A popular strategy for answering the question of why and how laws bind is to use the concept of political justification: to argue that laws bind when they can be justified in the political domain. Being defensible in the political domain is supposed to make laws emotionally compelling in virtue of their being justified for each member of the community, and intellectually compelling in virtue of their having emerged from a process that is subject to constraints (...) of rationality such as consistency and coherence. However, being politically justifiable does not and cannot explain why it is reasonable to expect individuals to conform because it places too much emphasis on deference to the judgments of public actors. In this paper I use a distinction between general availability and general acceptability accounts of publicity to explain why the answer to what makes laws binding lies in developing an account of good reasons, not an account of why political reasons should take priority. (shrink)

Thaler and Sunstein justify nudge policies from welfaristic premises: nudges are acceptable because they benefit the individuals who are nudged. A tacit assumption behind this strategy is that we can identify the true preferences of decision-makers. We argue that this assumption is often unwarranted, and that as a consequence nudge policies must be justified in a different way. A possible strategy is to abandon welfarism and endorse genuine paternalism. Another one is to argue that the biases of decision that choice (...) architects attempt to eliminate create externalities. For example, in the case of intertemporal discounting, the costs of preference reversals are not always paid by the discounters, because they are transferred onto other individuals. But if this is the case, then nudges are best justified from a political rather than welfaristic standpoint. (shrink)

On a proceduralist account of democracy, collective decisions derive their jus- tification—at least in part—from the qualities of the process through which they have been made. To fulfill its justificatory function, this process should ensure that citizens have an equal right to political participation as a respectful response to their equal status as agents capable of self-legislation. How should democratic participation be understood if it is to offer such a procedural justification for democratic decisions? I suggest that, in (...) order to overcome the structural procedural disadvantages affecting the actual, effective opportunities that citizens who hold nonmainstream views have to exercise their right to political participation, the enhancement of such opportunities requires securing space for contestation. Against this background, I vindicate the (currently underestimated) role of conscientious objection as a form of political participation. (shrink)

This essay reviews contemporary theories of public justification. In particular, it argues that conceptions of public justification and public reason have moved significantly beyond Rawls.

Whether the justification at stake is ethical or juridical, all attempts to argue for the welfare principle in Kant’s metaphysics of morals are unsuccessful. This principle cannot be justified a priori in Kant’s context. However, it is not only possible but also necessary to argue for a certain degree of social welfare in politics as the practice of right; otherwise, Kant’s project of political practice, with enlightenment as its core concept, will inevitably fail. Enlightenment requires that the state (...) be committed to reducing the impact of an unequal social structure on individuals so as to preserve the possibility of their enlightenment. However, it also imposes limits on state-sponsored social welfare because excessive social welfare could lead to a general minority. (shrink)

This article explores the historical and philosophical backgrounds that inform the appropriation of the term “public reason” in liberal theory. Particularly, it studies the differing nuances attached to public reason by Kant and Rawls. The article suggests that, while Kant viewed the public use of reason as a conditio sine qua non for Enlightenment to take place within the Prussian society, Rawls’s notion of public reason in Political Liberalism serves a different purpose in our contemporary world. Rawls sees public (...) reason as a tool, which would enable citizens of the pluralistic liberal state to unearth tolerable bases for coexistence, despite their trenchant and often conflicting ideological, cultural and religious differences. Moreover, Rawls’s notion of public reason aims at liberal legitimacy: the normative and political justification of the legal power of the state in liberal democracy. (shrink)

Political deliberation and decision-making typically take place in circumstances of substantial uncertainty about what should be done. Some of this uncertainty concerns decision-relevant empirical facts and some of it concerns decision-relevant normative facts. It is widely accepted that uncertainty about empirical facts should make us cautious and that political justification must take such uncertainty into account. Some have argued, however, that uncertainty about empirical and normative facts is not symmetrical, and that normative uncertainty does not demand the (...) same caution. In this chapter, I argue that the argument against symmetry does not work in the political context and that political justification must take normative uncertainty into account. (shrink)

In popular parlance the term "liberalism" denotes a collection of welfarist and progressive social policies, but I am here concerned with liberalism as the theoretical framework within which familiar debates over distributive justice and the scope of state power typically are conducted. To be sure, liberalism in this sense is a complex doctrine, but its core has been well captured by Martha Nussbaum.

