REASONABLE DISAGREEING ABOUT REASONABLE DISAGREEMENT

Abstract

Public Reason Liberals are committed to the public justification of political principles. According to them, citizens should bracket reasons which are subject to reasonable disagreement during political decision making. However, not enough attention has been paid to the fact that reasonable citizens will disagree on which disagreements are reasonable. This paper explores this difficulty and suggests that taking it seriously would have devastating consequences. I will describe what is necessary to specify a conception of reasonable disagreement and show that the complexity involved in specifying reasonable disagreement will imply that reasonable citizens are unable to converge on a single specification of reasonable disagreement. Finally, I explore the implications of this and show why it undermines the goal of generating a publicly justified polity that is stable for the right reasons, and that putting it into practice generates self-defeating results. I conclude by suggesting the way forward.