What is Pluralism? 9780815368212, 9780367410599, 9780367814496

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WHAT IS PLURALISM?

Is pluralism inherent to the human condition? Does it have its origins in the diversity of cultures? Are disagreements among individuals the same as disagreements among societies? Focusing on these critical questions essential to the understanding of modern societies, this book traces the origins of pluralism in contemporary political thought and presents new, original interpretations of the idea by contemporary philosophers. The chapters in the volume bring clarity into an ongoing fractious debate and reveal the underlying roots and fissures in our understanding of a dynamic and contested idea. Drawing on the works of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and other major political philosophers, they delve into the different strands of the concept, their possible real-world political outcomes, and popular misconceptions. A key text, this volume will be essential reading for scholars and researchers of politics, political theory and philosophy, and social theory. Volker Kaul teaches at the Department of Political Science at LUISS “Guido Carli” University in Rome and is lecturer at the CEA Rome Center, Italy. He also coordinates the research area “East-West Dialogues” for the foundation Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations. Ingrid Salvatore is an associate professor of political philosophy at the University of Salerno, Italy.

Ethics, Human Rights, and Global Political Thought Series Editors: Aakash Singh Rathore and Sebastiano Maffettone Center for Ethics & Global Politics, Luiss University, Rome

Whereas the interrelation of ethics and political thought has been recognized since the dawn of political ref lection, over the last sixty years – roughly since the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights – we have witnessed a particularly turbulent process of globalizing the coverage and application of that interrelation. At the very instant the decolonized globe consolidated the universality of the sovereign nation-state, that sovereignty – and the political thought that grounded it – was eroded and outstripped, not as in eras past, by imperial conquest and instruments of war, but rather by instruments of peace (charters, declarations, treaties, conventions), and instruments of commerce and communication (multinational enterprises, international media, global aviation and transport, internet technologies). Has political theory kept apace with global political realities? Can ethical ref lection illuminate the murky challenges of real global politics? This Routledge book series Ethics, Human Rights, and Global Political Thought addresses these crucial questions by bringing together outstanding monographs and anthologies that deal with the intersection of normative theorizing and political realities with a global focus. Treating diverse topics by means of interdisciplinary techniques – including philosophy, political theory, international relations and human rights theories, and global and postcolonial studies – the books in the Series present up-to-date research that is accessible, practical, yet scholarly. International Toleration A Theory Pietro Maffettone What is Pluralism? Edited by Volker Kaul and Ingrid Salvatore For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Ethics-Human-Rights-and-Global-Political-Thought/book-series/EHRGPT

WHAT IS PLURALISM?

Edited by Volker Kaul and Ingrid Salvatore

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Volker Kaul and Ingrid Salvatore; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Volker Kaul and Ingrid Salvatore to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-8153-6821-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-41059-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-81449-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of contributors Preface by Sebastiano Maffettone What is pluralism? An introduction Volker Kaul and Ingrid Salvatore

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PART I

Epistemic pluralism and democracy

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1 From pluralism to liberalism: the long way around Robert B. Talisse

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2 Pluralism and deliberation Matteo Bianchin

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3 Social choice or collective decision-making: what is politics all about? Thomas Mulligan 4 Liberalism, pluralism, and a third way Giulia Bistagnino

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Contents

PART II

Political pluralism and reasonable consensus

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5 Sideways at the entrance of the cave: a pluralist footnote to Plato Alessandro Ferrara

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6 Pluralism and the possibility of a liberal political consensus Catherine Audard

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7 Modus vivendi liberalism, practice dependence and political legitimacy Valentina Gentile

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8 A pluralist model of democracy Maeve Cooke

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9 Rawls, religion, and the clash of civilizations David Rasmussen

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PART III

Cultures, religions, and politics 10 The practice of liberty Erin I. Kelly 11 Sharing a conception of justice, sharing a conception of the good: liberalism as a pluralist theory vs. pluralism as a non-liberal theory Ingrid Salvatore 12 Pluralism and solidarity: non-authoritarian reasoning and non-fundamentalist attitude Karim Sadek

171 173

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13 Populism, liberalism and nationalism Volker Kaul

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Index

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CONTRIBUTORS

Catherine Audard is a visiting fellow at the Department of Philosophy of the

London School of Economics and is the chair and co-founder of the Forum for European Philosophy. She has widely published on John Rawls’s conception of democracy and public reason, on Habermas’s conception of the public sphere, and on various normative issues in political theory: justice and equality, ‘property-owning democracy’, citizenship, secularism and multiculturalism, liberalism, republicanism, and deliberative democracy. She is the author of John Rawls, London (2007), and has also published translations into French of works by John Stuart Mill and John Rawls as well as numerous books and articles in French. Her current project is a critical examination of the normative basis for social intervention and social justice in a multicultural, multi-faith environment. Matteo Bianchin is an associate professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca. He has been a DAAD research fellow at the University of Cologne and a MarieCurie Fellow at KU Leuven. His research focuses on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of social sciences, and political philosophy. Giulia Bistagnino is a postdoctoral research fellow in political theory and an

adjunct professor of political philosophy for the Ph.D. program in political studies at the Department of Social and Political Science of the University of Milan. She holds a Ph.D. in political studies from the University of Milan and a M.Litt. in philosophy from the University of St. Andrews. She was junior visiting scholar at Nuffield College, Oxford, and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her main research interests concern the problem of pluralism and disagreement within democratic societies, with a particular focus on the notions of legitimacy and compromise and the tension between expertise and democracy. Among her most recent publications are the article “Disagreement, Peerhood, Compromise”

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in Social Theory and Practice (2018), written with Federico Zuolo, and the book Compromessi di principio. Il disaccordo nella filosofia politica contemporanea [Principled compromises. Disagreement in contemporary political philosophy] (2018). Maeve Cooke is a professor of philosophy at University College Dublin, Ire-

land, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Her current research interests center on the relation between freedom and authority and on related questions of protest, resistance, and violence. Her subsequent project is a critical theory of the Anthropocene. She has published two monographs in critical social theory: Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (1994) and Re-Presenting the Good Society (2006) and is the author of many articles in the areas of social and political philosophy. She is on the editorial board of a number of scholarly journals and has held visiting appointments at leading universities in the United States and Europe. Alessandro Ferrara is a professor of political philosophy at the University of

Rome Tor Vergata. Educated in philosophy and sociology at the University of California at Berkeley and at the Goethe-Universität of Frankfurt, he is the author of The Democratic Horizon. Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism (New York, 2014); The Force of the Example. Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (New York, 2008); and Justice and Judgment. The Rise and the Prospect of the Judgment Model in Contemporary Political Philosophy (London,1999). On authenticity, he has authored Rousseau and Critical Theory, (Boston-Leiden, 2017); Reflective Authenticity. Rethinking the Project of Modernity (London & New York, 1998); and Modernity and Authenticity. A Study of the Social and Ethical Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Albany, 1993). Valentina Gentile is an assistant professor in political philosophy at LUISS Uni-

versity. From 2016 she has been a guest professor at Antwerp University, holding a chair in Interreligious Dialogue and the Ethics of Peace. Her research focuses on normative political theory, moral stability, pluralism, and the principles of reciprocity, toleration, equality, and social justice. Her recent publications include (2018) “From a Culture of Civility to Deliberative Reconciliation in Deeply Divided Societies” in the Journal of Social Philosophy (2018); “Rawls’s inclusivism and the case of ‘religious militants for peace’: A reply to Weithman’s restrictive inclusivism” in Philosophy and Public Issues (New Series) (2017); and “Democratic Justice: The Priority of Politics and the Ideal of Citizenship” in CRISPP Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. She is the co-editor of the collection Rawls and Religion and author of From Identity-Conflicts to Civil Society: Restoring Human Dignity and Pluralism in Deeply Divided Societies. Volker Kaul is a teaching fellow at the Department of Political Science at LUISS

“Guido Carli” University in Rome, a research associate at LUISS ETHOS, and a lecturer at the CEA Rome Center. Moreover, he works as scientific coordinator

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of the Istanbul/Venice Seminars for Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations. His work focuses on collective identities, intercultural ethics, and communication. In 2016, he published together with Seyla Benhabib a book titled Toward New Democratic Imaginaries – Istanbul Seminars on Islam, Culture and Politics. He is co-editing since 2010 a yearly special issue of Philosophy & Social Criticism on issues related to culture, religion, and politics. He is currently editing together with Ananya Vajpeyi a book on Populism and Minorities – Critical Perspectives from South Asia and Europe. Erin I. Kelly is a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. She works at the

intersections of ethics, political philosophy, and legal theory. Her book The Limits of Blame: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility (2018) criticizes the role of blame in popular philosophies of criminal justice. She has published papers on such themes as the limits of individual responsibility, the nature and sources of social inequality, how disadvantage bears on assessments of responsibility, and how to understand the requirements of justice in a society with a historical legacy of unjust inequalities. Her work has appeared in prominent philosophy journals, including Ethics and the Journal of Philosophy. Sebastiano Maffettone is a professor of political philosophy at LUISS “Guido Carli” University and director of LUISS ETHOS, a newly founded observatory of public ethics at LUISS Business School. His research focuses on John Rawls, global justice, human rights and comparative political theory. He has a forthcoming book with the title Politica on contemporary international political theory and published recently Karl Marx nel XXI secolo. Maffettone is also author of Rawls: An Introduction published by Polity Press and Il valore della vita. Thomas Mulligan is a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics, where he conducts research in, primarily, economic justice, and collective decision-making. He is the author of a monograph, Justice and the Meritocratic State (2018, Routledge). David Rasmussen is an emeritus professor at Boston College, where he con-

tinues as a research professor. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Philosophy and Social Criticism. He is author and editor of twenty-one books, including Reading Habermas, Mythic-Symbolic Language and Philosophical Anthropology, Universalism vs. Communitarianism, and the Handbook of Critical Theory. He is currently working on a book on the post-Theory of Justice work of John Rawls. Karim Sadek is currently an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, and an assistant professor at Alliance of Civilization Institute, Istanbul. Previously, Sadek was a Mellon PostDoctoral Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at the American University of Beirut, a visiting research fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, and a Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe Fellow at the Forum

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Transregionale Studien in Berlin. His research is located in the intersections between critical social theory, democratic theory, and Islamic political thought. It is concerned with the place and role religion should have in the public realm to best realize the emancipatory ideals of freedom, equality, and justice. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown University. Ingrid Salvatore is an associate professor at the University of Salerno. She is a political philosopher, mainly interested in liberalism and distributive justice. Her most recent publications are on socialism and justice, social justice in liberal theory, reasonableness and redistribution, and the theoretical burdens of distributive justice. She is also the author of Direct Democracy in a Populist Era. She has an interest in feminist theory and is now working on a book on feminism and the idea of patriarchy. Robert B. Talisse is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the

Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in political philosophy, with emphasis on democracy, liberalism, and public deliberation. His most recent book is Overdoing Democracy (2019).

PREFACE Sebastiano Maffettone

All people are pluralist now! Or, perhaps, it is better to say that they were all pluralist. Now only we are pluralist, where by “we” I mean “we liberals” (to use Rorty’s expression). And until few years ago, the large majority of scholars in political and moral philosophy were liberal. That’s why the political and theoretical debate on pluralism has been so rich and intense. However, in the past ten years, liberal pluralism has been contrasted by a wave of nationalistic populism. As it is witnessed by the success of popular political leaders such as Trump, Erdogan, Orban, Putin, Salvini, Le Pen, who do not seem – to use an understatement – particularly worried by pluralism. . . . Nevertheless, theoretical discussion on pluralism remains central. For us liberals, it is still central as a kind of way to understand who we are. As far as nationalist populists and other non-liberals are concerned, it represents a way to grasp the limits of their positions, or – differently stated – the compatibility of their vision with the tradition of liberal democracy. There are many theoretical questions concerning the nature and limits of pluralism. These questions basically address the extension of pluralism; the boundaries of toleration; and more foundationally, the relationships between the epistemological side and the ethical-political side of pluralism. Having read Rawls’s Political Liberalism, we are also convinced that – given the “burdens of the judgement” – some form of “reasonable” disagreement in ethics and politics is structural and not contingent. Because in ethics and politics: 1 2 3 4

freestanding evidence is difficult to find; even when there is agreement on competitive relevant considerations, you can be in disagreement on the weight to assign to each of them; our concepts in this field are often vague; the way in which we reason depends to a considerable extent on personal history and upon the experiences that each of us has had;

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often cases are controversial because normative considerations of similar weight hold on both sides; and in a social limited space, it is sometimes impossible to give priority to different values.

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Starting with these (or similar) premises, this book presents writings of numerous and prestigious authors that together compose a clear and useful panorama of the ways in which pluralism is conceived within the liberal tradition. Two visions confront themselves. According to the first, pluralism is a strict consequence of epistemological doubt and an ineliminable element of personal and interpersonal life. According to the second, instead, pluralism is the problem generated by the problematic compatibility of different worldviews in the same society. In both traditions, the open liberal society is, however, considered a necessary background of any normative political project. The different authors of the essays collected in this volume offer a full range of interpretations of pluralism so conceived. This originates a stimulating and complete presentation of the framework such that no scholar in ethics and politics should omit to read the book. Given the superb level of this volume, it is also natural to encourage the two editors of this book to continue their theoretical effort in the same direction, maybe extending the investigation to capture elements of pluralism also in nonWestern cultures and in non-liberal politics.

WHAT IS PLURALISM?1 An introduction Volker Kaul and Ingrid Salvatore

In the past three decades, political philosophy has been characterized by an intense debate on pluralism. For non-philosophers, this might seem somewhat bizarre if we consider to what extent pluralism seems to be a natural condition of our life. We are accustomed to the fact that other people have opinions different from our own, that they bother of things we don’t care and vice versa, that people from different societies and groups hold values different from those we give importance to. So, one might wonder what could be the aim of a theoretical investigation of pluralism. After all, we change our minds so many times in the course of our lives that there can be no surprise that different heads reason in different ways. For philosophers, and for political philosophers in particular, things are quite different. For political philosophers, pluralism is an utmost challenging question, standing in a line with classical philosophical problems such as the source of political obligations, the extension of freedom, the nature of value, to all of which, not by chance, pluralism is variously connected. What are the sources of pluralism? Is pluralism just the same as conf lict? Is it a value or a matter of fact? Does it entail skepticism? What is its extension? Does the denial of pluralism amount to admitting oppression? In the liberal tradition, two views on pluralism confront each other. According to one view, pluralism is, because of the nature of value, a not eliminable aspect of our personal life. Many things have value: It might be a value to be a good friend and a value to be an honest citizen. But there will come up circumstances in our life when we will not able to be both, and a choice has to be made. But as stated by this view, there are no grounds to assess which is the better choice. According to the other view, the question is not that we are systematically faced with tragic, irresolvable choices. Our conceptions, on the contrary, usually

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have an internal structure that organizes our values and plans of life, allowing us to make choices. What we cannot expect, however, is that people will all end up sharing one and the same conception structuring their ways of life. Taking into account this fact in the organization of societies, as maintained by this view, is a value in itself, the denial of which would lead to an oppressive use of state power. These are two very different approaches to pluralism that have very different grounds and sources. But even if the differences between the two approaches will clearly come out in this book, it will also become evident how the two conceptions go along with the idea that our societies are unavoidably pluralist and that therefore a liberal society is the only way to structure our political organization. It is not pluralism per se that gives rise to liberal institutions or the liberal way of life. It is the assumed unavoidability of pluralism that links it up with liberalism. If this makes immediately clear the political relevance of pluralism, it raises at the same time several questions to which this book aims to provide an answer. Questions about the inevitability of pluralism, its extension, the potential conf lict between pluralism and justice, are only some that deal with the relationship between pluralism and politics in the book. Many contributors problematize the assumption that pluralism is an unavoidable aspect of society or at least of any complex society. Some of them, however, focus in particular on theories according to which liberals state rather than show that pluralist societies are desirable and non-pluralist societies are oppressive. In this latter perspective, the privatization of values or doctrines that liberals supposedly describe or claim for neither is anything but necessary nor is it morally required. On the contrary, societies in which there is not a more extended and shared conception of the good risk to be somewhat pathological. We tried to keep together these two different perspectives to show how acknowledging pluralism can be for some a too strong and for others a too weak requirement for societies. While the essays of the book stand to some extent independently from each other, we would like the book to be read as a whole, with the different authors engaged in a dialogue with one another. The essays are crossed by many overlapping questions and are often intertwined. What we bring out in this introduction is one possible reading of the book, distinguishing one red line where others were possible. We start with a discussion of epistemic pluralism and how it relates to the question of democracy. It follows a section on political pluralism that opposes a more political realist conception of pluralism to a constructivist approach and asks to what extent liberalism actually requires a reasonable consensus on constitutional essentials. In the last section, we discuss cultural and religious pluralism and its potential conf lict with liberalism and justice.

Epistemic pluralism and democracy The collection starts with Robert B. Talisse’s discussion of Isaiah Berlin’s wellknown account of pluralism based on the incommensurability thesis. According

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to this view, values cannot be compared one with another, as we lack any way to order them, prioritizing one over the others. Contrary to what monists believe, we cannot state if, in a given situation, rescuing a life is a better choice than rescuing an important work of art. Since for pluralists, values differ in kind, when we are faced with choices involving values, whatever we do entails moral loss, putting us in front of “tragic conf licts” that cannot be resolved in any rational way. As Talisse points out, however, the incommensurability thesis is often taken to entail a commitment to liberal political institutions, characterized by inclusion, open-mindedness, and free discussion. Making such a connection, we pass from an intuitive understanding of pluralism to a philosophical view of pluralism. But while at the intuitive level, it might seem simply obvious that if our values are indeed incommensurable, we should readily accept liberal political institutions, at the philosophical level, incommensurability cannot lead in any straightforward way to liberalism. And this for the obvious reason that a defense of (intuitive) pluralism, leading to liberalism and open-mindedness, is the defense of a value that by definition cannot have a special status with respect to other values. To defend liberalism, according to Talisse, we should look for something less than a relation of entailment between pluralism and political liberalism and that is based on what he calls a modest epistemic view. By rejecting the metaphysical view of pluralism endorsed by Berlin, Talisse assumes that our inability to commensurate values is only a current state of affairs, while with respect to future developments, we should endorse a “quietist” attitude. Modest epistemological pluralism is the route for defending intuitive pluralism. This does not happen by way of entailment, as Talisse clarifies, since all that modest epistemological pluralism can provide are strong considerations in favor of liberalism. Given our actual ignorance with regard to values, it makes sense to try to improve our knowledge and to do it in ways that foster the improvement of knowledge. Moral learning takes precisely place in “open societies” where people are free to engage in open discussion, confronting their disagreements, raising challenges, and so forth. In a similar way, also according to Matteo Bianchin, some form of deliberative democracy confronts in the most effective way the challenge of pluralism. Bianchin examines the structure of pluralism, asking what has to be the case for genuine pluralism to subsist. As a minimal requirement for a theory of pluralism, according to Bianchin, the very same thing has to be understood by different people in different ways. People talking of different things do not actually disagree. There is pluralism then: When two people hold contrasting beliefs on a given thing or matter, they are both justified in holding. Making a distinction between the concept of justice and the various conceptions of justice, Bianchin argues that people who disagree on which principles should regulate our social cooperation are still able to attribute to each other a conception of justice as long as they agree on the essential properties of just institutions. This opens up for the possibility that the concept of justice might be referentially fixed by a set of facts concerning social institutions, where the

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nature of the relevant facts is the real object of a theory of justice. The different conceptions of justice should be interpreted as different theories about just institutions that can be compared one with another responding to questions such as efficiency, coordination, and stability. In this case, there can be one single correct conception of justice, independently from the fact that people disagree on the nature of the facts that determine the correctness of the claims about justice. Since the reasons that are seen to be relevant differ among persons, groups, communities, and cultures, pluralism has to be expected. But what people differ about are standards, methods, and norms for forming beliefs and judgments on certain kinds of facts rather than the nature of the facts themselves. In this sense, people disagree about epistemological and not metaphysical questions. Epistemological pluralism, as Bianchin takes it, is a descriptive notion, which can be easily explained by the fallibility of our rational capacities and by the limited evidence we have access to. Accordingly, it can be solved by arguments. This means, that for making a genuine case for pluralism, we must deny a descriptive conception of pluralism, which at least in principle cannot exclude that we all might come to share just one single true conception. As Bianchin claims, Rawls’s concept of reasonable pluralism fulfills this condition, insofar as the kind of justification relevant to political philosophy is determined by the fact that people cannot be expected to reach agreement upon a comprehensive moral doctrine despite applying equal epistemic standards. However, according to Bianchin, this is an unstable position. An epistemic view of deliberation does work better in the political field. Examining Joshua Cohen’s attempt to connect the concept of truth to political justification, Bianchin shows how a cognitive conception of the political justification is better understood according to a Habermasian epistemic view of the public use of reason rather than according to a Rawlsian political view. Thomas Mulligan compares collective choice to social choice, starting from the assumption that in making political decisions we are not only interested to make decisions but also to make good decisions. In Mulligan’s account, despite superficial similarities, social decision-making and collective decision-making are quite different. In social choice, what matters, from a moral point of view, is the way a certain decision is taken. According to this model, people do not agree upon what to consider morally relevant. They are assumed to have very different preferences, giving rise to very different policies. Moreover, their differences and disagreements are assumed to be permanent. Given this framework, all that we can do is to select a procedure for deciding. Morally relevant here is the decision procedure and not which decision we take. In the case of collective decisionmaking, on the contrary, people are taken to agree on some morally relevant end and the question concerns the adequate way to achieve it. Social decision-making is generally connected to democracy. In fact, democratic institutions seem to be precisely justified by the fact that there is not just one ‘right answer’ to how to go about taxes, immigration, women empowerment, punishment, the health system, and so forth. Whatever policy we choose,

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it is going to be considered the good one by some section of the population and the wrong one by some other section. However, given that what makes the choice acceptable and binding for all is not its content, but how we have come to decide upon it, if the procedure is fair, then independently of the content, the choice is justified. As Mulligan acknowledges, given our deep disagreement about almost any question concerning the way our societies should be organized, this way of proceeding is supposed to be inescapable. There seems to be no hope for making choices both acceptable and binding for all if we do not distinguish how we decide from what we decide. We have to pay a price in terms of the quality of our decisions and accept the formalism of social decision-making as the only available way to avoid oppression. Mulligan maintains that despite the apparent inevitableness of the formalism of social choice, the collective decision-making scenario is the more appropriate one for our political decisions. The proper way to understand our disputes and disagreements about political questions is not as conf licts about incomparable and incommensurable values, which we cannot hope to overcome, but as conf licts of an epistemic nature. Mulligan states, implicitly or explicitly, that people take their disputes as having objectively correct and incorrect solutions. This means that what they are really interested in is not that the policy they prefer is the one which is implemented but that we come up with the best solution. As a consequence of this, we have to admit in Mulligan’s view that even when we made the best effort to form a reasoned opinion, experts might understand the question better than we do. Therefore, Mulligan acknowledges that understanding our moral considerations to have an epistemic nature makes the case for democracy weaker. Giulia Bistagnino analyzes two different perspectives within the liberal approach, one based on modus vivendi and the other on public reason. According to Bistagnino, both the perspectives share, though for different reasons and with different consequences, the idea that a liberal solution to the problem of pluralism is not manageable starting from objectivist premises. Given the assumption that contemporary democratic societies are characterized by pluralism, Bistagnino considers liberals to conceive political agreements to be characterized both by inclusiveness and stability. As Bistagnino clarifies, the reasons why public reason liberals are so much concerned with inclusiveness are easy to understand. Liberalism is a political theory in which the value of liberty plays a fundamental role. People must not only be left free to choose their lives, but they are also autonomous. Freedom and autonomy give rise to the idea that people are entitled to the justification of social and political institutions. We cannot impose decisions upon others without providing a justification. Coercing people in the absence of justification amounts to authoritarianism. Bistagnino emphasizes that the form of stability liberals want is not any form of stability. Stability obtained through the use of force or through the elimination of pluralism and diversity is obviously ruled out. Stability, in public reason liberalism, is therefore normatively rich, based upon respect for diversity.

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In opposition to the public reason approach, Bistagnino examines the idea of modus vivendi, the methodological approach of political realism. Political realism aims to avoid any sort of idealizations, claiming to consider politics how it really works. Its strong concerns are peace and security. These values are seen as easily justifiable in instrumental terms given that they are necessary for everyone to realize his or her personal goods. Realists, however, also emphasize the need of acceptance by those who are subject to the envisaged settlements. Yet, modus vivendi theorists have no illusions about pluralism, considering only a non-ideal rational consensus possible. The pragmatic compromise represented by modus vivendi is subject to change over time and its content is not determinable ex ante. While this makes agreements highly inclusive, given that they can be supported for very different reasons, it also makes modus vivendi vulnerable to the possibility that the weakest are subject to the inf luence of the most powerful. Despite the differences in the way the two perspectives understand the sources and consequences of pluralism, Bistagnino underlines how the realist approach and the public reason approach share the conviction that there are three things that a liberal theory cannot endorse. First, a liberal theory cannot recur to moral realism. A liberal theory cannot be based upon moral objective facts that are independent from individuals’ mental states. Second, a liberal theory cannot endorse an objective view of reason. Finally, liberalism is incompatible with the idea that legitimacy depends upon objective reasons. In fact, moral truth is supposed to abolish pluralism and diversity, constituting a serious threat for liberty. Bistagnino’s essay aims to put into question this assumed incompatibility of liberalism with objectivism, providing an objectivist defense of political legitimacy. Bistagnino’s proposal for managing pluralism are ‘principled compromises’ among epistemic peers taking place within an objective framework. They are more than mere compromises, since they do not question the rationality of the conf licting parties. On the other hand, they do not reject the three assumptions that both the modus vivendi approach and public reason approach oppose. According to Bistagnino, not all our disagreements are among epistemic peers. Some questions are to be decided by experts with informed opinions. But there are also genuine disagreements among epistemic peers. Of this kind are our disagreements for instance on abortion, death penalty, the balance between liberty and equality, and so on.

Political pluralism and reasonable consensus In the first section, we examined epistemic pluralism and its complex relation with democracy. Now we are going to present theories that we gather under the heading of political pluralism. These theories locate the source of pluralism not in our actual difficulties in establishing moral facts but see it as a permanent aspect of modern societies. Some of the theories therefore make the reciprocal recognition of freedom and autonomy the basis for social cooperation.

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We start this section with Alessandro Ferrara’s rejection of the “experts’ role” and his defense of political liberalism. Ferrara’s point of departure is Plato’s famous myth of the cave, in which all that people can see are shadows, projections of real things on the cave walls. Since they have always lived there, what these people see is all the reality that there is for them – until one day when they decide to send one of them out of the cave. Outside the cave, after an intense period of learning, the explorer sees and understands how all the things really work. Upon the return to the cave, the explorer gives an account of the ‘real’ reality to the people still there. According to one interpretation, Plato intends to defend epistocracy with this famous myth, the form of government based on the idea that knowledge is the legitimate source of government. According to Ferrara, there are important anti-traditionalist and transformative potentials in the myth and, more generally, in grounding the social order on knowledge. But there is also an obvious threat of authoritarianism in it. If Plato represents the champion of epistocracy, the idea that somebody is in the position of making better judgments than others, Rawls’s idea of public reason provides a clear and feasible alternative to it. For Ferrara, A Theory of Justice still represents in “its weakest possible version” “the last reincarnation” of the Platonic myth, while Political Liberalism abandons this idea, turning pluralism into the crucial problem of political philosophy. What is crucial and particularly challenging about pluralism is the fact that, for defending a liberal political order, there must be something on which we do not disagree. But if pluralism is given, by definition, we cannot have such an agreement. Rawls’s public reason, breaking the connection between truth and political obligation, presents a way to sort out this puzzle. Making some adjustments to the Platonic myth, Ferrara asks us to imagine that, differently of what happens in Plato, not only one member of the cave is allowed to go out in the world but a little group. When, as in the original version, they come back, the world-visitors will not have only one report of the world but different reports, only partly overlapping. The plural accounts of the world-visitors make sense of what Ferrara individuates as the Rawlsian (Arendtian) turn. Disagreement is to be expected among people equally educated, among epistemic peers, or to carry on the Platonic metaphor, among men who have been equally exposed to the world outside the cave. For Ferrara, once the relevant contrast is seen not in terms of episteme versus doxa but in terms of different epistemai, there is no longer room for claiming any superiority to rule. It would be simply unreasonable. The idea of the reasonable, the very requirement to be reasonable, to which the alternative is oppression, is for Ferrara an appeal to the deliberative or discursive use of our reason, obliging us, as reasonable beings, to look not for the whole truth but only for what is the “most reasonable for us”. According to Catherine Audard, the deepest challenge faced by liberalism in recent years has come about by what might be called the return of the religious

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conf lict. Due to the multiculturalist characteristics of most of the Western societies and given the challenge represented by theocratic regimes, liberal societies seem to be put under pressure. To what extent a liberal democracy has and might tolerate religious non-liberal views? And on what bases? The question is made urgent by questions that range from women’s equality to freedom of religion and freedom of speech, issues on which religious views take an attitude quite different from the liberal one, promoting and maintaining values that are in deep conf lict with liberalism. Audard examines critically two answers that have been offered to this renewed challenge. The first temptation that we have to avoid is to say that some religions are so deeply incompatible with liberal values that either they need to radically transform themselves or we are entitled to use state power to enforce laws, banning practices that violate rights and limit individual freedom. Defending liberalism in this way, as Audard clarifies, would render liberalism one comprehensive doctrine among others, making it not only intrinsically oppressive but also to some extent also paradoxical. Liberalism would banish religious demands and practices using force for the sake of respecting religious and moral demands. The other temptation to avoid is to privatize religion and religious beliefs, limiting liberalism to a modus vivendi. In lieu of these unfeasible options, Audard proposes Rawls’s idea of public reason, whose meaning and relevance, however, depends upon a distinction between two different kinds of pluralism that Audard introduces. She distinguishes between pluralism at the level of first-order beliefs that plausibly entails incommensurability and pluralism at the level of second-order reasons, where talking of incommensurability is instead implausible. Following Wittgenstein’s anti-private language argument, Audard underlies how the requirement of publicity leads to the transformation of beliefs into reasons. Latter give to the public sphere its emancipatory power. Religious doctrines have already been transformed into public arguments. They are neither private values nor are they incommensurable in that they are intelligible even for those who do not share them. Audard believes that in the light of this distinction not only many objections raised against Rawls’s idea of reasonable pluralism can be answered but that religions conceptualized as public views can be pushed to transform themselves. Rawls’s notion of pluralism is anything but unproblematic. Is pluralism in politics really a question of reasonable pluralism rather than hyperpluralism or pluralism tout court? Valentina Gentile takes on this challenge and discusses modus vivendi types of political arrangements that are based upon non-moral, all-inclusive conceptions of pluralism. Whereas Rawls holds that liberalism is precisely the answer to the challenge of pluralism, he is at the same time convinced that liberalism is compatible only with certain forms of pluralism, namely, those that are reasonable and therefore imply the very notion of tolerance. This Rawlsian claim has come more and more under attack in contemporary political theory. As Gentile writes, there has recently been a realist turn in political thought that notably contests the fact that liberalism is incompatible with unreasonable

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forms of pluralism that have their origin in more fundamentalist comprehensive doctrines. Discussing in particular David McCabe’s Modus Vivendi Liberalism, Gentile shows to what extent these political realist approaches fail to ground liberalism over and above the contingencies of history. Gentile argues that under the condition of hyperpluralism citizens can freely converge on a non-liberal modus vivendi. Therefore, any notion of modus vivendi liberalism necessarily must presuppose some form of ‘minimal moral universalism’ that eventually becomes undistinguishable from Rawls’s political liberalism. In conclusion, if one should be unsatisfied with Rawls’s Kantian conception of pluralism and still believe in the universality of liberalism, political realism is not going to provide any satisfactory answers. Maeve Cooke goes a long way with modus vivendi conceptions of liberalism and criticizes Rawls and Habermas for limiting pluralism and aiming to achieve a consensus. Yet unlike political realists, Cooke has a principled argument for including the whole range of comprehensive doctrines in the public sphere and holds that liberalism is a matter of ethical requirement rather than mere convenience. Her core claim is that deep disagreement is “potentially conducive to individual freedom by opening up possibilities for mutual learning”. But then how to avoid the majoritarian populism that currently is dominating the political scene worldwide? Cooke starts from the assumption that however we might restrict argumentation in the public sphere, “public deliberation could never guarantee the general acceptability of arguments and reasons”. The reason for this is that what she calls “epistemically significant shifts in perception” take place in the non-deliberative contexts of social institutions that lay the groundwork for the available conceptions of the good life. Modern democratic social institutions guarantee formally ethical autonomy in form of a system of individual rights but also substantially constructing notions of the common good that empower citizens to develop their autonomy. It is precisely because modern institutions are required to leave place for contestation and disagreement in the development of personal autonomy, that any idea of the common good and the good life, that they are also asked to provide in their search for truth, remains perpetually under construction and always only provisional. This instability of institutional identities allows Cooke to distinguish political legitimacy from consensus and to provide liberalism with a moral foundation despite the prevalence of deep pluralism. David Rasmussen brings to the surface the ambiguity of the notion of pluralism in liberal political thought and, to some extent, distances himself from the possibility of a reasonable, overlapping consensus. Rasmussen points out that within the Rawlsian framework, despite the accommodating impact of modern political history and culture, “it is ultimately the citizen who makes stability possible by mediating between her own comprehensive doctrine and the realm of the political,” the domain of constitutional rights upon which all reasonable comprehensive doctrines converge. He further states that “comprehensive doctrines are in principle voluntary, and they no longer have the right to coerce

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because of the historical development of a pluralist society – or, put succinctly, because of the fact of pluralism.” And yet, Rasmussen concludes rather skeptically that “even in Rawls’ work, the trace of the clash of civilizations will always remain and the problem of stability will continue as a living tradition.” The question is why comprehensive doctrines might, at times, not incorporate the domain of the political within them and turn unreasonable. What emerges from Rasmussen’s analysis in particular of Huntington’s clash of civilization is that pluralism might be quite independent of individual reason and has its sources in collective rather than individual identities. This is the topic of the last section.

Cultures, religions, and politics Most of the authors until now have conceived disagreement to take place among individuals having their own values or conceptions of the world. It must be recognized, however, that our disagreements often do not arise among individuals who form a conception of the world or are faced with questions of value in vacuum. The values and the conceptions people hold are deeply inf luenced by the culture of the group they belong to, giving rise to potentially conf licting commitments. While these two aspects of pluralism have some element in common, they also differ to some extent. The relation between cultural pluralism and the liberal arrangement of society is the topic of the next essays. Erin I. Kelly identifies two main sources of pluralism. The first source of pluralism is what she calls the practice of rational deliberation. In rational deliberation, reason is understood as means-ends rationality. Its role is limited to enabling us to choose the most adequate mean to realize what happens to motivate us. It neither mandates particular ends, nor does it evaluate them. As people have different interests and goals, rational deliberation will conduce to a variety of life plans and schemes. However, the possibility of pursuing our aims and plans of lives is conditional on our freedom to affirm our beliefs and values, to gather information and so forth. A liberal society will protect the right to do these things, guaranteeing that people may realize their life plans. The second source of pluralism depends on the structure of moral deliberation. Different from rational deliberation, moral deliberation responds to the legitimate interest to ask for moral justifications from people affecting our choices and pursuits of life plans. People who respect each other will adopt the requirement of mutual justifiability as a regulative principle, structuring their social relationships on the basis of rights and liberties. The moral terms of interpersonal relationships, in that sense, provide a justification of rights and liberties independent from that of means-ends rationality. Yet, even when we are guided by a common disposition to accord with others, we have to expect disagreement on whether, for instance, we should help people in need or take measures to protect people from harming themselves. Different, morally permissible sets of shared ends will be possible, and this will generate pluralism.

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Pluralism produced by both moral and rational considerations is far from allowing any sort of doctrines, life plans, or worldviews. A liberal society can support pluralism only insofar as certain fundamental interests and needs, rational and moral agents have in common, are protected. However, as Kelly points out, contrary to what is often believed, this is not sufficient to avoid potential conf licts between liberal toleration and justice, especially when considering persisting forms of historical injustice and their sources. According to Kelly, some philosophers have attempted to identify the proper scope of toleration by specifying the extent of our rational and moral disagreement. They are driven by the idea that while rational and moral agents can reasonably disagree in a society, no life plan that is demonstrably irrational or unethical is compatible with the requirements of a liberal society. But this line of thinking, Kelly argues, is mistaken. Social norms and individual values often have little to do with what rationality or morality requires. They are inf luenced by practices and contingencies, conditioned by cultures and institutions. Some people will endorse and act upon false and even repugnant moral views. However, as a liberal account of toleration must accept what Kelly calls “the practice of liberty”, acceptable pluralism and tolerance are only political requirements of justice, involving a moral commitment just at an institutional level. In this view, reasonable people committed to democratic values would have to be tolerant of irrational and even incoherent views, provided that they do not violate the requirements of democratic institutions. But given the complex dynamics of historical injustice, this still allows group bias and norms of exclusion to continue to operate in the background culture, generating a conf lict between pluralism and justice. To solve this problem, Kelly proposes to pair liberal toleration with a public commitment to redress historical injustice without restricting personal liberties. The potential conf lict between justice and cultures is also at the center of Ingrid Salvatore’s essay. Salvatore reviews a number of philosophical perspectives defending the view, according to which we are in effect not entitled to judge the institutional arrangement of societies to which we do not belong, under the heading of cultural pluralism. As liberalism denies that the justice or injustice of rules and institutions depend upon the differences between societies, liberalism and cultural pluralism are two opposing views. What they disagree about is the source of our obligations. For liberals, obligations are on the one hand required for the sake of collective interest, but on the other hand, we might be tempted to not live up to them when they run against our private interests or good. Obligations, in this sense, can be seen as burdens: Their distribution is important to us. Liberals do not affirm that individuals’ private interests always prevail over the collective good. Distributive justice is supposed to establish when this is not the case. But liberals do not accept that individual interests never prevail, nor do they believe that there is a correspondence between the private and the common good. For liberals, contemporary societies are characterized by the fact that people do not share all of their interests. They have different conceptions

12 Volker Kaul and Ingrid Salvatore

of the good and different values. They pursue different projects of life, and very different things are considered to be of crucial importance in their lives. As such a plurality of conceptions of the good is seen by liberals as an unavoidable internal phenomenon of any complex society, grounding obligations on a shared conception of the good is unrealistic and might be obtained only by way of oppression. According to cultural pluralists, however, grounding obligations on the distributive view liberals take for granted is not the only way to proceed. Different societies may have different ways to ground obligations and different justified obligations. Salvatore argues that clarifying the nature of the cultural pluralists’ critique and taking seriously our strong intuition that we cannot morally judge people living under institutions we consider unjust helps us to arrive at a more convincing view of liberalism. Karim Sadek, contrary to Kelly and Salvatore, is very critical of the liberal response to pluralism, in particular with regard to Islamic politics. He contends, first, that liberalism is based upon an individual conception of the good that leaves no room for the notion of the absolute truth, as we can find it in Islamic thought. Second, he argues that liberalism tends to be strongly secular in the sense that religion is granted little to no space in the public sphere and politics. Sadek’s intention therefore is to elaborate a theory of public reasoning that does not exclude religion a priori. Yet if “the whole point of the Islamic state, its raison d’être, is ‘to realize shari’a, to instantiate the absolute in the course of history, and to connect the divine with the human’”, as Sadek sustains following Rached Ghannouchi, how can Muslims accept, to have pluralism within Islam and tolerate other communities? Sadek’s answer is that Islam despite its foundation on divine authority allows for non-authoritarian and non-fundamentalist reasoning, the two conditions brought forth by Sadek that make religious arguments stand in continuity with public reason. Islam cannot collapse into authoritarian conceptions of knowledge and justification, since it cannot do without interpretation (ijtihad) to figure out God’s law. This interpretation in turn must remain revisable and fallible in the absence of an epistemic status of certainty. The theoretical uncertainty makes it also that Muslims can adopt a non-fundamentalist attitude that avoids that disagreements are conducive to social fragmentation. According to Sadek, a non-fundamentalist attitude abstracts from “substantive instantiations of ideals and principles” that constitute collective and individual identities and conceives therefore pluralism and the resulting disagreement as “opportunities for growth and learning”. Volker Kaul starts from the observation that liberalism over the past decades has opened up substantially to the notion of cultural and religious pluralism, giving rise to what has come to be known as liberal multiculturalism and liberal nationalism. Yet what distinguishes these theories from communitarianism or multiculturalism tout court is the fact that they consider cultural identities to be the result of a process of identification and endorsement. It is not that individuals

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simply find themselves to have certain identities; rather, individuals choose their identities and remain therefore free despite the claims of culture. Kaul argues that the liberal concept of cultural pluralism is logically f lawed and incoherent. Liberals, who stand in line with Joseph Raz in the tradition of positive freedom, believe that freedom of choice can be realized only within a cultural context, given that cultures attribute meaning to available options. Yet cultural meaning cannot be freestanding not having a grip upon individuals if it is supposed to direct their choices. Meaning must enter an individual’s mind and create subjective meaning. However, if freedom presupposes meaning, cultural identity cannot be a matter of choice and identification but is given to individuals. This puts liberal theory under strain, given that it tends to put into question the very possibility of individual agency.