Political liberals ask citizens not to appeal to certain considerations, including religious and philosophical convictions, in political deliberation. We argue that political liberals must include a demanding requirement of intellectual modesty in their ideal of citizenship in order to motivate this deliberative restraint. The requirement calls on each citizen to believe that the best reasoners disagree about the considerations that she is barred from appealing to. Along the way, we clarify how requirements of intellectual modesty relate to (...) moral reasons for deliberative restraint. And we argue against attempts to weaken our requirement of intellectual modesty by emphasizing those moral reasons. (shrink)

This article argues that Hegel's political philosophy is grounded in the idea of mutual recognition, and the associated notion of the subject, which he derived from Fichte and elaborated in the Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Mind.

According to political liberalism, laws must be justified to all citizens in order to be legitimate. Most political liberals have taken this to mean that laws must be justified by appeal to a specific class of ‘public reasons’, which all citizens can accept. In this paper I defend an alternative, convergence, model of public justification, according to which laws can be justified to different citizens by different reasons, including reasons grounded in their comprehensive doctrines. I consider three (...) objections to such an account—that it undermines sincerity in public reason, that it underestimates the importance of shared values, and that it is insufficiently deliberative—and argue that convergence justifications are resilient to these objections. They should therefore be included within a theory of political liberalism, as a legitimate form of public justification. This has important implications for the obligations that political liberalism places upon citizens in their public deliberations and reason-giving, and might make the theory more attractive to some of its critics, particularly those sympathetic to religious belief. (shrink)

This book explores the morality of compromising. The author argues that peace and public justification are values that provide moral reasons to make compromises in politics, including compromises that establish unjust laws or institutions. He explains how it is possible to have moral reasons to agree to moral compromises and he debates our moral duties and obligations in making such compromises. The book also contains discussions of the sources of the value of public justification, the relation between peace (...) and justice, the nature of modus vivendi arrangements and the connections between compromise, liberal institutions and legitimacy. In exploring the morality of compromising, the book thus provides some outlines for a map of political morality beyond justice. (shrink)

Rainer Forst develops a critical theory capable of deciphering the deficits and potentials inherent in contemporary political reality. This calls for a perspective which is immanent to social and political practices and at the same time transcends them. Forst regards society as a whole as an ‘order of justification’ comprising complexes of different norms referring to institutions and corresponding practices of justification. The task of a ‘critique of relations of justification’, therefore, is to analyse such (...) legitimations with regard to their validity and genesis and to explore the social and political asymmetries leading to inequalities in the ‘justification power’ which enables persons or groups to contest given justifications and to create new ones. Starting from the concept of justification as a basic social practice, Forst develops a theory of political and social justice, human rights and democracy, as well as of power and of critique itself. In so doing, he engages in a critique of a number of contemporary approaches in political philosophy and critical theory. Finally, he also addresses the question of the utopian horizon of social criticism. (shrink)

The article discusses the status and role of politics — in its various facets — in the pragmatic sociology of critique. We focus on a number of different dimensions of politics — politics-as-justification, politics-as-distribution, politics-as-constitution, and politics-as-defiance — that can said to be of importance for a pragmatic sociology of critique, but that have not all been taken up equally in this approach. We situate pragmatic sociology in a tradition of thought that views politics as emerging in the settlement (...) of disputes over differences without resorting to violence. However, we argue that pragmatic sociology tends to ignore questions of the constitution of politics, and suggest that one way of bringing the foundational aspect upfront is by conceptualizing and studying defiance, including forms of explicit (dissent) and implicit critique (resistance) of the existing order. (shrink)

