36 - Cohen, Joshua

Summary

Joshua Cohen (b. 1951) studied under John Rawls, taught at MIT for twenty-nine years, and is currently Marta SuttonWeeks Professor of Ethics in Society and Professor of Political Science, Philosophy, and Law at Stanford. Much ofCohen’s work is inspired by Rawls and his own writing signiicantly influenced the development of Rawls’s mature thought.

Three contributions are central. The irst is Cohen’s distinctive “deliberative” conception of democracy. Against those who present democracy as simply a method of producing collective decisions through preference aggregation, Cohen argues that democracy is an activity of reasoning amongst equals on matters of common concern. As such, it is not merely an institutional procedure, but also – and more fundamentally – a type of society and a compelling normative ideal.

A second, related contribution is an original account of political legitimacy. For Cohen, the moral authority of democratic decisions derives from their source in a process of mutual justiication in which citizens argue for policies on the basis of reasons they can expect other citizens, understood as equals, to accept. Rawls had argued that the fact that citizens endorse conlicting moral and metaphysical doctrines constrains the role that appeals to justice may play in politics. Cohen strengthened this idea by emphasizing that only “reasonable” disagreement places limits on the types of justiication that can legitimately be offered in political argument. The idea that citizens of a diverse range of persuasions can converge on a shared understanding of the content of democracy’s “public reason” is key to Cohen’s project of showing how democracy can organize and justify other political values.