In lieu of conclusion We hope that this book sheds light, first, on the intricate difficulties to defend a theoretical position on pluralism over and above our acknowledgement of differences between individuals on the hand and communities on the other hand. In this regard, the book distinguishes between three theoretical positions – epistemic, political, and cultural or practice-based pluralism – and shows the connections but also the differences among these theories. Second, we hope that the book makes clear that a pluralist stance is compatible with different, partly opposing political models. In this sense, our presentation here is just one step in clarifying the question of pluralism in politics.

Note 1 Ingrid Salvatore wrote the first two sections, Volker Kaul is the author of the last three sections.

PART I

Epistemic pluralism and democracy

1 FROM PLURALISM TO LIBERALISM The long way around Robert B. Talisse

Ever since Isaiah Berlin popularized the doctrine, pluralists have tended to maintain that pluralism provides a compelling and direct justification of an especially attractive form of liberalism.1 Their thought seems to be that if, as pluralism asserts, it is a conceptual truth that objective goods can collide and exclude each other, then no single value perspective could encompass all of the legitimate goods that a human life or institution could manifest. From this it is alleged to follow that political institutions are fundamentally disordered when they aspire to orient human lives towards some purported all-embracing ideal. Liberalism is then identified as that social order which rejects the imposition of such an orientation, recognizes the inescapability of value collision, and accommodates the resulting need for individuals to choose among objectively good, but nonetheless excluding, options. Hence, it is held that pluralism justifies liberalism.2 Call this the intuitive argument. It is admittedly intuitive; indeed, many find it positively attractive. To be sure, the argument as presented is but a sketch. Some might call it sketchy. Nonetheless, the prevailing thought among pluralists is that a properly nuanced version of the intuitive argument is almost surely correct. Alas, the intuitive argument cannot succeed. There could be no entailment from pluralism to liberalism of the kind envisioned. In this chapter, I begin by explaining why this is so in the first section. Then, in the second section, I explore a less direct, and perhaps less intuitive, argument for liberal political commitments from pluralist premises. This indirect argument employs mediating epistemological and psychological claims that, in the end, do not supply an entailment from pluralism to liberalism but at best a strong reason for pluralists to embrace liberalism. So, pluralists can indeed think their way into liberal political commitments, but the deliberative route is not immediate or deductive; they must take the long way around, as it were. In the concluding section, I tie up some loose threads concerning the different varieties of pluralism. I should

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affirm straightaway that the question of whether the resulting case for liberalism compares favorably with non-pluralist liberal arguments will not be examined here. I aim to offer an argument for abandoning the dominant strategy among pluralists for justifying liberalism, and a sketch of a more complicated strategy that might take its place.

The intuitive argument and why it must fail To show why the intuitive argument cannot succeed, it is necessary to begin by diagnosing its intuitiveness, and this calls for a disambiguation among popular and philosophical senses of the term pluralism. My contention is that much of the appeal of the intuitive argument derives from the term itself. Pluralism often functions in the vernacular as shorthand for an admirable family of commitments, including anti-dogmatism, open-mindedness, non-conformism, inclusiveness, and so on. To simplify, let’s say that pluralism in this popular sense is the positive commitment to diversity; it is not only the recognition but also the appreciation the multiplicity of values, projects, and ways of life to which people devote themselves. Notice that popular pluralism has a decidedly second-order f lavor; it is not a view about what is good but rather the view that we should acknowledge, perhaps celebrate (or at least not begrudge), the diversity of views of the good. We are to recognize that the lives of monks, reformers, homemakers, poets, and actuaries can all manifest their distinctive values; moreover, we are to regard it as a good thing (or at least not a bad thing) that some live lives of solitary contemplation, others devote themselves to political activism, and still others to make art, raise families, and do business. To be sure, the actuary and the poet may disagree over many moral questions, from the meaning of life to tax policy. But pluralism in the popular sense does not work at this level of moral disagreement. Rather, popular pluralism takes itself to stand above the fray of everyday moral dispute, taking no stance on many of the issues over which people divide. It is rather a view that affirms the multiplicity of moral perspectives from which such disputes arise and counsels all to live and let live. Popular pluralism is therefore not only tolerant and open; it is in addition irenic and conciliatory. Hence its appeal. Pluralism in this popular sense is attractive, but within the context of the intuitive argument, serious difficulties lurk. Concepts such as “inclusion,” “openmindedness,” and “diversity” are notoriously ideal dependent: To be inclusive is to include everything that ought to be included, to appreciate diversity is to appreciate the multiplicity of things that should be appreciated, and to have an open-mind is to be open to those possibilities that are worthy of consideration. Although they are often appealed to as if they were strictly descriptive, the content of such concepts derives from the normative theory presupposed by the person employing them. Accordingly, liberal democrats and elitist oligarchs might both affirm the value of inclusiveness; they disagree about what ought to be included. The skeptical debunker and the astrologer both tout the virtue of open-mindedness; their dispute concerns the issue of what ought to be counted as evidence. Hence, the

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popular pluralist’s simple call for people to appreciate diversity, be inclusive, and retain an open mind is practically empty, and her call can do no reconciliatory work in the face of moral disagreement until she makes explicit her underlying value commitments. Consequently, if it is to avoid vacuity, popular pluralism must affirm a specific conception of diversity, inclusion, and open-mindedness and their value. But once the popular pluralist does that, her view becomes just one more debatable conception of what is of value, and popular pluralism forfeits its second-order character. Recall that this seemingly second-order and conciliatory feature was popular pluralism’s main selling point. Popular pluralism is either vacuous or unstable; at best, it is a code word rather than a philosophical position. And in any case, when it functions as a code word, it invokes a series of moral and social commitments that are characteristic of liberal societies. Pluralism in the popular sense therefore is more an invocation of liberalism than an argument in its favor. No doubt part of the widespread appeal of the intuitive argument owes to the fact that it is often no more than an affirmation of liberal values cleverly disguised as a defense of them. If the intuitive argument is to be an argument at all, one needs to look beyond the popular sense of pluralism and towards pluralism as a philosophical thesis. One way to get a grip on pluralism as a decidedly philosophical view is to examine its primary philosophical opposition. Pluralism is opposed to monism. Monism is the view that all valuable things are either instances of the one thing that is ultimately or intrinsically valuable or instruments towards attaining or producing instances or quantities of that one thing. To borrow Ronald Dworkin’s slogan, monism is the view that “value is one big thing” (2011: 1). Importantly, monism is not the claim that everyone should be the same or that there is but one way in which all should live. The monist need not embrace conformity, and she need not deny that there is rich diversity of good things; she asserts only that goodness in all of its instances is to be explained by reference to some one thing that is ultimately of value. To see this, consider that a monist could claim that the toleration of moral difference is intrinsically good; similarly, a monist could hold that moral variety is itself that which is ultimately of value. I do not claim that either of these possible monist positions would be viable; I claim only that they are available in conceptual space and would be instances of monism that nonetheless reject conformity and homogeneity. But if one is looking for an actual monist view that can value human difference, consider John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Mill holds that utility is “the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions” (1978: 10) but then explains that as “progressive beings” (1978: 10) we produce the most utility when we each “[pursue] our own good in our own way” (1978: 12). According to Mill, then, there is the one ultimate value, but it can be realized in a variety of ways. Monism hence is not a one-size-fits-all conception of value; rather, it says that value is one-thing-that-comes-in-many-sizes. For monism and pluralism to be opposing views, there must be some claim that one must assert that the other must deny. Now, the distinctive component

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of monism is the view that all goods are commensurable. On the simple utilitarian version, this means that for any two goods, it must be the case that one is better than the other, or else they are equally valuable.3 Of course, a utilitarian could hold that, with regard to certain pairs of values, informational and other limitations will make it impossible to discover the relative worth of the options. A monist could hold that certain value conf licts are undecidable by human agents, given their cognitive and other constraints. But even in cases of undecidability, monists must hold as a conceptual point that, among any two valuable things, either one is better than the other, or else they are equal in value. Commensurability follows from monism: If value is indeed one big thing, then differences among good things are never differences of kind. So, if there are differences among good things, they must be differences of degree. That’s the sine qua non of monism. From this it is clear that pluralism is not simply the claim that many things are of value. Nor it is merely the popular pluralist claim that we should embrace value difference. Philosophical pluralism holds that goods are irreducibly many, that there are differences in kind among values, and that some goods are incommensurable with others. Pluralism, then, is the view that there could be two goods that are not equally valuable, when neither is better than the other. This is to say that incommensurablism is the sine qua non of pluralism.4 One direct implication of pluralism is that there could be conflicts among values that do not admit of a uniquely rational resolution. When goods are incommensurable, there is no answer concerning which one trumps, and no easy way to establish a third value by means of which to adjudicate the conf lict; thus when one must choose between them, there is no uniquely rational moral perspective from which one could decide which is best. Pluralism holds that moral theory runs out, and we sometimes confront tragic choices. But it is worth repeating that, according to the pluralist, the inescapability of tragic choices is not due to contingent limitations of human cognition, agency, or other resources. We inevitably face tragic conf licts because of the structure of value. That is, according to the pluralist, there are goods that are intrinsically in conf lict with other goods. Berlin held that it is in the “essence” of certain values to “collide” in this way (1990: 12); he affirmed that some values are in “perpetual rivalry” (2002: 216) and “clash irreconcilably” (2002: 42). Hence, the pluralist countenances value conf licts that are impossible to ameliorate, conf licts that cannot be resolved without violating objective goods and betraying objective obligations. This, Berlin claims, is a “necessary, not a contingent truth” (2002: 215) about value. Accordingly, “The need to choose, to sacrifice some ultimate values to others, turns out to be a permanent characteristic of the human predicament” (2002: 43), and ours is a world of “irreparable [moral] loss” (1990: 12).5 We now have a clear view of what philosophical pluralism is. George Crowder summarizes it nicely as the view according to which there are objective values that are (1) universal, (2) plural, (3) incommensurable, and (4) in conf lict with other objective values (2002: 45). For our present purposes, it is best to focus on the rejection of commensurabilism, which is the monist’s central contention. Put

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positively, then, pluralism must affirm (whereas monism must deny) that there are incommensurable goods. Once clearly identified, it is not difficult to show that the intuitive argument cannot succeed. To be blunt: The intuitive argument fails because it attempts to derive a conclusion about what is of value from a thesis about value’s structure. As we have seen, pluralism is a thesis strictly about the structure of value; it is not clear how it could entail a conclusion regarding what political arrangement is to be valued. In fact, one suspects that pluralism entails no prescriptive content whatsoever; it is, one might say, prescriptively barren.6 But one need not argue for this broader thesis to defeat the intuitive argument. All that is necessary is to show that pluralism is consistent with anti-liberal political commitments. This suffices to defeat the supposed entailment from pluralism to liberalism. It seems that someone could with consistency be both a pluralist and a tyrant. Imagine a tyrant who recognizes a plurality of objective incommensurable values but holds (incorrectly, we might add) that things such as power, control, domination, hegemony, conformity, stability, cruelty, and the humiliation of others are the values. He recognizes that there are instances of inevitable conf lict among his values, as when control and humiliation or domination and conformity pull in incompatible directions.7 He also recognizes that there is no singly rational way to commensurate the values he recognizes. He sees that there is no uniquely rational way to weigh or measure the value of stability against the value of humiliating others; these are heterogeneous goods. Crucially, the pluralist’s disagreement with this tyrant is not over the structure of value but what is of value. As there is no inconsistency in the idea of a tyrant who embraces pluralism, there is no entailment from pluralism to liberalism. Maybe the pluralist will reply that our tyrant has a conception of what is valuable that is too distorted to count as a moral view at all, let alone a pluralist view of value. After all, the pluralist holds that there are incommensurable objective values. Our envisioned tyrant might fail to be a pluralist in virtue of failing to recognize objective goods as such. His values, it might be argued, are decidedly subjective in that he values his power and his ability to humiliate others. Fair enough. I myself am not moved by this retort, but it is no matter. Consider a case that removes occasion for this reply. Imagine a polity that recognizes the truth of pluralism and has an adequately non-distorted conception of what is of value. This polity, let us say, selects some broad, but internally consistent, subset of all of the valuable ways of life and forces each citizen to live according to one of these ways. We could even add that the polity allows each citizen to choose among the officially sanctioned options. Think of such a society as a kind of Platonic republic, only with more than three kinds of life available to citizens. Let’s say that the polity allows citizens to choose from among ten ways of life that are objectively good. Of course, this arrangement still disallows many objectively valuable life plans, but it also precludes citizens from choosing to live objectively bad lives. In any case, this political order is not liberal.

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Now, a pluralist might object to this arrangement on many grounds. Perhaps it will be said that the envisioned polity does not adequately respect individual freedom or autonomy. But according to the pluralist, these values are but two values among many, and there is no way to claim that they are in every case overriding. Thus, it is not clear that there is any violation of pluralism involved in a Platonic republic. A Platonic republic of the kind we have described is a nonliberal political order that is consistent with pluralism. Therefore, pluralism does not entail liberalism. This same result can be derived by appeal to the error of trying to derive an ought from an is.8 As we have seen, pluralism strictly affirms that there are many objective and incommensurable values, but this entails nothing about what one should value and so entails nothing about what one should do, or embrace. To derive a prescription, one must conjoin pluralism with an additional premise. In fact, Berlin implicitly recognizes this. In his famous argument from pluralism to negative liberty, Berlin reasons from the truth of pluralism to the inevitability of conf licts among incommensurable values. He then affirms that human beings must choose among such values. Next he observes that we place “immense value on the freedom to choose” (2002: 214). And this, he claims, demonstrates that politically, we must be entitled to choose. However, in claiming that we immensely value freedom of choice, Berlin introduces a psychological premise, a claim that is no part of pluralism itself. Even with the added psychological premise, Berlin’s argument fails. It simply does not follow from the fact that we immensely value the freedom to choose that the state must permit us to choose. To secure his intended conclusion, Berlin needs an explicitly prescriptive premise, namely, that the state must provide that which we immensely value. The trouble is that the force of Berlin’s prescriptive conclusion depends not on pluralism but on the added premise about what the state must provide. Pluralism is doing no work in the argument. To sum up: Pluralism is a thesis about the structure of value. It is the thesis that there are incommensurable objective goods. Hence, pluralism is not a thesis about what is of value. So, it is not clear how it could entail the conclusion that we ought to embrace liberal political commitments. We might say, then, that the intuitive argument is at best enthymematic. But in that case, the pluralist faces a new difficulty, namely, that of supplying an additional premise that both secures the entailment and is consistent with pluralism. It is not clear that this could succeed. Any attempt to complete the inference will have to invoke a premise that identifies a value and assigns to it an overriding or adjudicating role, but the very idea that there could be a trumping value fit to adjudicate conf licts among other values is inimical to pluralism. For example, one might argue that since there is a plurality of objective incommensurable values and we each are required to appreciate that plurality, we all should favor a liberal political order. Alternatively, one might argue that because objective values are incommensurably and we must respect each other’s ability to choose among them, we should embrace liberalism. But these both identify a requirement – presumably

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something akin to an obligation to tolerate value difference – that is assigned a trumping role over the full range of other values that may collide. It is not clear how a pluralist could assign any specific value to such a role. One may ask why, on the pluralist picture, should any value be presumed suitable for the role of adjudicating norm in conf licts among other values? Why should toleration prevail as the governing norm when other objective values are at stake? How could the case be made for thinking that the dominant norm for dealing with value conf lict is toleration unless it could be shown, pace pluralism, that toleration is in some sense more valuable or better than the values that happen to be in conf lict in any given instance? One could, of course, just say that it is part of being a liberal to think that toleration plays this adjudicative role in the moral economy of value conf lict. And this seems, to me at least, correct. But this reply suggests again that the intuitive argument is an affirmation of liberalism posing as an argument from pluralism to liberalism; it is thus no argument at all. More important, the foregoing considerations generalize to any premise employed to close the is-ought gap in the intuitive argument. Any additional premise will assign to some moral value the task of governing conf licts among all other values, and the very idea of such a value runs afoul of pluralism. It seems, then, that the intuitive argument, even when formulated with precision and detail, is doomed.

The indirect argument Admittedly, even in light of this argument, there is residual attractiveness in the thought that the sheer variety of goods of the kind that pluralism countenances provides some kind of reason to favor liberal political arrangements. In the remainder of this chapter, I sketch a way of vindicating this general idea.9 To be clear, the route I shall suggest from pluralism to liberalism is circuitous, and ultimately, the strength of the inference falls far short of entailment. Moreover, the argument I present involves what I suspect some Berlinians will regard as an unacceptably diluted version of pluralism. For what it may be worth, I myself happen to find Berlinian pluralism unattractive; in any case, I argue that the modest pluralism on offer is consistent with the more robust versions. If I am correct that the modest pluralism I propose is able to satisfy the desideratum of providing a pluralist rationale for embracing liberalism, the lesson for Berlinians might be that the more robust aspects of their pluralism should play no role in their reasoning in favor of liberal politics. To begin, some taxonomy is required. We’ve seen that pluralism is incommensurabilism about objective value. As one would expect, there are different varieties of pluralism, and they can be distinguished according to their different interpretations of incommensurability. Two broad categories suggest themselves: metaphysical and epistemological. Loosely put, in explaining incommensurability, metaphysical pluralists appeal to what values are, whereas epistemological pluralists appeal to what we (can) know about values.

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It is clear that Isaiah Berlin promoted a metaphysical pluralism. He regarded values as quasi-Platonic objects vying for instantiation in our lives but without a Form of The Good to unify them. William James (1977) should also count as a metaphysical pluralist, though his pluralism differs importantly from Berlin’s. James held that the good is the satisfaction of desire, yet he denied the homogeneity of desires. That is, according to James, there is incommensurability among desires; one’s desire for A can be different in kind, not merely in degree, from one’s desire for B. Although James would certainly have opposed the Berlinian ontology of value-objects, his pluralism nonetheless is driven by a metaphysics of heterogeneous and incommensurable psychological states.10 One might say, then, that whereas Berlin promotes an ontological version of metaphysical pluralism, James offers a psychological formulation of the view. Epistemological pluralism claims that some values are incommensurable with others because we are unable to commensurate them. Epistemological pluralism comes in two grades: strong and modest. The strong grade treats incommensurability as intrinsic; it holds that our epistemic powers, even in full development and exercise, are not sufficient to commensurate all goods. Hence, strong epistemological pluralism involves a skeptical stance towards the possibility of the rational resolution value conf lict. The modest variant claims that given the current state of moral knowledge and our deliberative capacities, we are unable to commensurate all goods. The modest view thus eschews a skeptical stance towards the resolution of value conf lict and says only that we currently know of no means of reasonably resolving them all. On both epistemological views, the moral explananda outstrip our moral theories, so our moral knowledge and practice are incomplete. The epistemological views differ on the question of whether this is a necessary feature of our moral epistemology. The strong view says yes; the modest view does not. A few additional points about these contrasts deserve emphasis. First, note that strong epistemological pluralism complements metaphysical pluralism. In fact, an ontological pluralist is likely to embrace the strong epistemological view, holding that value ontology explains the intrinsic epistemological indeterminacy of certain conf licts. Indeed, the two may support each other: Ontological pluralism explains the epistemic indeterminacy, and the epistemic indeterminacy serves as evidence for the heterogeneous value ontology. The psychological pluralist may also embrace the strong version of epistemological pluralism; she will hold that there are instances of irresolvable value conf lict because there could be no way to know how to commensurate the heterogeneous psychological states that are constitutive of value. Of course, the metaphysical pluralist may decline to adopt any further views, epistemological or otherwise, as well. The relationship between the modest epistemological view and metaphysical versions of pluralism is more complicated. Modest epistemological pluralists must be quietists about the metaphysics of value. They must not reject the claims of the metaphysical pluralist but rather merely decline to affirm them.11 Similarly, the modest epistemological view refuses the core of strong epistemological pluralism;

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again, the modesty of the view consists in its quietism on the deeper epistemological and metaphysical issues. Yet this is not evasion; the modest epistemological pluralist asserts that moral knowledge is not yet sufficiently developed to warrant bolder claims about the structure and epistemology of value. Hence, as I drew the contrast, the strong epistemological view asserts that indeterminacy is an insurmountable feature of moral epistemology, whereas the modest epistemological pluralist does not go so far as to deny this but only does not assert what the strong view asserts. The modest epistemological view refrains from proposing any deeper explanation of the inability to commensurate. It declines to speak to the nature of value and resists grand epistemological claims about the causes of our inability to commensurate. But crucially, is also does not deny any such claims. Instead, modest epistemological pluralism goes quietist with respect to value ontology and the deeper moral epistemic issues. It leaves such questions open and calls for ongoing metaphysical and epistemological investigation. With these preliminary points in place, we can proceed. Although the intuitive argument’s purported entailment from pluralist premises to liberal commitments cannot be forged, modest epistemological pluralism can nonetheless provide a basis for adopting such commitments. To explain: Modest epistemological pluralism begins from the fact that moral experience confronts us with conf licts among goods that we do not know how to commensurate. It then affirms that it is not yet clear precisely what to make of this inability, beyond the uncontroversial claims that our moral knowledge is yet incomplete, and for all we know at present, it could be completed with further inquiry. Modest epistemological pluralism therefore holds open the possibility of moral progress. In this way, modest epistemological pluralism involves a conative component; in moral inquiry, we strive for something that we are not sure can be realized. And this striving is fueled by the realization that we presently do not have adequate moral knowledge. This conative ingredient of modest epistemological pluralism gives it some bite. Though it does not strictly require it, modest epistemological pluralism engenders a kind of epistemic humility that rides alongside its exhortation for further inquiry. And this humility is a natural cognitive counterpart to social and moral commitments to familiar understandings of toleration, open-mindedness, diversity, inclusion, and the rest. That is, modest epistemic pluralism provides a reason to adopt these norms. The connection between epistemic humility and the norms of toleration and open dialogue is not difficult to see. If one is epistemically humble, one’s humility consists in the realization that one’s epistemological situation could be improved. The epistemically humble agent recognizes that she is a fallible and cognitively constrained creature who must rely on others; she acknowledges that she does not have all of the facts, cannot always adequately grasp all of the implications of the facts she has, and often misconstrues the relations between facts. She thus sees that maintaining certain kinds of relations with others is a crucial ingredient in her own epistemological and cognitive wellbeing. More

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specifically, she sees that to sustain conditions favorable to her own epistemological success, she needs to preserve cognitive spaces in which she can engage with others in reasoned disagreement, challenge, critique, and argument. Moreover, she recognizes that the norms and structures that compose these spaces need also to be vulnerable to criticism. Given these features of the kind of humility that modest epistemological pluralism encourages, those who embrace that view have reason to endorse a social and political order that is centrally focused on protecting a robust collection of familiar liberal political norms. Consider that modest epistemological pluralism encourages us to hold that to reason well about how to live, we must maintain conditions whereby we can share moral perspectives and compare moral reasons. Moreover, to make progress in our moral thinking, we need others to fully occupy moral perspectives that are different from our own; we each must enjoy broad latitude to live according to our own lights and to conduct our own experiments in living. And finally, dialogue and disagreement between views must be as open as is dialectically possible, allowing challenges and new considerations from all quarters in an ongoing exchange of arguments. We want to live as best as we can, and this requires knowing something about value, nature, and the possibilities of human life. To pursue knowledge of these kinds, we need others. Moreover, we need to live together in an open society. And an open society is a liberal society. The same conclusion can be approached from a different angle. Consider how your moral and cognitive aims are frustrated when open society norms fail. Imagine yourself living in a society where one is forbidden to question certain cherished ideas about value. You may find yourself firmly embracing these cherished views, but you eventually would come to see your commitment as formed by social pressure rather than by evidence. Or imagine yourself living in a society where information is strictly controlled so that certain “dangerous moral ideas” can never receive any articulation or support. You may indeed reject the dangerous ideas, but you would grow to worry that your steadfast rejection of them is the result of conditioning rather than reasoning. Consequently, your own moral commitments would begin to look suspect, alien, perhaps even deformed or pathological. The point is this: To see our moral commitments as properly formed and well-ordered, we need to be able to see them as the product of investigation, reasoning, and deliberation. Our capacity to regard our commitments in this way depends on our capacity to assess the conditions under which they were formed as (at the very least) favorable to moral inquiry. Modest epistemological pluralism helps us to identify these conditions as roughly liberal in character, conditions where moral differences are permitted to thrive, dissent and criticism are protected and perhaps encouraged, and individuals are afforded moral space to pursue their own best moral vision. One might wonder at this point whether the resulting picture of the reasoning from pluralism to liberalism hasn’t furtively discarded pluralism altogether. After all, the work in the indirect argument is done almost entirely by the conative

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ideal of moral inquiry. As I affirmed earlier, whatever pluralism and monism are, there must be something that the one must assert that the other must deny. And surely a monist could uphold the ideas that our moral knowledge is yet incomplete, we ought to continue investigating, and our investigations are aided by the open society norms characteristic of a liberal political order. What, then, is distinctively pluralist about the indirect argument? This challenge can be met by first identifying what is distinctively pluralist about modest epistemological pluralism. Modest epistemological pluralism is an anti-monist view because it does not affirm what monist views must. Again, the monist must affirm commensurabilism; she must hold that for any two goods, either one is better than the other, or else they are equal in value. Accordingly, the monist must assert that the very idea of a good that is neither better than, worse than, nor equal in value to, some other good is a conceptual confusion. According to the monist, commensurability is a feature of value’s structure; the idea of an incommensurable good is akin to that of a centerless circle. That is, on the monist view, there could be no such good that is incommensurable with other goods. The modest epistemological pluralist does not affirm what the monist must. He denies that the very idea of incommensurable goods is confused. To be sure, the modest epistemological pluralist does not affirm anything beyond the claim that we confront value conf licts where we do not know how to commensurate the competing values; this modest epistemological conception of incommensurability is, on his view, all that needs to be affirmed. He also contends that the question of whether there are incommensurable goods in the robust sense proposed by the metaphysical pluralist is as yet open. For the question to be regarded as open, the metaphysical pluralist’s idea of incommensurable goods must be affirmed to be coherent. And this is enough to put the modest epistemological pluralist at odds with the monist. So, perhaps despite appearances, the indirect argument indeed draws from an authentic version of pluralism. Now, to be sure, the kind of support on offer for liberal political arrangements is itself not distinctively pluralist. Any monist who holds a moral epistemology with a conative element will be able to avail herself of the kind of argument I have proposed. The indirect argument is in that sense not distinctively pluralist. But why should this be seen as a defect? In fact, my inclination is to regard it as a strength of a moral view that it can affirm reasons in support of liberal political arrangements that are accessible to moral perspectives other than itself. That the modest epistemological pluralist can find within his position reasons to uphold liberal political arrangements that do not put him at odds with his opposition in moral theory looks like a feature rather than a bug. Moreover, the idea, which apparently attracted Berlin, that pluralism should provide a unique case for liberalism, one that is exclusively pluralist, looks distorted. The political order engendered by liberal norms inevitably involves deep moral disagreements, including disagreements about whether pluralism in any of its varieties is correct. An argument for liberalism that proceeds from the

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premise that only one moral view could properly support liberal norms seems counterproductive at best.

Conclusion Pluralists who wish to reason from their value theory to liberal political commitments, then, must take the long way around. They accordingly should give up the project of trying to complete the inference suggested by the intuitive argument and build their case for liberalism from considerations that are in the neighborhood of their value theory though not exclusive to it. The indirect argument I have proposed is one example of the kind of reasoning I think is available to the pluralist. Before concluding, though, a final clarification is in order. I presented the indirect argument as drawing exclusively from one version of pluralism, namely, modest epistemological pluralism. For reasons I have not provided in this chapter, this version of pluralism seems to me to be the most viable. One wonders, though, whether the indirect argument is not also embraceable by the other versions of pluralism. My sense is that it is. Here’s why. Even the most robust versions of metaphysical pluralism deny that all goods are incommensurable. To repeat, in any of its forms, pluralism is the claim that there are incommensurable goods. This is consistent with the view that among some value pairs that may conf licts, there is a third value in virtue of which the conf lict could be uniquely rationally decided. And this is as it should be. It would be absurd to think that every value conf lict is tragic. So even the most uncompromising pluralist holds that some values are commensurable. Given this, it falls to the metaphysical pluralist to distinguish between legitimately tragic conf licts among incommensurable values and conf licts among commensurable values that nonetheless are too difficult to resolve. And it seems to me that it would be wise for the metaphysical pluralist to concede that this distinction is not easily drawn. At the very least, the advocates of the more robust forms of pluralism have not yet proposed a solid criterion for distinguishing the two kinds of case, and the matter surely becomes murkier when we turn from the task of providing an in-principle criterion to considering real-life cases of moral conf lict where it seems that the very nature of the conf lict is up for grabs. That is, if the metaphysical pluralist contends that there are some commensurable values and concedes that value conf licts do not always wear their nature on their sleeve, as it were, then she should adopt the modest epistemic pluralist’s stance in some cases. That is, even the Berlinian should say that with respect to some enduring conf licts, it is as yet unclear whether the clash is due to the (metaphysical) incommensurability of the values in play rather than our epistemological limitations. And this matter should be regarded by the metaphysical pluralist as an urgent occasion for moral inquiry. With this admission, the metaphysical pluralist puts the indirect argument in motion.

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Thus, the more robust forms of pluralism could embrace the indirect argument. For there are some cases in which the metaphysical pluralist must be driven to adopt the stance of the modest epistemological pluralist, namely, cases in which it is as yet unclear whether a given value conf lict involves intrinsically incommensurable goods rather than goods whose means of commensuration are unknown to us. To be sure, the suggestion is that the more robust forms of pluralism should base their case for liberalism on an attenuated version of what they see as the complete moral truth. In this sense, the long way around from pluralism to liberalism involves moral loss for the full-bore pluralist. But such a pluralist is definitely no stranger to moral loss.

Notes 1 By “pluralism” I mean what is sometimes called value pluralism, and I defer mainly to Berlin’s formulation of the view. There is a variety of pluralist views in currency; however, much of my engagement with pluralism in this essay does not require me to disambiguate these varieties, though some key distinctions will be introduced later. 2 Berlin clearly affirms this kind of argument, as do contemporary Berlinians such as Raz (1986), Galston (2002, 2005), Flathman (2005), and Crowder (2002, 2007). Others who are influenced by Berlin have rejected a supposed entailment to liberalism; see especially Gray (2000) and Hampshire (2000), who think that pluralism supports a Hobbesian “modus vivendi” political vision. Kekes (1993, 1998) argues that pluralism entails political conservativism. 3 Of course, not all monisms are utilitarian. Utilitarianism merely provides a simple example of monism, as it says that every good thing is either a quantity of pleasure or an instrument for delivering pleasure. Some monisms are not quantitative in this way. For example, consider Platonic-varieties monism. These hold that all good things are instantiations, manifestations, or aspects of The Good. Different good things are evaluated according to the quality of their relation to The Good. To be sure, the Platonic story quickly becomes complicated. But I need not enter into these matters here. The simple utilitarian version suffices to make the required contrast. 4 For a full elaboration, see Stocker 1990. 5 Compare Galston: “According to value pluralism, objective goods cannot be fully rankordered. There is no common measure of value for all goods, which are qualitatively heterogeneous. There is no summum bonum that is the chief good for all individuals” (2005: 12). 6 See my 2012 and 2015 and for this broader argument. 7 Perhaps he recognizes that in order to exercise his domination over his subjects, there must be some failure on their part to conform. He might see that the “good” of domination requires a degree of resistance from the dominated. 8 See Overeem and Verhoef (2014) for elaboration. 9 The argument that follows draws on Aikin and Talisse (2015, 2016). 10 See Chapter 2 of Talisee (2012) for more detail concerning Berlin and James. 11 Compare Huw Price’s conception of passive rejection (2011: 258).

Works cited Aikin, Scott F. and Robert B. Talisse. 2015. “Reply to Anderson.” The Pluralist 10.3: 335–343. ———. 2016. “Pragmatism and Pluralism Revisited.” Political Studies Review 14.1: 17–26.

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Berlin, Isaiah. 1990. The Crooked Timber of Humanity. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2002. Liberty. New York: Oxford University Press. Crowder, George. 2002. Liberalism and Value Pluralism. London: Continuum Books. ———. 2007. “Two Concepts of Liberal Pluralism.” Political Theory 35.2: 121–146. Dworkin, Ronald. 2011. Justice for Hedgehogs. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Flathman, Richard. 2005. Pluralism and Liberal Democracy. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Galston, William. 2002. Liberal Pluralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. The Practice of Liberal Pluralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gray, John. 2000. Two Faces of Liberalism. New York: The New Press. Hampshire, Stuart. 2000. Justice Is Conflict. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. James, William. 1977. “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” In The Writings of William James, John J. McDermott, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kekes, John. 1993. The Morality of Pluralism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1998. A Case for Conservatism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mill, John Stuart. 1978. On Liberty. Indianapolis: Hackett. Overeem, Patrick and Jelle Verhoef. 2014. “Moral Dilemmas, Theoretical Confusion.” Administration & Society 46: 986–1009. Price, Huw. 2011. Naturalism without Mirrors. New York: Oxford University Press. Raz, Joseph. 1986. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stocker, Michael. 1990. Plural and Conflicting Values. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Talisse, Robert B. 2012. Pluralism and Liberal Politics. New York: Routledge. ———. 2015. “Value Pluralism: A Philosophical Clarification.” Administration & Society 47: 1064–1076.

2 PLURALISM AND DELIBERATION Matteo Bianchin

Pluralism: some varieties A minimal, possibly uncontroversial, characterization of pluralism requires the same thing to be understood differently, as it seems that there is nothing to disagree about when different people talk or think of different things.1 Pluralism is commonly intended to convey the notion that, at least on certain matters, more than one view is rationally allowed, such that two people may disagree on a given question yet both be justified in their beliefs. However, it is not trivial to see how this might work. Rawls’s early distinction between the concept and conceptions of justice, for example, suggests that we can disagree about the nature of justice while agreeing that being just is a property of institutions designed to assign basic rights and to regulate the distribution of the burdens and benefits of cooperation in a well-ordered society. It is far from obvious, however, that this leaves room for pluralism. In fact, it was not Rawls’s view in A Theory of Justice that it does. Rawls took the concept of justice to express what the different conceptions of justice “have in common” in terms of basic properties that just institutions necessarily possess, such as that of making “no arbitrary difference among persons in the assigning of rights and duties” and that of determining “a proper balance between competing claims to the advantages of social life” (Rawls 1971: 5). People that disagree on the set of principles that should specify the basic terms of their association may recognize that each have a conception of justice as long as they agree about the essential properties of just institutions while leaving open the interpretation of the notions of an arbitrary distinction and of a proper balance Rawls 1971: 5). Although the latter are intended by Rawls to offer a “description” of just institutions in terms of the notions “included in the concept of justice”, one might be tempted to draw a parallel with natural kind terms

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(Putnam 1975: 215 ff.). While the reference of the concept of justice may not be fixed by any microphysical fact, it is likely to be fixed by a set of facts concerning social institutions – for example, their conforming to principles that can gain acceptance under qualified conditions and the psychological background required to settle those conditions – where the nature of the relevant facts is the object of the theory of justice. Thus, we might be open to the possibility that just institutions are a social kind and that the concept of justice behaves like a kind term whose content is fixed by the way the (social) world is, while different conceptions of justice represent different theories about just institutions that may be assessed with respect to a variety of factors, in particular with respect to how they respond to the demand for efficiency, coordination, and stability raised on just institutions (Rawls 1971: 6). The relevant facts will, of course, largely, although perhaps not fully, depend on human behaviors, actions, and attitudes. Yet this does not preclude the concept of justice from having its content fixed referentially. If we are permissive enough to grant that mind-dependent properties such as being a doorknob fix the content of the relevant concepts (Fodor 1998: 148 ff.), there is no reason why the content of social kind terms should not be fixed by social properties, however complex their metaphysics may turn out to be.2 On this reading, there may at best be one single correct conception of justice, although people disagree about the nature of the facts that determine the correctness of claims about justice, that is, about the truth conditions of those claim (Valentini 2013). Still, in this case, people disagree as a consequence of diverging in the reasons they take to be relevant to settling the issue. Different conceptions of justice thus differ in terms of the justification they provide for their respective claims about the nature of just institutions, while their proponents would agree that there is a determinate answer to the question. A prima facie case for pluralism can be made in this connection by arguing that what count as relevant reasons widely differ across persons, communities, and cultures as a consequence of their endorsing different sets of norms, standards, or principles for forming beliefs and judgments. Pluralism here does not concern the metaphysics but rather the epistemology of justice. It does not amount to the claim that there are different ways in which things may turn out to be – the claim that the facts about just institutions are relative to the way in which justice is conceived – but to the claim that there are different ways in which beliefs and judgments about justice may be assessed. Telling epistemology apart from metaphysics thus helps us to make sense of the idea that there may be a genuine case for pluralism in relation to justice.3 The interesting case rests on whether we can expect convergence in this domain among people talking and thinking about the same thing. The claim for pluralism here concerns the standards, methods, and norms for forming belief and judgment about certain kinds of facts rather than the nature of facts themselves. Borrowing from epistemology, however, we may distinguish between a descriptive and a normative understanding of this claim. Descriptive pluralism is the “simple, non-normative thesis that different communities, cultures, networks, and so on, endorse different epistemic systems – that is, different set of norms, standards, or principles for forming beliefs and other doxastic states”

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(Goldman 2010: 187). This weak, descriptive reading allows for principled ways to adjudicate controversial issues. Disagreement follows from the fallible nature of our rational capacities, the limited evidence we have access to, the different background beliefs and collateral information each of the parties relies on, and different methods and norms for forming beliefs and judgment. Yet disagreement in this case is virtually contingent, given that no principled limit is set to the possibility of arguing about evidence and the standards by which it is assessed. Nothing prevents even basic background assumptions and fundamental epistemic principles from being subject to critical ref lection so that disagreements may, on principle, be settled by argument (Feldman 2005: 206). Pluralism here ultimately collapses into a modest, reasonably uncontroversial, fallibilistic claim. People are allowed to diverge because they happen to form their beliefs and judgments in different ways, yet they may be expected to converge in the long run, at least under epistemically ideal conditions. The converse, normative view is that there is a plurality of epistemic systems yet no fact of the matter about which is the right or better one (Goldman 2010. 188). According to this stronger reading, disagreement may run deep, given that there are different sets of norms, standards, or principles governing how beliefs and judgments are formed, but there is no fact of the matter as to whether some of them are more correct than others. This kind of pluralism differs from descriptive pluralism in that it takes stance a stand on the normative issue of whether some norms, standards or principles are better than others. On this normative reading, however, pluralism entails a hardly feasible relativist claim that follows from the conjunction of three claims: (1) there are no absolute facts about what a particular item of information justifies; (2) judgments such as “E justifies belief B” express the claim: “According to the epistemic system C, information E justifies belief B”; and (3) there are many fundamentally different, genuinely alternative epistemic systems but no facts by virtue of which one of these systems is more correct than any of the others (Boghossian 2006: 73). In this case, there seems to be no way in which agreement can be reached by argument about deeply controversial issues because people holding different epistemic system diverge on what may count as a reason for belief. The lesson seems to be that if pluralism is to have a distinct standing, it needs to rest on grounds that are stronger than fallibilism yet weaker than relativism, thus ruling out both “deep” disagreement and the view that convergence can be expected. For on the one hand, relativism would be vindicated were disagreement to follow from “a clash of framework propositions” and/or “underlying principles” that “cannot be resolved through the use of argument” for in this case, the conditions essential to arguing are undercut (Fogelin 1985: 8), while, on the other hand, fallibilism would be sufficient to account for disagreement were it sensible to expect convergence. A viable understanding of pluralism thus seems to involve recognizing that, at least in some domains, convergence cannot be expected among persons who are broadly equal in their capacity to reason, acquire information, assess evidence and arguments, and engage in critical ref lection while accepting what has been labeled as “the uniqueness thesis”, that

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is, the claim that in principle, a body of evidence justifies at most one attitude toward a proposition (Feldman 2005: 205). This seems to be the rationale behind the idea of reasonable pluralism as a view about justification that is relevant to political philosophy and deeply differs from relativism, namely, the view that people who are equally endowed with the power of reason and apply common epistemic standards, while being willing to propose fair terms of cooperation, may be unable to agree upon the comprehensive philosophical, moral, and religious doctrines that underlie their (different) conceptions of justice (Cohen 1993: 282; Larmore 1996: 154). According to this view, disagreement is likely to occur and be resilient among broad epistemic peers. This qualification is important, as individuals may be defined as epistemic peers in either a strict or a broad sense. Under the strict reading, peerness requires both evidence possession and evidence processing to be the same. Under the broad reading, it only requires rational capacities and skills to be such that others cannot be taken to be more likely to be wrong than oneself (Elga 2007; Peter 2013; Matheson 2015). In the latter case, it may be true both that only a single conception is correct and that there are principled ways to adjudicate the issue, yet convergence is not likely to occur when difference is in evidence, in the way it is assessed, and in background information that affects the process of belief formation. This may sound too weak to claim pluralism, given that nothing here seems to prevent disagreements from being overcome by critical ref lection and rational discussion, at least in principle. Both evidence and background information might be expected be shared by the end of the inquiry, provided that no principled limit is set to the possibility of argument and that people exercise their power of reason. However, a key assumption behind the notion of a reasonable pluralism is that even “ref lective convergence” is not to be expected at least in domains where the process of belief formation is peculiarly complex, like the moral domain (Cohen 1993: 281–282).4 Reasonable pluralism seems thus to devise a kind of normative pluralism that is designed to steer clear of relativism. It preserves the claim that disagreements may not admit of rational resolution, while carefully avoiding claiming that there may be many different, fundamentally alternative ways of forming beliefs and judgment yet no facts by virtue of which one may be better than others. Political liberalism is intended to answer this predicament by advancing justice as fairness as a free-standing conception of justice that abstains from ontological and epistemic commitment in the justification of political principles. In the next sections, I argue that this is an unstable position and suggest that an epistemic view of deliberation may be better suited to making sense of political justification. The latter view, however, is bound to dispense with normative pluralism.

