Gerald Gaus

The roles of religious conviction in a publicly justified polity The implications of convergence, asymmetry and political institutions

We discuss whether religious reasons may be appealed to in justification and political debate in a polity whose laws must be justified to those subject to them in terms of reasons that are accessible to one and all. We argue that, properly understood, a commitment to public justification provides no grounds for the exclusion of religious reasons from politics. We trace the view that religious reasons are excluded from public reason to three basic errors: (1) the error of supposing that public justification must be based on shared reasons; (2) the error of supposing that in public justification the same constraints apply to reasons to impose coercion and reasons to resist coercion; and (3) the error of supposing that generating publicly justified laws must occur through public deliberations in which all aim at such laws.

The place of religious belief in public reason liberalism

Imperial decline has taken place in societies where traditions of citizenship have been either weak or absent, and the vast majority of imperial citizens were actually subjects. As such, political relationships within imperial constructs, although occasionally codified, were predominantly defined by hierarchy and asymmetry, with civil and political rights underpinned by elite arbitrariness and unaccountability. This noted, ‘missionary imperialism’ that promoted the hegemony of the dominant ethnic or national group(s) within most European empires encouraged the subsuming and conflation of civic and ethno-cultural dimensions of community and identity within a broader imperial framework that (partially) mollified competing nationalist discourses, thus suggesting homogeneity and inclusion. Moreover, the scale and demands of empire ensured the necessity to construct civic relationships that accommodated peripheral elites and their representative groups, and encouraged patterns of (asymmetric) migration and cultural exchange. However, civic inclusivity, and the intensity of the accordant identity, was largely defined by the degree of national, ethnic, social and religious commonality of imperial subjects and their perceived proximity to the dominant colonising groupIntroduction Maria Dimova-Cookson Part 1: The Moral Foundations of Multiculturalism The Place of Religious Belief in Public Reason Liberalism Gerald F. Gaus Cultures, Group Rights, and Group-Differentiated Rights Peter Jones Reasonable Disagreement John Horton Naivety, Doubt and the Politics of Cultural Identification Matthew Festenstein Value Pluralism and the Liberal Multicultural Paradox Monica Mookherjee Part 2: Secularism and the Political Claims of Religious Groups Muslims, Religious Equality and Secularism Tariq Modood Secularism and Fair Treatment for Muslims Cecile Laborde Part 3: Multiculturalism, State Sovereignty and Imperial Past Multiculturalism and the Concept of the State Peter M. R. Stirk The Enduring Legacy of Empire: Post-imperial Citizenship and National Identity(ies) in the United Kingdom Andrew Mycock

On two critics of justificatory liberalism: A response to Wall and Lister

In replying to Steven Wall’s and Andrew Lister’s thoughtful essays on my account of justificatory liberalism in this issue, I respond to many of their specific criticisms while taking the opportunity to explicate the foundations of justificatory liberalism. Justificatory liberalism takes seriously the moral requirement to justify all claims of authority over others, as well as all coercive interferences with their lives. If we do so, although we are by no means committed to libertarianism, we find that that many of our cherished values, moral intuitions, and political aspirations no longer ground the range of authority over others many of us would claim. In this sense, justificatory liberalism is a theory of limited authority and limited government — which is what a genuinely liberal theory must be.

ON JUSTIFYING THE MORAL RIGHTS OF THE MODERNS: A CASE OF OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES

In this essay I sketch a philosophical argument for classical liberalism based on the requirements of public reason. I argue that we can develop a philosophical liberalism that, unlike so much recent philosophy, takes existing social facts and mores seriously while, at the same time, retaining the critical edge characteristic of the liberal tradition. I argue that once we develop such an account, we are led toward a vindication of “old” (qua classical) liberal morality—what Benjamin Constant called the “liberties of the moderns.” A core thesis of the paper is that a regime of individual rights is crucial to the project of public justification because it disperses moral authority to individuals thus mitigating what I call the “burdens of justification.”

Public reason liberalism

The idea of public reason is almost always associated — sometimes exclusively — with John Rawls’ political liberalism. Many, no doubt, believe that if there is such a creature as “public reason liberalism” it is a Rawlsian creation. This is an error. The social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant all are based on conviction that the main aim of political philosophy is to identify an agreed-upon public judgment or public reason that allows us to overcome the disunity and confict that would characterize a condition in which each followed her own private judgment or reasoning about morality and justice. Captivated by their own concerns, however, political philosophers have, with very few exceptions, read the fundamental place of public reason out of the contract tradition.1 Hobbes is typically viewed simply as a theorist of self-interest and a proto-game theorist, Locke as a natural rights proto-libertarian, Rousseau as essentially a radical democrat.2 In section 2 of this essay, focusing on Hobbes and Locke, I take some modest steps to reverse this misreading, pointing out how social contract theory was fundamentally and explicitly concerned with identifying a source of public reason.3 Liberalism and public reason, I argue, arose together, as interrelated responses to the modern problem of creating a stable social order in societies deeply divided by religious and moral disagreements. The problem with which social contract theorists such as Hobbes and Locke were grappling is distinctively modern: in matters of religion and convictions about the ultimate value of life, morality and justice, the free exercise of human reason leads to disagreement. Their question — which is also the question of public reason liberalism — is whether a society faced with “intractable struggles” and “irreconcilable” conficts of “absolute depth” can share a common social and political existence on terms that are acceptable to all.4

