Isolating Public Reasons
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Description
This chapter will consider the attractions of a position that runs roughly along the lines of Rawls’s account of public reason. It will then consider some reasons for steering clear of positions of this kind. My argument is not directed at John Rawls’s view as such. I want to describe and criticize a view of a certain kind, one that comes close to his at a number of points. But I am going to set up the idea of public reason in a way that is quite different from the way it is set up in Political Liberalism. I hope not to get bogged down in fine issues of Rawls exegesis. If the difficulties of this kind of view are as I say they are, then that should have some effect on people’s readiness to subscribe to even a generous version of Rawls’s view. But Rawls’s own exposition has all sorts of conditions and qualifications built into it. If there are details in his account that enable it to avoid the criticisms I make of views of this kind, so much the better. I still think that understanding these criticisms is important.
Source Publication
Rawls's Political Liberalism
Source Editors/Authors
Thom Brooks, Martha C. Nussbaum
Publication Date
2015
Recommended Citation
Waldron, Jeremy, "Isolating Public Reasons" (2015). Faculty Chapters. 1560.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1560