Pluralism and reasonable disagreement The issue with pluralism, understood as outlined earlier, is different from the questions arising in connection with value pluralism, understood as the doctrine

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that there is a plurality of incommensurable and mutually incompatible, equally ultimate values. In fact, as noted by Larmore (1996: 154), the latter is itself a controversial doctrine about the nature or the source of value, which is not more likely to attract convergence than any other. What is meant to raise the problem of pluralism in the present context is rather the view that a plurality of reasonable and yet incompatible religious, moral, and philosophical doctrines is “the normal result of the exercise of human reason” in a democratic society (Rawls 1993: xviii). Pluralism thus follows from the possibility of reasonable disagreement, in which people are taken to be reasonable if they are willing to accept what Rawls terms the burdens of judgment – together with being willing to propose fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them, provided that others do so (Rawls 1993: 54). In explaining how reasonable disagreement is possible, Rawls, of course, rules out irrationality and lack of intelligence as well as the idea that different views ref lect different interests, rejecting them as “too easy” answers to the question at stake. What needs to be explained is indeed that disagreement occurs among people who apparently hold their views in good faith and are broadly equal in their capacity for reasoning and critical ref lection, given that they all “share a common human reason”. The sources of disagreement must therefore be “the many hazards involved in the correct (and conscientious) exercise of our powers of reason and judgment in the ordinary course of political life” (Rawls 1993: 55–56). This means that reasonable people (1) do not affirm their views dogmatically, (2) do not endorse significantly different norms of belief formation, thus providing no case for epistemic pluralism (Weineberg, Stich, Nichols 2001); and (3) do not use their powers of reason incorrectly. The sources of disagreement listed by Rawls are thus designed to account for disagreement among broad epistemic peers. People are not taken to possess exactly the same evidence and to process it in exactly the same way, yet they are taken to be in an equally good epistemic position regarding the issue at stake. The burdens of judgment are traced back to the following circumstances; note that only the last two are specific to the moral and political domains. 1 2 3 4 5 6

Evidence can be conf licting and complex and thus hard to assess and evaluate. Even when we agree about the considerations that are relevant, we may disagree about their weight. To some extent, all concepts are vague and thus subject to interpretation. The way we assess evidence and weigh moral and political values is shaped to some extent by our total experience, which naturally differs. Different normative considerations may carry different force, and it is difficult to make an overall assessment difficult Setting priorities and making adjustment among different moral and political values involves hard decisions that may seem to have no clear answer. (Rawls 1993: 57)

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The implication of the burdens of judgment is that “reasonable people do not all affirm the same comprehensive doctrine”, conceived as an intelligible view of the world that draws upon a tradition of thought and covers major religious, philosophical, and moral aspects of human life (Rawls 1993: 59). Rawls’s proposal, however, differs from those advanced in the peer disagreement literature. On the one hand, Rawls clearly holds that it is both rational and reasonable for each party to hold their own judgment true (Rawls 1993: 60). The rationale for this is that each is likely to have good reason to be confident, on ref lection, in their own judgment. While understanding that alternatives are reasonable from different perspectives, it seems that in this case one may be justified in thinking that one’s own assessment of the evidence and weighted considerations are on the right track, along with one’s interpretations of vague concepts and the relative force of one’s normative considerations and priority setting. Given that controversial beliefs are arrived at in ways that one is confident with and that there are no specific grounds for doubting one’s own exercise of the power of reason, disagreement appears to be no defeater.5 This rules out the argument that peer disagreement provides us with a reason for revising our judgment, suspending our belief, or lowering our confidence in the relevant propositions as a way to conciliate with others whose judgment is equally likely to be right, as proponents of so-called conciliatory views advise, and certain trends in deliberative democracy seem to suggest by claiming, for example, that economizing on moral disagreement or balancing one’s own and others’ perspectives is both the expected and desirable output of deliberation (Gutman, Thompson 2004: 134; Goodin 2003: 183). On the other hand, although reasonable people are justified in holding to their views in the face of disagreement, they are not in a position to “insist, when fundamental political questions are at stake, on what they take as true” (Rawls 1993: 61). This marks a departure from the “steadfast views” advanced in the literature as an alternative to conciliatory views. The rationale seems to be twofold. First, reasonable people recognize that their own doctrine is “but one reasonable doctrine among others” and that therefore they can raise no special claim over other equally reasonable people who affirm different views (Rawls 1993: 60). Second, insisting on the truth of one’s own view would amount to claiming legitimate authority to take it as a basis for deciding on the constitutional essentials or basic questions of justice and to use coercive power to repress other comprehensive views that are not unreasonable – which itself counts as unreasonable as long as a shared basis of justification for comprehensive doctrines is lacking (Rawls 1993: 61). In this respect, being reasonable is not just an epistemological stance but is connected with “the political ideal of a democratic citizenship that includes what free and equal citizen can require of each other with respect to their reasonable comprehensive views” (Rawls 1993: 62). By granting that each party is justified in believing their own comprehensive doctrine to be true, the burdens of judgment limit what may be reasonably justified to others.

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Rawls’s treatment of disagreement thus neither recommends conciliation, nor can be taken to vouch for a steadfast view. What is specific to Rawls’s solution is rather to hold that political justifications should avoid ontological and epistemic commitment. In the face of reasonable disagreement, a political conception of justice should be free-standing with respect to the ontological and epistemic commitments of comprehensive doctrines to be possibly justified to those who are bound by it. This means that while being a part “that fits into and can be supported by” any reasonable comprehensive doctrine, it is not derived from any of them and does not take stance on whether one of them is true (Rawls 1993: 12, 128). The limits set on what can be justified to others make no reference to truth here, given that reasonableness, not truth, is the standard, and reasonableness follows from a specifically political moral psychology that draws on “a scheme of concepts and principles for expressing a political conception of the person and an ideal of citizenship” (Rawls 1993: 87). What makes the latter specifically political is the fact that they are not advanced as truths about human nature to be settled by metaphysical reflection or empirical discovery but rather as a set of concepts and principles of practical reason entailed by the fundamental ideas that are found in the political culture of democratic societies (Rawls 1993: 13–14, 86–87, 126–127). Note that, according to this reading, the part of moral psychology that is specific to political philosophy turns out to be sui generis, given that it can be neither covered by a priori philosophical reasoning, nor by a posteriori scientific psychology. This results in the idea that public justification only indirectly depends on reasonable comprehensive doctrines. Public justification is only possible insofar as an overlapping consensus among comprehensive doctrines is found on a political conception of justice that provides common ground for public discussion, yet it is worked out by citizens “within the bounds of the political” as the contents of comprehensive doctrines play “no normative role” in this context (Rawls 1996: 387–388). In other words, public justification conforms to the sui generis standards of political justification that are settled by political liberalism as a free-standing conception of justice: Political liberalism does not use the concept of moral truth applied to its own political (always moral) judgments. Here it says that political judgments are reasonable or unreasonable; and it lays out political ideals, principles, and standards as criteria of the reasonable. These criteria in turn are connected with the two basic features of reasonable persons as citizens: first, their willingness to propose and to abide by, if accepted, what they think others as equal citizens with them might reasonably accept as fair terms of social co-operation; and, second, their willingness to recognize the burdens of judgment and accept the consequences thereof. For the political purpose of discussing questions of constitutional essentials and basic justice, political liberalism views this idea of the reasonable as sufficient. The use of the concept of truth is not rejected or questioned, but left to comprehensive doctrines to use or deny, or use some other idea instead. (Rawls 1996: 395–396)

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Political justification and truth Reasons for resisting this conclusion have been put forward in the literature. In this section, I consider Cohen’s objection and draw some conclusions that bear on Habermas’s epistemic view of deliberation. Cohen argues that in political justification, we cannot “do without the concept of truth” as Rawls contends because truth is connected “with the concept of belief and meaning, both fundamental in the account of thought” and (hence) with the very idea of a reasoning process (Cohen 2009: 13–14). First, belief is commonly taken to “aim at truth” in that truth is the standard of correctness for beliefs and their behavior is thus governed by rational norms or subject to ceteris paribus laws connected with their semantic properties: For instance, it is rational to revise a belief that P when confronted with evidence that P is false (Cohen 2009: 13). In the same vein, believing that Q and (if Q then P) leads to believing that P, perceiving that P leads to believing that P, believing that an action promotes a desired state of affairs leads to performing that action and so on. In this sense, beliefs are routinely taken to be functional states whose representational properties are connected with the role they play in psychological processes (Fodor 1985, see also Millikan 1984: 139–140). Second, reasoning processes are commonly conceived as rational transitions among mental states insofar as they are governed by epistemic norms connected with truth – for example, norms that require them to be truth preserving or reliably truth conducive (Cohen 2009: 14, see Goldman 2012, 2014). Given that truth is the standard of correctness for belief and reasoning processes are governed by epistemic norms, deliberation may be said to aim for truth in the sense that, when deliberating whether to believe that P, we “aim to determine whether P is true” (Cohen 2009: 13–14). Cohen is drawn to conclude that we can hardly imagine what it would mean to conduct political justification without recourse to the concept of truth (Cohen 2009: 15). The point is that in this view, it is inconsistent to allow judgment and reasoning in political justification while contending that the concept of truth has no application in this context: Rawls’ proposal is to endorse a cognitivist understanding of political conceptions of justice and political argument on which notions of judgment, reasoning, and argument are fully in play, while denying the availability of the concept of truth within such conceptions. The concern is specifically with the concept of truth, and the reason for leaving it out cannot be that political discourse traffics in something other than truth bearers. Someone might offer that rationale for the view that truth has no place in political argument, but not if they think of political argument as an exercise of public reason. (Cohen 2009: 19) 6 Cohen’s suggests, however, that political liberalism can be emended by establishing a political concept of truth that is tailored to suit the need for a cognitive

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understanding of political justification without dispensing with reasonable pluralism. The point is that it is not truth itself that is divisive and prevents agreement. The latter view is motivated by the fact that two inconsistent propositions cannot both be true, while they may both be reasonable to believe. Thus, asserting that a particular account of justice is true commits one to denying that any conf licting accounts are true while asserting that it is reasonable is compatible with accepting that others are reasonable, too. Reasonableness is compatible with pluralism, while truth is not because of its “singularity”: The singularity of truth seems to make it incompatible with pluralism and therefore unsuitable for public reason (Cohen 2009: 29). Cohen’s argument against this view comes in three steps. First, public reason clearly admits of no less divisive concepts and standards. Given that there is more than one political conception of justice, we may disagree about which view is most reasonable. Furthermore, we may disagree about what justice requires, for instance, about whether it requires equal or maximin basic liberties. In such cases, we cannot all be right, although we are reasonable. Second, deploying the concept of truth in raising our respective claims within public reason would add nothing to the disagreement we face; it would just express it. Third, the concept of truth may be used within public reason, provided that we endorse a reasonable attitude toward truth itself – that is, provided that we acknowledge that being true is not a sufficient condition for a proposition to play a role in political arguments, since reasonable people acknowledge that true propositions may fail to gain acceptance from others that are equally reasonable and are thus prepared to find reasons that are compelling to others (Cohen 1996: 100). As a consequence, not all true propositions count as relevant within public reason because the truth of a proposition does not “suffice [. . .] to make an appeal to it appropriate in political justification” (Cohen 2009: 31–32). In this view, truth claims need not be denied application in the political domain, but their relevance is constrained by reasonableness. The truth of a proposition is relevant to political justification only insofar as it rests on shared ground and therefore “an appropriate but limited role of judgments about truth” is licensed “on that shared ground” Cohen 2009: 35). Once so qualified, the concept of truth may be kept and may play a role in political justification. This debunks the argument against public reason that was initially suggested, namely, that public reason cannot support a cognitivist view of political justification because doing without truth precludes grasping what an argument, a judgment, or a reasoning process can possibly amount to. Cohen suggests that the concept of truth in play here should be labeled “the political concept of truth” (Cohen 2009: 37).7 Does this proposal square with the role of truth in cognitive processes? The political conception is designed to be “suited for the purposes of political ref lection and argument in a pluralistic democracy, characterized by doctrinal disagreements” (Cohen 2009: 3). Suppose people disagree on the principles of justice or on what justice requires. We have seen that this is entirely possible,

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given that there is a multitude of reasonable conception of justice. Their disagreement may be expressed in this context by saying that they disagree about the truth of a proposition P. Now suppose that deliberation leads them to overcome their disagreement by reasoning from shared premises. On the assumption that they exercise their rational powers correctly, the reasoning process will lead them to the truth if the premises they share are themselves true but will otherwise lead them to the wrong deliberative output. Reasoning correctly from false premises, they will be drawn to a false conclusion, which cannot possibly count as a desirable outcome if we take deliberations to aim at truth. If the cognitive role of truth is to be preserved, we should rather want false premises to be revised – ideally, at least –to avoid false conclusions. Thus, it is hard to see how the argument for the relevance of truth to the cognitive understanding of political argument can be squared with the view that false propositions may license correct conclusions within public reason. Public reason requires that arguments be carried out on shared ground, yet it would be wrong to accept a proposition that follows from false premises because they are reasonable. We cannot require truth to play a role in public reason and be unconcerned about accepting consequences that follows from false premises. Yet Cohen must allow that a false conclusion is acceptable, provided that it follows from considerations that are reasonable, although false. Public reason here draws on reasons that are shared across reasonable conceptions and provide no independent ground on which to sort out false premises. Permissible considerations thus are likely to include false premises, as long as there is a variety of reasonable conceptions of justice that cannot be jointly true, and some of them will entail false principles or beliefs. Cohen thus claims not only that being true is not a sufficient condition to count as a reason in political justification but also that it is not a necessary condition either, given that some views of justice, while false, may be reasonable: “what matters for democracy’s public reason is reasonableness, not truth” (Cohen 2009: 31). It has been argued on this basis that Cohen’s political concept of truth is expressive rather than operative because it does no real work in political justifications. More specifically, it does not perform the function of separating considerations that could count in deliberation from considerations that could not, given that false propositions play exactly the same justificatory role as true ones under the constraints imposed by reasonableness to the use of truth in political argument (Butler 2016). Participants can thus express their disagreement in terms of conf licting truth claims but cannot appeal to truth according to the role it plays in deliberation – where false beliefs are subject to revision because “when we deliberate about whether to believe that P, we try to determine whether P (is true)” (Cohen 2009: 13–14). In this sense, Cohen’s alternative seems forced to retreat to epistemic abstinence because it precludes deliberation from playing any epistemic role. The crux is that Cohen cannot allow what counts as shared ground to be shaken by considerations about truth, as truth would constrain the reasonable in this case rather than the contrary. Yet this is not compatible

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with maintaining that truth plays a role in political justification. If truth is to be relevant in political justification, we should expect false premises to be revised whenever possible to avoid false conclusions. Thus, any proposition within the set of propositions that count as shared ground should be possibly assessed for truth and removed should it turn out false. Any consideration relevant to the truth of such propositions, including considerations that concern the comprehensive doctrines on which they draw, would therefore be relevant to political justification. In fact, it would contribute to shape the space of public reason. The very idea of imposing a reasonableness constraint on public reason would collapse. A converse case is made by Ingham (2016) for showing that comprehensive doctrines may be affected by arguments that move from shared true premises. As illustrated by Cohen (2009: 30–31), disagreements within public reason may concern some proposition that can be inferred from a reasonable comprehensive doctrine when combined with auxiliary premises that are common ground. By hypothesis, in such cases, people may reasonably argue within public reason to the effect that the target proposition is false, and by modus tollens, any reason to reject it will count in this context as a public reason to reject some of the premises from which it is derived. Shared auxiliary premises, however, are allegedly true. Therefore, some of the premises that draw on the relevant comprehensive doctrine must be false. It follows that one can argue from within public reason to the effect that a comprehensive doctrine is, at least partly, false. While the former case showed that considerations concerning the truth of comprehensive doctrines may affect public reason, the latter shows that arguments conducted within public reason may affect the truth of comprehensive doctrines. The upshot is that granting the concept of truth an “operative” role in political justification leaves no room for constraining public reason. As long as we take the concept of truth to be connected to the cognitive properties of political justification, we are bound to conclude that we cannot have both a reasonability constraint on public reason and a cognitivist understanding of political justification.

Pluralism and deliberation This comes as no surprise under a cognitivist understanding of belief and rationality. Evidence that P is false normally leads to revision of the belief that P and other the beliefs it entails. How can this fail to be relevant to public reason? It is sensible to claim that public reason is not committed to the whole truth (Cohen 2009: 34–35). Yet we have seen that recognizing or failing to recognize the truth of a proposition may be relevant to deliberation, whether or not the proposition is presently included in the set of premises that count as shared ground. Conversely, arguments conducted within public reason to the effect that a proposition is false may affect the comprehensive doctrine from which the target proposition is derived. In other words, arguments to the effect that a certain proposition is true or false are likely to affect public reason with respect to the target proposition

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and the propositions it entails, regardless of whether they are shared ground. On the one hand, there is no way to insulate public reason from controversial truth claims connected to comprehensive doctrines because the revision of beliefs that are no part of what counts as shared ground may affect the deliberative resolution of disagreements within public reason. On the other hand, there is no way to insulate comprehensive doctrines from arguments raised within public reason, as the latter may affect the former by way of mudus tollens. What is taken to be common ground is therefore likely to shift over time as a result of arguments that turn on propositions which are far removed from what counts as shared among reasonable people at a certain time and place. It follows that what is relevant to public reason can be hardly be constrained by reasonability, given that no restriction can be set on the considerations that count in favor of or against political principles or public choices. Thus understood, however, public reason looks closer to Habermas’s epistemic view of the public use of reason than to Rawls’s distinctively political view. As long as the epistemic role of deliberation is left intact, the idea of a political liberalism is not just supplemented with a suitably constrained concept of political truth but replaced by a rather demanding view of deliberation, according to which convergence among broad epistemic peers is to be expected at least in idealized conditions (Habermas 1995: 117–118). Deliberation is in fact allowed to be guided by epistemic norms insofar as rightness is (taken to be) “on the same plane as propositional truth” and reasons enjoy causal powers with respect to beliefs (Habermas 1995: 123, 2003: 247–248; Forst 2015). Although in this context, rightness is something we discover by argument and the value of democracy goes therefore beyond the intrinsic and expressive properties of the democratic procedure, no meta-ethical commitment follows in relation to the standard against which deliberation is assessed (Landemore 2017). Rather, a two-step procedure is proposed for sorting out the right from the good that is supposedly free of substantive normative presuppositions (Habermas 1995: 115–116). First, principles that derive from conf licting comprehensive views of the good are selected to qualify as moral norms if and only if they are objective – in somewhat different terms, if they respond to agentneutral reasons. Second, putative moral norms are tested by argument for their responsiveness to generalizable interests (Habermas 1990: 65–66, 1998: 81–82). Deliberation here preserves its natural epistemic properties, while the borderline between the good and the right is drawn according to what may turn out to be accepted in the light of argument. Thus, neither convergence on comprehensive truths nor doctrinal agreement is required. In fact, convergence may be reached on moral norms that are not included in any comprehensive doctrine because it is generated by the deliberative process, and no restriction is set on what can be subject to revision. Cohen’s proposal, on the contrary, is designed to prevent the output of deliberation to depart from comprehensive doctrines – given that deliberation cannot turn out to backfire on what is taken to be shared ground. In this sense, politically true beliefs are granted to preserve given doctrines. One

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may wonder how this might add anything epistemic to the idea of an overlapping consensus. Conversely, when deliberation is credited with epistemic properties, it can be taken to yield genuine public reasons precisely because deliberative outputs differs from overlapping consensus in that they do not depend on contingent agreement among comprehensive doctrines (Habermas 1995: 114; Forst 2012: 92–93). On the latter view, pluralism is addressed in a different way. Deliberation, in fact, does not need to “bracket the pluralism of convictions and world-views from the outset” because it is not designed to record overlapping consensus but to yield a “we-perspective” that can be naturally expected to emerge as the practice of argumentation “enjoins those involved to an idealizing enlargement of their interpretive perspectives” (Habermas 1995: 117). An attractive feature of this framework is that reasonable and unreasonable people are treated in the same way, as the requirements for participating in public deliberation are fairly minimal.8 Normative pluralism, however, fades away. While a fallibilistic attitude that comes close to accepting the burdens of judgment is retained, in fact, disagreement can only be contingently rational here, since no principled restriction is set on arguing about both evidence and the way it is assessed, so that even the most well-entrenched beliefs and basic epistemic principles are subject to revision (Habermas 1995: 117–118). On this reading, the burdens of judgment set no principled constraint to public arguments designed to screen out ethical values from moral norms. Having formed their moral beliefs in different ways and in accordance with different religious or metaphysical worldviews, people may happen to diverge in what they advance as putative moral norms, yet nothing prevents disagreement to be met by argument. Conversely, the idea that there is a plurality of conceptions of the good life is preserved only insofar as these are credited with raising a sui generis claim to authenticity (Habermas 1995: 125–126). Pluralism here is descriptive, not normative. It has been suggested in this connection that the rationale for endorsing reasonable pluralism is that there is something specific to political morality connected with the social function that agreement performs in the political domain. On this reading, politics diverges from both epistemology and ethics because of the pressure to agree on a cooperative scheme (MacMahon 2009: 8 ff., 33, 69–70). Descriptive pluralism here may seem enough to raise a normative problem about the conditions under which agreement is reached, as convergence under epistemically ideal conditions is no solution for actual disagreements, and actual people cannot wait for rightness to emerge at the end of the inquiry before engaging in social cooperation. There are two problems with this view, however. First, idealizations are involved in any view of public reason, and Rawls’s abstinent view fares no better in this respect than full-blown epistemic conceptions of deliberation (Enoch 2015: 117–118, 127 ff.). Second, epistemically ideal conditions are better understood as a standard against which arguments are assessed rather than as a set of conditions to be met in order for something to count at all as a justification (Putnam 1981: 55). Although defeasible, arguments

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that fall short of meeting epistemically ideal conditions may still supply best evidence available for the time being and thus, while imperfect and subject to revision, attract sufficient (provisional) convergence, provided that public discussion abides by ordinary epistemic norms. In this respect, political disagreement is not special. Also, supplementing deliberation with a voting procedure seems sensible whenever arguments de facto fail to settle disagreement (Peters 2013). Mixed models have been proposed in this spirit over the past decades to combine deliberative and aggregative theories of democracy, building on the idea that while it may not be realistic to expect public deliberation to generate consensus on any specific issue, it is not unrealistic to expect that a meta-consensus can be generated on the relevant dimensions of choice (Dryzek, List 2003). Nothing here suggests that disagreement cannot be met by argument or that it can only be met by refraining from epistemic commitment. Reasonable pluralism seems to raise a claim that is more demanding than descriptive pluralism, while avoiding collapse into relativism, and to recommend epistemic abstinence as to demarcate the space of public reason. This is an unstable position. On the one hand, it is questionable that a genuine case for normative pluralism can be made on its basis. The burdens of judgment may account for how disagreement arises among broad epistemic peers but provide no principled reason to think that it cannot be addressed by critical ref lection and public argument. On the other hand, it is questionable that public reason can be constrained by reasonableness, for endorsing epistemic abstinence prevents political justification from drawing on a cognitivist conception of belief and reasoning while taking the latter seriously ultimately dismantles the case for normative pluralism. The upshot is, I think, unsurprising. Normative pluralism – be it reasonable or not – conf licts with the idea that there is something about political justification that stands beyond relativization.

Notes 1 Cf. Boghossian (2006: 39 ff.) and Hare (1991: 148), see, however, Plunkett, Sundell (2013) for critical discussion. 2 Externalism about social kinds is endorsed by Guala (2016) and at least suggested by Epstein (2015). 3 This does not per se invite moral realism because the distinction does not depend on whether moral facts are mind dependent. Mind dependence may be hold true, in keeping with moral constructivism of any variety, yet pluralism won’t follow unless moral truths are relativized to particular points of view (Bagnoli 2015). What is specific to metaphysical pluralism is indeed the claim that facts vary according to contingent conceptions of what there is and thus are relative to cultures, interests, and beliefs that may diverge across times and places. It is in this sense that, as noted earlier, metaphysical pluralism leaves no room for disagreement because people holding different conceptions would be talking and thinking about different things (Boghossian 2006: 39 ff.). 4 As we will see, this is different from Elga’s suggestion that moral disagreement is intractable because there are no epistemic peers in the moral domain, since moral beliefs are embedded in a wider web of beliefs concerning moral and non-moral issues (Elga 2007). In fact, there is no reason to think that even deeply entrenched beliefs are immune to

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argument, and thus it is sensible to consider not only that disagreements often take place against a background of broad moral and non moral agreement (Rowland 2016) but also that the latter can be established by argument when needed unless this possibility is ruled out by further considerations about the nature of moral disagreement. Elga’s point does not suffice to preclude epistemic peerness in the moral domain. See Wedgwood (2007: 261–263), Enoch (2010), and Kvanvig (2014: 116–117). Of course, this would not be the case under a noncognitivist understanding of political discourse, yet the latter is not consistent with the idea of public reason (Cohen 2009: 17). Political truth is constrained by reasonableness both with respect to the truths implicated in comprehensive doctrines and with respect to philosophical theories of truth. However, it preserves the idea of correspondence under a metaphysically uncommitted reading by detaching the concept of truth from the philosophical theory of truth that takes correspondence to be a relation between propositions and a mind-independent metaphysical kind of entity – facts, for instance – working as truth makers (Cohen 2009: 3–4, 27). The political concept of truth thus advances nothing but the plain, ordinary view that flows from Aristotle’s formulation that telling the truth amounts to “saying of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not” (Metaphysics VII, 1011b 25–26). In fact, no ontological commitment is built into it (Davidson 2005: 126–127). Introducing a political concept of truth therefore does not amount to advancing a new, or different, or in any way restricted concept of truth. The restriction rather concerns the topics that are amenable to be assessed for truth in this context. The requirement to access public deliberation ultimately amounts to nothing more than a disposition to subject to the authority of argument, which is connected to the “socioontological constitution of the public practice of argumentation” in that participants mutually recognize themselves as minimally free and equal rational beings (Habermas 1995: 127, see Habermas 1990: 89 ff.), yet it does not involve endorsing a specific political concept of persons and focus on the content of moral beliefs rather than on their being believed. For further discussion, see Ferrara (2014: 90–92) and Enoch (2015: 120 ff., 130 ff). Any full-blown deliberative approach will, of course, characterize deliberative rationality in one way or another, yet it is questionable that this amounts to advancing a comprehensive doctrine (Rawls 1993: 132; cf. Forst 2012: 91–92). For one thing, the view that humans share a common power of reason is equally crucial, as we have seen above, to Rawls’s ideas of reasonable disagreement and public reason. For another, a theory of deliberative rationality may rest on relatively minimal grounds by drawing on empirical theories designed to account for basic universal capacities of reasoning, agency, and social cognition (Habermas 1990: 31–32, 1984: 363 ff.).

References Bagnoli, C. (2015), “Constructivism in Metaethics”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/constructivism-metaethics/ Boghossian, P. (2006), Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Butler, J. (2016), “Finding Space for the Truth: Joshua Cohen on Truth and Public Reason”, Res Publica (forthcoming). DOI: 10.1007/s11158-016-9333-2 Cohen, J. (1993), “Moral Pluralism and Political Consensus”, in D. Copp, J. Hampton, J. Roemer (eds.), The Idea of Democracy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 270–291. ——— (1996), “Procedure and Substance of Deliberative Democracy”, in S. Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference, Princeton University Press, Princeton: 95–119. ——— (2009), “Truth and Public Reason”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 37(1): 2–42. Davidson, D. (2005), Truth and Predication, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

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Dryzek, J., List, C. (2003), “Social Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy: A Reconciliation”, British Journal of Political Science, 33: 1–28. Elga, A. (2007), “Ref lection and Disagreement”, Noûs, 41(3): 478–502. Enoch, D. (2010), “Not Just a Truthometer: Taking Oneself Seriously (But Not Too Seriously) in Cases of Peer Disagreement”, Mind, 119: 953–997. ——— (2015), “Against Public Reason”, in P. Sobel, P. Valletyne, S. Wall (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 1, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Epstein, B. (2015), The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of Social Science, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Feldman, R. (2005), “Reasonable Religious Disagreement”, in L.M. Antony (ed.), Philosophers without God, Oxford University Press, Oxford: 194–205. Ferrara, A. (2014), The Democratic Horizon, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Fodor, J. (1985), “Fodor’s Guide to Mental Representations”, Mind, 94(373): 76–100. ——— (1998), Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Fogelin, R. (1985), “The Logic of Deep Disagreements”, Informal Logic, 7: 1.8. Forst, R. (2012), The Right to Justification, Columbia University Press, New York. ——— (2015), “Noumenal Power”, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 23(2): 111–127. Goldman, A. (2010), “Epistemic Relativism and Reasonable Disagreement”, in R. Feldman, T. Warfield (eds.), Disagreement, Oxford University Press, Oxford: 187–215. ——— (2012), Reliabilism and Contemporary Epistemology, Oxford University Press, Oxford. ——— (2014), “Social Process Reliabilism: Solving Justification Problems in Collective Epistemology”, in J. Lackey (ed.), Essays in Collective Epistemology, Oxford University Press, Oxford: 11–41. Goodin, R. (2003), Reflective Democracy, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Guala, F. (2016), Understanding Institutions: The Science and Philosophy of Living Together, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Gutman, A., Thompson, D. (2004), Why Deliberative Democracy?, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Habermas, J. (1984), Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. ——— (1990), Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Polity Press, Oxford. ——— (1995), “Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason”, The Journal of Philosophy, 92(3): 109–131. ——— (1998), The Inclusion of the Other, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. ——— (2003), Truth and Justification, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Hare, R.M. (1991), The Language of Morals, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Ingham, S. (2016), “A Dilemma for Public Reason”, SSRN. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ ssrn.2315235 Kvanvig, J. (2014), Rationality and Reflection: How to Think about What to Think, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Landemore, H. (2017), “Beyond the Fact of Disagreement? The Epistemic Turn in Deliberative Democracy”, Social Epistemology, 31(3): 277–295. Larmore, C. (1996), The Morals of Modernity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. MacMahon, C. (2009), Reasonable Disagreement: A Theory of Political Morality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Matheson, J. (2015), “Disagreement and Epistemic Peers”, Oxford Handbooks Online in Philosophy. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935314.013.13 Millikan, R. (1984), Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

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Peter, F. (2013), “The Epistemic Circumstances of Democracy”, in M. Brady, M. Fricker (eds.), The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays on the Epistemology of Collectives, Oxford University Press, Oxford: 133–149. Plunkett, D., Sundell, T. (2013), “Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms”, Philosopher’s Imprint, 13(23): 1–37. Putnam, H. (1975), Mind, Language, and Reality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ——— (1981), Reason, Truth, and History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Rawls, J. (1971), A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. ——— (1993), Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, New York. ——— (1996), “Reply to Habermas”, in Political Liberalism, revised edition, Columbia University Press, New York. Rowland, R. (2016), “The Epistemology of Moral Disagreement”, The Philosophy Compass (forthcoming). DOI: 10.1111/phc3.12398 Valentini, L. (2013), “Justice, Disagreement, and Democracy”, British Journal of Political Science, 43(1): 177–199. Wedgwood, R. (2007), The Nature of Normativity, Oxford University Press, New York. Weineberg, Stich, S., Nichols, S. (2001), “Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions”, Philosophical Topics, 29(1–2): 429–470.

3 SOCIAL CHOICE OR COLLECTIVE DECISION-MAKING What is politics all about?1 Thomas Mulligan

Resolving disagreement is both a central challenge for our politics and one of its greatest gifts. It is rare that a policy commands anything like consensus; different special interest groups have different desires, and the elements of government compete among themselves for limited resources. Yet contemporary political systems push through: Decisions get made, even though some parties are left dissatisfied and uncertainty lingers over whether the decisions were the right ones or not. (The U.S. Congress is a salient and worrying exception, a result of Republican obdurance.) Perhaps it would be nice if there were no disagreement at all, so that government could concentrate on efficiently implementing the unambiguous will of its people. But there is no prospect of that happening (and it is not clear, from the point of view of good decision-making, that eliminating disagreement is desirable). So, we grapple with a question of both theoretical and practical importance: How should our politics deal with disagreement over policies, candidates, and the like? I consider this question here. In particular, I consider what, exactly, we hope to accomplish by resolving political disagreement. Our aim cannot simply be to ensure that a decision gets made, as that would legitimate obviously problematic systems of decision-making. We could, always and everywhere, obey the preferences of the oldest, white, male voter. But that seems wrong. It seems wrong, first, because it seems unfair – the preferences of other voters ought to count for something, too – and it seems wrong because no one person possesses the competences and character necessary to make good decisions across contexts. And the quality of our decision-making matters, morally. These are the two normative frameworks within which disagreement and decision-making are analyzed. The first framework is that of social choice. In some cases, whether disagreement gets resolved in a morally correct way turns on how those who disagree are treated by the process: Did everyone have an opportunity

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to air his opinion about the matter at dispute? Were votes fairly tabulated? Or did the opinions of some people count for more, or for less, on account of (e.g.) their race or gender? An example: A group of friends is deciding where to go to dinner. Each member of the group has a different restaurant preference. The moral challenge facing this group is to extract from these diverse individual preferences a single group preference which represents, in some sense, the “will of the people”. In situations of social choice, a morally correct decision-making process treats individuals involved in the process fairly. The second normative framework is that of collective decision-making.2 In these cases, an important end hangs in the balance, and the moral concern is whether the decision-making process is likely to achieve this end or not. Imagine a group of doctors debating whether treatment plan a or plan b will save the life of their patient (suppose that they know that one and only one of these plans will do this). The doctors have different opinions about which plan will work, different levels of ability, different knowledge of the patient and the treatments, and so on. But, in contrast to the restaurant case, they share a common preference – they all want to save their patient’s life. Here, the morality of their decision-making turns on whether they do this effectively. So long as the process is an effective one for getting at the truth about the correct treatment plan, no doctor has a legitimate moral complaint. The way each doctor’s personal preference inf luenced or did not inf luence the process is of no intrinsic moral relevance. Which framework is appropriate for politics? When we make decisions about candidates, economic policies, whether to go to war or not, whether to permit or proscribe abortion, and so on, should we be guided by a desire to treat citizens fairly or to get the decision right? Is there a single answer to this question? Or are there contexts in which both considerations apply? If there are, how should the two be balanced? Political theorists have devoted insufficient attention to these questions, which are fundamental ones, underlying debates about political legitimacy and the merits of expert rule, among other things. For example, there is lively dispute between scholars who defend democracy on the basis of its procedural value – how it treats voters – and those who think that democracy should be preferred on epistemic grounds – because it is a good, maybe optimal, way to make decisions.3 But that debate seeks to first resolve the procedural versus epistemic question a priori and then to impose the relevant framework on our politics. I suggest that we do the reverse: analyze real-world political disagreement and thereby gain insight into the appropriate theoretical framework. These questions are also underexplored in the economics literature. Here is how Shmuel Nitzan and Jacob Paroush – two pioneers in the theory of collective decision-making – describe the state of things: Which of the two juristic systems is socially preferable, a randomly selected group of jurors who possess diverse preferences as well as a

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variety of social norms or a team of professional judges who share a common goal of seeking the truth? Obviously, this dilemma has important applications, but as far as we know, there is neither an answer to this question nor even a theoretical framework within which the question can be analyzed. (2017: 501) My goal in this chapter is to take some steps toward addressing these lacunae. I proceed as follows: First, I give an overview of the formal frameworks of social choice theory and collective decision-making. Then, I consider the core questions just raised. I conclude that most, perhaps all, political disputes concern matters which citizens believe, if implicitly, to have objectively correct and incorrect resolutions. Politics appears to be a matter for collective decisionmaking, not social choice. I then turn to the seemingly disparate debate over pluralism. If pluralism is true, as I believe it to be (see Mulligan 2015), then in some political contexts there is no single good to pursue, and nothing to optimize. Although the social choice framework would seem appropriate for these contexts, pluralism threatens it, too.

Models of social choice and collective decision-making I begin by summarizing the theoretical frameworks used to analyze situations of social choice and collective decision-making. Although the two frameworks have some superficial similarities, they are quite different, as we shall see. In common are (1) a set of voters {v1, v2, . . ., v n} (these could literally be voters, or members of a policy committee, or friends debating where to go to dinner, etc.). Each voter has (2) a preference ordering over the various alternatives {a1, a 2, . . ., a m} at issue (candidates, policy options, restaurants, etc.). The goal of both frameworks is (3) to select a social welfare function (SWF), which extracts a single, group preference from the n individual preference orderings. In social choice theory, an axiomatic approach is used to select the SWF: We identify the constraints that we believe are required by “fairness” or “reasonableness” to yield a set of conforming SWFs. For example, one common axiom is known as No Dictators: It would be unfair and unreasonable if our SWF simply parroted the preferences of one voter. Note that this is a weak constraint: Given an electorate of 300 million voters, an SWF that f lat-out ignores the opinions of 299,999,998 of them still satisfies No Dictators. The most important, and surprising, discovery of social choice theory is that it does not take many axioms, nor implausible ones, to reduce the number of conforming SWFs to zero. This is Kenneth Arrow’s (1950) celebrated Impossibility Theorem: For m ≥ 3, no SWF satisfies three axioms simultaneously: (1) No Dictators; (2) Unanimity (if all voters prefer a x over ay, then the group preference ordering should prefer a x over ay); and

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(3) Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (whether the group preference ordering prefers a x over ay should only depend on how voters rank a x and ay – what they think of a z shouldn’t matter). The ramifications of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem for politics remains a matter of debate. The claim, sometimes made, that it shows democratic decisionmaking to be inevitably unfair is too quick, not least because elections involving only two candidates (i.e., m = 2) are not imperiled.4 What is appropriate to say is that for many real-world decision-making processes, there is a strong but not conclusive Arrovian case to be made that there is unfairness in the process. An importance difference between models of social choice and models of collective decision-making is that the latter assign each voter v i a competence – a probability pi that his preference ordering is correct. In situations of social choice, such an assignment would make no sense: There is no notion of some people’s preferences being correct and others’ incorrect. In addition, models of collective decision-making almost always restrict the number of alternatives under consideration to two (m = 2): two candidates, two policy options, two ways a referendum question might be answered.5 The core result in collective decision-making was obtained by Grofman, Owen, and Feld (1983) and Nitzan and Paroush (1982): Given some assumptions,6 p the optimal SWF is to weight voter v i ’s preference in proportion to log i , 1  pi and then apply majority rule. Consider the medical scenario discuss earlier. A critical feature of this scenario, and one which distinguishes it from social choice scenarios, is that the members of this decision-making body (the “voters”) share a common goal: They all want to save the patient’s life. What they disagree about is which treatment plan, a or b, will do this. Suppose that v1 and v2 are medical residents, each with a 70% chance of choosing the correct treatment plan (p1 = p2 = 0.70). The third doctor, v3, is an experienced specialist with an 85% chance of choosing the correct plan (p3 = 0.85). The optimal way for the doctors to make this decision – to decide between a and b – is to weight v1’s and v2’s preferences in proportion to log

0.7  0.847, and v3’s 1  0.7

0.85  1.73. Notice that, in this case, the prefer1  0.85 ences of the two junior doctors fail to outweigh v3’s preference (since 0.847 + 0.847 < 1.73). Therefore, in making this decision, the group should ignore the opinions of the two junior doctors. This maximizes the probability that the correct plan is chosen and that the patient’s life is saved. For this set of competences, expert rule – listening only to v3 – is the optimal SWF. Complaints by v1 or v2 that they are not being treated fairly (i.e., that their votes count for nothing) would indicate both irrationality – since these doctors’ stated goal is to save the patient’s life – and immorality – since any adjustments to the process in the name of “fairness” work against the patient, to whom the doctors have a duty of care.