Political realists have devoted much effort to clarifying the methodological specificity of realist theorising and defending its consistency as an approach to political reasoning. Yet the question of how to justify the realist approach has not received the same attention. In this article, I offer a prudential justification of political realism. To do so, I first characterise realism as anti-moralism. I then outline three possible arguments for the realist approach by availing myself of recent inquiries into (...) the metatheoretical basis of realism: The metaethical, the ethical and the prudential arguments. I explain that the prudential argument offers the most solid basis for political realism because it relies on the least controversial premises. Still, I delve into the metaethical and ethical arguments for two reasons: The prudential argument takes advantage of the theses defended by the rival arguments and elaborating the other arguments shows the comparative strengths of the prudential argument. (shrink)

In Rawls’s political liberalism, legitimate exercises of political power must be publicly justifiable to reasonable citizens on grounds each can coherently accept, where citizens count as “reasonable” only if they can accept certain values of public culture. Other citizens have no say in public justification, or no equal say. For Rawls, then, legitimate political power must accord with a subset of cultural values, and can be legitimate even if it is not (equally) justifiable to people who (...) cannot accept them. Does this mean that Rawls permits that such people be dominated? What kind of domination, if any, would this involve, and would it involve “cultural” domination? This chapter takes its lead from these questions. It offers a reading of the role of public justification in political liberalism that foregrounds differences in the discursive standing of reasonable and unreasonable people, and interpret these differences in domination-theoretic terms. I suggest that there is reason to believe that Rawls’s view would subject the unreasonable–a mixed group that also includes respectable people–to forms of discursive and political domination, and this in a manner that attracts the worry that cultural domination is involved. (shrink)

I outline Rawls's theory of justification, highlighting its philosophical and pragmatic conditions. I argue that the theory has remained essentially unchanged since his earliest methodological writings, and that his recent writings have sought to show how "justice as fairness" can satisfy these conditions, given Rawls's new construal of the "fact of pluralism" which theories of justice designed for modern Western liberal democracies must address. I argue that neither Rawls's revised conception of reflective equilibrium, based on the "fixed points" of (...) such societies' political cultures rather than on individuals' "considered moral judgments" nor the newer notion of "overlapping consensus", succeed in justifying "justice as fairness" according to the terms of Rawls's theory of justification. (shrink)

Media representations of environmental conflicts between companies and communities play an important role in influencing ideas about the rightful exploitation of natural resources. This article examines local newspapers’ representations of fishers’ claims over resource access in a conflict between fishers and the oil industry in Tabasco, Mexico. Our analysis is based on articles from two newspapers dating from 2003–2004 and 2007–2012, and ethnographic data from 2011–2012. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot's theory of jus-tification, discussions on patrimonial collectivities, and studies of (...) media and social movements, we suggest that Tabascan newspapers reshape fishers’ claims over resource access by portraying fisheries and oil as patrimony. Being an ambivalent vocabulary for the defence of space and locality within a con-flict over natural-resource enclosure, the newspaper narratives of patrimony both invoke subaltern concerns and reconstrue state authority and local hierarchies. Furthermore, the newspaper narratives are interconnected with fisher leaders’ narratives, in particular, while misrepresenting different fisher groups’ arguments, and thereby contribute to political division among the fishers as a whole. (shrink)

(Please note: the main ideas of this paper are restated in revised/developed form in: "On actualist and fundamental public justification in political liberalism" and "Patterns of justification: on political liberalism and the primacy of public justification". Both papers are available from philpapers.) The paper suggests the deep view of Rawls-type public justification as promising, non-ideal theory variant of an internal conception of political liberalism. To this end, I demonstrate how the deep view integrates (...) a range of ideas, views and commitments at the core of political liberalism’s justification structure, including pro tanto justification, full justification, political values and their priority, justificatory neutrality, the role of reasonable comprehensive views, the nature public reasons, the wide view of public political culture, the role of overlapping consensus and political legitimacy, and not least, the status of reflective equilibrium and the Original Position. I then contrast the deep view with Quong’s ideal theory variant if the internal conception, and argue that we should prefer the deep view. Thus, the prospects of political liberalism depend not so much on whether we find ways to make ideal theory relevant for non-ideal purposes. Rather, it depends on whether political liberalism can devise a credible response to the problem of public dogma. (shrink)

