Rescuing Public Justification from Public Reason Liberalism

Public reason liberals from John Rawls to Gerald Gaus uphold a principle of public justification as a core commitment of their theories. Critics of public reason liberalism have sometimes conceded that there is something compelling about the idea of public justification. But so far there have not been many attempts to elaborate and defend a “comprehensive” liberalism that incorporates a principle of public justification. This chapter spells out how a principle of public justification could be integrated into a comprehensive liberalism, and it rebuts three objections: That the idea of public reason could not be sustained in a comprehensive liberalism, that public justification would lose its point (be it to provide stability, express respect, or form a community), and that the principle of public justification could not work on the right theoretical level. The chapter concludes that everything worthwhile about public justification can be extracted from public reason liberalism.