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Any set of competences defines a unique, optimal SWF. For n = 3 there are two possibilities: expert rule and simple majority rule (i.e., “one person, one vote”).7 As n gets large, the number of possibly optimal SWFs grows – but the optimal SWF is always well-defined and always straightforward to identify. A comment on the importance of the number of alternatives under consideration by the group (i.e., the value of m). Many real-world cases of decisionmaking, including political decision-making, are naturally dichotomous (m = 2): American voters select the Democrat or the Republican; a Federal Reserve committee raises interest rates or it does not; the president approves a CIA operation against a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, or he denies the operation. In addition, some cases involving many alternatives can be dealt with through a series of dichotomous steps. Thus, a legislature might select one of many possible tax rates by holding a series of up-and-down votes on amendments to an underlying bill.

Analyzing political disputes Are our political disputes better modeled by the formalism of social choice or collective decision-making? In this section, I offer some suggestions for answering this question by examining particular cases of political disagreement. If real-world disagreement consists in clashes of incommensurable preferences, none with a claim to objective correctness, then the morally important feature of our politics will be ensuring that voters are treated fairly. In practice, this means that we will likely endorse democracy (although see Brennan 2011, 2016 for a dissenting view). If, in contrast, we believe that there are right answers and wrong answers to our political questions, then the principal moral consideration will be epistemic quality. And the case for democracy will be weaker. First, let us consider those political disputes that seem to obviously involve conf licting preferences. Suppose, for example, that a municipal government earmarks $10 million for cultural purposes. Residents of the city are divided between using these funds to renovate the public libraries or to establish a ballet company. At first blush, it seems there is no fiducial standard of correctness against which these two alternatives may be weighed. (While it is possible that some aesthetic tastes are depraved and thus objectively wrong, that does not seem to be the case here.) Or suppose, even less controversially, that a newly formed country is establishing a road network and debating whether to have drivers use the left side of the road or the right side. They put the matter to a vote. How could there be a correct answer to this question? What might make us think that there is a moral feature to the dispute beyond ensuring that voters are treated fairly? In fact, these examples belie difficult issues. Consider the first example and imagine that an alderman makes the following argument: “Some people want the ballet and some people want the library. We all agree that aesthetic preferences for ballet and literature are equally legitimate. We’re never going to resolve

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things that way. So let’s figure out which project will make our city a happier place and choose that.” In this way, the alderman asks voters to (1) recognize the fact of disagreement, (2) accept that there is no first-order answer to the debate, and (3) seek to identify another goal, which might command consensus or something close to it, to resolve the matter. If we find such an approach plausible, we have moved out of the realm of social choice and into the realm of collective decision-making. Now one of the two alternatives is correct – namely, the welfare-maximizing one. This alternative might be selected under a social choice approach, but it might not. If ballet brings more pleasure to its fans than the library brings to bookworms, then the “fair” preference aggregation method – plausibly, simple majority rule – might select the library, not the ballet, despite a consensus on welfare maximization which demands the latter. Or consider the second example given. There is evidence (Leeming 1969) that driving on the left leads to fewer accidents than driving on the right. Given this, could voters still resist the idea that there is no correct answer to the question of which side of the road they should choose? To be sure, justifications for right-side driving might be given: Maybe longstanding practice should be respected. Maybe the new roads should be easy for right-side-driving tourists to navigate. But if justifications are being given in this way – if we are offered reasons for thinking that safety is not in fact the controlling value – then we are again being asked to make a judgment about the correctness of the conclusions our arguments are pointed toward. Next, consider a salient political debate, which is a hotly contested one in the United States. This is the debate over whether we should mobilize to fight climate change. This mobilization could include new economic regulations, leading to a loss of output, as well as a reallocation of public and private spending from unambiguously worthy causes (e.g., humanitarian relief ) to environmental protection. We might again be tempted to say that this is a matter for social choice, since it is a debate over the sort of society we prefer to live in – one in which output is X and we fund public education (or the military, or humanitarian aid, or whatever) versus one in which output is Y and we spend some of our scarce funds to fight climate change. But that is not correct. Both sides of this debate agree about something important – if climate change is happening, then we ought to take steps to fight it. Those opposed to environmental regulation and a tax on carbon think that these are bad policies because they are skeptics about climate change itself. With climate change, we have an empirical dispute which masquerades as a matter of conf licting preferences. But if it’s an empirical dispute, then somebody’s right and somebody’s wrong; either climate change is happening or it is not. Again, considerations of social choice are misplaced. And it would seem that some people – namely, scientists – are more likely to answer the climate change question correctly than the ignorant are. If that is so, then we have reason to endorse

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an “unfair” decision-making process (e.g., one which does not allow the average voter to weigh in on climate change policy) in the name of epistemic quality.8 To be sure, the debate is more complicated than that. People disagree about the existence of climate change, but believers disagree among themselves: about the extent to which climate change threatens our economic livelihood, our moral duties to future generations, the appropriate discount rate to use in today’s policy decisions, and so on. But this does not establish that there is no right answer to the question of whether we should fight climate change. It only suggests that the question is a complicated one. And grappling with inaccuracy is precisely what our collective decision-making processes are designed to do. Imperfections in voters’ abilities to get to the truth about these questions will reveal themselves in the quality of our political outcomes. The right response to discovering such imperfections is not to abandon the process; it is to be aware of our epistemic limitations and to try to improve outcomes by improving competence. While applying the collective decision-making framework requires consensus about a goal, the goal may be a very “thin” one. Despite widespread disagreement over rights, utility, liberty, and myriad empirical facts about our world, do we not all agree that the just climate change policy ought to be chosen? So long as we can reach consensus on some fiducial standard – such as the establishment of justice – we share the necessary common goal. Even a thin consensus, like the pursuit of justice, suffices to show that these disputes are not clashes between preferences, but collective searches for truth. Consider one more example: the debate over abortion. Here it is hard to interpret the debate as one of clashing preferences. Abortion is as hotly contested as it is because people are driven by strong moral sentiments about the objective rightness or wrongness of killing a fetus. It does not help to resist this by arguing that public policy cannot be purely determined by the demands of morality but must also be shaped by attention to citizens’ preferences. For example, we might concede the immorality of abortion but yet still think that a just society permits it if it is sufficiently desired by its citizens. If this is true, it simply pushes the collective decision problem up one level: Instead of asking, “Is abortion morally wrong or not?”, we ask, “Given some accepted fact about the morality of abortion and the degree to which it is supported (or opposed), should it be permitted in our society?” This again is a normative question which has a right and a wrong answer. Suppose that God were to come down and deliver the True Principles of Morality to us, and we thus learned that abortion is immoral and ought to be proscribed. What would we think of a person who, despite this knowledge, continued to agitate for the permissibility of abortion in society? Is there any way in which she could be exculpated for her conduct, for promoting a political view which she knew to be wrong? I do not see how. While this might seem like a trivial point, there is in fact an interesting and subtle consequence of admitting that political questions like these are truth-apt. This is that a rational voter might both (1) judge that X is the correct policy

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within some domain and (2) endorse a decision-making procedure which she believes is likely to select Y rather than X. Imagine a voter, Sally, who forms a belief about the moral permissibility of abortion in an epistemically optimal way: She surveys the evidence in detail; she works to free herself from bias; and she takes care to scrutinize the various arguments on offer. She may even modify her own belief in light of what she knows about the beliefs of others (this possibility is considered in the literature on the epistemology of disagreement).9 In any case, let’s stipulate that, given the evidence available to her, Sally has arrived at a maximally justified belief about abortion and has concluded X. Now Sally may act in one of two ways, politically. First, she may try to maximize the probability that the abortion policy corresponding with her view – X – obtains. But this would be irrational. Sally understands that collective decision-making has epistemic power. Therefore, she should accede to a political process that can more effectively get at the truth of the abortion question than she alone can. This is true even if Sally believes that the process is likely to select Y and not X. For example, if the government offers Sally the ability to choose, by fiat, abortion policy – in lieu of majority rule – a rational Sally will turn down this power. And she will turn it down even if she believes that by doing so there is a greater probability that Y, which is by her lights wrong, will obtain. Sally has done the best that she can to arrive at the truth about the morality of abortion. She believes it is X; others believe that it is Y. But the question of which moral belief she is maximally justified in adopting is different from the question of what political decision-making process is most likely to implement the correct policy. And Sally’s moral responsibility, vis-à-vis that second question, is to comport herself so that the system that is most likely to choose the correct policy, whatever that happens to be, is established. Now, one might think that such a demand is tantamount to asking Sally to violate her conscience. It is, but that is not a problem. If actions were legitimate so long as those taking them believed that they were doing the right thing, then many of history’s worst moral monsters would be exonerated. That you believe that what you are doing is right does not justify your actions.10 Nor is following one’s conscience a necessary condition for acting morally, as explained. Or consider vaccine skeptics: people who believe, against the scientific consensus, that vaccines do not prevent disease and may even be harmful. Some people are vaccine skeptics because they are willfully stupid, or because they propagandize themselves on the Internet, or because they have not devoted sufficient time to studying the issue – or for other blameworthy reasons. But surely not all skeptics are like this; some are intelligent and careful people who have simply arrived at (what we believe to be) the wrong conclusion about vaccine safety. Now suppose that one of these skeptics is considering not what to believe but how to act: She is considering whether to vaccinate her child or not. If her goal

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is maximizing the welfare of her child, as it ought to be, then she will vaccinate her child. Why? Because she recognizes the epistemic value of the de facto collective decision-making process that has already taken place: the investigation of vaccine safety by expert scientists and the consensus they have reached. If this parent is rational and if she seeks to act in the best interest of her child, she will subordinate her own judgment to the judgment of the collective for the purpose of action – even as she believes the collective’s judgment to be wrong. None of this requires that the parent change her mind about vaccine safety or that she refrain from trying to persuade others that her skeptical view is the right one. The point is that one cannot move from (1) P believes that X is the right thing to do in domain D to (2) P ought to try to establish, politically, X in D. That does not follow. P’s moral responsibility is to act in such a way that maximizes the probability that the correct alternative in D, whatever it happens to be, obtains. Two final notes. First, I have advanced theoretical reasons for believing that politics is a matter for collective decision-making. There are empirical reasons as well. It is well-known from experimental economics that people are not singleminded self-interest seekers,11 and political science research tells us that the same is true when it comes to voting: Citizens do not vote with an eye toward maximizing their own advantage but select the policies, candidates, and so on that they believe are in the interest of their country at large. Citizens vote, that is, “sociotropically”.12 This suggests that there is a common goal which voters pursue. Second, there may be formal ways to reduce scenarios of social choice to collective decision-making. Even in scenarios of social choice, there is a sense in which there is a best preference ordering: It is the “fair” preference ordering, the one that would be selected by a properly constrained SWF. In this way, individual preference orderings can be regarded as noisy judgments about this objectively correct preference ordering (Conitzer and Sandholm 2005).

The relevance of pluralism The concept of moral pluralism (sometimes, “value pluralism”) has three elements: (1) There are multiple, irreducible, incommensurable moral goods; (2) these goods sometimes come into conf lict in the real world (in the sense that pursuing one requires foregoing another); and (3) there is no rational way to resolve these conf licts. For the pluralist, moral loss is inescapable. Although the idea of pluralism is most commonly credited to Isaiah Berlin, it was in fact first elaborated by Sterling Lamprecht (1920, 1921) four decades earlier. Lamprecht gives the example of a military commander who, in deploying his forces, must choose between protecting a cultural treasure – the cathedral at Chartres – or saving the lives of his soldiers. For the pluralist, there is no right answer: Human life is a genuine moral good, sublime art is a genuine moral good, and there is no “correct” solution to the commander’s dilemma. This

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stands in contrast to the views of most normative theorists. The utilitarian, for example, reduces the value of the cathedral, and of the soldiers, to the happiness they now possess or will create. And in that way, the utilitarian provides, at least in principle, unambiguous guidance to the commander. For the pluralist, no such guidance can possibly be given because no such reduction of value is possible. By definition, disputes between plural values cannot be resolved with the collective decision-making framework. That framework only applies when there is agreement about the right goal; and a consensus goal is precisely what the pluralist denies. As Robert B. Talisse puts it, pluralism must countenance “no fault” moral disagreement: two parties may hold opposing judgments on a moral question, and yet it could be that neither is wrong.  .  .  . Certain moral disagreements are “no fault” not because of some lack of objectivity about value judgments but rather because it is a fact about certain judgments that they correctly identify and properly estimate the significance of certain objective goods, which are incommensurate with other such goods. (2012: 22) That is straightforward enough. What is surprising is that the social choice framework may also be unhelpful. There are two reasons for this. First, the pluralist’s principle (3) tells us that there is no rational way to resolve conf licts between incommensurable goods (“when a moral dispute is due to a conf lict between heterogeneous goods, there is no uniquely rational resolution to the dispute” (Talisse 2012: 22). Much of social choice theory is devoted to providing precisely such a resolution. Second, social choice is normative: We believe that we should obtain a group preference ordering in such and such a way because that way has moral value (typically, because it is fair). But if that is true, then the fair group alternative is just one more morally good thing, to stand beside the moral goods of the alternatives themselves. And pluralism would suggest that it has no claim of superiority over them. What, then, does the social choice framework get us? Does it not introduce one more way for our world to produce moral loss? Perhaps the moral value of fair aggregation is of a different order than the values of the individual alternatives we seek to aggregate. That is, perhaps we could both agree with the pluralist that there is no standard measure against which the value of the cathedral and the value of the soldiers’ lives may be measured, and say that new, better, second-order value is created when we treat those tasked with this decision fairly. The first-order moral loss associated with whatever choice we make is a terrible one, but some good may come of it – if we structure our choice in the appropriate way. In sum, for disagreements which concern plural values, the framework of collective decision-making is clearly misplaced. The framework of social choice

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would seem appropriate for modeling these disagreements, but its application leads to problems. Some of these problems disappear with more precise definitions: Is the “rational” resolution to value conf licts which pluralism denies equivalent to the “rational” constraints we seek to put on our SWFs? If not, then pluralism will not threaten the social choice approach. Other problems are deeper. For example, does the pluralist maintain that normative value simpliciter is incommensurable? Or only a subset of this value? If the latter, then it may be possible to make claims about the superiority or inferiority of second-order, political decision-making processes while denying the possibility of similar claims at the first-order level. Finally, we might wonder to what extent the political disputes considered earlier are instances of pluralism in action. Disputes over climate change, at least as described – in which they are disputes about an underlying empirical thesis – are not. But perhaps claims about whether to build a library or fund a ballet company are – and if that is the case, then satisfying resolutions at the first order level may not be possible.

Conclusion The issues raised in this chapter will, I believe, command increasing attention in coming years. Brexit, the Colombian people’s (initial) rejection of peace with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia after decades of war, and the election of Donald Trump are all political events which are arguably upright in the social choice sense (since they were results of fair, democratic, political processes) but morally dubious in the collective decision-making sense (since they are, or will lead to, objectively bad outcomes). But assigning value or disvalue to these events requires that we first determine what our politics are all about. I have argued that much of politics is a collective search for truth, and if this is so, then recent events should indeed unsettle us. We are in a better position to answer Nitzan and Paroush’s question, “Which of the two juristic systems is socially preferable, a randomly selected group of jurors who possess diverse preferences as well as a variety of social norms or a team of professional judges who share a common goal of seeking the truth?” The answer is the latter. Often we can agree on an objective standard of correctness, and if so, then we are obliged to arrange our decision-making process to best serve that objective. The standard may be a thin one, such as “justice” (with no further definition given for that term). But no matter how thin the standard, if it is endorsed by all those who participate, then all must defer to that process, whatever the implications for their own, personal preferences. To be sure, there will be vigorous debate over exactly what is meant by “justice”. Is justice in a criminal trial convicting defendants who more likely than not committed the crime? Or does justice require, as we typically think it does, a burden of proof above and beyond this? But again, this dispute is not one of

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conf licting preferences; rather, it is a dispute about the proper “thick” definition of “justice”. All that said, as discussed, the possibility of pluralism raises problems for addressing politics through collective decision-making. Pluralism provides richness in our culture while creating challenges for our politics. This is wellknown. What is surprising is that perhaps there is a similar dichotomy at work in our theory, as well.

Notes 1 I thank Jesse Hill for helpful discussions on the matters discussed in this chapter. 2 Although I use these terms consistently in this chapter, I note that usage in the literature varies; terms such as “social choice”, “collective decision-making”, and “social welfare function” mean different things to different authors, so it is important to check definitions. 3 In the former, procedural camp one finds, e.g., Dahl (1979) and Schumpeter (1950). The latter, epistemic camp includes Dietrich and Spiekermann (2013), Goodin (2003, 2008), and Landemore (2013). And then there are hybrid theorists, such as Estlund (2008). 4 For a defense of democratic decision-making against Arrow’s result, see Mackie 2003. 5 An exception is Ben-Yashar and Paroush (2001). 6 Most notably, the assumption that votes are statistically independent. The model has been extended to cover the relaxation of this assumption; see Berend and Sapir (2007); Berg (1993, 1996); Boland (1989); Boland, Proschan, and Tong (1989); Ladha (1992, 1993, 1995); Nitzan and Paroush (1984); Peleg and Zamir (2012); and Shapley and Grofman (1984). 7 For n = 3, expert rule is to be preferred over simple majority rule iff for the most competent voter, v3, log

p3 p p  log 1  log 2 . 1  p3 1  p1 1  p2

8 See Kappel 2017 for a discussion of the ramifications of these fact-dependent policy disputes for political legitimacy. 9 The best introduction to disagreement is Feldman (2007). 10 On the moral (ir)relevance of conscience, see Foot (2002) and Schueler (2007). 11 This line of research began with Güth, Schmittberger, and Schwarze (1982). 12 Kinder and Kiewiet (1979, 1981).

References Arrow, K. 1950. A difficulty in the concept of social welfare. Journal of Political Economy 58: 328–346. Ben-Yashar, R. and Paroush, J. 2001. Optimal decision rules for fixed-size committees in polychotomous choice situations. Social Choice and Welfare 18: 737–746. Berend, D. and Sapir, L. 2007. Monotonicity in Condorcet’s jury theorem with dependent voters. Social Choice and Welfare 28: 507–528. Berg, S. 1993. Condorcet’s jury theorem, dependency among jurors. Social Choice and Welfare 10: 87–95. ——— 1996. Condorcet’s jury theorem and the reliability of majority voting. Group Decision and Negotiation 5: 229–238. Boland, P. J. 1989. Majority systems and the Condorcet jury theorem. Statistician 38: 181–189.

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Boland, P. J., Proschan, F., and Tong, Y. L. 1989. Modelling dependence in simple and indirect majority systems. Journal of Applied Probability 26: 81–88. Brennan, J. 2011. The right to a competent electorate. Philosophical Quarterly 61: 700–724. ——— 2016. Against Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. 2005. Common voting rules as maximum likelihood estimators. Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-05). Arlington, VA: AUAI Press. Dahl, R. A. 1979. Procedural democracy. In Philosophy, Politics & Society, eds. P. Laslett and J. Fishkin, 97–133. Oxford: Blackwell. Dietrich, F. and Spiekermann, K. 2013. Epistemic democracy with defensible premises. Economics & Philosophy 29: 87–120. Estlund, D. M. 2008. Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Feldman, R. 2007. Reasonable religious disagreements. In Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, ed. L. M. Antony, 194–214. New York: Oxford University Press. Foot, P. 2002. Moral relativism. In her Moral Dilemmas: And Other Topics in Moral Philosophy, 20–36. New York: Oxford University Press. Goodin, R. E. 2003. Reflective Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. ——— 2008. Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice after the Deliberative Turn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grofman, B., Owen, G., and Feld, S. L. 1983. Thirteen theorems in search of the truth. Theory and Decision 15: 261–278. Güth, W., Schmittberger, R., and Schwarze, B. 1982. An experimental analysis of ultimatum bargaining. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 3: 367–388. Kappel, K. 2017. Fact-dependent policy disagreements and political legitimacy. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20: 313–331. Kinder, D. R. and Kiewiet, D. R. 1979. Economic discontent and political behavior: The role of personal grievances and collective economic judgments in congressional voting. American Journal of Political Science 23: 495–527. ——— 1981. Sociotropic politics: The American case. British Journal of Political Science 11: 129–161. Ladha, K. K. 1992. The Condorcet jury theorem, free speech, and correlated votes. American Journal of Political Science 36: 617–634. ——— 1993. Condorcet’s jury theorem in light of de Finetti’s theorem. Social Choice and Welfare 10: 69–85. ——— 1995. Information pooling through majority-rule voting: Condoret’s jury theorem with correlated votes. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 26: 353–372. Lamprecht, S. P. 1920. The need for a pluralistic emphasis in ethics. Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 17: 561–572. ——— 1921. Some political implications of ethical pluralism. Journal of Philosophy 18: 225–244. Landemore, H. 2013. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Leeming, J. J. 1969. Road Accidents: Prevent or Punish? London: Cassell. Mackie, G. 2003. Democracy Defended. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mulligan, T. 2015. The limits of liberal tolerance. Public Affairs Quarterly 29: 277–295. Nitzan, S. and Paroush, J. 1982. Optimal decision rules in uncertain dichotomous choice situations. International Economic Review 23: 289–297.

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——— 1984. The significance of independent decisions in uncertain dichotomous choice situations. Theory and Decision 17: 47–60. ——— 2017. Collective decision making and jury theorems. In The Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics, Volume 1: Methodology and Concepts, ed. F. Parisi, 494–516. New York: Oxford University Press. Peleg, B. and Zamir, S. 2012. Extending the Condorcet jury theorem to a general dependent jury. Social Choice and Welfare 39: 91–125. Schueler, G. F. 2007. Is it possible to follow one’s conscience? American Philosophical Quarterly 44: 51–60. Schumpeter, J. A. 1950. Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy. New York: Harper & Row. Shapley, L. and Grofman, B. 1984. Optimizing group judgmental accuracy in the presence of interdependencies. Public Choice 43: 329–343. Talisse, R. B. 2012. Pluralism and Liberal Politics. New York: Routledge.

4 LIBERALISM, PLURALISM, AND A THIRD WAY Giulia Bistagnino

That there exists a special link between politics and diversity of opinions, which may lead to even disruptive conf licts, is an undeniable fact. And it is true that political philosophers have been concerned with the problem of how to understand the proper relation between these two elements since the beginning of rational inquiry. As it is well known, Plato envisages an irreconcilable tension between disagreement and justice: The latter cannot be reached in the ideal city if the former is allowed; philosophers are to rule for justice requires harmony in each individual and in society. After Plato, political philosophers have become more optimistic, and two major visions of the relation between diversity and politics have been defended. The first one sees diversity and conf lict as somehow constitutive of politics. According to this view, the attempt to eliminate diversity and conf lict is an attempt to suspend politics. This is the idea of Hannah Arendt, for example, who thinks that the notion of plurality is crucial to understand political action. From her point of view, the condition of possibility of political action is precisely that of plurality: It is because individuals do not live in isolation, and are different with respect to their ideas, tastes, and aspirations that it is possible to act politically (Arendt 1958). Similarly, Jacques Ranciere argues that disagreement is the pivotal characteristic of politics, and thus seeking consensus constitutes an attempt to depoliticize politics (1999). Contrary to this view, the second vision of the relation between politics and diversity is the liberal one, which has its roots in the tradition of the social contract and the theories defended by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. According to this view, politics is seen as a way to eschew conf lict and secure individual spaces of liberty and institutions apt to guarantee proper relations among individuals living in the same society. Since the publication of John Rawls’s Political Liberalism, this problem has been formulated with reference to the idea of pluralism: “How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society

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of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?” (2005, xviii). Contemporary liberals answer this question in two ways. On one hand, there is the theory of modus vivendi, according to which the fact that there are many forms of life in which individuals can rationally thrive and the fact that they have different preferences and interests call for “pragmatic compromises” and negotiations to secure peace and security. Such compromises and negotiations need to be generally accepted by those who are party to it despite their different reasons for doing so. On the other, there is public reason liberalism, which relies on the idea that, since political authority must in some sense rest on the free consent of those subjected to it, coercion must be justified to all citizens with public reasons, which are reasons citizens can reasonably be expected to accept. Here, I am concerned with the second vision of the relation between politics and diversity, which is prominent within debates in normative political theory, and in particular I tackle the relation between liberalism and pluralism. From my point of view, liberals – let them be defenders of modus vivendi or public reason – seem to share the idea that a liberal solution to the problem of pluralism cannot start from objectivist premises.1 There is a widespread conviction that it is not possible for liberals concerned with pluralism to accept three related and intertwined philosophical and metaethical thesis: (1) moral realism, according to which there are moral objective facts that exist independently of individuals’ mental states, such as desires, attitudes, experiences, emotions, and so on; (2) the objective view of reasons, according to which justificatory reasons, even in the political context, are agreement-independent for they are considerations given by or stemming from objective facts; and (3) the idea that political legitimacy is provided by justification simpliciter, which is based on objective reasons. Indeed, liberals think that, to solve the problem of pluralism, either political agreements should not be truth-sensitive for the concept of truth is detrimental to the aim of harmonization,2 or it is necessary to embrace a subjectivist or a relativist view on reasons and values. With respect to the problem of pluralism, liberals want to secure (at least some) inclusiveness of different points of view in order to establish political legitimacy, given their commitment to the idea of individual autonomy; they want to guarantee some form of political stability apt to allow individuals to pursue their preferred ends and plans of life; and they think that to achieve these two desiderata, either the idea of truth should be abandoned, or a relativist account should be embraced. Liberals seem to believe that endorsing an objective understanding of moral truth is dangerous insofar as it can be used as a means to silence pluralism, dissolve diversity, and in the end destroy liberty.3 The aim of this chapter is precisely to challenge this idea of the incompatibility between liberalism and the objectivist view of political legitimacy4 with respect to the problem of pluralism. I attempt to show that what I label “principled compromise” constitutes an option for those who are committed to objectivist premises and yet want to secure an agreement that is liberal in kind because it is somehow inclusive and stable. Of course, the idea of principled compromise is not without

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problems. However, I contend that it is a position worth considering, that should be evaluated and that can compete with the other standpoints present within the liberal approach. The chapter proceeds as follows: I begin by specifying the main commitments liberals hold in the face of pluralism and their skepticism towards the idea of truth. Secondly, I reconstruct the positions of modus vivendi and public reason liberalism and show the way in which they consider inclusiveness, stability, and truth. The discussion is important because modus vivendi and public reason liberalism treat these three points in different manners, and therefore it is important to specify such differences in order to compare both positions with the proposal of principled compromise. I then provide an account of the idea of principled compromise as a genuine alternative to modus vivendi and public reason liberalism. Finally, I put forward some concluding remarks about the idea of principled compromise.

What a liberal wishes for When it comes to the problem of political legitimacy – and thus to that of the justification of political authority in the context of contemporary democracies characterized by pluralism – liberals contend that political agreements, among citizens who live in the same society and are subjected to the same laws, should provide some form of inclusiveness and stability. So, for an objectivist standpoint to qualify as liberal, it needs to provide a solution to the problem of pluralism apt to honour these two desiderata. However, liberals usually argue that questions of truth and objectivist premises are ill suited because they would constitute an impediment to the establishment of a proper political agreement. But why are inclusiveness and stability so special for liberals? And what is wrong with truth and objectivity? It is not difficult to explain why liberals care about inclusiveness, in the sense of being committed to the idea that people with different ideas should be respected and that political authority should in some sense take such diversity into account. Liberalism is a political view and theory based on the value of liberty, in the sense that it rests on the premise that individuals should be left free to choose their ways of life and to lead their lives as they prefer, in accordance with their own understanding of what gives life meaning and value. This idea does not come as a surprise given the traditional tie between liberalism and the idea of liberty not only as “non-interference” but also as “self-mastery” or “autonomy”: Liberals consider the condition of an agent who is in control of her own action, able to act in accordance with her genuine desires and dispositions to be of great value. Such commitment to the value of liberty turns into the conviction that there exists a presumption in favor of liberty and thus that any form of violation or coercion requires some sort of justification to those that are subjected to it. This idea is rooted in the link between liberalism and the Enlightenment tradition, which is characterized by a solid and firm optimism in reason, intended as

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a shared capacity of human beings to reach correct answers about not only the natural world but also the social world. It is because individuals are considered capable of reasoning and understanding that political authorities and their principles must be susceptible of comprehension and must be able to be justified to those who have to live under them. As Jeremy Waldron puts it, the “foundation of liberal thought is based on this demand for a justification of the social world” (1993, 44). The point of liberalism is that justification of social and political institutions and order should be in principle intelligible to everyone because when it comes to the limitation of one’s liberty, everyone not only seeks an answer but is also entitled to one.5 The important point to understand here is that liberals strongly believe that it is not right to impose political decisions on individuals without providing justification for it because coercion without justification constitutes a form of authoritarianism and amounts to a form of disrespect towards the equality of individuals and their capacities to have different views of life, values, and ideas. To put it in a nutshell, given their commitment to individual liberty, liberals cannot solve the problem of pluralism by suppressing pluralism itself but only by attempting to provide a justification that is compatible with as many different points of view as possible, at least ideally. Liberals are also committed to a certain idea of stability because of their commitment to liberty. For individuals to lead their lives as they please and choose their preferred plans of life, a political order needs to be somehow stable. If they are to live under chaotic institutions, which run the risk of being turned down so that anarchy becomes a real possibility, individuals are not under conditions letting them enjoy their liberty.6 At the same time, it is important to note that liberals should not be seen as committed to stability per se but to a form of stability that it is not achieved or maintained through oppression. Stability cannot, for example, be implemented by the use of force. Because liberals are concerned with the liberty and autonomy of individuals, their political theories cannot guarantee peace and stability if they are based on some form of tyranny, authoritarianism, or the physical oppression of those who do not accept and disagree with the proposed political arrangement and its measures. Again, stability cannot be secured by the suppression of pluralism and diversity. In this sense, liberals want to secure stability because only with stability is it possible for individuals to lead life as they please, without the fear of succumbing to anarchy. However, stability cannot be established via oppression because it would constitute an infringement on individual liberty. So, liberals strive for a kind of qualified stability that is normatively rich because it is based on a form of respect for diversity. When it comes to understanding the relation between liberalism and moral truth, it is crucial to understand that liberals do not necessarily oppose the idea of the existence of some objective moral truth, nor do all of them want to argue that moral realism, as a metaethical theory, is false.7 In the end, their philosophical ancestor is John Locke, whose famous argument for toleration starts from the idea that, even though there might well be a true or valid religion, the state should not be permitted to favor any religion over another (Locke 1685). The

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problem for liberals is that they fear that grounding political legitimacy on realist premises and objective reasons necessarily implies the justification of an authoritarian society, in which those who believe to know the moral truth can impose it on others, with the result of the suppression of pluralism and the establishment of the wrong kind of stability, if any. If inclusiveness and stability, as liberals conceive them, are both to be secured, seeking moral truths and appealing to objective reasons in the justification of political authority are wrong and damaging.

Modus vivendi and public reason liberalism Let us consider how inclusiveness, stability, and truth are related to each other within contemporary liberal theories in a more detailed manner. Modus vivendi approaches are characterized by a specific methodological standpoint, namely that of political realism.8 Theorists working within this approach are committed to the idea that political theory should be descriptively accurate in taking into consideration how real politics actually work, without mischaracterizing it in some idealized and chimerical manner. In this sense, theories of modus vivendi are designed not to propose a full-f ledged, ideal theory of justice. Rather, at their heart, there is a strong concern with the conditions of peace and security. So, modus vivendi dismisses the project of establishing rational consensus on some particular values as aspirational and focuses on a modest and normatively limited goal, namely that of establishing peaceful and stable political settlements. This is because, on one hand, pacific coexistence is seen as instrumentally necessary for the realization of anyone’s plan of life and personal goods, and so it is of value to everyone. On the other, peace and security constitute crucial concerns for politics and political theory because there is no illusion about the fact that pluralism is here to stay. Despite differences in understanding the sources and causes of pluralism,9 defenders of modus vivendi agree on the fact that conf lict is one of the key circumstances of politics and a feature that cannot just be eradicated, given that a political arrangement based on common values is unavailable. John Gray, for example, argues that his theory “does not cherish the hope that the world would someday converge on truth. It does not seek to converge on the truth. [It represents] the search for terms of coexistence between different moralities” (2000, 136–138). Thus, modus vivendi is not a form of political accommodation that aims at eliminating conf lict but attempts to bring about “common institutions in which many forms of life can exist” (Gray 2000, 6). It is important to understand that modus vivendi’s commitment to peace and stability does not turn into the idea that any form of stability is valuable and should be pursued. “To count as a modus vivendi an arrangement has to be broadly ‘acceptable’ or ‘agreeable’ to those who are party to it, even if reluctantly and for diverse reasons” (Horton 2010, 439). In this sense, those who are subjected to the settlement envisaged by modus vivendi theorists are to recognize and consider it acceptable and thus valid. However, given the realist spirit of modus vivendi, there is no restriction or normative constraint on the reasons that

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citizens may have to accept the political settlement. This is why modus vivendi can be seen as a theory of pragmatic compromise,10 namely a theory fostering a kind of compromise in which strategic as well as moral reasons are allowed and thus whose outcome is accepted not necessarily because it is just but because it protects one’s interests. Of course, given its pragmatic character, the compromises fostered by modus vivendi are always the results of political mediation and negotiations and, therefore, cannot help to be contingent and circumstantial. If it is true that “there is no good reason to think that the appropriate content of any modus vivendi can be determined in advanced” (Horton 2010, 439), it is also true that any modus vivendi can never be considered definitive and settled once and for all: It is in its nature to be a kind of agreement that is precarious in character, and this can change when political circumstances change. From this brief overview, it is possible to draw three considerations. First, by aiming at establishing a political agreement that is minimal because it can be supported by various and very different kinds of reasons, modus vivendi scores really high in terms of inclusiveness: No individual is excluded from the legitimation pool as long as she does not want to impose her views on others with the use of force. Second, modus vivendi theorists are primarily concerned with peace, though realized in terms of an acceptable settlement or actually accepted settlement.11 However, given the contingent and circumstantial character of the idea of pragmatic compromise, the stability provided by modus vivendi is somehow weak. It is important to clarify that considering the stability of modus vivendi weak does not amount to the conviction that a pragmatic compromise cannot be solid and persist for a considerable length of time.12 Rather, it is only to argue that modus vivendi is weak from a normative point of view: Since it seeks only to secure peaceful agreements that are not oppressive, it is vulnerable to the possibility that the most powerful in society exercise their inf luence at the expense of the weak. Indeed, in a modus vivendi, each one’s capacity to inf luence the political agreement is directly related to one’s negotiating power. Finally, the rejection of truth, within this perspective, is grounded in its realist methodology. It is because of their convictions that politics is characterized by conf lict and that political arrangements based on values and moral reasons are utopian that modus vivendi theorists dismiss the search for moral truth and seek only to secure peaceful settlements. Different from modus vivendi, public reason liberalism13 relies on the idea of public justification, according to which a political authority is legitimate as long as its existence and its decisions are justified with public reasons, namely reasons that those subjected to them can be expected to accept. In this sense, public reasons are reasons that are acceptable from everyone’s point of view, despite particular interests or individual convictions, and to justify something publicly means to appeal to reasons apt to reach an agreement because of the acceptability requirement. Within public reason liberalism, there are different conceptions of what constitutes a public reason and its justificatory force, and theorists defending this approach have opted either for a consensus or a convergence interpretation

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of it. The former considers public reasons those having the characteristic of being sharable or acceptable to all; according to the latter, on the contrary, public reasons need only to be intelligible, in the sense that they need to appear justified for the person who has them, given her own particular evaluative standards and point of view.14 In what follows, I mainly rely on the work of Rawls and Gaus because they represent the two most relevant and inf luential positions within public reason liberalism. Public reason liberalism starts from a methodological standpoint concerning the role of political philosophy, which should quit philosophical and metaphysical controversies to perform a practical function, namely that of finding the basis for the possibility of existence and persistence of a society in which citizens deeply disagree about morality and all other sort of things. For Rawls, the practical task of political philosophy emerges “from divisive political conf lict and the need to settle the problem of order” (Rawls 2001, 1), whereas for Gaus, political philosophy should guide us in finding conceptions of justice apt to “allow us to live together in cooperative, mutually beneficial, social relations” (Gaus 2011, 4). Starting from this premise, public reason liberals argue in favor of some sort of independence of political philosophy from moral theory and philosophy in general and strongly oppose the idea that political philosophy should be concerned with the search for objective moral truths. To use Rawls’s words, public reason liberals “apply the principle of toleration to philosophy itself ” (1985, 231) and avoid the search for objective truth, which is controversial, divisive, and thus counterproductive to the aim of securing a good and stable basis for cooperation. According to Gaus, a theory “that refuses to take seriously an analysis of how morality is necessary to secure cooperative human life is academic in the most pejorative sense” (2011, 176). Despite this shared starting point, consensus and convergence conceptions of public reason liberalism part company when it comes to the reasons why seeking moral truth should be off the political philosopher’s agenda. The former grounds it in a complex understanding not only of the moral attitudes citizens need to display in the political realm but also of epistemic fallibilism, according to which no belief can ever be justified in a conclusive way. Indeed, Rawls does not deny that an objective moral truth may indeed exist. However, he identifies the source and explanation of reasonable pluralism in the burdens of judgment, namely “the many hazards involved in the correct (and conscious) exercise of our powers of reason and judgement in the ordinary course of political life” (Rawls 2005, 56). In this sense, Rawls argues that we need to realize that our beliefs may be mistaken and that there are certain epistemic difficulties15 making it impossible for us to claim to possess the truth with certainty. Therefore, if we are reasonable, we are to recognize the burdens of judgment and support a political conception of justice that is freestanding with respect to the diverse and competing moral, religious, and philosophical doctrines and based on fundamental ideas already present in the political culture of a democratic society. Accordingly, public reasons are reasons that refer only to such political values that are already shared, are

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neutral towards individuals’ personal commitments, and thus are acceptable from everyone’s point of view. The convergence standpoint, on the contrary, devises a model in which the conception of justice is supported by the different reasons citizens may reasonably have. For the model to make sense and thus for convergence to function, it is necessary to embrace some sort of relativism about reasons,16 according to which individuals have and are justified to have very different sort of justificatory reasons because of their different set of beliefs, experiences, and upbringings (Gaus 1996, 38, 2011, 239). Since different persons may have different initial beliefs, given their different perceptual and cognitive experiences, it is possible for one to have a reason to believe a certain proposition in force of her system of beliefs and not for another whose system of beliefs is different. A convergence conception of public justification requires citizens only to support a political authority and its laws, norms, and decisions on the basis of their individual reasons and seeks an agreement on those very laws, norms, and reforms and not on reasons themselves. Now, it is crucial to understand that all kinds of public reasons are not reasons that are actually accepted by the citizens of a certain democratic society, for such a consensus would be impossible to achieve. Rather, public reasons are reasons that are acceptable from everyone’s point of view, either because they refer to values that are already shared within the society or because they support the same conclusion from different points of view. Public reason liberals understand that it would be impossible to find political principles, norms, or policies all actual individuals endorse, so their solution is to employ the device of idealization. Indeed, both consensus and convergence restrict17 the degree of pluralism that can be harmonized in democratic societies. For example, Rawls (2005, 59) famously proposes his theory of political liberalism as a response not to the problem of pluralism but to that of reasonable pluralism, which concerns the diversity of opinions arising only among reasonable citizens, who not only recognize the burdens of judgment but are also moved by a desire to cooperate in society with others on terms of reciprocity and thus are ready not to exceed the boundaries of public justification. Similarly, Gaus (2011, 279) distinguishes between “radical pluralism” and “mutually intelligible evaluative pluralism” to set some limits on the kind of evaluative standpoints that can enter into public justification. According to him, certain evaluative standards transgress the boundaries of the “common human horizon”, and individuals who hold them “cannot be committed to the moral enterprise” (Gaus 2011, 282). Through idealization, consensus and convergence constrain public justification and restrict the number of citizens to which a political authority and its decisions are to be justified. Such a move is necessary, given the main desideratum of public reason liberals of securing a form of stability that is stronger than the one established by a modus vivendi. Indeed, both consensus and convergence aim at establishing political agreements that are based on normative reasons and not on the negotiating power of the parties. Rawls’s overlapping consensus is based on the idea that citizens accept the

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political agreement not out of their preferences but in force of their normative convictions, and thus it does not depend on some sort of balance of power. When an overlapping consensus is achieved and therefore the society is stable for the right reasons, the political agreement is supported even if certain convictions and positions may increase their importance and inf luence to the point of becoming dominant within the society (Rawls 2005, 147–148). Similarly, Gaus imagines political authority and its decisions to be supported by the different and equally valid normative reasons citizens have and not by prudential considerations. Comparing public reason liberalism with modus vivendi, it is possible to note that the two perspectives differ with respect to the desiderata of inclusiveness and stability. Public reason liberalism pursues a form of stability, which does not rest on prudential reasons but is normatively grounded. However, to achieve this kind of stability, public reason liberalism needs to limit the pervasiveness of pluralism, so it restricts the legitimation pool and admits only a limited number of citizens and perspectives to the circle of public justification. In this sense, if public reason liberalism can secure a stability that does not merely ref lect power relations, it cannot help to be less inclusive than modus vivendi. Finally, both theories are suspicious towards the search for objective truth in political philosophy: Public reason liberalism and modus vivendi consider appeals to some form of objective truth detrimental to the reaching of an agreement that is respectful towards pluralism and apt to provide some kind of stability.

