This is a post by Andrei Bespalov (Pompeu Fabra University).
In liberal democracies, citizens must respect one another as free and equal partners in self-government. According to public reason liberals, the idea of civic respect entails that policies can be enforced by the state only if they are reasonably justified to all citizens. But what should count as a reasonable justification in a public whose members disagree with one another on the basic matters of morality, philosophy, and religion? Imagine Alf, a devout Catholic, who believes that from the moment of conception God endows human fetuses with moral personhood and, therefore, abortion is murder. Do Alf’s religious arguments make a reasonable justification for the abortion ban to atheist Betty?
Public reason liberals have offered two competing approaches to such problems. These approaches correspond to two competing models of public justification.
One is the consensus model proposed by John Rawls in his seminal book Political Liberalism. On this model, proper public justification should be based only on reasons that are at least accessible to all citizens. Consensus theorists call a justificatory reason “accessible” to all citizens if it conforms to an evaluative standard — i. e., a set of norms according to which citizens affirm and weigh justificatory reasons — shared by all citizens. For consensus theorists, reasons derived directly from comprehensive religious, moral, and philosophical doctrines are not proper public reasons, because they draw on incommensurable evaluative standards. Only reasons that appeal to liberal political conceptions of justice, such as Rawls’s own justice as fairness, common sense, and uncontroversial science should be allowed in the balance of considerations for and against policy proposals.
The alternative is the convergence model developed by Gerald Gaus in The Order of Public Reason. On this model, proper public justification does not have to be based on the evaluative standards shared by all citizens. It only needs to make sure that each citizen considers a policy on a given issue to be an improvement compared to having no policy on that issue at all, based on each citizen’s own evaluative standard. Effectively, convergence model allows all sorts of intelligible reasons in public justification. It only excludes reasons that are at odds with the very idea of social morality, such as those that draw on grotesquely egoistic, sadistic, or masochistic evaluative standards.
According to convergence theorists, due to the openness of their model to diverse justificatory reasons, it has the following three advantages over the consensus model:
(a) the convergence model promises to be less costly to citizens integrity — i.e., the model is less likely to end up compelling citizens to act and speak contrary to their deeply held beliefs about how they ought to act and speak — because it does not exclude justifications grounded in comprehensive doctrines;
(b) the convergence model promises to resolve more political disagreements, because it allows for shared decision-making outcomes without shared justificatory reasons;
(c) the convergence model promises a better algorithm for overcoming ideological polarization, because it focuses on justifying a patchwork of local arrangements on policies, which is much easier than justifying a general conception of justice and then showing that a given policy proposal realizes it.
In my new article I contend that the convergence model cannot deliver on any of its three promises.
(a) To begin with, I concede that, if the requirement of justificatory restraint is applied to citizens’ speech, the consensus model imposes the costs to integrity that the convergence model does not. The consensus model prohibits citizens from invoking their comprehensive doctrines, while the convergence model does not. However, a simple proviso eliminates this difference. We can assume that public reason is not meant to restrict anyone’s speech, it only determines what counts in the balance of justificatory reasons for and against political decisions. In this case, at the very least, the potential costs to citizens’ integrity imposed by the convergence model are equal to those of the consensus model. Under both models, Catholic Alf will have to acknowledge that the legal ban on abortion is impermissible, unless it is supported by non-religious reasons that would be accessible to atheist Betty.
(b) It is hard to see how invoking sectarian views can contribute to resolving political disagreements in addition to what can be achieved by searching for reasons accessible to all. Convergence theorists have yet to provide an example of a policy that draws support from a variety of sectarian reasons and at the same time lacks any plausible non-sectarian justification.
Perhaps, by promising “shared outcomes without shared reasons” convergence theorists refer to situations when political disagreements are resolved through bargaining, exemptions, and polycentric arrangements. (Polycentric arrangements are those that, for example, allow the adoption of different redistributive policies in different parts of the country.) However, these strategies are also available under the consensus model.
(c) Convergence theorists underestimate the flexibility of the consensus model. Even Rawls associated public justification with a family of liberal political conceptions of justice, not necessarily with one particular conception. To be reasonably acceptable under the consensus model, a policy must maintain liberal justice broadly construed — i.e., it must not violate basic rights and liberties and be demonstrably aimed at ensuring that all citizens have adequate all-purpose means to make use of them. This task is not as daunting as the one that convergence theorists assign to their consensus-oriented counterparts.
Furthermore, the consensus model clearly points in the direction where political agreements are achievable — namely, in the realm where we try to fairly distribute all-purpose means (such as income and wealth) and set aside our incommensurable conceptions of final ends (“the Good”). In contrast, by allowing all sorts of controversial reasons to defeat policy proposals, while relying heavily on ad hoc bargaining, exemptions, and polycentric arrangements, the convergence model leaves political agreement to chance.
As it turns out, more diversity is not necessarily better for public reason.
To read more about this, check out my article, “Can Convergence Public Reason Fulfill Its Promises?” which appeared this year in Social Theory and Practice.
My work on this article has been supported by María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence grant CEX2021-001169-M (funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033).
Andrei Bespalov is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Pompeu Fabra University working in the Law and Philosophy group in the Department of Law. He specializes in political philosophy with the focus on theories of public reason and their policy applications. The overall purpose of his research is to develop a minimalist conception of political liberalism that will be less morally and epistemically demanding than the standard Rawlsian one.
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