Only during a brief period in the aftermath of the revolution was a portion of the Soviet intelligentsia eager sincerely to cooperate with the Soviet system. Soon, with Stalin''s repressions, the intelligentsia, and especially its elite — the intellectuals, or those involved in creative activities such as science, literature and the arts, became locked in permanent conflict with the government.Once mass terror disappeared after Stalin''s death in 1953, intellectuals faced the possibility of confronting the regime without fear of instant arrest (...) and eventual death in the Gulag. (shrink)

In political philosophy and political theory justification is an important element of normative force – of rightful pull to compliance. To justify is to address a subject in a form or with a substantive content in virtue of which the subject is supposed to be bound. Theories of justification spell out how addresses are supposed to establish subjects as rightfully bound. All arguments that purport to establish that a practice, institution, requirement or legal regime rightfully exerts (...) a pull to compliance employ or make use of a theory of justification, and so are susceptible to challenges based in scepticism about the adequacy of that theory of justification. Theories of justification typically have epistemological and moral dimensions. The epistemological dimension of justification concerns features of the form or content of an address that generate normative force in virtue of their relationship or contribution to cognitive processes. The moral dimension of justification concerns features of the form or content of an address that generate normative force in virtue of their relationship or contribution to the requirements of morality. Both the epistemological and moral dimensions of theories of justification purport to explain what makes the form or content of an address rightfully compelling. Whether the explanation purports to explain compellingness in epistemological or moral terms, and how, precisely, the cognitive or ethical features of the address are supposed to bind is key to understanding how a specific theory of justification works. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of punishment are primarily concerned with punishment by the (or: a) state. More specifically, they attempt to explain why the (a) state may justifiably penalize those who are judged to violate its laws and the conditions under which it is entitled to do so. But any full account of these matters must surely be grounded in an account of the nature and purpose of the state and the justification of state authority. Because they are not so grounded, (...) deterrence and retributive theories are incomplete as they are typically formulated. The intuitions behind these theories can be satisfied in a variety of complete theories, i.e., theories that understand the justification of punishment in relation to the justification of state authority. A consequence of this is that at least some of the intuitions underlying deterrence and retributive theories can be satisfied at the same time by a given theory. (shrink)

La meta del presente artículo es defender la tesis de que la aceptación de las ideas fundamentales del liberalismo político no conducen necesariamente a una concepción de la justicia global minimalista como la que desarrolló John Rawls en The Law of Peoples. Sostendré, contra lo que el filósofo explícitamente afirma, que las democracias liberales contemporáneas pueden apelar públicamente, en la esfera política global, a los ideales igualitarios y a una concepción robusta de los derechos humanos como justificación de ciertos aspectos (...) de su política exterior. Intentaré demostrar que ello no resulta incompatible con el requisito de asumir una posición de tolerancia y de respeto con las naciones que suscriben mayoritariamente formas de vida y sistemas de creencias incompatibles con algunos de los valores liberales más significativos. (shrink)

Public justification in political liberalism is often conceptualized in light of Rawls’s view of its role in a hypothetical well-ordered society as an ideal or idealizing form of justification that applies a putatively reasonable conception of political justice to political matters. But Rawls implicates a different idea of public justification in his doctrine of general reflective equilibrium. The paper engages this second, more fundamental idea. Public justification in this second sense is actualist and (...) fundamental. It is actualist in that it fully enfranchises actual reasonable citizens. It is fundamental in that political liberalism qualifies conceptions of political justice as reasonable to begin with only if they can be accepted coherently by actual reasonable citizens. Together, these features invite the long-standing concern that actualist political liberalism is objectionably exclusionary. I argue that the exclusion objection, while plausible, is more problematic in own right than it seems if actualist and fundamental public justification hypotheticalizes and discursive respect is compatible with substantive discursive inequality. This leaves proponents and critics of political liberalism with deeper questions about the nature of permissible discursive inequality in public justification. (shrink)

Basing its understanding on the two uses of the notion of violence in Honneth’s theory of recognition, this paper aims at developing a framework for the analysis of the thesis of the moral justification of political violence, whenever forms of political violence can be defined as legitimate struggles of recognition. Its contention is that the requalification of some forms of collective violence as recognition conflicts makes it possible to establish a hierarchy of justification for forms of (...) violence which cannot be constructed through a priori criteria, but should rather be the result of a descriptive social philosophy enquiry. (shrink)