Principled compromise: a third way? But is it really true that an objectivist framework needs to be dropped to secure inclusiveness and stability? This section resists the temptation to answer this question in a negative manner and proposes a third way, which I call principled compromise,18 to solve the problem of pluralism. The aim of this section, and of this chapter in general, is not that of defending or fully vindicating the perspective of principled compromise. Rather, it is to show that the idea of principled compromise is a concrete theoretical option to explore for those interested in the problem of pluralism and concerned with inclusiveness and stability. The idea of principled compromise starts with the conviction that not all disagreements are alike: Some of them are genuine; others are apparent. Apparent disagreements are disagreements in which the parties are talking past each other or placed in an epistemically asymmetric relation. Such disagreements can be solved as long as the parties are ready to recognize that they are referring to different things or that there is an epistemic difference making it the case that one is wrong and the other is right or that there are reasons for epistemic deference. Genuine disagreements, on the contrary, are disagreements in which epistemic peers disagree not only about the substantive content of a particular issue but also about the correct justificatory reasons supporting their claims.19 Within this perspective, if a certain norm, law, or policy is subjected to apparent disagreement, it is possible to coerce those who refuse to recognize that they are in error,

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although they are presented with evidence proving it. Consider, for example, Bill and Jill, who have to decide on a pension reform. Bill wants to implement reform A, which is unfeasible for the government’s budget cannot cover for it; Jill, on the contrary, wants to implement reform B, which is consistent with the government’s spending possibilities. Let us now assume that Bill does not know that reform A is unfeasible until he discusses it with Jill, who works for the government and is thus well-informed about the country’s finances. Let us further assume that despite Jill’s efforts to explain why reform A is unsuited, Bill continues to support it. In this case, reform B can be safely implemented, despite Bill’s disagreement, for he is failing in revising his belief about the pension reform, although he has a reason to do it. Some may find this disturbing because from a liberal point of view, legitimacy of a particular political decision obtains when justification is given to all those subjected to it with reasons they can accept. However, principled compromise rejects the idea of public justification and attempts to outline a framework for legitimacy that it is compatible with the idea of justification simpliciter and the framework of objective reasons. At the same time, those feeling disturbed by what the perspective of principled compromise allows in cases of apparent disagreement should not worry too much if they consider that those disagreements that have been the focus of contemporary debates concerning pluralism (abortion, death penalty, the balance between liberty and equality, and so on) fall under the category of genuine disagreement. Indeed, such disagreements qualify as disagreements among peers, for they persist among individuals and experts who (1) have roughly the same rational and epistemic capacities with respect to the issue at hand, (2) have considered the same relevant evidence, and (3) have considered the evidence conscientiously, and thus, being in an equally good epistemic position, they are equally likely to be right (or mistaken) (Kelly 2005; Elga 2007). The reason for the persistence of such disagreements is epistemic in kind. On one hand, it is due to the fact that peers cannot fully assess and expound the evidence at their disposal because it is too complex. As Ernest Sosa (2010) notes, many cases of disagreements regarding political, religious, and philosophical matters occur because the evidence is unclear or uncertain. On the other, peer disagreements are generated by differences with respect to epistemic norms: Alvin Goldman (2009), for example, argues that although there may be one maximally justified system of epistemic norms, there are different rationally permissible systems of epistemic norms that could be employed and leading to different conclusions.20 Now, assuming that peer disagreements exist, how should they be dealt with in the political context? Here is where principled compromise kicks in. The idea is that when a genuine disagreement is cast over an issue that is politically relevant, in the sense that it requires some collective action 21 for, if not settled, it would advantage a certain part of the population,22 there are principled epistemic reasons to settle for a compromise. A compromise is a situation in which, from an initial position of conf lict or disagreement, each of the disputing parties

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make some concessions and find a middle ground between them. However, in cases of genuine disagreement, peers should not strike a pragmatic compromise based on strategic reasons, as in the case of modus vivendi. Rather, the kind of compromise at play here is principled because it stems from the recognition of the rationality of the parties at dispute. Indeed, despite being constituted by various, divergent, and conf licting positions, with different understanding of what is the best way to respond to such disagreements, theorists working on the epistemology of disagreement share the idea that peer disagreement are epistemically significant and cannot be nonchalantly dismissed.23 In this sense, in a genuine disagreement, all the different and competing convictions and beliefs that are at stake should be taken into consideration, and this is what provides reasons to settle for a compromise. Such compromise is principled in character because it is based on principled reasons regarding the rationality of the parties at disagreement. The compromise is required by the fact that, given epistemic parity, it is not possible to understand (at least for the moment) who got things right in a genuine disagreement, and thus, all diverging beliefs should not be dismissed but taken into consideration. Now that the idea of principled compromise is sketched,24 it is possible to compare it with public reason liberalism and modus vivendi with respect to the two desiderata of inclusiveness and stability and thus understanding if it can qualify as liberal. First, it is not difficult to understand how that of principled compromise is a perspective sensitive to pluralism, given that the very idea of compromise is associated with a solution in which different points of views are combined and concessions by each part is required. However, from this perspective, not all points of view are admitted, and the kind of pluralism that it addresses is not without limits. Indeed, the idea of principled compromise is inclusive as long as genuine disagreements are concerned: Apparent disagreements, in which the parties are talking past each other, or placed in an epistemically asymmetric relation, do not constitute a condition for taking all the different and diverging opinions seriously. Positions that are false or irrational to hold because they are refuted by those who are epistemically better placed are to be dismissed and not taken into consideration. In this sense, principled compromise is similar to public reason liberalism and its aim of finding a solution not to the problem of pluralism but of reasonable or mutually intelligible evaluative pluralism. However, despite tackling a limited form of pluralism, public reason liberalism and principled compromise substantially differ in the rationale for excluding points of view from the legitimation pool. Indeed, the criterion defended by public reason liberals is moral in kind, for it excludes those position that are not agreementdependent and thus unacceptable and disrespectful. Differently, to be excluded from a principled compromise are positions that are not epistemically sound, regardless of their capacity to conduct to an agreement. In this sense, similarly to public reason liberalism, principled compromise is less inclusive than a modus vivendi, which does not envisage limits on the kind of claims that could be legitimately taken into consideration in the justification of political decisions.

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However, the ambitions of principled compromise and public reason liberalism differ from that of modus vivendi in attempting to secure political agreements that do not merely ref lect the power relations present within a society. Second, when it comes to stability, principled compromise differs from public reason liberalism, which seeks agreements that can be accepted by citizens as firstbest options and attempts to eliminate disagreements concerning which arrangements would be optimal so that no concessions are necessary. If public reason liberals attempt to ensure consensus on a set of principles that are supposed to be definitive, all compromises are susceptible to change and can be revised.25 However, such revisions vary with respect to the reasons grounding the compromise. In a modus vivendi, compromises can change when the power relations among citizens change. On the contrary, principled compromises are not affected by political opportunities. Given that the reasons for the compromise are principled, for they are grounded in the recognition of the epistemic parity of others, the content of a principled compromise can be modified only when new evidence or new epistemic considerations that are relevant for the issue at hand arise. In this sense, the idea of principled compromise aims at securing a kind of stability that is not grounded in strategic but epistemic reasons, and thus, although the agreements fostered by such perspective are not definitive or conclusive, they are nonetheless not susceptible to the different powers political actors have.

Conclusions In this chapter, I have attempted to show that what is usually considered impossible, namely a liberal solution to the problem of pluralism framed within an objectivist view of reasons, constitutes an available option. In these concluding remarks, I would like to clarify two points with respect to the idea of principled compromise. First, I have not argued that the perspective of principled compromise is without problems: I have not shown nor demonstrated that principled compromise is the overall best suited solution to the problem of disagreement within democratic societies. To this aim, it would be important, for example, to explain why the paradigm of peer disagreement, which is highly idealized, should be consistent and helpful in the context of political philosophy. Moreover, it would be necessary to better explain how the negotiations to reach the compromise should be carried out. I have not intended to hide these difficulties. Rather, I have only attempted to carve out the space of a possible theoretical standpoint, different from those of modus vivendi and public reasons liberalism. Second, one may wonder whether the idea of principled compromise is somehow related to perfectionism. This is not the case. I think perfectionism is a reactive theory, in the sense that it is built as a reaction to mainstream conceptions of liberalism. Indeed, perfectionists usually do not propose solutions to the problem of pluralism but limit themselves to rejecting the idea of state neutrality and arguing that the state should promote the good and guarantee conditions for citizens to lead good lives. And indeed, one of the charges they face is precisely

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that of not settling the problem of pluralism and being hopeless in the face of disagreement.26 Perfectionists are criticized for simply stipulating that there are certain forms of life that are better than others, which should be promoted by the state, without providing tools to actually recognize them and to deal with the problem of disagreement. The idea of principled compromise definitely shares some commitments with perfectionism, in the sense that it refers to an objectivist view of reasons and rejects the idea of public justification. At the same time, by drawing on the literature concerning the epistemology of disagreement, it aims at proposing a solution to the problem of pluralism sensitive towards inclusiveness and stability. In this sense, principled compromise is an interesting proposal for those who have some sympathies for perfectionism but are unsatisfied and disappointed by its practical solutions and implications.

Notes 1 With objectivist premises, I refer to the idea of moral objectivity as moral realists defend it. Of course, there is no doubt that certain liberals, such as Rawls, aim at securing a peculiar form of objectivity, which Martha Nussbaum has labelled “political” (2001). 2 It is important to note that not all liberal theories of legitimacy are incompatible with moral realism or reject the idea of moral truth all together. Notably, Charles Larmore (2008, 139) grounds his idea of political liberalism on the moral principle of equal respect for persons, intended as objectively true. Moreover, David Estlund (1998, 2008, 40–64) argues that political liberalism must appeal to truth in securing the idea that political principles are legitimate insofar as they can be endorsed by all reasonable persons. However, despite grounding their theories in realist premises, such theorists argue that political principles and norms are to be publicly justified and thus that justificatory reasons, at least in the political realm, are agreement-dependent. It is in this sense that all liberal theories of legitimacy reject the objective view of reasons and are suspicious towards the idea of the truth. So, my aim here is to show that it is possible, from a liberal point of view, to consider a political authority legitimate when it is justified with objective reasons, which are agreement-independent. 3 It is interesting to note that Hannah Arendt (2005) has a similar reading of the dangers of truth in politics. 4 Perfectionists defend an objectivist view of political legitimacy, but some fear that it fails to really adhere to the liberal project (Neal 1994). Despite sharing some core premises, my proposal differs from the perfectionist one in attempting to propose a theory more sensitive to the problem of pluralism. I say more on this point in the conclusive section of the chapter. 5 For a different understanding of the relation between liberalism and the Enlightenment, according to which contemporary theories of liberalism (and in particular public reason liberalism) constitute a post-Enlightenment project because of their belief that free inquiry and debate would not lead to the truth even in moral and religious matters, see Gaus (2003, 1–25). 6 Michael Taylor (1982) attempts to argue that anarchy and liberty are realistically compatible. However, Taylor does also claim that some form of “community” is necessary to secure individual liberty in the absence of a state. 7 Even for Richard Rorty (1989), it is not that objectivity is false and truth does not exist. Rather, “objectivity” and “truth” are misleading terms, which should be dropped because they are counterproductive towards the aim of pragmatist philosophy and of fostering solidarity. 8 John Horton considers modus vivendi a way to respond to the critical idea that political theory is unrealistic and against what is usually called “liberal moralism” (Horton 2010).

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9 Some modus vivendi theorists are committed to value-pluralism, according to which there are different, irreconcilable, and most important, incommensurable values that cannot be ranked and are likely to conflict with each other (Gray 2000; McCabe 2010). Others, on the contrary, believe that a commitment to value-pluralism is risky not only because it is a controversial metaethical theory but also because such a commitment may lead one to consider only conflicts of value, whereas politics is concerned also with other important kinds of conflicts, as, for example, those regarding interests (Horton 2006). 10 On the distinction between moral and pragmatic compromises, see Căbulea May (2005) and Wendt (2016, 47–50). 11 Horton defends a theory of political legitimacy grounded in the idea of actual consent: modus vivendi settlements are legitimate insofar as they are accepted by citizens in virtue of reasons that may be moral or pragmatic in kind. On this point, see Horton (2010, 438–440, 2011, 124–125). 12 As Thomas Pogge argues, “it is precisely because its terms are flexible that a modus vivendi can endure over time. As the bargaining power of the values and interests of the various groups change, the institutional distribution of benefits and burdens is adjusted so that the scheme continues to be rationally acceptable to all” (1989, 101). 13 The label of public reason liberalism identifies a group of theories that differ from each other but are all characterized by the idea of public justification. Relevant examples of this approach are Ackerman (1980), Gaus (2011), Larmore (1990), Nagel (1987), and Rawls (2005). 14 On the difference between consensus and convergence approaches within public reason liberalism, see D’Agostino (1996) and Vallier (2011). 15 According to Rawls, the sources of persistent yet reasonable disagreement identified by the burdens of judgement are: The difficulty of assessing and evaluating empirical and scientific evidence; the difficulty of weighing such evidence; the vagueness and thus indeterminacy of moral and political concepts; the disparity between people’s total life experiences that shape their judgements; the difficulty of reconciling different kinds of normative considerations in an overall assessment; and the difficulty of selecting between and setting priorities among competing cherished values (2005, 56–57). 16 Jonathan Quong (2011, 265–273) criticizes convergence by arguing that, given its methodological standpoint focused on practical relevance, it cannot ask citizens to accept the truth of relativism of reasons not only because it would be excessively demanding but also incoherent. 17 It is important to note that the degree of idealization greatly varies from consensus and convergence. In particular, theorists defending the latter approach attempt to use a limited form of idealization: Gaus talks of “mild idealization” (2011) and Vallier of “moderate idealization (2014). However, by admitting some form of idealization, they restrict the legitimation pool nonetheless. 18 The idea of principled compromise is not new in the literature and has been strongly defended by Weinstock (2013, 2017). Here, I attempt to defend a particular version of the idea of principled compromise, understood as grounded in epistemic reasons, based on objectivist premises, and combined with the idea that political legitimacy is provided by justification simpliciter. 19 This is only to specify that genuine disagreements are not those captured by the idea of convergence, in which individuals agree on the substantive content of a certain decision, despite their different reasons for doing so. 20 These arguments resonate with Rawls’s idea of the burdens of judgment and the sources of reasonable disagreement. 21 It may well be the case that if we had all the time in the world to discuss the issue at stake in a genuine disagreement, if it was possible to understand the evidence without doubt and to recognize the maximally justified system of epistemic norms to apply, we would have no reasons to compromise for we would have the resources to solve the disagreement. However, as long as such circumstances do not obtain at the political level, a practical solution is necessary. A similar point is made by Weinstock (2013, 547). 22 For example, if no decision about the permissibility of using non-human animals for research purposes is made, the part of the population believing that such kind of research

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23

24 25 26

is permissible is advantaged because, in a democracy, what is not legally forbidden is allowed. Conciliatory views argue that peer disagreement requires some revision in belief and some doxastic conciliation (Christensen 2007); justificationist views state that one’s belief revision in the face of peer disagreement depends on the degree of justification one had for her belief prior the disagreement (Kelly 2010). Finally, even steadfast positions, which hold that one can continue to rationally believe the truth of some proposition despite knowing that some epistemic peer explicitly believes the opposite, can hold that disagreement has an impact, for example, in the form of a partial defeater (Thune 2010). For a more comprehensive and detailed analysis of the idea of principled compromise grounded in epistemic reasons, see Zuolo and Bistagnino (2018). On this point, see also Wendt (2013) and Weinstock (2017). For a perfectionist attempt in this direction, see Wall (2010).

References Ackerman, Bruce A. (1980) Social Justice in the Liberal State, New Haven and London: Yale University. Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: Chicago University Press. ——— (2005) “Truth and Politics”, in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Between Past and Future, New York: Penguin Books. Căbulea May, Simon (2005) “Principled Compromise and the Abortion Controversy”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33(4):317–348. Christensen, David (2007) “Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News”, Philosophical Review, 116(2):187–218. D’Agostino, Fred (1996) Free Public Reason Making It Up as We Go, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elga, Adam (2007) “Ref lection and Disagreement”, Noũs, 41(3):478–502. Estlund, David (1998) “The Insularity of the Reasonable: Why Political Liberalism Must Admit the Truth”, Ethics, 108(2):252–275. ——— (2008) Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gaus, Gerald (1996) Justificatory Liberalism An Essay on Epistemology and Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (2003) Contemporary Theories of Liberalism Public Reason as a Post-Enlightenment Project, London: Sage Publication. ——— (2011) The Order of Public Reason a Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldman, Alvin (2009) “Epistemic Relativism and Reasonable Disagreement”, in Richard Feldman and Ted Warfield (eds.), Disagreement, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 187–215. Gray, John (2000) Two Faces of Liberalism, Cambridge: Polity Press. Horton, John (2006) “John Grey and the Political Theory of Modus vivendi”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 9(2):155–169. ——— (2010) “Realism, Liberal Moralism and a Political Theory of Modus Vivendi”, European Journal of Political Theory, 9(4):431–448. ——— (2011) “Modus Vivendi and Religious Accommodation”, in M. Mookherjee (ed.), Toleration and the Recognition in the Age of Religious Pluralism, Dordrecht: Springer, 121–136. Kelly, Thomas (2005) “The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement”, in Tamar Szabò Gendler and John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology I, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 167–195.

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——— (2010) “Peer Disagreement and Higher Order Evidence”, in Richard Feldman and Ted Warfield (eds.), Disagreement, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 111–174. Larmore, Charles (1990) “Political Liberalism”, Political Theory, 18(3):239–260. ——— (2008) The Autonomy of Morality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Locke, John (1685) A Letter Concerning Toleration, James Tully (ed.), Indianapolis: Hackett [1983]. McCabe, David (2010) Modus Vivendi Liberalism. Theory and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nagel, Thomas (1987) “Moral Conf lict and Political Legitimacy”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 16(3):215–224. Neal, Patrick (1994) “Perfectionism with a Liberal Face? Nervous Liberals and Raz’s Political Theory”, Social Theory and Practice, 20(1):25–58. Nussbaum, Martha (2001) “Political Objectivity”, New Literary History, 32(4):883–906. Pogge, Thomas (1989) Realizing Rawls, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Quong, Jonathan (2011) Liberalism without Perfection, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rancière, Jacques (1999) Disagreement, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rawls, John (1985) “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14(3):223–251. ——— (2001) Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ——— (2005) Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press. Rorty Richard (1989) “Solidarity or Objectivity?”, in M. Krausz (ed.), Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 167–183. Sosa, Ernest (2010) “The Epistemology of Disagreement”, in Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar, and Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Social Epistemology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 278–297. Thune, Michael (2010) “‘Partial Defeaters’ and the Epistemology of Disagreement”, Philosophical Quarterly, 60(239):355–372. Taylor, Michael (1982) Community, Anarchy and Liberty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vallier, Kevin (2011) “Consensus and Convergence in Public Reason”, Public Affairs Quarterly, 25(4):261–279. ——— (2014) Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation, New York: Routledge. Waldron, Jeremy (1993) “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism”, in Liberal Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 35–62. Wall, Steven (2010) “Neutralism for Perfectionists: The Case of Restricted Sate Neutrality”, Ethics, 120(2):232–256. Weinstock, Daniel (2013) “On the Possibility of Principled Compromise”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 16(4):537–556. ——— (2017) “Compromise, Pluralism, and Deliberation”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 20(5):636–655. Wendt, Fabian (2013) “Peace beyond Compromise”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 26(4):573–593. ——— (2016) Compromise, Peace and Public Justification Political Morality beyond Justice, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Zuolo, Federico and Giulia Bistagnino (2018) “Disagreement, peerhood, compromise”, Social Theory and Practice, 44(4): 593–618.

PART II

Political pluralism and reasonable consensus

5 SIDEWAYS AT THE ENTRANCE OF THE CAVE A pluralist footnote to Plato1 Alessandro Ferrara

For a political philosopher of normative inclination, the notion of pluralism is one of the most impervious to elucidate. Relatively unproblematic for anyone who understands pluralism along the lines of political realism, as a shorthand signifier for the factual diversity of orientations operative in the political field under observation, for the normative political philosopher, pluralism raises a dilemma whose solution is the object of this chapter. The dilemma does not concern the definition of pluralism but its normative credentials. I take it as relatively unproblematic to define pluralism, for the purposes of political philosophy, as the simultaneous presence within the same polity of broad, “comprehensive” conceptions of society, of the human condition and of what is desirable that are pervaded by, and responsive to, competing values not reconcilable on the basis of a shared hierarchy of priority. That pluralism so understood should count not as an unfortunate predicament to be remedied as urgently as possible, but as a permanent condition that legitimate institutions and authorities ought not to try to alter through the coercive force of law, is the claim which generates a difficult dilemma for the normative philosopher. On the one hand, one cannot put forward this stance as one opinion among others – a Rortyan “that’s the way we do things here, in democratic contexts”, “that’s how we feel, in liberal progressive circles” – without thereby emptying it of all normative force and reducing it to a matter of “political taste”, as it were. On the other hand, one cannot claim that the obligation not to try to bring the predicament of pluralism to an end (through the coercive use of law and the agency of institutions) is objectively binding on us, as though it were part of the normative furniture of the universe, without incurring a performative contradiction: The plurality of perspectives predicated at one level is implicitly denied at the meta-level of the justification offered for endorsing pluralism.

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Plato’s Allegory of the Cave still offers an invaluable “expository device” for this dilemma and, as I hope to show, provides a language for overcoming it. As political philosophers, we can neither understand “accepting pluralism” as one of the opinions circulating within the cave without enervating its normative import nor can we posit it as the one normative truth imported from outside the cave without denying the pluralism we wish to defend. How can a defense of pluralism be articulated without falling into either of these traps? I argue that Rawls’s “political liberalism” provides a fruitful starting point for this new way of understanding pluralism, once its central normative standard – the reasonable, especially in the version of “the most reasonable for us” – is elaborated along lines revolving around exemplarity. The Allegory of the Cave, revisited again, is modified to make visible this element of novelty inherent in the “political liberal” view of pluralism.

The Allegory of the Cave revisited For about 25 centuries, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave has inf luenced Western philosophy and cast a spell over political philosophy – a spell that only in recent times has been broken and overcome by Arendt and Rawls. Building on previous materials by Parmenides, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Empedocles,2 and elaborating on the theme, first outlined in Phaedo, of the captivity of the soul uninfused with philosophical insight, in the opening section of Book 7 of The Republic (at 514a-519b) Plato invites us, through Socrates addressing Glaucon, to imagine an “underground cave-like dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave” wherein are human beings “from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around”.3 The main source of light is “from a fire burning far above and behind them”. Between the chained prisoners and the fire, there is a road and on it “a wall, built like the partitions puppet-handlers set in front of the human beings and over which they show the puppets”.4 Along this wall we are to imagine that “all sorts of artifacts, which project above the wall, and statues of men and other animals wrought from stone, wood, and every kind of material” are being paraded by carriers some of which “utter sounds while others are silent”.5 These prisoners are “like us”. If “they had been compelled to keep their heads motionless throughout life”, they would base their knowledge of themselves and one another on little else “than the shadows cast by the fire on the side of the cave facing them”.6 Likewise, they would take the shadows projected by the objects dragged along the wall for the objects themselves and would attribute the sounds emitted by the carriers to the shadows. Under such conditions, the inhabitants of the cave “would hold that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of artificial things”.7 Traditionally, commentators inclined toward identifying the core meaning of Plato’s allegory as the contrast of doxa and episteme have emphasized the

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intra-cave distinction between shadows and real objects (and the fire) as matching the distinction, previously introduced in Book 6 in the elucidation of the Line, of eikasia (illusion) and pistis (commonsense knowledge).8 Within this interpretive pattern but in tune with his philosophical conception of truth as alétheia, Heidegger has pointed out that “the prisoners do indeed see the shadows but not as shadows of something. . . . It is only we, privy to the whole situation, who call what the prisoners face ‘shadows’. . . . For the essence of their being is such that, to them, precisely this unhidden before them suffices – so much so indeed that they also do not know that it suffices. They are entirely given over to what they immediately encounter”.9 As we will see, this is one of the aspects of the allegory that we, readers of the 21st century schooled in Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s respective versions of the Linguistic Turn, need to pause thinking about. Again, as Heidegger put it, “When questioned, they always talk about shadows, which, however, they do not know as shadows”.10 Commentators who instead incline toward identifying the core meaning of Plato’s allegory as the contrast of a polity run through faulty and illusory prejudices and a polity legitimately run through true knowledge have put less emphasis on the distinction of eikasia (the shadows on the wall of the cave) and pistis (the objects that project such shadows), connecting the distinction just with the difference between mathematics and philosophy. They take the allegory’s point to be not so much the contrast between doxa and episteme, the sensible and the intelligible, qua cognitive states, but the contrast between the effects they produce on our associated life when they form the basis of the legitimacy of authority.11 For some, the cave is “a study of our nature with regard to paideia and apaideusia”.12 One of the crucial divides within this interpretive perspective then turns around whether the new polis, governed by those who have been enlightened through exposure to the sun outside the cave, will put an end to doxa. Strauss has argued that the shadows are ineradicable from the life even of the kallipolis: “Even political life at its best is like life in a cave”, to which Julia Annas adds that “Even in an ideally just society, we all start in the Cave”.13 Arendt, among the critics of the epistemological reading, is the interpreter who has most forcefully challenged the implications of the allegory for the idea of a just polity. Her account will be taken up later. A rupture in this static scheme of life in the cave occurs when Plato asks us to imagine that one of the dwellers is released and allowed to walk his way out of the cave, past the road and the fire. An important way-station on the way out occurs when the fugitive becomes aware of the puppets generating the shadows and the fire. The shape of the puppets is magnified and made fuzzier by their projected shadows, but Plato does not expand on their significance. As one commentator has noted, while on the one hand, these puppets “are truer, because they are what they are, without distortion, not what the shadows make them to be” even though they are lit by an artificial fire (which we can take to symbolize “the light of human opinion”) and not directly by the sun, on the other hand, “they are not a stage in the education; their sole end is to cast shadows, to make illusions”.14

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Actually, in looking up toward the light, the former prisoner “is dazzled . . . unable to make out those things whose shadows he saw before”. If asked to recognize the objects whose shadow earlier he could quickly identify, wouldn’t he be “at a loss and believe that what was seen before is truer than what is now shown?” When finally exposed to sunlight, “wouldn’t he have his eyes full of its beam and be unable to see even one of the things now said to be true?”15 This path to true knowledge represents for Plato the optimal education of the individual,16 and it is enmeshed with suffering from the separation from one’s own way of life and the measuring up with the estrangement and solitude of the seeker-hero,17 with a state of homelessness or atopia.18 Not an illumination, a lightning-like intuition of a mystical truth, a moment of merging with Cosmos, the educational path of the philosopher-hero is a gradual and toilsome process of habituation, a reorientation of the senses and of perceptive familiarity. The third narrative juncture of the allegory reports this gradual habituation of the temporary fugitive, now outside the cave: “at first he’d most easily make out the shadows; and after that the phantoms of the human beings and the other things in water; and, later, the things themselves. And from there he could turn to beholding the things in heaven and heaven itself, more easily at night .  .  . than by day”.19 Only at the end of this process of ascent to knowledge would the former captive be able to turn his gaze at the sun, not the ref lections of the sun in water, “but the sun itself by itself in its own region”.20 It is indeed a path to become acquainted with a perfection of the orders of the worlds, which results in self-perfection.21 The realm outside the cave is immediately and unquestionably equated with a transcendent realm incommensurable with the deceitful quality of the realm of shadows below in the cave.22 Here the opposition of episteme and doxa also implies an opposition between on one hand the exceptionality of the bios theoretikos – the life of self-ref lection or the examined life – and on the other hand, the everyday life lived under the inf luence of the shadows, of appearances that are never questioned – a form of life characterized by superficiality, unref lectiveness, and lack of autonomy. In the 20th century, this opposition between the common and the exceptional, the mundane and the authentic way of life has surfaced again – in Weber’s idea that the “warring gods” are perceived as irremediably clashing only by their virtuoso and intellectually sophisticated devotees, while the common person is absorbed by pragmatic issues and lacks the motivation for pushing the questioning of received assumptions too far; in Heidegger’s opposition of the search for Eigentlichkeit as prerogative of the exceptional ones, while most humans remain happily entrapped in the illusory images of “das Man”, the things that are “best said” and “best done” in the everyday life; in Freud’s ideal of bravely facing up to the truth. The fourth turn is the most dramatic. The fugitive recognizes the sun as the source of the seasons and the “steward of all things” and “in a certain way the cause of all these things he and his companions had been seeing”.23 He rejoices at his discovery and at the same time feels pity for his fellow captives back in the cave. Those “honors, praises and prizes” for which they would compete by

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guessing what shadow would pass next now seem hollow and worthless, and he’d rather be the servant of a day-laborer than live again that way. Breaking away from, actually reversing, “the Homeric world order” that located the afterlife in the underground Hades and human life on the surface,24 and for reasons that were left for endless speculation during the subsequent centuries, the former captive decides to return to the cave and share his discovery with all the others. With this juncture of the allegory, two important implications are connected: The motivational one and the adaptation that the ideas, encountered outside the cave, have to undergo as they acquire a new function. Concerning the motivation to return to the cave, Plato does not offer an explicit one. In a subsequent exchange, Socrates emphasizes the political significance of the Allegory of the Cave. One of its “consequences” is affirmed to be that “those who are without education and experience of truth” (i.e., that never ventured outside the cave) “would never be adequate stewards of a city”.25 Hence, the “best natures” should be compelled “to go up that ascent” and “see the good”, and “when they have gone up and seen sufficiently”, they should not be allowed to do “what is now permitted”. To Glaucon’s inquiry into what that action to be prohibited could be, Socrates replies that the philosopher become knowledgeable of the outside world should not be allowed “to remain there and not be willing to go down again among those prisoners”.26 Glaucon wonders whether “an injustice” is thereby done to individuals who have undergone such education by making them “live a worse life [by returning to the cave] when a better is possible for them”.27 To this objection, Socrates opposes the idea that the point of the law – which we can understand extensively as the point of having a scheme of government – is not to promote the well-being of one individual or group of individuals (those who have been educated by exposure to the outside world) but the well-being of “the city as a whole”, by “harmonizing the citizens by persuasion and compulsion”, that is by “making them share with one another the benefit that each is able to bring to the commonwealth”.28 Comparing the class of philosophers educated by exposure to the outside world to kings in beehives, Socrates insists that each of them “must go down . . . into the common dwelling of the others and get habituated along with them to seeing the dark things”. You the philosopher, Socrates continues, “will see ten thousand times better than the men there, and you’ll know what each of the phantoms is, and of what it is a phantom, because you have seen the truth about fair, just, and good things”. Two different interpretations of this rationale for having the fugitivephilosopher return are possible. A strong deontological interpretation is offered by Annas. She claims that educated philosophers would not wish to go back into the cave and rule but would come to the realization that they should do so because that is what justice – the organization of the city according to the principle of optimizing the competencies and functions of three classes of citizens, expounded in Book 4 – requires. Fugitive philosophers re-enter the cave on impersonal grounds not because they are pursuing their own or even other

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people’s happiness but because “they take a wholly impersonal attitude to their own happiness, along with everybody else’s; and this is because their judgments are made in the light of the impersonal Good, the separated Form which is what is simply good, not good relative to anything”.29 A more nuanced and ultimately eudaemonistic interpretation is put forward by Sheppard. He convincingly argues that the philosopher’s motivation must be reconstructed “not simply in relation to his crowning vision of the good, but [to] his education in the forms as a whole”. This education enjoins him to understand his good in relation to the one, to the community as a whole and specifically to understand “that it is only in his proper participation in the whole that his own ‘usefulness and value’ (505a) is manifest”. The philosopher-ruler not only “does not consider his return to involve a personal loss” but also “does not equate acting in accordance with the good with acting impersonally. Rather – and most importantly – it is only in his return to the cave that he becomes properly human”.30 To rephrase Sheppard’s point, the philosopher descends into the cave again not so much in obedience to some deontological injunction inscribed in one impersonal Form but in order to fulfill his true self as he understands it (as a component of the whole cave community of fellow-humans), on the basis of the view of the polis outlined by Plato in Book 4. Shepperd’s interpretation on the whole appears capable of making the most of a larger part of Plato’s doctrine of the Forms, not just of the idea of the good. In any event, a close examination of Plato’s relevant passages has disclosed that he is considering the single prisoner ascending his way out of the cave as representative of a group of individuals – the philosophers, destined ideally to rule in the cave. Our contemporary elaboration of the allegory, for the purpose of solving the paradox of pluralism, will unfold precisely from this point. The second implication of this juncture of the Allegory of the Cave concerns the fact that what is observed in the outside world, and especially the idea of the Good, cannot exert a function inside the cave unless it undergoes a deep transformation. To be of guidance and inspiration for praxis within the cave, the ideas contemplated by the fugitive philosopher must be made relevant to and foundational for the authority of reason, represented by the philosopher returning and taking up his role as leader. As Arendt puts it, the original function of the ideas was not to rule or otherwise determine the chaos of human affairs, but, in ‘shining brightness’, to illuminate their darkness. As such, the ideas have nothing whatsoever to do with politics, political experience, and the problem of action, but pertain exclusively to philosophy, the experience of contemplation, and the quest for the ‘true being of things’. It is precisely ruling, measuring, subsuming, and regulating that are entirely alien to the experiences underlying the doctrine of ideas in its original conception.31 Returning down into the cave means to change the nature of the ideas into “standards, measurements and rules of behavior”; it means to also transform the

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pantheon of ideas from one where Beauty rules to one where the idea of the Good prevails and to redirect the attention of the philosopher from the “philosophical experience of aletheia to the political experience or to that of praxis”.32 We are now at the final turning point. When the fugitive-philosopher proceeds to abide by his duty to report back to the fellow inhabitants of the cave, he again suffers, this time from the sudden transition from the sunlit outdoor environment to the dark inside of the cave. He is temporarily unable then to distinguish the shadows that once bore no secrets for him, and for this fault – attributed by all others to the foolishness of his venturing out of the cave – he is much scorned. He even risks being killed by his comrades when he tries to free them from their chains and urges them to follow in his footsteps, an aspect of the allegory widely reputed to convey a tribute to Socrates’ death.33 Plato’s narrative does not tell us how and by what means the superior knowledge that the philosopher imports into the cave eventually comes to capture the consenting respect of those who never saw anything but shadows. All we are told is that the returning philosopher, after re-adapting to the darkness of the cave, eventually will see things “ten thousand times better than the men there” but not how the men in the cave will come to recognize that the philosopher’s perception of things is ten thousand times better than theirs.34 To sum up, many metaphysical, moral, and philosophical-anthropological meanings can and indeed have been read into Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. It seems difficult to deny that the core teaching of the allegory bears a political philosophical significance: Truly entitled to legitimately rule over others is only the one individual, taken as representative of a class, the philosophers, who has had the courage to leave doxa, which prevails inside the cave, and has endured the suffering that accompanies that quest for true ideas and the jettisoning of eidola and later the pains of violent rejection, when on re-entering the cave he has tried to convince his fellow inhabitants to shed away their false certainties and embrace a true account of how things are and what the Good is. Legitimate rule is ultimately rooted in episteme’s supremacy over mere doxa. No interpreter, along the long history of the reception of the Allegory of the Cave, has more perceptively captured this deep-seated and very inf luential teaching that has shaped all normative political philosophy for over two millennia, than Hannah Arendt. As she put it, in those initial passages of Book 7 of The Republic, the whole realm of human affairs is seen from the viewpoint of a philosophy which assumes that even those who inhabit the cave of human affairs are human only insofar as they too want to see, though they remain deceived by shadows and images. And the rule of the philosopher-king, that is, the domination of human affairs by something outside its own realm, is justified not only by an absolute priority of seeing over doing, of contemplation over speaking and acting, but also by the assumption that what makes men human is the urge to see. Hence, the interest of the philosopher

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and the interest of man qua man coincide; both demand that human affairs, the result of speech and action, must not acquire a dignity of their own but be subjected to the domination of something outside their realm.35 In a nutshell, that legitimate rule comes down to epistocracy is the enduring legacy of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. When considered from the temporal distance of two and a half millennia, this legacy appears to contain a dangerous ambiguity. On the one hand, the allegory embeds a deep critical, anti-traditionalist, anti-conventional thrust, and to this extent, it may embed an unequalled transformative, even messianic, potential. On the other hand, it contains a seed of authoritarianism, lodged in the primacy of solitary seeing over action in concert or joint self-definition and anchored in the subordination of politics to ethics (the Idea of the Good) or, in the modern secularist versions (e.g., Marxism and the social darwinism inaugurated by Spencer), the subordination of politics to some law-like non-political sort of truth.

