Whose public reason? Which reasonableness?

Abstract

Rawlsian public reason liberalism holds that laws must be justified in terms of reasons that all reasonable citizens can accept. But who counts as a “reasonable” citizen? Rawlsians typically answer that reasonableness is conditional on acceptance of liberal values. But they do not typically defend this answer by explaining why the Rawlsian definition is superior to alternative possible definitions of reasonableness—for instance, libertarian reasonableness, perfectionist reasonableness, communitarian reasonableness, and so on. Once this full range of possibilities is set out in plain view, it creates a novel challenge which I call the which‐reasonableness challenge. This is the challenge of showing that the Rawlsian definition of reasonableness is superior to all the alternatives. In this paper, I set out this challenge (Section 1) and consider potential ways to overcome it: namely, by arguing that the Rawlsian definition of reasonableness is superior to the alternatives on grounds of its free‐standingness and stability (Section 2), its implicitness in the public political culture (Section 3), its anti‐sectarianism (Section 4), its fidelity to the underlying motivations of the public reason project (Section 5), and its avoidance of triviality, ad‐hocness, shoehorning and related perils (Section 6). I argue that while these considerations narrow the range of possible definitions of reasonableness, they do not do so by enough to uniquely pick out the Rawlsian definition. Rawlsian public reason liberals thus face a pressing challenge stemming from the simple question: Whose public reason? Which reasonableness?