Many political realists endorse some notion of political normativity. They think that there are certain normative claims about politics that do not depend on moral premises. The most prominent moralist objections to political normativity have been metaethical: specifically, that political normativity is not genuinely normative; and that it is incapable of justifying normative claims. In this article, I criticize the latter metaethical objection. I argue that the objection presupposes a notion of ‘justification’ that renders it (...) something that is no longer necessarily valuable to realists. I then extend this argument to show that all metaethical objections to political normativity are unsuccessful. Furthermore, insofar as these metaethical objections purport to constrain the types of politics that realists endorse, realists should regard them as another expression of what Raymond Geuss calls ‘dead politics’. (shrink)

Public justification-based accounts of liberal legitimacy rely on the idea that a polity’s basic structure should, in some sense, be acceptable to its citizens. In this paper I discuss the prospects of that approach through the lens of Gerald Gaus’ critique of John Rawls’ paradigmatic account of democratic public justification. I argue that Gaus does succeed in pointing out some significant problems for Rawls’ political liberalism; yet his alternative, justificatory liberalism, is not voluntaristic enough to satisfy the (...) desiderata of a genuinely democratic theory of public justification. So I contend that—pace Gaus, but also Rawls—rather than simply amending political liberalism, the claims of justificatory liberalism bring out fatal tensions between the desiderata of any theory of liberal-democratic legitimacy through public justification. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Many theorists have addressed a central concern of current political theory by contending that the dithering intellectualism of left politics prevents genuine political action. Arguments and Fists confronts this concern by refuting these arguments, and reconciling philosophical debates with the realities of current activism. By looking at theorists such as Montesquieu, Kant, Rousseau, the book contradicts current academic debates and also goes against contemporary theory's image of the liberal political agent as a narrowly rational abstraction. Mika LaVaque-Manty (...) also argues that progressive political philosophy and political action go hand in hand. He then ventures past Kant and Rousseau to talk about specific environmental activism, finding middle ground between the two while asserting that the liberal urge for political reform stems from sound philosophical considerations about the nature of politics and isn't the "cowardly" afterthoughts some theorists have called it. Arguments and Fists then puts these theoretical insights to use, examining environmental justice movements and varieties of environmental radicalism, showing how liberal theory illuminates concrete contemporary political practices. (shrink)

The discussion develops the view that public justification in Rawls’s political liberalism, in one of its roles, is actualist in fully enfranchising actual reasonable citizens and fundamental in political liberalism’s order of justification. I anchor this reading in the political role Rawls accords to general reflective equilibrium, and examine in its light the relationship between public justification, pro tanto justification, political values, full justification, the wide view of public political culture (...) and salient public reason intuitions. This leaves us with the question of how a more plausible, post-Rawlsian political liberalism should understand the commitment to discursive respect and robust discursive equality that is reflected in its view of actualist and fundamental public justification. (shrink)

Examines in more detail his main arguments for justifying political authority and obligation, namely the existence of society, the legal enforcement of morality, the role played by political activity in human well-being, and the need for coordination. Special consideration is then given to Aristotle’s apparent commitment to the challenging view that not only imperfect agents but even fully rational and moral people would still be in need of political authority.

Abstract: In this article the author develops the view, held by some, that political constructivism is best interpreted as a pragmatic enterprise aiming to solve political problems. He argues that this interpretation's structure of justification is best conceived in terms of two separate investigations—one develops a normative solution to a particular political problem by working up into a coherent whole certain moral conceptions of persons and society; and the other is an empirically based analysis of the (...) political problem. The author argues that the empirically based analysis can generate criteria for assessing whether the normative theory successfully works out a solution, thereby developing a functionalist structure of justification. He further argues that this interpretation overcomes a longstanding criticism of constructivism, namely, that the use of substantive moral concepts in the hypothetical choice procedure biases the defense of principles in a particular direction and therefore begs important philosophical questions. (shrink)