Rawls and the cave The over 24 centuries that separate us from the time when Plato wrote The Republic have added a great number of substantive variations on this theme, while leaving the deep-seated overall teaching basically unchallenged. The idea of the Good, symbolized by the sun, has been over time replaced by the revealed will of a monotheistic God, by insights into the desiring nature of man, by the laws of evolution, by Reason in history, by the dynamics of class struggle and revolutionary emancipation. What underlies all these expressions is the idea that true knowledge, a speculative knowledge which precedes intersubjective deliberation and sets the standard for sorting out good and bad deliberation, provides the foundations for the legitimate use of coercive power, for political obligation, and for all the normative concepts found in politics. The last reincarnation of such an epistemic approach to normative political philosophy is “justice as fairness”, as understood in A Theory of Justice. It is the weakest possible version of Plato’s allegory, topographically located at the extreme edge of this philosophical model, beyond which the model undergoes radical transformation. In fact, within A Theory of Justice, the fact of pluralism is already part of the “circumstances of justice”, the point of “justice as fairness” being to enable us to build a just polity amidst conf licting conceptions of the good outside the cave, and ultimately, it is the consensus of us inside the cave that can validate the philosopher’s argument.36 However, A Theory of Justice still lies within the bounds of Plato’s line of thinking because it incorporates the expectation, later denounced as “unrealistic” in Political Liberalism, that everybody in the cave eventually will recognize the superiority of “justice as fairness” over all the rival accounts of what is outside the cave, and notably over utilitarianism – as though the “burdens of judgment” could be fully neutralized by some philosophical argument.37

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With a radical departure from this long-established tradition, public reason breaks free of Plato’s spell.38 It is a kind of deliberative reason which neither surrenders to the world of appearances, to doxa, nor presumes that salvation can originate from without, from subjecting politics in the cave to “the whole truth” imported from out of the cave. As Rawls famously out it, “the zeal to embody the whole truth in politics is incompatible with an idea of public reason that belongs with democratic citizenship”.39 Public reason, instead, tries tenaciously to distinguish better and worse, the more and the less just, the more reasonable and what is less so, within the bounds of the cave. Yet the Allegory of the Cave can still be helpful for clarifying our understanding of pluralism and its proper place in politics on a line of continuity with one of the most ancient and inf luential sources of political thought. Can a non-epistocratic version of the Cave be worked out? Why bother? Starting from the latter question, to rethink the allegory of the cave matters for two reasons. It matters in order to gauge the distance our contemporary understanding of the just polity has come from its inaugural moments. At the same time, it matters in order to highlight the potential of political liberalism to engage and overcome that inaugural normative model. Our tribute to Plato cannot but materialize in a contestation of his claims in the language of his own imaginary at the same time when we break free of his epistocratic spell – namely, the up-until-Rawls-indissoluble link of political obligation and truth. In the remainder of this section, I reformulate the allegory in such a way as to enable it to ref lect the Arendtian and Rawlsian insight into the possibility of weaving pluralism, reasonable disagreement, and a non-speculative form of reason into the allegory. I then highlight the tensions that this Arendtian and Rawlsian version of the allegory leaves unsolved. Then the third and final section offers a solution to these tensions and yet another reformulation of the allegory. If we wish to translate the gist of Rawls’s non-perfectionist liberalism into the imagery of Plato’s cave, we would have simply to press a host of question that the objectivist ontological assumptions undergirding all Ancient philosophy placed out Plato’s critical reach: What language does the fugitive-philosopher use when reporting what he has seen outside the cave? Can a language shaped by the deceitful knowledge of the shadows provide him with adequate expressive resources for describing an altogether alien world? If all he has seen are shadows that, as Heidegger rightly points out, are not known as shadows,40 then how can the fugitive-philosopher conclude that objects are causally related to their own shadows? How can he attribute a greater ontological significance to objects as opposed to perceiving them as “thicker shadows”? Since the size and length of the projected shadow vary with the angle at which a light source and the object are placed relative to one another, how can the former prisoner come to the conclusion that such variation is causally associated with the positioning of the light source and not the other way around? Why does a low sun make the objects project a long shadow, as opposed to long shadows causing the sun to lower? If all he has seen are shadows, how can the fugitive have in his vocabulary terms for

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describing non-shadows, namely objects and sources of light, when he returns and wants to report what he has seen? Maybe, for the sake of the Platonic argument, he will be assisted by “intuition” and eventually will grasp “the right order of things” – light-sources, and the sun above all, illuminate objects, and illuminated objects project shadows – but conceivably, he will lack words to properly express this intuition. Will he forge a private language, with its syntax connecting terms to which no one else other than himself is able to assign any reference? How can that private language ever prevail, when he is back into the cave, over the local language shared in the community of the prisoners? How will the returning philosopher be able to convince his fellows to recognize the superiority of the newly enriched language he is proposing them? We can begin to answer these questions if we introduce a temporal modification in the received version and imagine the scene of the cave at a later stage. At 519d, Socrates is undoubtedly speaking in the plural: “our job as founders is to compel the best natures . . . to go up that ascent; and, when they have gone up and seen sufficiently, not to permit them what is now permitted”. He and Glaucon are referring to a “class of philosophers”: “we won’t be doing injustice”, continues Socrates (at 520a), “to the philosophers who come to be among us, but rather that we will say just things to them while compelling them besides to care for and guard the others”. So let us recalibrate the temporal setting of the allegory at that subsequent point in time, not entirely beyond Plato’s mindset: Not just one single prisoner, as in the canonical version, but a number of them, say an expedition team of three or four philosophers, have made their way up to the outside world. Then we no longer have to imagine a private language for one user only, conjured up to express a single person’s intuitions, but we can fathom a small community, no different from scientists, who come to a conclusion about the way things – notably light, objects, shadows – are related out there and based on that knowledge reassess the beliefs formerly held by them and still dominant in the cave. They enrich a shared language and create a new vocabulary in an intersubjective process no different, except for its content, from what goes on in any linguistic community, including the cave. When they descend inside again, acting on the motives illustrated earlier, they also meet with scorn and incredulity but are better able, relative to the single isolated fugitive, to sustain their counter-account of the reality of the cave. Assume, for the time being and for the sake of the argument, that their account of how things outside the cave truly are, after the initial difficulties in all ways similar to the ones described by Plato, convinces the fellow inhabitants: Life in the cave is now under the rule of the philosophers under the legitimation of a narrative or an account of reality consensually endorsed by the people of the cave. The Rawlsian (and Arendtian) revolution is connected with the pluralization of the number of the former prisoners imagined to have experienced the outside world. On coming back, their accounts of what lies outside conceivably would

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partly overlap and partly differ, not because the returning philosophers lie or are individually blinded by prejudice but simply because they are all-too-finite beings faced with an overwhelmingly complex, if not infinite, reality. Even allowing for the fact that they obviously come from the same shared culture of the cave, some of the “burdens of judgment” may be quite operative. Out there in the outside world, when trying to make sense of the relation of light to the sun, to objects, and to shadows, our philosophers may legitimately converge on identifying the relevant aspects of reality yet may assign a different weight to these single aspects due to their singular experiences in the cave, their specific location and point of observation in the outside world, and their propensities or personal characteristics. We do not need to imagine that their accounts be radically diverse. All that the case for pluralism requires is the assumption that their accounts, coming from individuated single human beings, are not identical. This assumption is enough for reinterpreting Plato’s allegory of the cave in a non-epistocratic way. Imagine, as stipulated earlier, that the philosophers’ accounts carry the day in the cave yet are discovered to be partly the same, partly different. What then? Should the operation of politics, within the cave, the ordinary workings of authority, of government, be suspended until it is determined which of the diverse accounts is the true one? Should authority be exercised according to what each official deems the best account? Should the cave collectively decide, in a kind of somewhat “populist” referendum, to adopt one account to the exclusion of others? If oppression means to be forced, through the coercive power of law, to live according to principles or ideas one does not endorse, how can life without oppression take place under such conditions in the cave even if the perfectionist philosophers are ruling? The problem of pluralism has thereby been introduced in terms not too distant from the ones now made familiar by the opening paragraphs of Political Liberalism: “How is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?”41 How can the cave be ruled without oppression unless we assume that the plurality of now “educated” philosophers produces identical accounts of the ideas encountered outside? If their accounts are partially overlapping, partially diverging, under what conditions can ruling in the cave not be oppressive? The non-perfectionist solution to the problem of avoiding oppression consists of dividing the public space in two areas, which Rawls calls “the public forum” and “the background culture”.42 In the public forum legislative, executive or judicial decision binding for all are made. Their legitimacy, the legitimacy of legal coercion and of the exercise of power to secure compliance, and the corresponding obligation of every citizen to abide by these decisions cannot but be justified, if oppression is to be avoided, on principles that derive or are somehow connected with the overlapping part of the reports on the outside world and its objective values. Only if life in the cave is ruled in this way no one can lament to be a victim of oppression.

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This normative restraint, at the core of public reason, does not hold and is not meant to suppress the natural impulse of truth-seeking (and now educated) human beings to find out which of the distinct and rival accounts comes closest to the truth, better mirrors the order of the world out there. That natural impulse must be relocated – in consonance with a non-epistocratic reformulation of the allegory of the cave – from the public or official forum into the “background culture”, or the public sphere, or any other segment of social life where passionate exchanges of reasons and ideas are at home, but no practical decision binding for all is expected to follow, and therefore no exercise of authority and legal coercion is linked with the prevailing of one or the other view. If reinterpreted along these lines, Plato’s allegory of the cave can continue to capture our sense of what a legitimate and just political order would look like when ref lection, or the Socratic “examined life”, is at the center of communal deliberation, when “we, the cave-people” are freed from the spell of the shadows and also when the plurality of views emerging from the exercise of the reason of limited finite beings confronting an overwhelmingly transcending realm is not compressed to the detriment of the equal consideration owed to everyone. Whereas in the original version of Plato’s allegory, diversity was rooted solely in the disparity of education (paideia) and lack thereof (apaudeusia), and this predicament resulted in the duty of the doxa-bearers to yield to the superior insights of the episteme-bearers, in the reformulated Arendtian/Rawlsian version, diversity is found also among the equally educated peers, who have all undergone the experience of ascending out of the cave. This second kind of diversity ought not to be treated like the former because for institutions to forcibly suppress the intra-philosophical diversity in favor of uniformity around one or the other account of the outside world would be tantamount to inf lict oppression on the bearers of the discarded account. Up to now we have reconstructed the familiar Rawlsian picture of reasonable pluralism and translated it into Platonic parlance: Whereas a just polis is premised on the primacy of episteme over doxa, if we allow for a plurality of fugitive-philosophers venturing out of the cave and returning possessed not of a monolithic form of episteme but of a plurality of partially diverging epistemai, then it follows that a polis where one controversial kind of episteme is imposed, through legal and institutional coercion, not over doxa, but over rival versions of episteme, is not in the least a just polis.

Sideways at the entrance: a pluralist footnote We are at the last leg of our revisitation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. After reconstructing its transformative and at the same time “anti-political”, authoritarian potential, then Rawls’s understanding of “reasonable pluralism”, as bona fide partial “intra-epistemic” disagreement, the coercive institutional suppression of which inevitably generates oppression, has been translated into a modified version of the allegory, still consistent with the broad outline of the original one.

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We now need to address a normative blind spot affecting Rawls’s view and to do so in terms of yet another modification of the allegory of the cave. The normative blind spot concerns the justification of the pluralistic stance.43 Clearly, the burdens of judgment are the keystone of a descriptive argument about why, in the absence of an oppressive matrix of positive and negative incentives, the expected outcome of the deliberation of finite and situated human minds over issues of broad scope and significance should be plurality and not unanimity. Not all of the six burdens are applicable to the cave setting, but for the sake of our argument, at least one was found fully relevant. Furthermore, that descriptive argument serves as a premise for a complex normative argument to the effect that: 1 2

3

the bona fide reasonable pluralism generated by the burdens of judgment should be preserved for the sake of avoiding oppression; coercion can be exercised legitimately in the cave only when it is used to enforce principles that everybody can endorse for principled reasons, thus only when it can be justified on the basis of the non-controversial, overlapping part of all the accounts of the outside world; to reconcile the desire to avoid oppression (i.e., to avoid being coerced to comply with some version of the account of the outside that one does not endorse) and the legitimate aspiration to identify the one fully true account, the public space of the cave is best understood as divided in the two realms of the “public forum” and the “background culture”.

We need to take a closer look at the normative credentials of these three intimations for institutions, officials, and ultimately individuals to preserve and respect “reasonable pluralism” in the public forum. The existence of a plurality of orientations among the philosophers who ventured out of the cave is a fact. How can it project a normative cogency and enjoin respect? Why couldn’t a political actor in the public forum, as Larmore has rightly observed, dig in his heels and refuse to accommodate views that do not correspond to the account of the external world, or the comprehensive conception, deemed the only correct one by him? How can it be a virtue to accommodate what one considers less than adequate? Who said oppressing others by forcing them to comply with principles one considers the only true ones is worse than compromising with error? Two answers seem to me problematic. The first answer, provided by Larmore, consists of pointing to a principle of equal respect that is operative underneath Rawls’s case for a pluralism-respecting public forum and for “justice as fairness” as a political conception of justice. This principle – the “moral heart of liberal thought” – is “the idea that basic political principles should be rationally acceptable to those whom they are to bind”.44 The reason why forcing others to accept political principles they do not in full conscience endorse is unjust cannot be that the use of force is in and of itself wrong or unjust. Then political association would not be possible. The reason is rather that to seek compliance on a forced

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basis, without engaging the person’s ability to think on her own and for herself, or by engaging that person’s ability only to the limited extent of appraising the threat of a prospective use of force against her, means to treat that person in a demeaningly different way from the way in which we consider ourselves. It means to engage that person’s distinctive capacity to choose principles of conduct in a different, much more limited way. Thus, concludes Larmore, in so far as political justice is concerned, “to respect another person as an end is to require that coercive or political principles be as justifiable to that person as they presumably are to us”.45 It is not difficult to realize what is problematic with this answer. Larmore brings the difficulty out with great clarity. As he points out, “Respect for persons lies at the heart of political liberalism, not because looking for common ground we find it there, but because it is what impels us to look for common ground”.46 Consequently, the principle of equal respect must be “understood as having more than just political authority”, indeed an authority “that we have not fashioned ourselves” and that is “binding on us independently of our will as citizens”.47 This way of understanding the normative credentials of pluralism-respecting institutions forfeits the “political” quality of our liberalism. It restores the epistocratic reading of the allegory of the cave. Again, out of the cave, the sun symbolizes one unitary moral hypergood – now: equal respect – that the philosophers become exclusive interpreters of and in whose name they select “justice as fairness” not as the political conception of justice compatible with all the differently nuanced accounts of the outside and as capable of minimizing oppression when translated into constitutional essentials but as the one view of justice most responsive, relative to its competitors, to the principle of equal respect that emanates from the sun. We are back to an epistocracy that happens to single out pluralism as the means to further its end. The other answer essentializes pluralism as though it was part of the furniture of the world outside the cave. Isaiah Berlin is the champion of this view. Vico and Herder are for him heroes of what he understands as pluralism, namely the idea that “there are many objective ends, ultimate values, some incompatible with others, pursued by different societies at various times, or by different groups in the same society, by entire classes or churches or races, or by particular individuals within them, any one of which may find itself subject to conf licting claims of incompatible, yet equally ultimate and objective, ends”.48 This solution does not posit a principle that in turn enjoins us to accept pluralism but posits pluralism directly as a normative aspect of the world outside the cave: In fact, who speaks and from where when the phrase “there are many objective ends, ultimate values” is uttered? The philosophers returning to the cave would announce that the sources of light out there are more than one and cannot be brought to a hierarchy. There would then be no other choice for the institutions within the cave than to mirror this pluralized source of value: After all, if the world outside is not capable of bringing this plurality of values to a unity, why expect that the miracle be effected within the cave? Again, the content is

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different but like Larmore’s solution, also “metaphysical pluralism” à la Berlin restores the epistocratic reading of the allegory of the cave, with all its authoritarian implications. The philosophers are the trustees of an ontological truth that happens to have pluralism as its content but incurs an ironic performative contradiction: It asserts pluralism but does not allow for a pluralist understanding of its claim. Who can question that “there are” several, diverse values “not structured hierarchically”?49 In the light of these difficulties incurred by the attempts to ground respect for pluralism in some out-of-the-cave non-pluralist objective principle or to turn pluralism into the essence of the outside world and since my normatively intended approach to pluralism precludes the solution of thinking of pluralism-affirming institutions as just expressing one prevailing preference – we are still in search of a different answer. What could that be? How could the acceptance of pluralism be something other than either one opinion among the many voiced in the cave or an authoritative message coming from out of the cave? That tertium has long existed in general philosophy under the headings of phronesis, ref lective judgment, exemplarity. Rawls has built it into the core of his later political philosophy under the heading of the reasonable, the standard of public reason. The reasonable is precisely what is neither part of the normative furniture of the outside world (lest public reason be turned into the mouthpiece of practical reason within the cave) nor one preference or orientation among many others. Rawls did not explore the broader philosophical implications of his invention, which amounts to identifying a non-speculative, but fully deliberative, mode of reason – which, of course, draws inspiration from the transformative and critical powers of speculative reason but remains anchored to a context where the best solution has to be identified for a pressing communal problem without the privilege of being in a position to wait for a consensus to coalesce on the background normative questions. According to our modified version of the allegory, life in the cave must be somehow regulated before the controversy concerning which of the full accounts truly matches the outside world is over. The predicate “reasonable” applies to all positions that embed an awareness of this predicament and of their own validity as something other than full scale mirroring of the order of the outside world. Among these positions, the protection and respect of pluralism and “justice and fairness”, qua political conception of justice equally endorseable by the supporters of all the complete accounts of the external world, can aspire to the status of “most reasonable for us”. That status is not a second best. It is the idea of normativity that we can have if we wish to avoid the epistocratic interpretation of the allegory of the cave and at the same time to avoid embracing not just pluralism but a relativism that has trouble spelling out how one position or proposal could ever be “more reasonable” than another and has no place at all to offer to the normative idea that one such position could be “most reasonable for us”.50 Let me end where we have started, with the allegory of the cave. Can that complex symbolic structure, so inf luential for so long time on our political

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imaginary, still accommodate the new horizon of non-foundational normativity opened up by the later Rawls’s political liberalism? Does it contain enough symbolic resources? The answer is positive. We political theorists of the 21st century can still articulate our normative sensibility through that “expository device” created by Plato in fourth century Athens. Just imagine, as illustrated earlier, that not just one but a group of philosophers – those destined to rule the cave – were heading back from the outside world for motivations not different from the ones found in the canonical version. They want to report what they have seen and reform life in the cave. Wouldn’t they also perhaps want to stop for a while, on their way back, at the entrance of the cave and consult among them to exchange their impressions and check if they can come to a common story that one of them, as their spokesperson, would relate? And if upon conversing at the entrance of the cave, standing sideways and alternatively casting their gaze at the misery inside and at the splendor outside, the conversation dragged on without coming to a close and they came to the realization that their dialogue weren’t any likely to result in a common report, wouldn’t they agree to keep their report to the observations and conclusions blessed by full overlap and to make them the only basis for ruling the cave and exercising legitimate authority? As to the contentious conclusions and observations, wouldn’t they agree to bar any factional, divisive enforcement of them through whatever authority each of them would happen to wield when back in the cave and to further explore their merit in proper venues for the purpose of seeing if the area of agreement could be further extended in the future? And finally, would they describe the argument that established the prohibition, for those ruling in the cave, to enforce controversial portions of the accounts – so that none of the accounts triumph or succumb in the cave by the sheer contingency of the distribution of power – as just another “opinion” like the ones exchanged in relation to the passing shadows, another brick in the wall of the “indistinct difference” reigning in the cave? “Certainly not”, any 21st century Glaucon would concede. Could then the fugitive-philosophers describe that pluralism-affirming argument as something that they found in the outside world, as objectively as they found the light of the sun? “Hardly so”, a contemporary Glaucon again would have to admit. He would have to concede that the philosophers, during their en route conversation, standing sideways at the entrance of the cave, saw in this pro-pluralism argument neither doxa nor episteme but simply the most reasonable thing for them to do. They’ve discovered deliberative reason and its standard, the reasonable. The allegory of the cave can still speak to us if we are prepared to filter away its epistocratic implications and to add another footnote to Plato.

Notes 1 A shorter version of this chapter was published as A. Ferrara, “Sideways at the Entrance of the Cave: A Pluralist Footnote to Plato”, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2019, 45(4), 390–402.

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2 For a reconstruction of the background philosophical imaginary of human life as unfolding in a cave-like earthly environment (Empedocles) which could conceivably have nourished Plato’s elaboration of the allegory, see J.H. Wright, “The Origin of Plato’s Cave”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 1906, 17, 131–142. 3 Plato, The Republic, translated, with notes and an interpretive essay by A. Bloom, 2nd edition (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 193, 514a. 4 Ibidem, 193, 514b. 5 Ibidem, 515a. 6 Ibidem, 515a. 7 Ibidem, 194, 515c. 8 See R.L. Nettleship, Lectures on the Republic of Plato (1901) (London: MacMillan, 1955), 247–248 and 260–263. For an insightful defense of the impossibility of ultimately reconciling the Line and the cave within a consistent picture, which assigns the same extension to eikasia in both, see J. Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 254–257. For a compatibilist attempt at reconciliation, see J. Malcolm, “The Cave Revisited”, The Classical Quarterly, New Series, 1981, 31(1), 60–68. 9 M. Heidegger, The Essence of Truth. On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Thaetetus, translated by T. Sadler (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 20. 10 Ibidem, 23. 11 See D. Hall, “Interpreting Plato’s Cave as an Allegory of the Human Condition”, Apeiron. A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science, 1980, 14(2), 74–86. 12 See A.S. Ferguson, “Plato’s Simile of the Cave”, Part II “The Allegory of the Cave”, The Classical Quarterly, 1922, 16(1), 15. On apaideusia not simply consisting of “privation of education”, see A.S. Ferguson, “Plato’s Simile of Light Again”, The Classical Quarterly, 1928, 28(3–4), 206–207. 13 L. Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964), 125; J. Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, cit., 252–253. 14 A.S. Ferguson, “Plato’s Allegory of the Cave”, cit., 24–25. 15 Plato, Republic, cit., 194, 515d. 16 H.G. Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, translated and with an introduction and annotation by P. Chr. Smith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 100. 17 For a discussion of the similarity of the path to estrangement and solitary seeking found in this section of the Allegory of the Cave and the axial positing of an unbridgeable gap between mundane orders and transcendent orders ultimately linked with an image of “unalloyed goodness”, be they understood as the “Heaven” in Chinese thought or the Idea of the Good, see Ch. Taylor, “What Was the Axial Revolution?”, in R.N. Bellah and H. Joas, The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 35. 18 For “homelessness” see R. Bellah, “The Heritage of the Axial Age”, in R.N. Bellah and H. Joas, The Axial Age and Its Consequences, cit., 455. For an account of the new predicament of the cave-fugitive as atopia, see A. Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 106. 19 Ibidem, 194, 516a-b. 20 Ibidem, 516b. 21 For a thought-provoking comparison of the allegory of the cave and the exemplariness of Buddha’s life, see R. Bellah, “The Heritage of the Axial Age”, cit., 459–460. 22 On the axial-like radicality of the opposition of the outside world to the inside of the cave, see also J. Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, cit., 253–254. 23 Ibidem, 194, 516b-c. 24 See H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959), 265. 25 Plato, Republic, cit., 198, 519c. 26 Ibidem, 198, 519d.

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27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Ibidem, 519e. Ibidem, 520a. J. Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, cit., 267. D.J. Sheppard, “Why the Philosopher Returns to the Cave”, Richmond Journal of Philosophy, 2004, 6, 5, emphasis mine. H. Arendt, “What Is Authority?”, in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 112–113. M. Abensour, “Against the Sovereignty of Philosophy over Politics: Arendt’s Reading of Plato’s Cave Allegory”, Social Research, 2007, 74(4), 974. See H. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, One-Volume Edition (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1978), 81. On this point, never clarified properly by Plato, see D.J. Sheppard, “Why the Philosopher Returns to the Cave”, cit., 7. H. Arendt, “What Is Authority?”, cit., 114–115, emphasis mine. See J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971), Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 129–130. See J. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 58. At three junctures, the later Rawls takes explicit distance from A Theory of Justice. First, in footnote 7 of Lecture 2 of Political Liberalism, he dismisses his own attempt, pursued in A Theory of Justice, to ground a justification of the principles of justice on the theory of rational decision as “incorrect”. Second, in the text, on p. 53, Rawls calls the idea of justice as fairness as embedding the attempt to derive the reasonable from the rational a “misinterpretation” of the original position. Finally, on p. 179 of “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”, Rawls admits that the kind of “well-ordered society” envisaged in A Theory of Justice, namely a society whose members affirm justice as fairness as a comprehensive liberal doctrine, “contradicts the fact of pluralism and hence Political Liberalism regards that society as impossible” (my emphasis). J. Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”, 442. In fact, prior to his ascending out of the cave, we are not given any indication that the fugitive philosopher is in any different position than his fellow-prisoners, except for his shackles being suddenly released. J. Rawls, Political Liberalism, cit., 4. Ibidem, 215 and 220–222. On the relation of the “background culture” to Habermas’s “public sphere”, see J.Rawls, “Reply to Habermas”, in ibidem, 382. Larmore argues that the term pluralism should be used only to refer to “metaphysical pluralism” à la Berlin, discussed later, and “reasonable disagreement” for the phenomenon of reasonable people failing to reach consensus over broad matters. See Ch. Larmore, “Pluralism and Reasonable Disagreement”, in The Morals of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 152–174. Here the two notions are kept conceptually distinct, but in consonance also with Rawls’s use of the term “reasonable pluralism”, I have retained the same word. For political liberalism, pluralism is too important a concept for letting it be monopolized by supporters of such a peculiar and self-contradictory view as “metaphysical pluralism”. Ch. Larmore, “The Moral Basis of Political Liberalism”, Journal of Philosophy, 1999, 96(12), 605. Ibidem, 608. Ibidem. Ibidem, 609, my emphasis. I. Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Random House, 1992), 79–80. Ibidem, 80. In the same passage, Berlin contends that this view of pluralism is distinct from relativism. See R. Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy over Philosophy”, in R. Vaughan (ed.), The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom: Two Hundred Years After (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

6 PLURALISM AND THE POSSIBILITY OF A LIBERAL POLITICAL CONSENSUS Catherine Audard

Introduction For those who, following Max Weber (Weber 1917–1919), diagnose our disenchanted liberal world as characterized by the “irreconcilable death struggle between values” or, with Isaiah Berlin (Berlin 1969), by “the existence of incommensurable values”, a political consensus on liberal democratic values seems to have become quasi-impossible. Only modus vivendi arrangements or “accommodations” (Kymlicka 2007: 3) can be hoped for in multicultural, multi-faith societies. This threatens the stability of the liberal consensus, which has dominated the free world since 1945. However, in Political Liberalism (1993) and in “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (1999), John Rawls develops an argument showing that a liberal consensus based on the use of public reasons is possible. Whereas he agrees with Berlin, on the fact of ‘deep’ pluralism and that “no society can include within itself all forms of life” (Rawls 1993: 197), he refuses to see it as “an unfortunate condition of human life” (Rawls 1993: 37). Instead, he understands it as “the inevitable long-run result of the powers of human reason at work within the background of enduring free institutions” (Rawls 1993: 4) and as such, as the main feature of democratic societies. “The [democratic] society in question is a society in which there is a diversity of comprehensive doctrines, all perfectly reasonable” (Rawls 1999: 31). He then endeavours to show “the possibility of a reasonable harmonious and stable pluralist society” (Rawls 1993: xxvii). How is that feasible? Rawls suggests that we take into account two facts. First, not all disagreements and conf licts are the upshot of self and class interests or of irrational preferences, but most conf licting views, in particular religious views, can be seen as ‘reasonable’ in the sense that they may offer sound reasons for disagreements. Second, we should recognize the difference between

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the reasons offered in the public sphere and the beliefs and values shared in the non-public domain, the former being much more conducive to agreement. This should lead to a useful distinction between ‘pluralism as such’ and ‘reasonable’ pluralism (Rawls 1993: 36), a distinction that would explain how it is possible to reach a limited but stable political consensus on liberal political values and principles.1 This is a fairly optimistic view that has raised numerous criticisms and misunderstandings. In this chapter, I clarify Rawls’s controversial conception of a ‘reasonable’ pluralism and show that while ‘deep’, it is still distinct from value pluralism, the moral doctrine advocated by Max Weber and Isaiah Berlin. I argue, however, that Rawls’s argument would benefit from a distinction between two levels of pluralism: ‘first-order pluralism’ among values or beliefs and ‘second-order pluralism’ among conceptions of the good and their public ‘reasons’ or arguments.2 I also insist that the emphasis in Rawls’s argument should be on the transformative and integrative power of the public sphere. I then specify the limits and focus of such a political consensus once we abandon the illusion of unanimity or of overwhelming allegiance to ‘common’ values. Against Rawls’s ‘realist’ critics,3 I conclude that the possibility of a limited, but inclusive, political consensus, what Rawls called an ‘overlapping’ consensus, is a real hope, a view that should be contrasted with the results of ‘secularization’ and its subsequent alienation of religious minorities. A good example of such a political ‘overlapping’ consensus is the way British Muslims organizations, between 1989 and 2006, used public reasons in the Rawlsian sense that led to the inclusion of their grievances and claims within the British legal system and to widespread consensus on antidiscrimination legislation.

Pluralism as an obstacle to liberal political consensus Let us start our inquiry with some facts that shed a light on the meaning of pluralism and the renewed tensions between political and cultural pluralism. As the sociologist Tariq Modood mentions: a high degree of racial, ethnic and religious mix in its principal cities will be the norm in twenty-first century Europe, and will characterize its national economic, cultural and political life . . . the majority of nonwhites in the countries of Europe are Muslims; the UK, where Muslims form about a third of nonwhites or ethnic minorities, is one of the exceptions. With estimates of 12 to over 17 million Muslims in Western Europe today, the Muslim population in the former EU-15 is only about 3–5 % and is relatively evenly distributed across the larger states. However, in the larger cities, the proportion, which is Muslim, is several times larger and growing at a faster rate than most of the population. (Modood 2013: 13)

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Islam in the liberal polity Coupled with this rapid expansion, we have witnessed the growth of a new assertiveness of Muslim religious, not solely racial or ethnic, identities in the West. Muslims are expressing their demands for inclusion and equality in terms of respect for their religion, no longer in simply socio-economic, racial or ethnic terms. This is a major change. The recent rise of multiculturalism in the West, starting in Canada with the 1988 Multiculturalism Act, has been disrupted by the rapidity of these changes. The problem is no longer the peaceful coexistence of different ‘races and ethnicities’ (the American model of race-relations and colourblind policies) or of ‘cultures’ (the Canadian model for immigrant integration) but how far the secular liberal state can tolerate religious groups that do not share liberal values such as equality of women, freedom of religion or of speech, and so on. As Tariq Modood notes: “The emergence of a Muslim political agenda has thrown liberalism into theoretical and political disarray” (Modood 2010: 49). It is this new Muslim assertiveness that seems incompatible with liberal political values, even stretched with the help of multicultural policies.4 Whereas previous conf licts in Europe involved various strands of Christianity, the emergence on such a large scale of Islam in the West as well as the geopolitical issue of its radicalisation, have created major problems in contemporary contexts. The commonly shared view is that of the otherness of Islam,5 that it seems to be a source of divisions and conf licts because, on the whole, it advocates values that are inherently incompatible with liberal democracy,6 with its conception of persons as free and equal citizens. On women’s rights and equality, on the right to exit one’s religious community, on free speech and toleration for other religions, on the dominant role of religion in the public space and in law and legislation as well as policies, the conf lict is inherent, as Islam does not recognize the separation between State and religion.7 Religious allegiance to Islam and the customs and ideologies that accompany it are increasingly seen as a threat to democratic institutions, to the separation of State and religions, making it impossible to integrate. Is Islam really the Other of democracies? Can we agree that “today, it is the “figure of the Muslim [that] stands like a sentinel, marking the limits of the West: the state system, human rights, civil freedoms, democracy, sovereignty, even the simple requirements of the bare life” (A. Norton 2013: 5)? Given that democracies are inherently politically pluralist and can only survive through consensus and agreement, be it constitutional or majoritarian, and that the liberal principle of legitimacy states that “principles and ideals must be acceptable to citizens’ common human reason” (Rawls 1993: 137), what could be the basis for a political consensus in that situation? As Rawls says, the new problem of our time is: How is it possible for those affirming a religious doctrine that is based on religious authority, for example the Church or the Bible [one could add

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the Koran], also to hold a reasonable political conception that supports a just democratic regime?” (1993: xxxix). Or again: “How is it possible for citizens of faith to be wholeheartedly members of a democratic society who endorse society’s intrinsic political ideals and values, and do not simply acquiesce in the balance of political and social forces? . . . How is it possible – or is it – for those of faith, as well as the nonreligious (secular), to endorse a constitutional regime even when their comprehensive doctrines may not prosper under it, and indeed may decline? (Rawls 1999: 149)

The paradox of liberalism One easy answer would be to claim that some religious doctrines are so clearly incompatible with liberal values that they have no place in liberal societies unless they transform themselves and become more “like us”, liberal individualists. This means that liberal values should be the dominant standard and should be recognized as such even if that leads to using the oppressive power of the State. However, even if State power is ‘soft’ or indirect, appealing to moderation to nudge citizens of faith towards accommodating or even abandoning their faith altogether, it is still oppression. The cases of Enlightenment rationalism or of French secularism or laïcité are exemplary. Restraining freedom of conscience is, for them, justified in the name of reason and progress towards the ‘essential’ unity of mankind behind the ‘apparent’ diversity of creeds and doctrines. Such a view is very much alive in the French version of secularism (Audard 1996, 1999, 2001; Bhargava 1998) in which the use of State power to curb the religious freedoms of minorities is justified as a means towards political integration through the unanimous endorsement of ‘democratic values’. But this is paradoxical, as Rawls notes: If we think of political society as a community united in affirming one and the same comprehensive doctrine, then the oppressive use of state power is necessary for political community. In the society of the Middle Ages, more or less united in affirming the Catholic faith, the Inquisition was not an accident; its suppression of heresy was needed to preserve that shared religious belief. The same holds, I believe, for any reasonable comprehensive philosophical and moral doctrine, whether religious or nonreligious. A society united on a reasonable form of utilitarianism, or on the reasonable liberalisms of Kant and Mill, would likewise require the sanctions of state power to remain so. Call this “the fact of oppression”. (Rawls 1993: 37) The connection of liberalism with cultural or religious pluralism is thus deeply troubling. Liberals, on the one hand, claim to respect the diversity of moral and religious doctrines while, on the other, defending what Habermas calls the

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“ethical standard of individualism” (Habermas 1992: 271) or secularism, which is one particular value or ethos among others. Rawls echoes this criticism in Political Liberalism: Historically, one common theme of liberal thought is that the state must not favour any comprehensive doctrines and their associate conception of the good. But it is equally a common theme of critics of liberalism that it fails to do this and is, in fact, arbitrarily biased in favour of one or another form of individualism. (1993: 190) How is it possible for liberal values to claim allegiance without resorting to oppression, without asserting themselves as superior to any other acceptable values in society? This is the liberal predicament.

Is value pluralism the answer? The doctrine of value pluralism is one way of overcoming this paradox. Following Max Weber and Isaiah Berlin, it redefines liberalism as a doctrine that takes diversity seriously and even embraces it as an intrinsic value. Accepting ‘deep’ pluralism, as a fact of the human condition should be, then, the defining feature of liberalism and lead to public institutions that let such differences f lourish within limits, of course, instead of coercing them into homogeneity and unity. William Galston (Galston 2002: ch. 2) has developed a useful contrast between post-Enlightenment and post-Reformation liberalisms. Whereas the former is monistic and confuses universality with homogeneity, post-Reformation liberalism includes pluralism as its major tenet. For this form of liberal pluralism, accepting and managing diversity and conf licts through mutual toleration is the preferred strategy, justified not on the basis of moral principles or epistemic ideals of rationality and scientific progress but by political realism. This was the result of the Wars of Religion of the 17th century that led to the vision of toleration expressed by Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690) and his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Since beliefs in religious matters are private, attempts to use the blunt instrument of the state to control them are likely to be futile, and Locke recommended that the civil government should not force minorities to convert but aim at a peaceful modus vivendi among people sharing incommensurable values. Similarly, for Isaiah Berlin’s value-pluralism (1969, 1990, 2000a), our moral universe is characterized by plural and conf licting values that cannot be harmonized in a single comprehensive way of life. This then justifies institutional pluralism, “the desirability of public institutions that conduce to the expression, rather than the coercive suppression or overt homogenization, of such differences” (Galston 2002: 27). Its outcome is a modus vivendi model of consensus: the existing balance of powers leads to a momentary equilibrium between the

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various conf licting demands and permits the management of diversity as peacefully as possible even if this outcome is not lasting. Politics being the art of the possible, peace, not unanimity, should be the ambition of this form of liberal consensus. For Berlin, then, defining the limits within which diverse worldviews can coexist peacefully is more important than reaching unanimity on fundamental values. Instead of looking for full agreement and unity, we should limit our ambitions to peaceful coexistence and to the recognition that what divides us is definitive and constitutive of our humanity. To be rational, then, means to accept that the other may differ from me and still be ‘reasonable’ and the existence of ‘reasonable disagreements’ is a lasting feature of free and tolerant societies as “reasonable people tend naturally to disagree about the comprehensive nature of the good life” (Larmore 1994: 62). Such a view means renouncing a central assumption in the Western tradition (with the exception of Hume, of course), that conf licts about values are in principle soluble, as are conf licting views of facts, and soluble with finality. It also means renouncing the confusion between universality and homogeneity. Equality, for instance, is a universal value not because it has the same meaning for all but because it is recognizable by all in many different ways. Value pluralism, then, can be said to have three main elements. The first element is the most distinctive: The human condition is characterised by a plurality of values that are sometimes exclusive of one another but may still be worthy. For example, asceticism and engagement in political life are equally worthy ambitions, but they are not compatible in one single life. This is a weak version of value pluralism, as the incompatibility is not ontological, just pragmatic: No human life can include all the values we would like to support, and here Rawls agrees with Berlin, “no social world is without loss” (Rawls 1993: 196). A stronger version would claim that incompatibility is built into the nature of values as subjective preferences. This is Max Weber’s strong conception of pluralism when deep personal and existential commitments are concerned. In his 1917–1919 Vocation Lectures, he says that “the ultimate possible attitudes towards life are irreconcilable and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion.” In that case, the intensity of spiritual commitments precludes any political accommodation. The second element is that values are incommensurable. This means literally that there is no common measure to decide among them and among individual choices because values are not facts and cannot be decided upon in an authoritative way whereas facts can, as stressed in Kant’s famous distinction between ‘pure theoretical reason’ and ‘pure practical reason’: “Practical reason is concerned with the production of objects according to a conception of those objects – for example, the conception of a just constitutional regime taken as the aim of political endeavour – while theoretical reason is concerned with the knowledge of given objects” (Kant 1788: 65, 89; Rawls 1993: 93).8 In contrast, the appeal to dominant standards as ‘facts’ be they religious, cultural, or political, based on the confusion between facts and values only exists in authoritarian societies;

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and the rejection of this confusion in the name of freedom of conscience is the cornerstone of ethical liberalism. Value pluralism is thus firmly grounded in the experience of contemporary liberal democratic societies. However, for non-relativist value pluralists (Kekes 1994: 44), there is a third element to consider. If individual choices and preferences cannot be authoritatively arbitrated, their consequences can. ‘Reasonable’ accommodation or a modus vivendi among these incommensurable and incompatible values can still be found in order to reach some political settlement that leaves the value of these choices aside and only consider their consequences. An excellent example of political consequentialism can be found in the conclusion of Jean Bodin’s Colloquium, in which all seven participants end the discussion peacefully, accepting their irreversible differences.9 This version of value pluralism, however, seems to lead to a very weak conception of consensus in which all agree to disagree and it leaves political values in a very unstable situation when opposed by illiberal doctrines. Now, what conclusions can we draw for the possibility of a liberal political consensus among conf licting doctrines and groups?

The weakening of liberalism: a dangerous outcome The main problem is certainly how far and how deep we should assume contemporary pluralism to be. Extreme forms of value pluralism go as far as affirming the intrinsic value, not only the reality, of diversity. This is highly problematic and contradictory. If values are incommensurable with one another, then why rank diversity above other values such as national cohesion, community or social conformity? This is not satisfactory for at least three reasons. First, value pluralism does not provide any guidance with respect to urgent issues such as the limits within which diverse religious views might be tolerated, especially views that openly reject liberal values such as equal protection of individual rights, even if superficially they conform to the legal framework. Arbitration courts such as Islamic Sharia courts or Jewish Beit Dins should be subjected to state controls, but these are very difficult to set up in a tolerant but firm way without any guidance for the judges based on value rankings, between, for instance, political and religious values. Second, extreme value pluralism leads to laissez faire and toleration as indifference as it does not engage with the root and extent of divergences and with the groups it opposes as ‘illiberal’. The intensity of beliefs around the ends of life, for instance, or the constitutive role values play in creating individual as well as collective identities, are treated as intractable questions and left aside. However, this contradicts the virtuous social dynamics, whereas minorities can change voluntarily and enjoy the benefits of openness, inclusion and recognition. Value pluralism is an individualistic take on moral questions that ignores the capacity and willingness of minorities to compromise and the pragmatism shown by individuals and communities that want to survive and f lourish in an often fairly hostile environment. By adopting this stance, liberal democracies fail to commit

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themselves to discuss and advocate their own values and leave the very liberal principles of individual freedom and equality defenseless and without authority, making the establishing of a stable political consensus impossible. This form of liberal pluralism is fairly ethnocentric and not conducive to dialogue and recognition, which were exactly the demands formulated by the British Muslims in their reaction to the publication of the Satanic Verses in 1989. This is why it will be worth looking at the Rushdie Affair in more detail, as I will in the next section. Third, and even more problematic, value pluralism is a controversial view on ethics and the human condition that can lead to relativism even if Berlin states that some goods are universal and if non-relativist value pluralists claim that accommodation among values is possible. There is a serious danger of relativism in this ‘realist’ attitude: the demands of the other remain ‘other’ in the name of toleration and are not taken into account. As Anne Phillips notes, “the tendency to represent individuals from minority or non-Western groups as driven by their culture and compelled by cultural dictates to behave in particular ways . . . denies human agency . . . and implies a contrast with rational, autonomous (Western) individuals, whose actions are presumed to ref lect moral judgments, and who can be held responsible for those actions and beliefs” (Phillips 2007: 8–9). In the end, recognizing diversity as an intrinsic value is a divisive, not an inclusive, conception of pluralism and may be seen as a one-sided view, not shared by minority communities. The problem is, then, how to take seriously the plurality of values while arguing for a liberal political consensus, that is, one that is reached freely. My claim, as I will show now, is that the argument for liberal pluralism should proceed on two planes. First, we should clarify what pluralism means at the political level and make a distinction between two levels of pluralism instead of treating diversity as an intrinsic value. Second, we should stop equating consensus with unanimity and look at the various ways in which agreements between competing doctrines can be reached. Let us start with a revisionist view of value pluralism.

First-order and second-order pluralisms: a critique of value pluralism It may be useful at this stage to introduce a distinction between two levels of pluralism: the plurality of values or beliefs and the plurality of reasons and doctrines. This will lead to ask whether and in what measure the plurality of values, of individual and collective beliefs and choices concerning the most important issues in our lives, is directly political, directly relevant for political life, decisions and legislation. Is it not rather their public expressions that are political? It is important to emphasize the distinction. Public disagreements stem from clashes among apparently incommensurable values and beliefs, on abortion, gay marriage, equality of women, religious education, and so on, but are distinct from them. They are necessary tools in the political struggles for power and for

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mobilizing public opinion. However, they are not simple expressions of incompatible choices, as they must rally both their constituencies and the wider public.

