked to reflect in some way on identity and openness in a pluralistic world. Specifically, the question is, "How do I understand my own identity as a religious Buddhist or Christian in light of the fact that I am open to the validity of the beliefs held (...) by the other tradition?"Frankly, this puzzle seems like a no-brainer to me and always has. Religions are language systems, and no language is universal and absolute. End of problem. In one fell swoop, as we concede the relativity of all our language games, we also recognize that more than one language could be "valid," whatever that might mean. There is no reason to assume that all people speak my language and it would be illogical to claim that people who don't speak my language are deficient. The worth and utility of my language is in no way diminished because it is not the only language in the world. Language is a tool through which we communicate, and any language could be a useful tool, so long as we don't endow it with universal relevance, more freight than it can bear.There may or may not be a formless absolute that grounds all finite existence. All religions assert that there is, whether as a being or as an experience. But beyond that assertion nothing can be determined because all such assertions must be expressed in language or some other limited expression—an expression in form. There is no other option. Much as we might long to transcend expression in form and leap into mind-to-mind transmission, in a public medium that is not possible. Many of us may have intuited such experiences of mind-to-mind transmission, but when we open our mouths to speak, we can only do so in the realm of form. And so we are stuck with our myriad expressions of a formless, transcendent absolute and cannot even determine for sure if we are talking about the same thing when we try to express the inexpressible.Therefore, we are compelled to concede the limits of language. This is the solution to the problem of the coexistence of a strong individual religious identity with openness to the relevance of other religious languages. Other religions, as well as my [End Page 15] own, are nothing more than highly relative language systems. There is no logical or spiritual way for them to be anything more. It seems to me that copping to the limitations of language, to the inability of language ever to capture truth completely, is completely essential in the pluralistic world we now inhabit. It is hard to imagine how people could believe that the deity speaks Arabic, not Hebrew, or Hebrew, not Arabic, and biblical Hebrew (rather than any other version of Hebrew) at that! It is hard to imagine how people could believe that they have the actual words of Jesus in the red print in their new testaments, even though those words were originally written in a language he never spoke and were translated into an archaic English that we no longer speak and barely understand. Nothing but egotistical pride can drive such self-aggrandizement, such identification of my viewpoint, my verbal attempts to express my experience, with the eternal and ultimate Way Things Are.In light of the historical and cross-cultural information that is now more than abundantly available, the only rational and humane conclusion to be drawn is that all religious institutions and creedal systems are human constructions dependent at least in part, if not wholly dependent, on the particular circumstances of those who construct and utter them. Therefore, they are of limited rather than universal relevance. Their cultural specificity is too obvious for any other conclusion to be feasible. Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and English are not universal languages, and only extreme hubris could claim the Formless Absolute speaks my language, not yours. Thus, even if our religions owe their genesis to some transcendent, nonhistorical source, they can be codified and captured only in a relative... (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between Raz's theories of practical reason and political morality. Raz believes the former underpins the latter, when in fact it undermines it. This is because three core features of his theory of practical reason – desires, goals, and competitive pluralism––combine in such a way as to undermine a core feature of his theory of political morality––what Raz calls our autonomy-based duty to provide everyone with what he takes to be an adequate range of valuable life (...) options. As it turns out, if we are reasonable, in terms of the former theory, then we are likely to be immoral, in terms of the latter one. (shrink)

In this article I argue that G.A. Cohen is mistaken in his belief that the concept of justice needs to be rescued from constructivist theorists of justice. In doing so, I rely on insights of John Rawls’ later work Political Liberalism and Rainer Forst’s discourse theory of justice. Such critical engagement with Cohen’s critique of constructivism is needed, because Cohen bases his critique of constructivism almost exclusively on Rawls’s arguments and positions in A Theory of Justice. He thus neglects - (...) at least by and large - that Rawls had further developed his constructivist method of justification in his later work Political Liberalism, as well as that Forst’s discourse-theoretical works offer elaborate versions of constructivism. These refined versions of constructivism recognize a plurality of reasonable conceptions of ideal justice and draw an important distinction between moral and political constructivism. Because of these features these advanced constructivist theories are not in need of Cohen’s rescue. (shrink)

