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Rawls, Reciprocity and the Barely Reasonable

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2013

CHRISTOPHER MCMAHON
CHRISTOPHER MCMAHON*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara, [email protected]
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Abstract

The concept of the reasonable plays an important role in Rawls's political philosophy, but there has been little systematic investigation of this concept or of the way Rawls employs it. This article distinguishes several different forms of reasonableness and uses them to explore Rawls's political liberalism. The discussion focuses on the idea, found especially in the most recent versions of this theory, of a family of liberal conceptions of justice each of which is regarded by everyone in a polity as reasonable, even if only barely so. The idea of such a family is central to Rawls's notion of reciprocity and the view of political cooperation associated with it. This article questions whether the concept of the reasonable can play the role that Rawls intends.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York, 1993), p. 35Google Scholar.

2 Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass., 1999)Google Scholar, which contains ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’ (pp. 129–80).

3 Rawls, Law of Peoples, p. 122.

4 Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, p. 132.

5 Rawls, Law of Peoples, p. 125.

6 Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, pp. 136–7. See also his The Law of Peoples, p. 14. Rawls presents the idea of a family of conceptions as follows: ‘There are many liberalisms and related views, and therefore many forms of public reason specified by a family of reasonable political conceptions’; ‘[E]ach of these liberalisms endorses the underlying ideas of citizens as free and equal persons and of society as a fair system of cooperation over time. Yet since these ideas can be interpreted in various ways, we get different formulations of the principles of justice and different contents of public reason. Political conceptions differ also in how they order, or balance, political principles and values even when they specify the same ones’ (both quotes are from ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, p. 141).

7 Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, p. 137.

8 Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, p. 169.

9 Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, p. 168.

10 For a different argument that the concepts of reasonableness and reciprocity cannot be employed in the way that Rawls intends, see Reidy, David A., ‘Reciprocity and Reasonable Disagreement: From Liberal to Democratic Legitimacy’, Philosophical Studies 132 (2007), pp. 243–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Rawls, Law of Peoples, p. 87.

12 ‘[A moral conception] is comprehensive when it includes conceptions of what is of value in human life, and ideals of personal character, as well as ideals of friendship and of familial and associational relationships, and of much else that is to inform our conduct, and in the limit to our life as a whole. A conception is fully comprehensive if it covers all recognized values and virtues within one rather precisely articulated system’ (Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 13).

13 Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 4.

14 Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 56.

15 Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 56–7.

16 Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 55.

17 Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 145.

18 I explore the idea that competent reasoning about questions of political morality can lack interpersonal transparency in Reasonable Disagreement: A Theory of Political Morality (Cambridge, 2009).

19 In ‘Reasons All Can Accept’ (Journal of Political Philosophy 17 (2009), pp. 253–74), James Bohman and Henry Richardson argue that, as employed by Rawls, the concept of the reasonable is a substantive normative notion, with the result that the members of a Rawlsian polity are asked to determine whether a given reason is ‘consistent with the constitutive requirements of reasonableness, which are the same for all’ (p. 260). Reasonableness as competence and reasonableness as appropriate concession are both normative notions, but these authors seem to have in mind the latter. If the argument I present here is correct, however, the constitutive requirements of reasonableness, in the concession sense, admit of reasonable (competently reasoned) disagreement.

20 For an account of the concept of supervenience, see Kim, Jaegwon, ‘Supervenience as a Philosophical Concept’, in his Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 131–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 In ‘Disagreement about Fairness’ (Philosophical Topics 38 (2010), pp. 91–110), I make a distinction between the morality of direct concern, of which utilitarianism constitutes a prominent example, and the morality of reciprocal concern. Fairness, distributive justice and reasonableness in the concession sense are all concepts of the morality of reciprocal concern. I believe that these concepts, too, are best understood as response-dependent. But the response is not a positive scalar response-like amusement. Rather it is negative, an aversion to disparities of concession of various kinds.

22 In discussing doctrines that deny full liberty of conscience, Rawls says: ‘I do not say that they are reasonable, but rather that they are not fully unreasonable; one should allow, I think, a space, between the fully unreasonable and the fully reasonable’ (Law of Peoples, p. 74). Here Rawls seems to be speaking of reasonableness in the concession sense and equating the reasonable with the fully reasonable while allowing for moderate degrees of unreasonableness.

23 This possibility was also suggested by the anonymous referee.

24 Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, ed. Bromwich, D. and Kateb, G. (New Haven, 2003), p. 113Google Scholar.

25 See the references in n. 6.

26 Rawls, Law of Peoples, p. 11.

27 Rawls, Law of Peoples, p. 24.

28 Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 119–20.

29 In Law of Peoples, Rawls describes what he calls a decent consultation hierarchy. He says that decency is a normative idea of the same kind as reasonableness, but covering less (p. 67). I believe that Rawls's liberal reasonableness can be understood as a particular conception, itself relatively broad, of the broader concept of reasonableness in the concession sense. If this is right, decency, as a different way of understanding appropriate concession in a political community, will constitute an alternative conception of this concept, an alternative conception of reasonableness in the concession sense.

30 Cohen, Joshua, ‘Truth and Public Reason’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 37 (2009), pp. 3–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Cohen, ‘Truth and Public Reason’, p. 30.

32 I would like to thank an anonymous referee for Utilitas for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.