James W. Boettcher

What is reasonableness

The concept of reasonableness is essential to John Rawls’s political liberalism, and especially to its main ideas of public reason and liberal legitimacy. Yet the somewhat ambiguous account of reasonableness in Political Liberalism has led to concerns that the Rawlsian distinction between the reasonable and the unreasonable is arbitrary and ultimately indefensible. This paper attempts to advance a more convincing interpretation of reasonableness. I argue that the reasonable applies first to citizens, who then play an important role in determining which comprehensive doctrines and political conceptions of justice are reasonable. In addition, while Rawls fails to specify explicitly the meaning of the reasonable in his standard of political justification (i.e. the liberal principle of legitimacy based on the criterion of reciprocity), I offer an interpretation of what it means for citizens to present reasonable claims and arguments to one another in public reason.

Introduction: Religion and the public sphere

Recent normative accounts of the proper role of religion in the public sphere respond to – and are likely motivated by – both central theoretical difficulties and urgent practical considerations for liberal democracies. On the practical side, churches and other religious voices in the public sphere assist in fulfilling essential democratic functions by advocating on behalf of marginalized populations and motivating participation in the associations of civil society and the discourses which inform political decision-making. On many pressing issues – e.g. war and peace, poverty and social justice, abortion and end-of-life decisions, biomedical research and human nature – religious voices are among the most morally strident and politically efficacious. At the same time, religiously based disagreement and conflict appears to be endemic, both within and beyond the borders of liberal-democratic polities. These disagreements are sometimes successfully negotiated by means of familiar constitutional norms. Some cases give rise to demands for special accommodations, such as exemptions from generally applicable rules or limited governance powers for religious minorities. But more severe and intractable conflicts often yield stronger, opposing reactions, especially in light of resurgent fundamentalisms worldwide. Where some call for containing religion and fortifying the wall of separation between church and state, others increasingly express deep-seated suspicion about, and even hostility toward, liberal-democratic states and their corresponding public political cultures. The theoretical terrain is no less contested. Some of the most interesting discussions have been conducted outside of academic philosophy, where conventional assumptions about religion and the public sphere are being challenged. For example, many 20th-century social scientists, following in the footsteps of Durkheim, Marx and Weber, simply assumed

Debating Rawls: Maffettone and his critics

The essays collected in this special section are the result of a lively and engaging main program ‘Author Meets Critics’ session at the 108th Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association held in Washington, DC in December 2011. The session was devoted to Sebastiano Maffettone’s recent book on John Rawls’ political philosophy, Rawls: An Introduction. Participants included critics T. M. Scanlon and David M. Rasmussen, whose APA papers are included below, chair James Boettcher, and respondent Maffettone. Maffettone’s reply to his critics at the APA meeting took the form of a detailed slide presentation with extensive commentary. His article here incorporates the main ideas from that reply and also provides a useful introduction to the principal themes of his book. With its comprehensive scope, accessible style and concise and critical treatment of various objections to Rawlsian political philosophy, Rawls: An Introduction is an excellent introductory text for advanced students. At the same time, graduate students and specialists in the field will be rewarded by a study of it. Not only does Maffettone’s book advance an original interpretive framework for understanding the whole of Rawls’ enterprise, but it does so from a continental-European point of view that may turn out to offer fresh insights to Anglo-American readers. The book is organized around three themes, or what Maffettone calls ‘hermeneutical hypotheses’ (R 16). The first hypothesis – the ‘interpretive hypothesis’ – states that there is substantial continuity between the earlier and later periods of Rawls’ thought. While the publication of ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory’ (1980) does indeed mark the beginning of a second period for Rawls, the similarities between that period, with its political turn, and an earlier one, defined mainly by A Theory of Justice (1971), are far more important than the differences. This interpretation stressing continuity is supported

Internal Minorities, Membership and the Freedmen Controversy

This paper looks at recent efforts within the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma to expel descendants of the freedmen, persons of African descent held as slaves until their emancipation and subsequent adoption as tribal citizens according to the terms of an 1866 treaty. The unavoidable racial dimensions of this controversy lead me to examine it as an example of the internal minorities problem, i.e., the problem of minorities within minority cultures, familiar from the literature on liberal multiculturalism. I argue that while no single approach to the internal minorities problem is fully adequate for resolving the controversy, the balance of reasons drawn from these approaches shows expulsion of the freedmen descendants to be unjust. Furthermore, in contrast to leading theoretical approaches, a deliberative approach to multiculturalism can best account for the need to encourage critical public dialogue about underlying notions of blood, race and Cherokee identity.