Taking religious freedom as illustrative, this essay proposes a theory of the basic freedoms that pacifies the conflict among libertarian, egalitarian, and communitarian sects of liberalism. This theory follows John Rawls’s suggestion that constitutional courts are exemplars of public reason but rejects his partisan construal of public reason in terms that only an egalitarian liberal would recognize. If, as Rawls argues, liberal pluralism is reasonable and if constitutional courts are guardians of public reason, then an ideal constitutional court will (...) guide itself by the theory of the basic freedoms that reconciles liberal pluralism with the rule of public reason. Such a theory will integrate the plurality of liberal sects into an inclusive liberalism that preserves a distinctive role for each in defining and limiting constitutional rights, while refining them of the errors resulting from their hegemonic ambitions. Liberal pluralism is thus preserved, but liberal fragmentation is overcome. Public reason is sought not through an escape from pluralism but in a logical concord among the denominations of liberalism. The way for courts to execute this concord in constitutional cases is to follow the method of reasoning they have already largely adopted. That method is proportionality review. (shrink)

It is virtuous for individual and collective agents to be tolerant. However, toleration is difficult, both in practice and in conceptualization. Firstly, given that toleration can be understood in various ways (Walzer 1997, Forst 2007), it seems that to determine what is the proper conception of toleration would be controversially difficult. Here I shall suggest one particular conception of toleration is more suitable than others. This conception allows, as I shall explain, us to better understandthe difficulties of toleration. Thus, this (...) particular conception of toleration should lead us to see what is more adequate for dealing with the difficulties of toleration. To be more precise, I shall argue for a political conception of toleration, which different from the attitudinal conception of toleration as being indifferent, or the ethical conception of toleration as respect. There is the suggestion of toleration as recognition (Galeotti 2002). These alternative understandings of toleration do not provide better diagnoses of the difficulties of toleration. The political conception of toleration is intended to be grounded on some moral considerations, notpragmatic purpose. It is political in that it recognizes the fact that toleration is essentially practiced to deal with a power relationship among the parties of toleration. Where these is no such power relationship, as I shall argue, there is no issue of toleration. Secondly, this proposed conception of toleration is political in the sense that it shall not deal with differences coming from, to use John Rawls’s phrase, the fact of pluralism by adopting any comprehensive doctrine such as an ethics of respect or recognition. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What Is Equality? From the Fact of Inequality to the Fact of Pluralism The Difference Principle Ideals Latent in Public Political Culture How Egalitarian Are We? Outside of the Bounds of Public Reason References.

Poetic Interaction presents an original approach to the history of philosophy in order to elaborate a fresh theory that accounts for the place freedom in the Western philosophical tradition. In his thorough analysis of the aesthetic theories of Hegel, Heidegger, and Kant, John McCumber shows that the interactionist perspective recently put forth by Jürgen Habermas was in fact already present in some form in the German Enlightenment and in Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology. McCumber's historical placement of the interactionist perspective runs counter (...) to both Habermas's own views and to those of scholars who would locate the origin of these developments in American pragmatism. From the metaphysical approaches of Plato and Aristotle to the interactionist approaches of Habermas and Albrecht Wellmer, McCumber provides an original narrative of the history of philosophy that focuses on the ways that each thinker has formulated the relationships between language, truth, and freedom. Finally, McCumber presents his critical demarcation of various forms of freedom to reveal that the interactionist approach has to be expanded and enlarged to include all that is understood by "poetic interaction." For McCumber, freedom is inherently pluralistic. Poetic Interaction will be invaluable to political philosophers, historians of philosophy, philosophers of language, and scholars of legal criticism. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to identify a type of fact-given warrant for action that is distinct from reason-based justification for action and defend the view that there are two types of practical warrant. The idea that there are two types of warrant is familiar in epistemology, but has not received much attention in debates on practical normativity. On the view that I will defend, normative facts, qua facts, give rise to entitlement warrant for action. But they do (...) not, qua facts, give rise to reason-based warrant. Normative practical reasons, I will argue, are true propositions that represent fact-based favouring and that are made true by normative facts. (shrink)