A critique of value pluralism This complexity and the demands of political struggles are obscured by the way value-pluralists package values as mere a-political preferences. The sheer fact that values appear as incommensurable could be the result not of any ontological divide but of the way they are presented. In this sense, value-pluralism as a doctrine on the nature of values is possibly not as relevant as it seems in the political sphere. For instance, values can be and are often packaged as mere consumer goods. In some streets of San Francisco, you can see stall after stall of such spiritual goods or ‘values’ offered for consumption: a Catholic church, a yoga workshop, many different schools of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, a Buddhist temple, a Presbyterian chapel, a space for meditation or mindfulness, and so on, all catering for the well-being of various sections of the population. In this case, it is clear that any reasonable comparison between them is impossible. They are clearly incommensurable, and only individual choices can decide: There is no accepted common standard to choose among them. It is up to the individual to create her own value system after experimenting with what is on offer in a free society. But this is a highly distorted view of the sense in which values are diverse. In reality, values are social and historical constructs, prized not only by individuals but also by groups and communities over the course of history. This is what the history of human societies and of ethics teaches us. What we call values are not mere preferences; rather, they are final ends or objectives that have been validated by our various traditions, that we find deposited in our culture and that we rely upon in order to properly develop and realize our own potential both as individuals and as members of a group. Some have been more successful than others, and two centuries of the liberal experiment may teach us the superiority of freedom for a fulfilling life, but this does not exclude other successful experiments in living such as choosing to conform to traditions or to sacrifice one’s success for the happiness of others. Whereas some have been total disasters and have been rejected as monstrous by humanity because they are based on destruction and exclusion, for instance, the belief that the value of some lives requires the destruction of others or their exclusion, others have f lourished and are universally recognized as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. We need to reconnect individual and collective values with their historical environment to make sense of the nature of pluralism in the public sphere. Let me now take a powerful example and introduce a distinction between personal and cultural beliefs, on the one hand, and public reasons, on the other, between first-order and second-order pluralism of values. The streets of 17th century Venice were very different from 21st century San Francisco. The Jewish population was hidden from public view and locked

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on its islet, the Ghetto, where the drawbridge was carefully lifted every night. In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, we have an extraordinary prescient indication of the problems of pluralism. When Shylock and Antonio first meet, the incompatibility and incommensurability of values explode in front of the audience: I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you and so following, but I will not eat with you nor pray with you. (I, 3) I hate him for he is a Christian: he lends out money gratis and brings down the rate of usance here with us in Venice. (I, 3) When Shylock gives reasons to justify usury: “This was a way to thrive and he was blest: and thrift is blessed if men steal it not” (I, 3), Antonio refuses to listen and then concludes: “The Hebrew will turn Christian – he grows kind” (I, 3), making any recognition of the diversity of values impossible. However, there comes a point in this most ambiguous and paradoxical of tragedies, when Shylock transcends the incommensurability of values, the chiasm between Judaism and Christianity, in his famous monologue: He hath disgraced me and hindred me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my gains – and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick me, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? If we are like you in the rest, we resemble you in that. (III, 1, my emphasis) One reading traditionally praises Shylock’s appeal to universal values as a way of resolving value conf licts. But I don’t think that this is the true meaning of Shakespeare’s change of tone. The tragic point is that Shylock is now trying to talk to Antonio and to express his conception of the Good through reasons nourished by his Judaism, but he fails. Beyond the antagonism of personal or private values, there should be room for a public confrontation of reasons. What reason do you have, asks Shylock, to scorn me other than the fact that I am a Jew, which is no reason? Shylock is appealing to public reasons and justice in a very modern way, showing that value conf licts should not prevent their translation into intelligible, even reasonable demands for justice. Even if their personal values are incommensurable, the protagonists, following Shylock’s example, may express them in

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intelligible and reasonable terms, which is exactly what his Christian adversary refuses. Shylock uses public reasons to make his case but is denied a hearing. Fair Sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last, you called me dog and for these courtesies, I’ll lend you thus much moneys? (I, 3) It is extremely revealing that the play should end with a trial as it is in the legal context of the final trial and of its public nature that the demands of each party ought to be phrased as public reasons, which is denied to Shylock, who never gets justice, as in Act 4, Portia appeals to ruse and to legal justice, not to public reasons: The Jew shall have all justice – soft, not haste – He shall have nothing but the penalty . . . Shed thou no blood . . . Thou diest and all thy goods are confiscate. (IV, 1) The tensions between the private and the public expressions of values are apparent in another example, that of the “proud FGC cutter”,10 a very successful practitioner, a woman from Zambia interviewed by the BBC who is paid by families to mutilate young girls and make them acceptable as future brides. Talking to an interviewer, she claims to be proud of her trade, that she perpetuates important traditions that bring the community together. However, when asked what the reasons for the practice are, she tellingly refuses to answer and declares: “We are a secret society”. There are no public reasons to support these beliefs, and they cannot be translated into shared reasons; they have to remain secret. This illustrates something important at work in the public sphere and missed by value-pluralists, a distinction between first-order beliefs that directly concern important goods or values and second-order reasons or arguments that support these beliefs and that are intelligible even for those who do not value them. However, intelligible does not mean universal or identical but solely translatable into a common language.11 In contrast, the incommensurability of value refers, primarily, not to political life but to personal experiences and beliefs, individual or collective. Writers too easily slip into talk of the incommensurability of cultures when they mean the incommensurability of first-order beliefs.12 ‘Conceptions of the Good’, – the term used by Rawls to designate religious, moral and philosophical comprehensive doctrines – are second-order ‘conceptual schemes’ that organize and structure value judgments in ways that can be translated and made public for other individuals, groups and communities while remaining intelligible for their followers.13 The possibility of this distinction stems from the transformative power of the public sphere in a free society. Following Wittgenstein’s anti-private language argument, we should recognize that the requirements of publicity lead to the transformation of beliefs into reasons,

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as there cannot be ‘private reasons’ (Rawls 1993: 220 note 7). Reasons are either non-public or public and translatable, but they are not private. This is the main reason why public and reasonable disagreements between various moral or religious doctrines should not be confused with the incommensurability of values. What happens in the political sphere is a clash between conceptual schemes, not between incompatible values. Religious and moral doctrines have already transformed and processed first-order conf licting beliefs and interests into secondorder conceptualized arguments that are at play in the epistemic ideal of public justification.

The transformative power of the democratic public space: the struggles of contemporary British Muslims (1989–2006) To conclude this section, I would like to show how the experiences and struggles of contemporary British Muslims illustrate the transformation of religious beliefs into public reasons and the integrative role a pluralist democratic public space can play. Without this transformation and the public space needed for it, no political consensus among conf licting values and choices can take place. In his study of Sharia Councils in Britain, John Bowen shows the creativity of British Muslims, how the “fractured” character of Islam in Britain helps to make it “institutionally creative” (Bowen 2016: 6) – especially in comparison with the markedly less divided and less creative character of Islam in France. He sums up his main contention as follows: “British Muslims, most of them anyway, are in the long and messy process of creating institutions that make sense in Islamic terms and also in British ones” (Bowen 2016: 6). Bowen’s master stroke is the counter-intuitive claim in the final chapter that “The real debate about Islam in Britain is taking place elsewhere, among Muslims”, especially over the boundary between conservatives and liberals in matters such as gender relations, patterns of dress, forms of education, and marriage and divorce, where “a f lourishing of liberal cultural activists square off against their conservative opponents” (Bowen 2016: 209). And it is precisely among Muslims in Britain that Bowen detects evidence of public reasoning that he calls “practical convergence” or a form of “adaptation to a British context” (Bowen 2016: 227), which nevertheless draws on normative resources within different interpretations of Sharia law. Bowen sees practical convergence as a creative attempt to devise institutional mechanisms such as Sharia councils, which try to be responsive both to their British context and to Muslims’ demands. But the most striking case of this transformative power of the public space is, possibly, the way British Asian Muslims mobilized after the publication of the Satanic Verses (1989) by Salman Rushdie (Modood 2010: ch.1). This was not a top-down movement but a challenge to mainstream public opinion and existing majority–minority relations from below. “The Rushdie Affair was the hour of the simple devotionalist” (Modood 2010: 27) that led to the creation of the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs. This was the first instance of Muslim political

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agency and entry into public life, Muslim communities addressing directly British institutions. “They looked to the British establishment (publishers, the political class, the politicians, the law courts) to intervene on their behalf ” (Modood 2010: 10). What is remarkable is that the first argument used by the Committee was that of ‘apostasy’. The offense that had angered Muslims was that Salman Rushdie being a Muslim was an apostate, an argument, which being exclusively religious, the British public could not be expected to make sense of. This is the reason why, realizing that they had achieved little sympathy, the Muslim Council of Britain, created in 1998, used the more British term of ‘blasphemy’, which is still familiar in British law. But it is only with the demand for the criminalization of ‘incitement to religious hatred’, echoing legislation for Northern Ireland and that over incitement to racial hatred in Britain that British Muslims managed to change the legislation in 2006. Starting from non-public beliefs and values, they succeeded in entering mainstream politics with an equality agenda based on public reasons on four issues: mobilizing and establishing a Muslim religious community voice, securing legislation on religious discrimination and incitement to religious hatred, socio-economic policies to fight against severe disadvantages and creation and support for Islamic schools. Allowing Muslims to politically organize as Muslims without any sense of illegitimacy and for them to raise distinctive concerns, to have group representation in political parties, trade unions, various public bodies and so on, means allowing Muslims to organize in ways they think appropriate at different times, in different contexts and for different ends. The result will be a democratic constellation of organizations, networks, alliances and discourses in which they will be agreements and disagreement, in which group identity will be manifested more by way of family resemblances than the idea that one group means one voice. (Modood 2010: 5) Unfortunately, the Muslim Council of Britain’s pre-eminence began to suffer from the mid-2000s, and since 2006 this process has stalled, and hopes for meaningful dialogue and progress have faded.

Unpacking Rawls’s conception of pluralism I would now like to ‘unpack’ the meaning of Rawls’s ‘reasonable’ pluralism in view of my comments on ‘second-order’ pluralism and of the transformative power of the public space. Rawls’s ‘reasonable’ pluralism14 should be understood not as a first-order pluralism among incommensurable values but as a secondlevel pluralism among ‘reasonable’ conceptual schemes and doctrines that political mobilization through access to the public realm make necessary and possible. This is the meaning of a ‘reasonable’ pluralism, a notion that has been widely misunderstood. From there, a political consensus based not on unanimity and

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shared values, but on differences and discussions on collective norms and principles, becomes more realistic while still being able to recognize that “conf licts at the level of reasonable moral, religious, and philosophical comprehensive doctrines have ‘absolute depth’” (Rawls 1993: xxviii). This is Rawls’s nuanced answer to the pessimism of value-pluralists.

Two main criticisms Rawls starts, as I mentioned, with a distinction between ‘pluralism as such’ and ‘reasonable’ pluralism (Rawls 1993: 36). At first glance, a ‘reasonable’ pluralism is not a serious and deep enough description of the contemporary situation. A ‘reasonable’ pluralism begs the question of political conf licts and the urgency of consensus. It makes it too easy. Rawls seems to ignore the modern challenges to this view of reason and he seemingly remains wedded to Enlightenment liberalism. Second, his claim that religious doctrines can be reasonable, and part of a ‘reasonable’ pluralism is a very contentious view. If they are reasonable in the sense of being moderate, they will easily agree on terms of cooperation and the conf licts they will try to overcome will not be, in the end, that deep and divisive, which is not the case in the contemporary situation. If, for instance, pro-life militants end up accepting legislation guaranteeing procreative justice for women, it can only be in the name of political expediency, not as a result of a consensus on liberal values. ‘Reasonable’ pluralism is then toothless. But these critics ignore some very important distinctions. First, these two criticisms are victims of what Kant called a transcendental illusion: confusing things as they are for us and as they are in themselves. They share the illusion that incommensurability and the impossibility of consensus on a common standard are the last words on the ontological nature of values, whereas, as I noted before, this has perhaps as much to do with the way values are packaged as consumer goods in modern societies as with the nature of values. Rawls quite rightly rejects this confusion and insists that ‘reasonable’ pluralism is a feature of contemporary democratic societies, not a statement on the nature of values. Second, because we are dealing with political conf licts and mobilization within a democratic set-up, we only need to refer to reason as the capacity of political agents to advance reasons for action, not as a theoretical faculty or the capacity to reach unanimous judgments on truth. “In the realm of values as opposed to the world of fact, not all truths can fit in one social world” (Rawls 1993: 197 note 32). Again, we should refer here, as Rawls does, to the Kantian distinction between practical and theoretical pure reason. Third, just as they ignore the democratic context Rawls refers to, these critics ignore the transformative power of a free public space, of the kind made possible by the struggle for basic rights and freedoms in democratic societies for the past two centuries, a space where beliefs can be freely transformed into arguments and religious beliefs can evolve into fully f ledged conceptions of the good and of justice. I will argue that these

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distinctions are operative in Rawls’s argument but need to be unpacked. I will start with the conceptions of reason and of ‘reasonableness’.

The ‘reasonableness’ of religious doctrines In what sense may religious doctrines be ‘reasonable’ according to Rawls? This means, first, understanding the religious phenomenon, particularly Islam, as contributing to political conceptions of justice rather than simply contrasting its articles of faith with the secularization of society. This is an essential step that liberalism must take and from which it must draw new intellectual resources. Rawls sets an example in this respect with his analysis of the compatibility between Islam and liberalism.15 Citizens’ mutual knowledge of one another’s religious and non-religious doctrines expressed in the wide view of public political culture recognizes that the roots of democratic citizens’ allegiance to their political conceptions lie in their respective comprehensive doctrines, both religious and nonreligious. In this way, citizens’ allegiance to the democratic ideal of public reason is strengthened for the right reasons. (Rawls 1999: 153) Religions are, then, ‘reasonable’, in the sense that they are not simply constituted of dogmas or articles of faith but have also acquired the capacity to use ‘public reasons’, that is, arguments phrased in a language accessible to all, not exclusively directed to the community of believers. The recognition of such a capacity is not new in the history of religions and in Christianity, since Aquinas and Locke, reason and religion have been in constant interaction. ‘Reasonable’ is then contrasted by Rawls with ‘true’, meaning that reasonable religious doctrines recognize that doctrinal truths, such as the sanctity of life, are not directly relevant politically unless they are rephrased and expressed in a public political language as I have shown in the case of British Muslims’ 1990s mobilization. Rawls quotes the example of Martin Luther King Jr. who, first, expressed his condemnation of the institution of slavery as contrary to God’s law, basing his argument on religious grounds and ‘truths’ (Rawls 1993: 249 and n.39: 250). But then “King was able to appeal to the political values expressed in the Constitution”, to the 1954 Supreme Court decision that hold segregation unconstitutional. It is this capacity to move to common ground that expresses the ‘reasonableness’ of religions. As a consequence, secondly, religious doctrines are ‘reasonable’ when they get to recognize the political domain as a domain where their own views do not necessarily and directly prevail. They start to acknowledge the plurality of competing views as well as the principle of democratic legitimacy, the authority of political principles beyond their own community of justification in order to regulate these conf licts. Borders, of course, are porous, but in terms of justification, the reasons invoked are utterly different: Churches appeal to their various

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religious doctrines to impose ‘local’ rules and principles, whereas when they enter the public sphere, they change their language and accept that political practices and decisions have to be justified on the basis of a common ‘political’ conception of justice that is independent from any religious or other comprehensive doctrines and thus acceptable to all. Religious doctrines that accept this authority and the democratic principle of legitimacy are ‘reasonable’ in this limited political sense of recognizing the reality and the coercive nature of the political domain, not in any substantive sense. They can, then, recognize equal freedom for other religions and, for example, the ‘right to exit’ for reasons that are political, not religious or secular. This is, of course, a long and tortuous process, as two authorities, spiritual and political, are competing, and it takes great efforts to understand that basic human rights are not representative of a secular doctrine but “are recognized as necessary conditions of any system of social cooperation” (Rawls 1999: 68). Third, ‘reasonable’ religious doctrines are responsible in the sense that they develop a sense of civic responsibility towards the polis as a whole. Ideally citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the principle of reciprocity, they would think it most reasonable to enact. (Rawls 1993: 219) Because political power constrains all members of the body politic taken collectively, it can have devastating results (Rawls 1999: 137). The democratic principle of reciprocity as well as political consequentialism require that each person as a citizen think about how the others will accept or reject the legislation in question and that she gives priority to fair terms of cooperation over her own beliefs without abandoning them. They also require a dynamic conception of the political domain where such understandings and transformations can take place without coercion. Instead of seeking hegemony for their own beliefs and principles in the public sphere, ‘reasonable’ religious persons learn progressively to view themselves as citizens, as parts of a larger whole than their own religious community and to consider the consequences of their choices for those who do not share their convictions. The same is true, of course, of non-religious persons, who are not necessarily disposed to be reasonable and politically responsible. This is a long process, and such a result can only be achieved through education, mobilization, conf licts and lengthy decision-making procedures. If, for instance, we vote on abortion rights solely according to our substantive beliefs, we do not act ‘politically’ as citizens, but when we realize that our vote has public consequences, we act ‘politically’. We should remember that voting, says Rawls, is a public, not a private, act as our decisions have political, legal and economic consequences for others far beyond one’s own community of justification (Rawls 1993: 219). As citizens, we see ourselves as both legislators and addressees of the law, and we should care for the consequences of our political decisions for all

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others who do not think like us. We are not asked to fully accept, for instance, the right to abortion, the right to gay marriages or the teaching of Darwinism as a shared ethos, only to make sure that legislations in these domains respect the limited principle of reciprocity which guarantees accommodations and compromises on these burning issues. Even if, at first sight, some religious persons cannot bring themselves to modify their choices in view of their political consequences for others such as the right to abortion, they can progressively be made aware of the benefits of citizenship and of “accepting that politics in a democratic society can never be guided by what we see as the whole truth” (Rawls 1993: 243). However, such a view of the reasonableness of religions raises many questions. Feminists oppose it on the ground that it leaves too much to be decided by comprehensive religious doctrines, in particular concerning the role of women in the family and in society. Rawls, writes Okin (Okin 1994: 31), “does not apply the same strict criteria of reasonableness to comprehensive doctrines that involve considerable gender inequality that he does to those that treat people differently on racial or ethnic grounds.”16 Many have also doubted that our deepest disagreements could be moved off the political agenda so easily without being publicly dealt with. For instance, Joseph Raz’s perfectionist defence of liberalism is highly critical of Rawls’s epistemic abstinence (Raz 1994: 60–70) and insists on the value of deep disagreements so that when we reach a consensus, it will have a stronger basis in a shared overcoming of our opposing beliefs. Akeel Bilgrami (Bilgrami 2004: 173–196) equally insists on the benefits of having to deal publicly with our deep disagreements in order to develop new reasons and arguments through a historical process. The use of public reason, being constrained on two counts – by the principles of justice and by the exclusion of truth – may be left powerless, especially when faced with deep religious claims, be they by Christians or Muslims or other. My defence of Rawls is that these criticisms are based on a different understanding of what ‘deep’ disagreements are. To claim that disagreements can be overcome does not mean that they are treated as shallow or that they are not taken seriously. Instead, it means that the transformative power of the public sphere acts on second-order conceptual schemes, not on stark contrasts between non-public beliefs and communities, and once we make the distinction between the two pluralisms, it is clear that ‘reasonable’ accommodations are not impossible. Political consequentialism and epistemic abstinence do not block out first-order ends and interests but demand that they be transformed into second-order public reasons.

Reconciliation through the use of public reasons: an overlapping consensus The main advantage of the appeal to public reasons is that it preserves the diversity of the main competing views as no agreement is asked on any particular doctrine or conception of the good. The only requirement is that, from within each

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religion or religious morality, a narrow or wide backing for a public conception of justice (basically, constitutional principles, procedures and norms) should be found through public reasons and deliberation. This should lead to an ‘overlapping consensus’, that is, a partial and open-ended consensus in which some religious and moral doctrines may provide a full backing for democratic principles but others are only in limited agreement on very general values such as ‘the good of democracy’, peace, freedom and prosperity, rejecting more specific requirements of democratic justice, such as exposure to other religions and cultures for their children, or the right to abortion or divorce, or the rights of gay couples, and so on. The minimal agreement would be on the two principles of justice (justice as fairness) and on a ‘general conception of justice’ that “states that all social values – liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the social bases of selfrespect – are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone’s advantage”. (Rawls 1971: 54). As a consequence, Conf licts between democracy and reasonable religious doctrines are greatly mitigated and contained. . . This mitigation is due to an idea of toleration. . . . There are limits, however, to reconciliation by public reason. (Rawls 1999: 176–177) What kind of political consensus does such a view of liberal pluralism make possible? What conditions would make it stable enough to resist the assaults of illiberal critics and enemies? The first point is that such a consensus would be limited. An ‘overlapping consensus’ can be understood as occupying the middle ground between two other forms of agreements. A comprehensive consensus or a philosophical consensus would mean that all parties to the agreement endorse it for the same reasons. As I have already mentioned, Rawls goes so far as to claim that a philosophical consensus upon a political conception can be sustained only by oppression (Rawls 1993: 37). Alternatively, when a principle is endorsed as a modus vivendi, each party to the agreement accepts it reluctantly, as a less-than optimal compromise. Rawls argues that a modus vivendi agreement on a liberal conception is “political in the wrong way” and inherently unstable (Rawls 1993: 142). Here, as I have shown, he parts company with both political ‘realists’ and ‘value pluralists’ for whom political expediency is, in the end, the only way liberal institutions and principles can survive in a hostile environment, if their consequences are better than those of other political principles. By contrast, when a principle is the focus of an overlapping consensus, it means that each party endorses it for different but serious reasons, grounded in some deep beliefs, as something more than a compromise. Utilitarian citizens tell a decidedly utilitarian justificatory story about the same political conception that Kantians endorse for Kantian reasons, and so on for every reasonable citizen. Accordingly, even though citizens do not share a common justificatory story for the liberal conception, each endorses it “for its own sake” and “on its own merits” (Rawls 1993: 148).

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The second point is that such a consensus should be moral in the precise sense that it is reached through a justification process that involves not only “the powers of reason (judgment, thought and inference)” but also what Rawls calls the citizens’ two moral powers, the capacity to develop a conception of the good and a sense of justice (Rawls 1993: 19). It is not moral in the sense that it is based on a specific moral doctrine or on shared values, but that it is the work of citizens who view themselves as moral persons – something, which, I would like to stress, is extremely important for gaining the allegiance of deeply religious people. As I show in the next section, one of the most shocking aspects of secularism for believers is the equivalence between secularism and axiological neutrality that leads to the exclusion of moral concerns from the public sphere in the name of the ‘privatization’ of moral and religious doctrines. Instead Rawls stresses that public justification treats citizens as moral persons whatever their religious affiliation and thus recognizes in practice their equal dignity as interlocutors instead of imposing a common doctrine without dialogue and recognition. “Being designed to reconcile by reason, justification proceeds from what all parties to the discussion have in common” (Rawls 1971: 508). Consequently, such an overlapping consensus can be reached not by excluding the most intractable conf licts but through difficult and often painful discussions, constitutive of a pluralist and ‘deliberative’ democracy (Rawls 1999: 138).

Why secularism is not the basis for reconciliation But, how far should such reconciliation go? Is it not essential to win people’s “hearts and minds” and not to be satisfied with the passive acceptance by religious minorities of a necessary political agreement? Here Rawls enters dangerous territory and appears to distance himself from liberalism and the necessary ‘privatization’ of religions by the liberal secular State. He seems to suggest that only a ‘thick’ moral consensus around political values such as equality, freedom and the rule of law can produce a lasting agreement. The insoluble problem that Rawls comes up against is that a substantive consensus of this kind, even on liberal values, is excluded by liberalism, for it can only result from the intervention of the coercive power of an illiberal state. Rawls’s answer is twofold. First, neutrality is a contested concept and liberal democracies only ask for neutrality of aim, namely that the State should be prohibited from promoting any one dominant aim, not that religious doctrines should be excluded from the public sphere that should remain a level playing field. “The state is to ensure for all citizens equal opportunities to advance any [permissible] conception of the good they freely affirm” (Rawls 1993: 192, see also 190ff.). But it also means, secondly, that this neutrality should not be confused with secularism or the ‘privatisation’ of religions. If the State is not to be dominated by one single comprehensive doctrine, be it philosophical, moral or religious, secularism being such a doctrine cannot be the answer to pluralism and dissent. This would signal the end of both individual liberty to choose one’s

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own values and way of life, and of equality among citizens, as minority religions or beliefs-systems would be crushed or excluded. This, even more importantly, would destroy the main feature of democratic regimes and societies, that direct confrontations between religious doctrines and State power are mediated through dialogues and debates and the appeal to public reasons. “When there is a plurality of reasonable doctrines, it is unreasonable or worse to want to use the sanctions of state power to correct or to punish those who disagree with us” (Rawls 1993: 138).17 Rawls asks us consequently to overcome the confusion between ‘secular’ and ‘secularism’. To be ‘secular’ simply means not to affirm any particular doctrine in the political sphere. As Rawls states, “It is a grave error to think that the separation of church and state is primarily for the protection of secular culture; of course, it does protect that culture, but no more so than it protects all religions” (Rawls 1999: 166). If liberalism is to take seriously the fact of pluralism characteristic of democracies, it cannot exclude religious doctrines from the public sphere. However, it has to ask them to enter into a dialogue which is admittedly limited to politics, but which presupposes reciprocal understanding and recognition. ‘Privatisation’, by contrast, could lead to extremism and radicalization. Only a public and institutionalized process of mutual justification can lead to successful reconciliation. Without this dialogue, we are left with a weak procedural form of democracy, deprived of any moral content and always vulnerable to the existing balance of power.

Conclusion I have tried to show that neither value pluralism and its skepticism nor secularism and its exclusion of religious doctrines from the public sphere are the answers to the fact of pluralism even when we take it seriously as ‘deep’ pluralism. The answer lies in the opening up of the public sphere to the second-order pluralism of public reasons, as my examples have shown. However, just as liberalism needs to evolve and justify its principles convincingly, so too do religions need to change in contact with democratic societies and become more ‘political’ in the limited sense that they may mobilize and start to fully participate in the political consensus and alter not the content of their doctrine but the type of arguments that they agree to use to defend their viewpoints. Although the convictions underlying the demands of minority religions are not universally valid, they must at least be communicable or capable of being framed in such terms that they can be justified and recognized as valid even if they are not shared. “Justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitting together into one coherent view” (Rawls 1971: 19). Both liberal institutions and principles and religious doctrines should be part of this process of mutual public justification and deliberation that is the key to success. As I have shown, a limited consensus on liberal political principles is conditioned on a transformative process in which first-order beliefs give rise to second-order reasons when entering the public space.

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Notes 1 The question of a stable political consensus occupies the best part of Part III of A Theory of Justice, but, in Political Liberalism, Rawls recognizes that because T.J. does not take into account the fact of reasonable pluralism, “the account of the stability of a well-ordered society in part III is unrealistic and must be recast” (Rawls 1993: xix). 2 For a similar distinction, see Susan Wolf (1992: 790), Charles Larmore (1994: 62) and George Crowder (2007: 134). 3 Critics of Rawls remain unconvinced that plurality could be so easily accommodated. See John Gray (2000) and William Galston (2002). On the ‘realist’ critique of Rawls’s utopianism, see the special issue of Social Philosophy and Policy, 33/1–2, Winter 2016, Cambridge University Press. 4 Here is a list of current multicultural policies: (1) constitutional, legislative or parliamentary affirmation of multiculturalism at the central and/or regional and municipal levels (e.g., Canada Multiculturalism Act of 1988); (2) the adoption of multiculturalism in school curricula; (3) the inclusion of ethnic representation/sensitivity in the mandate of public media or media licensing; (4) exemptions from dress-codes, Sunday-closing legislation; (5) allowing dual citizenship; (6) the funding of ethnic group organizations to support cultural activities; (7) the funding of bilingual education or mother-tongue instruction; and (8) affirmative action for disadvantaged immigrant groups. 5 See Anne Norton (2013: 5): just as “the Jewish question was fundamental for politics and philosophy in the Enlightenment [i]n our time, as the Enlightenment fades, the Muslim question has taken its place” . 6 ‘Liberal democracy’ is a shortcut for the combination of popular sovereignty, constitutional checks and balances, and the rule of law that has dominated Western democracies since 1945. See Fareed Zakaria (Zakaria 2003: 17). 7 This is not true to the same degree for the quietist tradition of Shia Muslims and the Grand Ayatollah Sistani of Iraq has stressed the separation between politics and religion quite firmly. 8 Such a distinction can be questioned in the name of epistemic pluralism, a critique I do not mention in this chapter. If following John Stuart Mill’s defense of liberalism in On Liberty, one stresses the crucial importance of a free public and pluralist space for scientific discovery and progress, the Kantian distinction is less convincing. “For Mill, a society governed by liberal institutions is the most efficient in producing true beliefs and correcting false beliefs at least in the long run” (R. B. Talisse 2008: 4). However, this might be a case of confusing the quest for truth and its conditions with truth itself as a norm. In that case, the Kantian distinction is still valid. 9 Jean Bodin, Colloquium of the Seven (1588). Bodin was a precursor of Locke and one of the first to argue that a state might contain several religions. See Rawls’s homage to Bodin (Rawls 2009: 266–269). 10 “My quarrel with a proud FGM cutter” by Tulip Mazumdar, BBC News 20 November 2016, from the section Magazine. 11 The view most commonly associated with Wittgenstein and Davidson asserts that there are no insuperable problems of translation between languages or “conceptual schemes”. Conceptual schemes cannot turn out to be wholly or radically incommensurable. Conceptions of the Good are conceptual schemes and as such are, at least partly, translatable. 12 Berlin is also sometimes at fault in this respect (Berlin 2000b: 233, 235). See G. Crowder (2007). 13 An excellent example would be that of the Catholic Church’s teachings on sex education and its arguments. For Pope John-Paul II (1981 Familiaris Consortio), “imparting sex information dissociated from moral principles” leads to “the loss of serenity” and the opening of the “way to vice.” Hence, the Pope’s moral opposition to familiar forms of sex education appears to be based on empirical data. Consequently, the Pope’s argument “in part rests upon what he takes to be reliable data and to the kind of social epistemic system that is best realized in a liberal society” (Talisse 2008: 118). The arguments then

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14 15 16 17

appeal both to his constituents as expressing their first-order beliefs and to the wider liberal society’s conception of truth as based on empirical verifiable data. C. Larmore quite rightly notes that Rawls confuses pluralism with reasonable disagreement, which are two distinct ideas and that “doctrine and reasonable disagreement about doctrine can hardly be the same thing” (Larmore 1994: 63). See also Rawls (1999: 151, note 46), and his analyses of the work of Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’ïm (1990). For Rawls’s view of Islam, see Rawls (1999: 75–78). See also Martha Nussbaum (2003: 508–511). It might be useful to note here that in ‘On my Religion’, Rawls mentions his interest as a young man for the history of the Inquisition and for “its use of state power to establish its hegemony and to oppress other religions” (Rawls 2009: 264). Such interest transpires also in Rawls (1993: 37).

Bibliography An-Na’ïm, Abdullahi Ahmed. 1990. Toward an Islamic Reformation, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse. Audard, Catherine. 1996. ‘Political Liberalism, Secular Republicanism: Two Answers to the Challenges of Pluralism’, in David Archard (ed.), Philosophy and Pluralism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 163–175. Audard, Catherine. 1999. ‘French Republicanism and “Thick” Multiculturalism’, in R. Bhargava (ed.), Multiculturalism, Liberalism and Democracy, Oxford University Press, Oxford: 116–137. Audard, Catherine. 2001. ‘The French Republic and the Claims of Diversity’, in C. Gould and P. Pasquino (eds.), Cultural Identity and the Nation State, Rowman and Littlefield, Oxford: 85–108. Audard, Catherine. 2011. ‘Rawls and Habermas on the Place of Religion in the Public Domain’, in G. Finlayson and F. Freyenhagen (eds.), Habermas and Rawls: Disputing the Political, Routledge, London: 224–246. Berlin, Isaiah. 1969. ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford University Press, Oxford: 118–172. Berlin, Isaiah. 1990. The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. H. Hardy, John Murray, London. Berlin, Isaiah. 2000a. The Power of Ideas, ed. H. Hardy, Chatto & Windus, London. Berlin, Isaiah. 2000b. Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. H. Hardy, Pimlico, London. Bhargava, Rajeev (ed.). 1998. Secularism and Its Critics, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Bilgrami, Akeel. 2004. ‘Secularism and Relativism’, Boundary 2 – Volume 31/2, Duke University Press, Durham, NC: 173–196. Bodin, Jean, 1588. Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime. Translated, with an introduction, annotations, and critical readings by Marion Leathers Daniels Kuntz. Princeton University Press, Princeton. 1975. Bowen, John. 2016. On British Islam, Religion, Law, and Everyday Practice in Shari’a Councils, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Crowder, George. 2007. ‘Two Concepts of Liberal Pluralism’, Political Theory 35/2: 121–146. Galston, William. 2002. Liberal Pluralism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gray, John. 2000. Two Faces of Liberalism, Polity Press, Cambridge. Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. Beyond Facts and Norms, Polity Press, Cambridge. ‘Ideal Theory for a Political World’, Special Issue of Social Philosophy and Policy 2016. 33/1–2. Special issue on an ‘Ideal Theory for a Political World’.

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Kant, Immanuel. 1788. Critique of Practical Reason. Tr. T. Kingsmill Abbott, Longmans, Green and Co, London, (1948). Kekes, John. 1994. ‘Pluralism and the Value of Life’, Social Philosophy and Policy 11/1: 44–60. Kymlicka, Will. 2007. Multicultural Odysseys, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Larmore, Charles. 1994. ‘Pluralism and Reasonable Disagreement’, Social Philosophy and Policy 11/1: 61–79. Locke, John. 1690. Second Treatise of Government. 1689. J.M. Dent, London, Everyman’s Library, (1986). A Letter Concerning Toleration. Eds. R. Klibansky and J.W. Gough, Clarendon Press, Oxford, (1968). Mill, John Stuart. 1859. On Liberty. Ed. H.B. Acton, J.M. Dent, London, Everyman’s Library, (1992). Modood, Tariq. 2010. Still Not Easy Being British, Trentham Books, Stoke in Trent. Modood, Tariq. 2013. Post-Immigration ‘Difference’ and Integration, the Case of Muslims in Western Europe, British Academy Report, London. Norton, Anne. 2013. On the Muslim Question, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Nussbaum, Martha. 2003. ‘Rawls and Feminism’, in S. Freeman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Rawls, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA: 508–511. Okin, Susan. 1994. ‘Political Liberalism, Justice and Gender’, Ethics 105/1: 23–43. Phillips, Anne. 2007. Multiculturalism without Culture, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Rawls, John. 1971. (1999 revised edition). A Theory of Justice, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Rawls, John. 1993. (1996 paperback edition). Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, New York. Rawls, John. 1999. The Law of Peoples and the Idea of Public Reason Revisited, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Rawls, John. 2009. A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith with “On My Religion”, T. Nagel (ed.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Raz, Joseph. 1994. Ethics in the Public Domain, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Talisse, Robert B. 2008. ‘Toward a Social Epistemic Comprehensive Liberalism’, Episteme: 106–128. Weber, Max. 1917–1919. Vocation Lectures, in D. S. Owen, T. B. Strong (eds.), Rodney Livingstone (Translator), Hackett Publishing Co, Inc, Indianapolis (2004). Wolf, Susan. 1992. ‘Two Levels of Pluralism’, Ethics 102/4: 785–798. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Zakaria, Fareed. 2003. The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, Norton, New York.

7 MODUS VIVENDI LIBERALISM, PRACTICE DEPENDENCE AND POLITICAL LEGITIMACY1 Valentina Gentile

Contemporary political theory is characterised by a realistic critique of liberalism, in which the political realm is more clearly distinguished from the moral. In the literature, two lines of argument are invoked to support realist considerations in politics: (1) political realism is seen as an antidote to a somehow idealized and unfeasible version of liberalism, and (2) realist theorizing is said to provide the proper contingent response to the deep pluralism that characterises contemporary democracies (Horton 2010; Galston 2010). In the first case, political realism is strictly defined as an anti-utopian and feasible theory, while in the second, realist theorizing is seen as avoiding foundational disagreements about justice mutating into second-order disputes concerning the justifiability of legitimate political institutions. In this second sense, the realist critique challenges a key aspect of Rawls’s liberal project – that is, its justificatory constituency. David McCabe (2010: 6) presents an interesting example of realist critique of Rawls’s justificatory project. McCabe argues that Rawls’s Political Liberalism, which relies on a substantive consensus view, asks citizens to commit to a demanding version of the Justificatory Requirement ( JR) ‘that expresses political values that others as free and equal also might reasonably be expected to endorse’ (Rawls 1996: l). Yet this goal is practically unfeasible and normatively inadequate if the aim of liberal theory is to take the fact of moral diversity seriously. In conditions of deep pluralism, the JR should be recast so to include those, illiberal or sceptical, who are in fact excluded by Rawls’s justificatory constituency. Following Scanlon, McCabe believes that the argument for liberalism should be one the critic of liberalism cannot reasonably reject (2010: 7). This chapter contributes to this discussion by confronting the modus vivendi justificatory project as presented by McCabe with Rawls’s liberal project. It suggests that both Modus Vivendi Liberalism (hereafter MVL) and Political Liberalism (hereafter PL) seem to endorse a practice-dependent account of political justice

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in which ‘politics is prior to morality’; yet the ways in which reasons are endorsed to justify the shared conception of political authority are significantly different in these two schemes. McCabe presents a distinctive kind of contingent practicedependent liberalism that might be distinguished from Rawls’s institutional model. Following Sangiovanni (2008), I recover the notion of ‘practice dependence’ to reveal the differences underlying these two liberal projects and the implications that a contingent practice-dependent model might have on what McCabe calls the central feature of the liberal project, that is its JR (McCabe 2010: 5). The paper is structured as follows. Starting from Rawls’s notion of consensusbased toleration, the first section provides a brief reconstruction of the recent literature on modus vivendi. A common feature in this body of work is to consider modus vivendi as a realist and strictly political response to Rawls’s highly moralised conception of political authority. The second section focuses on a specific version of modus vivendi political theorizing, as suggested by McCabe (2010). McCabe’s MVL is here presented as an alternative liberal justificatory project: It insists on a notion of political legitimacy that is crucially linked to the inclusion of a plurality of voices in the justificatory constituency of liberal democratic societies. The third section reconsiders both Rawls’s and McCabe’s versions of justificatory liberalism in the light of Sangiovanni’s notion of practice dependence. It distinguishes two practice-dependent justificatory views: Rawls’s institutional model and McCabe’s contingent one. The fourth section focuses on the ideal of political legitimacy implicit in such a contingent model, which is guaranteed by what I call the ‘Inclusiveness Requirement’ (IR). The fifth section shows that this version of political legitimacy seems to rely on an idea of public justification based on convergence of reasons. This is opposed to Rawls’s institutional model, which insists on the conditions of shareability and accessibility of reasons as a basis for public justification. This section clarifies the differences between these two models and their implications for such issues as stability and autonomy. The last section considers McCabe’s proposal as a case of practice-independent justificatory liberalism. In this second reading, however, MVL seems to be inconsistent with its realist premises.