Justification, choice and promise: three devices of the consent tradition in a diverse society

The twin ideas at the heart of the social contract tradition are that persons are naturally free and equal, and that genuine political obligations must in some way be based on the consent of those obligated. The Lockean tradition has held that consent must be in the form of explicit choice; Kantian contractualism has insisted on consent as rational endorsement. In this paper I seek to bring the Kantian and Lockean contract traditions together. Kantian rational justification and actual choice are complementary devices through which our freedom and equality can be reconciled with moral and political authority. We should not think that there is simply one way by which relations of moral and political authority can be reconciled with our status as free and equal. I defend three distinct devices through which freedom and authority may be reconciled: justification to others, social choice and promise. All three are aspects of the ‘consent tradition’ broadly construed.

THE PROPERTY EQUILIBRIUM IN A LIBERAL SOCIAL ORDER (OR HOW TO CORRECT OUR MORAL VISION)

The “welcome return” to “substantive political philosophy” that Rawlss A Theory of Justice was said to herald has resulted in forty years of proposals seeking to show that philosophical reflection leads to the demonstrable truth of almost every and any conceivable view of the justice of property rights. Select any view—from the justice of unregulated capitalist markets to the most extreme forms of egalitarianism—and one will find that some philosophers have proclaimed that rational reflection uniquely leads to its justice. This is, I believe, a sort of ideological thinking masquerading as philosophizing. In this paper, using some tools from game theory as well as experimental findings, I seek to sketch a non-ideological approach to the question of the justification of property rights. On this approach the aim of political philosophy is, first and foremost, to reflect on whether our social rules of property are within the “optimal eligible set” of rules acceptable to all.

Reasonable utility functions and playing the cooperative way

In this essay I dispute the widely held view that utility theory and decision theory are formalizations of instrumental rationality. I show that the decision theoretic framework has no deep problems accommodating the “reasonable” qua a preference to engage in fair cooperation as such. All evaluative criteria relevant to choice can be built into a von Neumann‐Morgenstern utility function. I focus on the claim that, while rational choice‐driven agents are caught in the Pareto‐inferior outcome, reasonable agents could “solve” the PD and cooperate. Not so, I argue. If reasonable people find themselves in PD situations they too would follow the dominant “defect” strategy. The difference between instrumentally rational agents and those who are also reasonable is not that they would behave differently in Prisoner’s Dilemmas, but that reasonable people are more successful at avoiding the Prisoner’s Dilemma and tend to play more cooperative games.

THE COMMONWEALTH of BEES: On the IMPOSSIBILITY of JUSTICE-THROUGH-ETHOS

Some understand utopia as an ideal society in which everyone would be thoroughly informed by a moral ethos: all would always act on their pure conscientious judgments about justice, and so it would never be necessary to provide incentives for them to act as justice requires. In this essay I argue that such a society is impossible. A society of purely conscientiously just agents would be unable to achieve real justice. This is the Paradox of Pure Conscientiousness. This paradox, I argue, can only be overcome when individuals are prepared to depart from their own pure, conscientious, judgments of justice.

The Priority of Social Morality

In a number of works, I have argued that social morality—a system of internalized “social-moral rules”—is fundamental to human social cooperation. Russell Hardin disputed this, arguing instead for the primacy of conventions, based largely on self-interest, in developing cooperative social order. This chapter considers three challenges for my view raised by Hardin. The chapter commences by considering small-scale cooperation; I believe that the evidence indicates that even in very small groups of face-to-face cooperators, the internalization of moral rules is fundamental to their cooperation and cheater suppression. I then consider Hardin’s charge that accounts of social cooperation based on moral rules, in which individuals act on the rules despite their interests, are stuck with invoking a variety of somewhat dubious and weak “claims of moral commitment or shared values through [to] Rawls’s magical ‘addition of the sense of justice and moral sentiment’ to make justice work at a large scale.” I argue that the evidence in support of internalized rule compliance, even in the face of high costs to personal interests, is impressive, and the underlying mechanisms are not mysterious. Lastly, I briefly turn to the fundamental issue of how social morality functions in large-scale settings and, importantly, whether it is largely displaced by formal legal and political institutions.