Jonathan Quong

Liberalism Without Perfection

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. What Kind of Liberalism? 2. The Argument from Autonomy 3. Paternalism and Perfectionism 4. Justification and Legitimacy 5. A Question Internal to Liberal Theory 6. The Role of an Overlapping Consensus 7. Disagreement and Asymmetry 8. Truth and Scepticism 9. The Scope and Structure of Public Reason 10. Unreasonable Citizens Conclusion Bibliography

Killing in Self‐Defense*

Can we ever permissibly kill others in self-defense, and if we can, what is the moral principle that permits such lethal acts? Consider a Villainous Aggressor who wants to kill me simply because he hates me, and I see him coming at me with an axe. Can I permissibly kill him if this is the only way to save my own life? What about the case of an Innocent Aggressor? This is someone who has the intention to kill me, but they are not morally responsible for forming this intention: perhaps a villain slipped them a drug which temporarily caused them to have this intention. Finally consider an Innocent Threat—someone who threatens my life even though they have formed no intention to kill me and exercise no agency at all. An example would be someone who has been pushed off a cliff and will land on me and kill me unless I vaporize him with my trusty ray gun first (if I do not shoot he will survive the fall). Like Judith Jarvis Thomson, I think these are all cases where it is permissible to kill one person in order to save my own life. Jeff McMahan, Michael Otsuka, and several others, however, have offered a powerful argument against the permissibility of killing Inno-

The Scope of Public Reason

This paper presents two conceptions of the scope of public reason. The narrow view asserts that the ideal of public reason must regulate questions of constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice, but should not apply beyond this limited domain. The broad view claims that the ideal of public reason ought to be applied, whenever possible, to all political decisions where citizens exercise coercive power over one another. The paper questions whether there are any good grounds for accepting the narrow view. I survey and reject three potential reasons. The priority argument for the narrow view claims that constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice are the only proper subjects of public reason because they have a special moral priority for our reasoning about justice. The basic interests argument supports the narrow view by arguing that public reasons only exist at the level of constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. Finally, the completeness argument defends the narrow view on the grounds that public reason can only be complete if it abstains from most legislative questions. I conclude that there are no good reasons for accepting the narrow view of the scope of public reason, whereas there are several reasons to prefer the broad view.

THE DISTRIBUTION OF AUTHORITY

This article challenges David Estlund’s claim that epistocracy involves an extra element of authority when compared to democracy. I argue there is no more authority in epistocracy than democracy, at least not in a way that would make the former subject to a higher justificatory burden than the latter. I suggest Estlund reaches his democratic conclusion by implicitly relying on an undefended presumption that egalitarian, or prioritarian, distributions of political authority face a lower justificatory burden than other distributions. The latter sections of the article propose a Rawlsian justification for this presumption.