From political liberalism to modus vivendi theorizing The tension between moral pluralism and the stability of liberal institutions is central to contemporary liberal thought. In PL, Rawls famously asks, ‘How is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?’ (Rawls 1996: xxv). For Rawls, institutions and, especially, the constitution of a democratic society provide the proper framework of reasons for reaching an ‘overlapping consensus’ and thus supporting liberal democratic arrangements over time. In this way, he argues, a ‘stability for the right reasons’ is realized (xxxix). This account importantly links the issue of the stability of liberal institutions in plural societies to the principle of liberal legitimacy so that the

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view of toleration introduces a conception of political authority which is justified to everyone in terms that cannot reasonably be rejected. Here, Rawls draws an important distinction between two different models of toleration: a view of liberal toleration based on an ‘overlapping consensus’, and another, more traditional view that he calls ‘modus vivendi’ (Rawls 1996: 181). A modus vivendi sees people in divided societies endorsing liberal institutions as a matter of balancing opposing forces. In such circumstances, citizens view society as a compromise between what they consider to be the best possible arrangement (namely, a state based solely on their own comprehensive doctrine) and the worst (namely, a state based solely on a comprehensive doctrine opposed to their own). Yet within a modus vivendi, each citizen sees the liberal state as, at most, a second-best political order, and accordingly, the relationship between state and citizen is inherently unstable. Rawls clarifies this point using the example of Catholicism and Protestantism in the sixteenth century: ‘Both faiths held that it was the duty of the ruler to uphold the true religion and to repress the spread of heresy and false doctrine. In such a case, the acceptance of the principle of toleration would indeed be a mere modus vivendi, because if either faith becomes dominant, the principle of toleration would no longer be followed. Stability with respect to the distribution of power is lacking’ (148). Recently, the notion of modus vivendi has revived. It has increasingly attracted the interest of scholars who criticize the implicit moralism and strict legalism of Rawls’s project. First, John Gray has proposed an idea of modus vivendi as an antidote to Rawls’s ‘anti-political legalism’ (Gray 2000: 16). Gray distinguishes between two incompatible views of liberal toleration: one aimed at establishing universally justified principles that are based on rational consensus, the other instead focusing on the more modest claim of balancing different values and ways of life. He insists on the need to dismiss a liberal universalist project in favor of a view of liberal toleration that is compatible with the historical fact of pluralism (6). According to Gray, Rawls’s justificatory framework, ref lecting values that are firmly grounded on an ‘overlapping consensus’, is in fact unable to accommodate the demands of moral pluralism. This approach displaces all fundamental issues, such as basic liberties and social distribution, from the realm of politics (16). Yet, Gray reminds us, disagreement does not cover only the good but also the right (7). A modus vivendi, which does not rely on problematic notions such as truth or right, should inform a feasible political project of liberal toleration. This is based on the idea of compromise and bargain among competing communities who hold different sets of values. Under a modus vivendi, toleration is presented as a condition for peace which embraces diversity instead of suppressing it. Gray’s defence of modus vivendi liberalism has inspired a vast body of literature focused on the possibilities of reconciling an account of toleration with what Waldron (1999) has called the ‘circumstances of politics’. Different views regarding not only the concept of the good but also the content and the application of the principles of justice inevitably must confront the issue of political authority and the ways in which it should be constructed in order to be legitimate (Gentile

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2017). Matters of justice therefore cannot be isolated from matters of politics, nor, more precisely, from those democratic procedures and practices that can be widely recognised as legitimate. In this literature, it is possible to broadly distinguish two distinct approaches: The first insists on an account of comprehensive pluralism (Galston 2002), while the second seeks to recast the problem of political legitimacy in contexts of deep pluralism in less moralised terms (see, e.g., Horton 2010, 2012; McCabe 2010). To recall Williams (2005), I shall call this approach ‘political realism’. This chapter focuses on the second version of modus vivendi theorizing. For political realism, a modus vivendi envisages a ‘broadly consensual’ view of toleration that introduces a procedural interest of the parties in recognizing the legitimacy of a particular political arrangement (Horton 2010: 432). In contrast to Rawls’s principle of liberal legitimacy and its justificatory structure, this view invokes a narrower idea of legitimacy understood as a distinctive political concept (Galston 2010: 388). Thus, appropriate standards of evaluation of the legitimate institutional arrangement should arise within politics rather than from external moral standards (Galston 2010: 386).

Modus vivendi, political legitimacy and public justification Within what I have labelled ‘political realism’ it is possible to distinguish at least two different ways in which political legitimacy has been linked to the notion of modus vivendi. For Horton (2012), the problem with Rawls’s principle of liberal legitimacy is that it depends on an account of justice that is implicit in its justificatory structure. Against this, Horton argues that political legitimacy should be located in relation to the criteria that are operative in particular social, cultural and conceptual contexts, and which inform people’s judgements about the legitimacy of their state (145). In this way, Horton hopes to resist the attitude of several liberal (neo-Kantian) scholars who provide a predetermined justification of the principle of liberal legitimacy irrespective of both contextual circumstances and people’s actual beliefs. The notion of political legitimacy related to modus vivendi ought not to be extrapolated from consent theory: People consent to a modus vivendi because they acknowledge its political legitimacy (Horton 2019: 141–142). A modus vivendi is, for Horton, less stable than an ‘overlapping consensus’, yet such an instability ref lects the very political circumstances from which it arises (Horton 2010: 441). Thus, he suggests a contingent and relatively unstable idea of political legitimacy linked to actual political institutions and practices, which is aimed at ruling out the liberal commitment to public justification. This account, however, can provide only scant resources for a normative defence of modus vivendi political legitimacy. By separating the notion of legitimacy from the JR, Horton concedes that modus vivendi political legitimacy may not be distinctively liberal. He locates his idea of modus vivendi outside the realm of liberalism. Thus, the contingent account of political legitimacy could

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easily be satisfied in hierarchically ordered societies – say, a society whose conception of political authority is defined strictly in religious terms. For normative political theorizing, however, what counts is to provide an argument to explain a widely shared intuition regarding the fact that a liberal political order, in which basic freedoms and rights are protected, is preferable to one in which the principle of freedom of conscience is at risk. One might argue that Rawls also recognizes the political legitimacy of some non-liberal hierarchical societies, which he calls decent hierarchical peoples (Rawls 1999: 62ff ).2 Of course, Rawls’s notion of ‘decent peoples’ has important implications for the idea of international toleration, because the kind of pluralism that characterizes international society will inevitably be ref lected in a diversity of political forms, some of which may be non-liberal democracies but still satisfy the conditions that justify the recognition of them as ‘equal participating members in good standing of the Society of Peoples’ (59). Yet the account of ‘institutional decency’ represents a central normative constraint. Rawls does not provide a clear definition of decency but suggests that it might be understood as a kind of weak reasonability (67; Beitz 2000: 686). Rawls’s notion of decency amplifies the anti-paternalism of the theory. In the international Society of Peoples, some non-liberal decent hierarchical peoples are recognized as members of an enlarged justificatory constituency, the original position of second level. This weak form of legitimacy is based on their capacity as peoples to select and support what Rawls considers to be ‘certain familiar and traditional principles of justice among free and democratic peoples’ (1999: 37). Yet two elements distinguish Rawls’s international legitimacy from the kind of political legitimacy suggested by modus vivendi theorists. First, also this weak idea of international legitimacy is grounded on an ‘overlapping consensus’ among liberal and decent non-liberal peoples; second, the liberal notion of legitimacy, which is satisfied within liberal societies, and the legitimacy of decent non-liberal peoples, which is realized at the level of the Society of Peoples, importantly differ. I shall return to this point in the last section. However, some supporters of modus vivendi theorizing have taken the commitment to liberalism seriously in providing an account of political legitimacy linked to some form of public justification. McCabe (2010) offers an interesting case of a modus vivendi justificatory project. Here, a minimal account of political justice that is justified as a modus vivendi should be preferred to an idealized version of liberalism. MVL is nonetheless linked to a normative account of political legitimacy as far as it ref lects citizens’ reasons to consent to it. Thus, MVL provides a more plausible answer to what McCabe calls the liberal project’s JR. In his view, JR is essential to any liberal theory insofar as it captures two main features of liberalism, namely the harm principle and anti-perfectionism. The task of MVL is to reconnect JR to the deep pluralism emerging in contemporary societies. In this model, the political legitimacy of a specific institutional setting must ref lect a commitment to JR that is compatible with a fundamental condition of inclusiveness.

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MVL is a ‘particularist’ form of liberalism rooted in two considerations: first, the recognition that many citizens might not endorse a liberal view of political association; and yet second, that these citizens might see the existence of the state either as an unchangeable fact of modern life or as something that is instrumental to the achievement of other important goods (McCabe 2010: 133). Under these conditions, an agreement on the liberal terms might emerge as a compromise among citizens who view the liberal state as a second-best solution (133). As a normative project, MVL asks citizens who accept the liberal terms on a modus vivendi basis to commit themselves to a weak proceduralism that is grounded in a presumption that the interests of all persons matter equally (140). Like other scholars who have emphasized the need to make the liberal justificatory constituency more inclusive (see especially Sala 2013; Kelly and McPherson 2001), McCabe believes that it is necessary to recast JR so as to include those citizens who, albeit illiberal, would nonetheless have reasons to accept the liberal state. Under a modus vivendi, liberal principles might be endorsed, for contingent reasons, also by those illiberal citizens who are excluded from Rawls’s justificatory constituency. Although this sort of compromise might lead to lesser degrees of stability, ‘it does not fail to meet the ideal of justification’, McCabe argues (2010: 156). To test the implications of McCabe’s justificatory project and whether it appropriately addresses the problem at the core of the realist critique of Rawls’s project, I shall explore Sangiovanni’s (2008) definition of a practice-dependent model of political theorizing in the next section and consider Rawls’s and McCabe’s approaches in the light of it. I then go on to consider the implications that these two liberal justificatory projects have for the idea of legitimacy.

Two versions of practice-dependent liberalism Sangiovanni has distinguished a ‘practice-dependent’ model of political theorizing – in which ‘the content, scope and justification of justice depends on the structure and form of the practices that the conception is intended to govern’ – from a more general practice-independent view of morality which holds that first principles of justice do not depend on practices or institutions (2008: 2). In general terms, practice dependence is founded on a relational account of justice since it assumes that institutions and social practices ‘put people in a special relationship, and it is this special relationship that gives rise to first principles of justice’ (4). Thus, a practice-dependent model of political justice relates a certain notion of equality to extant social institutions. In my view, both Rawls and McCabe could be seen to endorse a practice-dependent model of justice in which ‘politics is prior to morality’ (Sangiovanni 2008: 5). However, the ways in which the two normative approaches link their justificatory framework to principles and institutions varies significantly. From Rawls’s PL, we derive an institutional interpretation of practice-dependency. As I have shown elsewhere (Gentile 2017), Rawls’s political constructivism is a

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procedure that enables the specification of the normative implications of certain moral premises concerning citizens’ social and political equality for the political conception of political authority. This procedure assumes institutional conceptions of citizenship and society and a background condition of reasonableness, so that ‘rational agents, as representative of citizens and subject to reasonable conditions, select the public principles of justice to regulate the basic structure of society’ (Rawls 1996: 93). This account serves to demonstrate the practical aim of Rawls’s conception of political authority – namely, justice as fairness: ‘it presents itself as a conception of justice that might be shared by citizens as a basis of reasoned, shared and informed and willing political agreement. It expresses their shared and public political reason’ (9; on this point see also Klosko 1997). This view of practice dependence tells us that sharing a liberal institutional context (I) shapes the framework of reasons (R i) for endorsing a conception of political authority (P) that better represents certain moral premises concerning citizens understood as socially and politically equal (M i). The institutional/public morality (M i) expressed by the appeal to the shared framework of reasons (R i) ref lects citizens’ consensus regarding the liberal terms. For Rawls, the appeal to shared reasons (R i) is consistent with citizens’ capacity to realize political autonomy (Rawls 1996: 77–78). I will come back to this notion of political autonomy in the next section. McCabe seems to offer a different version of practice dependence. The political legitimacy of JR based on a modus vivendi is to be drawn from actual citizens’ acceptance of the liberal terms which ref lect society members’ actual equality of status, understood here as a ‘presupposition of minimal universalism’ (McCabe 2010: 140). This model seems to adhere to the practice-dependence desiderata since it assumes that institutions and practices put people in a special relationship and this gives rise to principles of political justice. In this case, however, the liberal order is justifiable by citizens who endorse a set of different reasons, e.g., instrumental, prudential, and so on (let us call them r1, r2, r3, . . .), all ref lecting a contingent condition of actual social equality (C*) that is, in turn, implicit in that institutional setting (Ic). McCabe distinguishes between JR understood as a moral ideal, namely Rawls’s R i, from the set of reasonings r1, r2, r3, . . . that motivate the endorsement of a liberal institutional arrangement to which JR applies (159). Under a modus vivendi, citizens show their commitment to JR, albeit for different reasons, and this achieves morally acceptable outcomes. JR is therefore here understood as a procedural commitment which ‘serves as a constraint on acceptable outcomes’ (160) without entailing any specific one.

Political legitimacy, inclusivism and public justification In the previous section, I argued that McCabe’s project can be seen as an attempt to recast an idea of practice-dependency in terms of a weak form of proceduralism that is genuinely political. According to the author, this rules out problematic notions such as reasonableness and reasonable pluralism in favor of a contingent

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understanding of compromise among competing sets of reasons. Under such a contingency, however, the liberal state is just one possible outcome of the justificatory scheme. McCabe concedes that the case for modus vivendi liberalism depends upon conditions that are neither universal nor guaranteed (2010: 160). Yet, what are the implications of this justificatory project for the notion of political legitimacy? While the institutional account importantly connects a notion of stability ‘for the right reasons’ to the principle of liberal legitimacy, MVL, understood as a practice-dependent model of political theorizing, entails a trade-off between the stability of the consensus and the notion of political legitimacy. In rejecting the idea of a shared framework of reasons, MVL appeals to a notion of political legitimacy that is grounded in an account of inclusiveness. Let us call it the Inclusiveness Requirement. Given the deep pluralism of contemporary societies, the political legitimacy of liberal institutions can only be contingent: It is realized when citizens’ reasons converge in endorsing this institutional arrangement. For Rawls, the converse is true. Acknowledging the fact of reasonable pluralism is precisely why an idea of stability ‘for the right reasons’ should be supported. As Weithman (2011, 2016: 98ff ) has shown, the reason behind Rawls’s political turn was his recognition that the idea of stability presented in A Theory of Justice was unrealistic. That book laid out how a liberal institutional setting would encourage members’ views of the good to ‘converge’ – that there would be a ‘congruence’ between the right and the good (Rawls 1971: 520ff ). But Rawls came to realize that this conclusion was not only improbable but also conf licted with the fact that liberal institutions encourage pluralism about the good. Now, the principle of liberal legitimacy that is expressed in JR is a guarantee of this new idea of stability. The appeal to R i, which ref lects the values expressed by liberal institutions, is not aimed at preventing moral disagreement; rather, it encourages reasonable pluralism by showing some degree of ‘compatibility’ between a private and public morality. The idea of compatibility between the good and the right, however, suggests that state laws or decisions should not necessarily have to be regarded as ‘good’ from the perspective of one citizen’s comprehensive doctrine in order to be seen as legitimate. The legitimacy refers rather to the justificatory process that ref lects such a compatibility. Quong’s (2005) distinction between foundational and justificatory disagreement might be useful here to grasp the sense in which liberal legitimacy is linked to Rawls’s JR. As Quong rightly points out, Rawls’s standard for liberal legitimacy asserts that the state should not act on grounds that citizens cannot ‘reasonably expect to endorse’ (2005: 316). Yet McCabe believes that Rawls’s notion of liberal legitimacy is problematic precisely because it assumes a background condition of reasonable pluralism. In contrast, MVL suggests a justification for liberalism that cannot be rejected by those who are unreasonable. Some gradations of instability are the price to be paid to ensure such a broader justificatory constituency: The inclusiveness of reasons, in turn, seems here to be the crucial factor to realize political legitimacy.

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Thus, while Rawls’s principle of liberal legitimacy derives from a symmetry between the framework of reasons (R i) for endorsing a particular liberal institutional setting and certain moral premises regarding the normative ideal of citizens understood as free and equal (M i), MVL relies on an account of political legitimacy that is satisfied when different citizens, on grounds of their own different reasons (r1, r2, r3, . . .), actually and voluntarily support a contingent liberal arrangement (Ic). It is precisely this nexus of political legitimacy, IR and JR that I find problematic in MVL, however. Under a modus vivendi, it might be the case that citizens endorsing different reasons, both liberal and illiberal, come voluntarily to support the same liberal institutional arrangement. Yet as Rawls maintains, when liberal institutions are accepted as a modus vivendi, they will be easily abandoned when the balance of forces among citizens’ competing views changes in favour of one specific doctrine. For McCabe, this possibility would not detract from what is appealing in MVL: that under a modus vivendi the liberal state could be endorsed and justified by all citizens on the basis of their own reasons. Such a congruence between the conception of political justice (the right) and citizens’ varying comprehensive doctrine (the good) would be the guarantee for citizens’ autonomy. Yet even conceding that such a consensus is both contingent and unstable, it is not clear how those who are not committed to liberalism, and especially citizens who endorse illiberal doctrines, would nevertheless freely and voluntarily support the liberal state. In responding to this objection, McCabe concedes that MVL needs to explain why liberal institutions are the best option not only for citizens who support liberalism but also for those who see it as a second-best solution. He insists that citizens who endorse illiberal views will be still committed to an ideal of the equal moral status of all persons, so that liberal institutions are a suitable option not only for fully liberal citizens but also for all citizens who are committed to such a view of equality (2010: 159). This move is bizarre. Although McCabe asserts that the mere acceptance of the liberal terms might emerge as a compromise among competing forces, he also argues that under a modus vivendi, citizens, either liberal or illiberal, endorse liberal institutions on the basis of their own reasons given their shared commitment to equality. A distinctive feature of MVL is therefore ‘its commitment to minimal moral universalism grounded in the presumption that the interests of all persons matter equally’ (138). In other words, McCabe seems to share some of the Rawlsian concerns regarding the stability of liberal institutions precisely in connection with such a commitment to the IR. If I understand McCabe’s argument correctly, however, it seems that from the theory, we can derive two different interpretations of the notion of political morality that, in turn, entail two different views of the political legitimacy–IR– JR nexus. At some point in his argument, McCabe seems to derive an equality of moral status from the contingent liberal institutions (2010: 133). Yet it seems that this view of equality, which is consistent with a contingent practice-dependent

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justificatory model, ref lects a de facto situation of equality that is the product of the historical development of modernity. This model, however, can provide only a weak normative defence of the liberal state. In other sections of McCabe’s book, though, a thicker moral understanding of equality seems to transcend such a contingent institutional situation: McCabe relates ‘the presumption that the interests of all persons matter equally’ to what he calls a ‘moral minimal universalism’ (2010: 138). This notion of thin morality seems to trump practicedependency: In this way, however, this proposal fails to meet the main realist desiderata of the theory, that is the ‘priority of politics to morality’. In the next two sections, I consider McCabe’s project in light of the two interpretations suggested earlier. In the first case, MVL is presented as a distinctive practice-dependent model of justification, one that entails an idea of a convergence of reasons that ought to be introduced with the aim of public justification. This view contrasts with Rawls’s consensus view, which bases public deliberation on shared and accessible reasons. For Rawls, the appeal to a shared framework of reasons is crucial to support the ideal of political autonomy, which is linked in turn to the principle of liberal legitimacy. In the contingent model, instead, the appeal to different reasons is committed to an idea of threshold autonomy (McCabe 2010: 51–53) linked to political legitimacy. According to MVL, the liberal state is a legitimate one as long as all citizens, even illiberal ones, have reasons to accept and endorse that political order. The last section instead considers the case of MVL as a practice-independent model of public justification.

MVL as a practice-dependent justificatory model of political theorizing How should the political legitimacy of liberal institutions be understood in the outlined practice-dependent interpretation of MVL? Crucial to practicedependency is the priority of politics to morality. Rawls’s institutional version of practice-dependency connects politics to morality in a specific way: It ensures that the conception of political authority, which is justifiable to all citizens, is committed to a view of institutional morality that sees citizens as free and equal. McCabe’s contingent version of practice-dependency seems to reproduce a similar structure insofar as it suggests that, by sharing the same institutional settings in which they are recognized as equals, all citizens might endorse a liberal state S for their own reasons that, albeit different in nature (e.g., instrumental, prudential, self-interested and so on), all ref lect a widely shared intuition regarding equality (M) which is implicit in that contingent liberal institutional setting. Let us call this set of private reasons r m1, r m 2, r m 3, etc. In this sense, the argument supported by contingent and institutional practice-dependent scholars is similar. The difference is rather related to the content of political morality: A notion of equality of moral status which is ref lected in a plurality of private reasons is here opposed to an institutional understanding of political morality in which citizens are understood as free and equal.

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However, if this is the case for modus vivendi JR, this model seems to provide a version of the convergence view of the kind defended by Stout (2009) and Gaus and Vallier (2009). The difference between convergence and consensus is specified by the variable R in JR. Following D’Agostino (1996), the distinction between consensus and convergence views can be described as follows: ‘If both A and B share a reason R that make the regime reasonable for them, then the justification of the regime is grounded on the consensus with respect to R. If A has a reason Ra that makes that regime reasonable for him and B has a reason Rb that makes that regime reasonable for her, then the justification of the regime is based on convergence on it from separate points of view’ (D’Agostino 1996: 30). Thus, the dispute here is about the framework of reasons that serves the justificatory desiderata. For Vallier, the acknowledgement of the fact of reasonable pluralism in the liberal JR should imply ‘that there is a presumption in favour of less restrictive conceptions of reasons’ (2011: 4–5). Similarly, in McCabe’s view, a convergence of reasons ref lects the possibility that illiberal citizens might nonetheless endorse liberal institutions as a second-best arrangement on the basis of their own reasons. Different from Gaus and Vallier, however, McCabe’s idea of convergence is committed to a realist form of political theorizing: He hopes to rule out thick moral notions such as reasonability and reasonable pluralism that he finds problematic in the institutional model. While the institutional version of practice dependence envisages a consensus in the model of public justification where the reason R must be either shared or at least accessible to all citizens – for it appeals to reasons we all expect to be endorsed (see on this also Boettcher 2015: 192) – the contingent version of practice dependence suggests that a convergence of different sets of reasons would be sufficient to guarantee the realization of a weak version of autonomy, which McCabe calls threshold autonomy (2010: 51–53). In this way, McCabe hopes to show that as far as all citizens have reasons to endorse the liberal order, that order is legitimate to them. Thus, while the political legitimacy of liberal order is guaranteed by its commitment to the IR – based on the inclusion of citizens’ reasons – its political stability can only be weak. For McCabe, this is a necessary outcome if we take seriously the form of deep pluralism that characterizes contemporary democracies. Although MVL provides only a weak defence of the liberal order, this is one that could be accepted also by critics of liberalism. The contingent model presents a justificatory defence of liberal institutions that is committed to a weak version of autonomy. Here, political legitimacy is linked to the absence of coercion. In his treatment of JR, McCabe distinguishes between in-practice and in-theory justifiability. A’s claim is justifiable in practice to B if, by acknowledging the fact of pluralism, it is supported by a line of reasoning that is seen by B as ‘warranted by good reasons’ (McCabe 2010: 81). In contrast, A’s claim is justifiable in theory to B if ‘it is grounded on reasons that would persuade an appropriately competent interlocutor’ (ibid.). McCabe argues that Rawls moves from the first, in-practice justifiability, to the second, in-theory justifiability (82). By committing the principle of liberal legitimacy to an idea of ‘stability for the right reasons’, Rawls’s justificatory model shifts

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foundational disagreements about justice to a dispute concerning the framework of reasons that reasonable citizens should be expected to endorse. This move, McCabe believes, is unfeasible: it restricts the justificatory constituency only to those (reasonable citizens) who already endorse the moral premises implicit in that justificatory construction. It is also normatively inadequate: it is morally arbitrary and disregards the form of pluralism that characterizes contemporary liberal societies. My impression, however, is that McCabe fails to acknowledge some important aspects of Rawls’s institutional model. In his recent work, Weithman has argued that an important difference between convergence and consensus is related to the way in which different notions of political autonomy are connected to the idea of political legitimacy (2016: 168). Weithman’s reasoning is extremely useful in illuminating the real difference between the contingent and institutional models. As noted earlier, both institutional views and contingent views are consistent with a practice-dependent model of political theorizing. In both cases, the form of justifiability is constrained by a certain notion of political morality. Both justificatory schemes are concerned with the realization of a certain notion of political autonomy distinct from a comprehensive view of autonomy. However, against Rawls’s institutional understanding of political morality, McCabe proposes a ‘weak’ idea of equality of moral status which is ref lected in a plurality of private reasons. While Rawls’s idea of political autonomy is realized if a liberal state is justified in light of an institutional conception of political morality, in which citizens are understood free and equal, McCabe believes that a kind of threshold autonomy is realized when citizens voluntarily accept the liberal order on the basis of their own reasons. This difference in the two theorists’ understanding of political autonomy has important implications for their accounts of legitimacy. For McCabe, the liberal order is legitimate when its justificatory structure expresses its uncoercive character: We should not expect all citizens to assign the same value to or justify in the same way, say, the constitutional principle of freedom of conscience; it is sufficient to acknowledge that, given certain historical and contingent conditions, all citizens are in-practice ready to accept it. For Rawls, however, the uncoercive character of liberal institutions is not what counts in JR. The principle of liberal legitimacy asks that the justification for the coercion of liberal institutions should ref lect an ideal of political autonomy in which citizens are understood as free and equal. Rawls in fact believes that it is not enough to acknowledge that certain historical or contingent conditions might bring about the same conclusions regarding the liberal regime S. The justifiability of S should rest on some moral premises that people share by virtue of their status as citizens. Thus, given the fact of reasonable pluralism, the form of justifiability should be stable for the right reasons. The idea of stability ‘for the right reasons’, linked to the principle of liberal legitimacy, is not meant to rule out coercion; rather, it aims at providing a justification for coercion which ref lects an institutional understanding of political morality while transcending the contingency of certain historical or particular facts of a given society (see on this also Weithman 2016). Therefore,

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citizens are expected to endorse the constitutional principle of freedom of conscience in terms that ref lect not their comprehensive or contingent reasons but their moral and political status as citizens. Imagine that A supports a certain illiberal view x – say, the caste system. Imagine that x is also shared by the majority of citizens of the state S where A lives. Now, suppose that in S there is only a small minority that does not support x but that these citizens have prudential or self-interested reasons to support x as a second-best solution. (They believe that if they support a different view, it would endanger their status, or they think that by supporting x, they will be granted a special status within S.) In this situation, the caste regime of S would be uncoercive to both the majority that fully supports x and the minority that supports x as a second-best solution. However, this regime cannot be said to be legitimate from a liberal point of view. For liberal legitimacy, we need to justify why a specific form of coexistence, namely the liberal one, is something citizens should give value to, albeit disagreeing deeply in terms of their comprehensive views.

MVL as a practice-independent model of political theorizing McCabe would probably be resistant to this conclusion. He would perhaps argue that such a case could not arise under modern conditions, simply because too many citizens would resist it. As already mentioned, McCabe maintains that his particularistic defence of liberalism rests on the conjunction of two facts: Contemporary societies are characterized by a form of pluralism that is not necessarily reasonable, but these citizens do nonetheless regard liberal institutions either as an unchangeable fact of modern life or as something that is instrumental to the achievement of other ends (2010: 133). Even conceding that this case is too unrealistic to be taken seriously, a conceptual problem with this idea of political legitimacy remains: If this is the right interpretation of MVL as a justificatory project, this model of theorizing hardly helps to provide an adequate justification for the liberal political order when a large majority of the population endorses an illiberal doctrine, such as the caste system. However, McCabe could also respond that my reading of MVL’s justificatory project as a practice-dependent model is in fact incorrect. If MVL does not provide a practice-dependent view of justice, the opposite should be true. Following Sangiovanni, a practice-independent view of morality holds that first principles of justice do not depend on practices or institutions (2008: 2). Accordingly, the justification for a modus vivendi should not be derived from extant institutions but rather should be committed to a transcendent view of morality. Thus, the set of reasons (r1, r2, r3 . . .) that citizens can endorse to justify the liberal state, albeit different in nature, must all ref lect a view of morality that McCabe calls ‘minimal moral universalism’. Thus, MVL JR is committed to a view of moral universalism that is implicit in the international human rights standards (McCabe 2010: 138).

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The caste system supporting state S would, of course, be ruled out as a possibility by this account of MVL JR. But not on the grounds of political legitimacy: this sort of regime would be impossible because the illiberal view x on which it stands is in opposition to such a ‘minimal moral universalism’. According to this interpretation, however, it seems that a kind of constraint on the permissible set of reasons is necessary to realize the idea of threshold autonomy defended by McCabe. Thus, much of what was appealing in the MVL project seems to be lost in the practice-independent interpretation. By selectively intervening in the sets of citizens’ private reasons, this view is inconsistent with its anti-perfectionist premises. Thus, this second interpretation of the modus vivendi justificatory project is also unsatisfactory. By relying on a view of morality which is contextindependent, the justificatory structure of MVL is at odds with the main goal of the theory, which is to provide a less idealized and somehow anti-utopian defence of the liberal state. It is neither anti-utopian, since it relies on an external view of morality that applies to JR, nor is it able to provide a defence of the liberal state that is strong, only one that is contingent and very limited. McCabe might still object that MVL is not anti-utopian or committed to a radical realist rejection of moral or ideal theorizing but should rather be understood as a model of ideal theorizing aimed at ensuring more inclusivity than Rawls’s public reason liberalism. Yet I wonder whether the appeal to a moral minimum is enough to defend the liberal order. MVL ideal theorizing seems to provide a version of toleration similar to Rawls’s international model. As mentioned earlier, Rawls’s institutional decency is the requirement for the inclusion of some non-liberal societies in the Society of Peoples. A decent hierarchical society is presented as peaceful, respectful of basic human rights and supportive of some form of equality. Yet the form of political autonomy required by the liberal principle of legitimacy is realized only within well-functioning liberal democratic regimes. It seems that MVL JR crucially disregards the discontinuities between these two accounts of legitimacy. To understand this last point, it might be useful to consider the case of an existing state. Take, for example, the case of Venezuela, a constitutional republic committed to basic human rights and a certain degree of political pluralism.3 Yet this regime is founded on an illiberal doctrine of popular sovereignty over national resources that entails the weakening of property rights.4 The restrictions on firms’ and individuals’ property rights is perhaps the most problematic aspect of chavismo from a liberal democratic perspective. Nonetheless, Venezuela’s political regime could fall within the category of a decent society and liberal peoples ought to tolerate it in the Society of Peoples (see on this point also Gentile 2018).

Concluding remarks Contemporary normative theory is marked by a realist turn. In this chapter, I have linked a main realist concern, in which the political is defined as being

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distinct from morality, to Sangiovanni’s idea of a practice-dependence model of political theorizing. I have suggested that McCabe’s defence of the liberal order on the grounds of a modus vivendi could be understood as a contingent model of practice-dependent political theorizing. This has been contrasted with Rawls’s institutional model. The contingent practice-dependent version of JR suggests a weaker form of proceduralism that is genuinely political. This view is meant to rule out problematic notions such as reasonableness and reasonable pluralism in favour of a contingent understanding of compromise among competing sets of reasons. A contingent justification of the liberal order is, however, a weak one. For McCabe, a loss in terms of stability is the price to be paid if we want to take seriously the fact of moral diversity that characterizes contemporary societies. MVL is meant to provide a justification of liberal institutions that the critics of liberalism cannot reject. Such an attempt to expand the justificatory constituency of JR is ref lected in the account of political legitimacy, realized when citizens voluntarily accept the liberal arrangements. The idea of in-practice justifiability is therefore preferred to Rawls’s in-theory model. McCabe’s model seems to miss a crucial point of Rawls’s institutional practice dependence and the idea of liberal legitimacy related to it. As I have shown in this chapter, the most problematic aspect of the contingent model is that it disconnects the idea of legitimacy from a conception of liberal political morality: an idea of political legitimacy that ref lects the uncoercive character of extant institutions seems to be sufficient to meet the MVL JR. Yet from a normative point of view, this might be not enough. As the example of the caste system shows, and McCabe would perhaps agree, normative political theory need not show that the system is in-practice uncoercive; rather, it needs to provide an argument that explains why a specific form of coexistence, namely the liberal one, is something citizens should give value to, albeit disagreeing deeply in terms of their comprehensive views. In conclusion, I have considered McCabe’s model as a version of ‘practiceindependent’ moral theorizing. A transcendent view of threshold morality is meant to ensure certain acceptable outcomes in terms of rights and freedoms. This move, however, comes at the cost of sacrificing the theory’s premises of anti-perfectionism and realism. Furthermore, the appeal to a threshold morality, implicit in the international human rights standards, seems to be inadequate to distinguish between the legitimacy of a liberal order, in which all democratic freedoms are secured, and that of a decent, yet not fully liberal, institutional order.

Notes 1 Earlier drafts of this chapter were presented at the panel on ‘Modus Vivendi and the Problem of Inequalities of Power’, IPSA World Congress 2016 (Poznan) and at the workshop on ‘Modus Vivendi Theory’ at MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory 2016 (Manchester). For their stimulating comments, I am grateful above all to Fabian Wendt, Fabian Wenner and Manon Westphal. Special thanks are owed to John Horton for his

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extensive comments and precious suggestions on the last version of this chapter. This chapter has appeared as a journal article in 2018 for journal Biblioteca della Libertà, LIII n.222, pp. 27–47. 2 I am grateful to John Horton for raising this point. 3 In the elections of 2013, President Maduro defeated his more moderate opponent, Capriles, by a slim margin (only 1.5 per cent), a result that was deeply contested by the opposition and which has put into question the legitimacy of the whole process (see McCarthy and McCoy 2013). This stands in contrast with a pattern that, from 2006 to 2012, saw President Chávez build a system of cooperative relationships with his moderate opponents and demonstrate openness to political pluralism. This strengthened Chávez’s political legitimacy and popular support. 4 Chavismo is based on the idea that national resources belong to the population and the government has the right to revoke the ownership of private firms or individuals in the name of the Venezuelan people.

References Beitz, C. 2000. Rawls’s Law of Peoples. Ethics, 110(4): 669–696. Boettcher, J.W. 2015. Against the Asymmetric Convergence Model of Public Justification. Ethical Theory & Moral Practice, 18: 191–208. D’Agostino, F. 1996. Free Public Reason: Making It Up as We Go. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Galston, W.A. 2002. Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galston, W.A. 2010. Realism in Political Theory. European Journal of Political Theory, 9(4): 385–411. Gaus, G. and Vallier, K. 2009. The Role of Religious Conviction in a Publicly Justified Polity: The Implications of Convergence, Asymmetry and Political Institutions. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 35(1–2): 51–76. Gentile, V. 2017. Democratic Justice: The Priority of Politics and the Ideal of Citizenship. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 20(2): 211–221. Gentile, V. 2018. Clean Trade, Anti-Paternalism and Resources’ Entitlement. Philosophy and Public Issues (New Series), 7(1): 79–94. Gray, J. 2000. Two Faces of Liberalism. New York: The New Press. Horton, J. 2010. Realism, Liberal Moralism and a Political Theory of Modus Vivendi. European Journal of Political Theory, 9(4): 431–448. Horton, J. 2012. Political Legitimacy, Justice and Consent. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 15(2): 129–148. Horton, J. 2019. Modus Vivendi and Political Legitimacy. In J. Horton, M. Westphal and U. Willem, eds. The Political Theory of Modus vivendi. Cham: Springer, 131–148. Kelly, E. and McPherson, L. 2001. On Tolerating the Unreasonable. Journal of Political Philosophy, 9: 38–55. Klosko, G. 1997. Political Constructivism in Rawls’s Political Liberalism. American Political Science Review, 91(3): 635–646. McCabe, D. 2010. Modus vivendi Liberalism: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCarthy, M. and McCoy, J. 2013. The Limits of Legacy: The Post-Chávez Challenge and Electoral Legitimacy. In Americas Quarterly: Politics Business and Culture in the Americas. www. americasquarterly.org/the-limits-of-legacy-post-chavez-challenge (accessed 18 July 2018). Quong, J. 2005. Disagreement, Asymmetry, and Liberal Legitimacy. Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 4(3): 301–330.

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Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. 1996. Political Liberalism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Rawls, J. 1999. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sala, R. 2013. The Place of Unreasonable People Beyond Rawls. European Journal of Political Theory, 12(3): 253–270. Sangiovanni, A. 2008. Justice and the Priority of Politics to Morality. Journal of Political Philosophy, 16(2): 137–164. Stout, J. 2009. Religious Reasons in Political Argument. In C.J. Stanton, ed. The Ethics of Citizenship: Liberal Democracy and Religious Convictions. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 261–292. Vallier, K. 2011. Convergence and Consensus in Public Reason. Public Affairs Quarterly, 25(4): 1–21. Waldron, J. 1999. Law and Disagreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weithman, P. 2011. Convergence and Political Autonomy. Public Affairs Quarterly, 25(4): 327–348. Weithman, P. 2016. Rawls, Political Liberalism and Reasonable Faith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. 2005. In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

8 A PLURALIST MODEL OF DEMOCRACY Maeve Cooke

Pluralism has been a topic in Anglophone democratic theory for a long time. Think of Harrington in the 17th century,1 Madison in the 18th century,2 John Stuart Mill in the 19th century,3 Dahl in the 20th century.4 Some debates on the topic have focused on the competing interests of individuals and groups; others have focused on the divergent and possibly conflicting values of individuals and groups. My concern in the following is with pluralism of values rather than interests. By “value pluralism”, I mean a multiplicity of ideas as to how human beings should live their lives, as incorporated in everyday behaviour and practices. Such ideas may be based on cultural traditions, religious beliefs, philosophical positions, political ideologies or other allegiances: Differences of this kind are not relevant to my discussion. For the sake of simplicity, I focus on value pluralism at the intersubjective as opposed to intra-subjective level: on encounters between human subjects who hold diverging or conf licting ideas of the good life. Indeed, my focus is even narrower: I am concerned with encounters between citizens in modern democracies who hold diverging or conf licting ideas of the good life. In the history of democratic modernity, such encounters have often been seen as a source of social divisiveness, both by political theorists and those actively engaged in political affairs. They have also been seen as a threat to individual freedom, calling for freedom’s protection against attack, typically through a system of rights. Indisputably, conf licts of values have given rise to terrible social conf licts. Moreover, they continue to be socially divisive. In these turbulent times of global migration, with the consequent increase in encounters between people who hold diverging or conf licting ideas of the good life, it is readily conceivable that things will get worse rather than better. The main aim of my discussion is to sketch a model of pluralist politics as a basis for exploring the kinds of institutional framework and practices of socialization that could make things better. In the political-philosophical perspective I outline, encounters between

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diverging or conf licting ideas of the good life are seen as strengthening social bonds rather than as weakening them and as conducive to individual freedom rather than threatening it. The name “Isaiah Berlin” is often associated with value pluralism. In his 1958 essay “Two Concepts of Liberty”, Berlin famously proclaimed that, with its connotation of “negative liberty”, (value) pluralism was a truer and more humane ideal than visions of society based on a “positive” conception of freedom as self-mastery.5 He deemed it truer because it recognizes the fact that human goals are many, that not all of them are commensurable and that they are in perpetual rivalry with one another. He deemed it more humane because it does not require submission of the self to some higher moral authority. Berlin considered submission to a higher moral authority inimical to human self-transformation, which he regarded normatively as a condition of human identity. Humans, in his view, are “unpredictably self-transforming” beings, with an emphasis on the self as the agent of transformation.6 From this he draws the conclusion that human beings, in the end, have to choose between ultimate values, and moreover, that they choose for identity-related reasons. As he writes: “they choose as they do because their life and thought are determined by fundamental moral categories and concepts that . . . [have become] part of their being and thought and sense of their own identity; part of what makes them human”.7 Although, as we shall see, my position is very different to Berlin’s, like him, I regard value pluralism as a potential human good and use an identity-related argument to justify its importance. Furthermore, I endorse his picture of humans as unpredictably self-transforming beings. However, I distance myself from his prioritisation of choice in the development of human identity and from the individualistic conception of the self on which it is based.8 Not surprisingly, given the bloody history of conf licts arising from diverging ideas of the good life, political theorists have rarely seen value pluralism as something to be fostered socially and politically ( John Stuart Mill is a notable exception). Even Berlin who, as mentioned, advocates value pluralism as a “more true” and “more humane” ideal, commends it purely from the point of view of individual freedom, which for him has no intrinsic social or political dimension. On a socio-political level, he sees value pluralism as resulting inevitably in a lamentable collision of values. Indeed, even on the individual, intra-subjective level, he holds that value pluralism necessitates painful choices, for example, between liberty and social justice: He describes the need to choose between such fundamental values as the tragedy of human life.9 In short, Berlin saw the effects of value pluralism as a problem rather than as a positive potential. This continues to be the dominant political-philosophical perspective. The most inf luential contemporary version of it is John Rawls’s political liberalism.10 Rawls agrees with Berlin that value pluralism is the result of a capacity for individual choice and judgment that is central to modern identity formation. Moreover, like Berlin, Rawls is concerned by the negative impact of collisions of values on individual freedom and on the social fabric of which they are part. Rather than seeing this as

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a tragedy and adopting an attitude of resignation, however, he develops a model of liberal politics that is designed to prevent destructive clashes of values. Rawlsian political liberalism assumes the inevitability of deep and permanent disagreement among humans about matters of value; such disagreement is regarded not as the effect of irrationality, prejudice or self-interest but rather as resulting from the normal functioning of human reasoning under normal conditions.11 This is why Rawlsians do not attempt to eradicate value pluralism. At the same time, they see value pluralism as a threat to social integration and cohesion and the need for an institutional framework and political culture that will curb its socially destructive power. As Rawls puts it, the aim is a reasonable pluralism, in which citizens who profoundly disagree with each other in matters of right and wrong, social justice or the purpose of human life can live together peacefully.12 To this end, his model makes political legitimacy dependent on an overlapping consensus among citizens as to the basic structure of society and constitutional essentials.13 The consensus is described as overlapping because citizens may have quite different reasons for their general acceptance of the basic structure of society and its constitution.14 Such a consensus can be established only if citizens are reasonable, by which he means able and willing to abstract from their deeply held values when these are not shared by other citizens. Put slightly differently, political power is normatively valid for Rawls only if all citizens find it acceptable, but this requirement can be met only if citizens are able and willing to distance themselves from their particular ideas of the good life. A great deal has been written over the past thirty years about whether the Rawlsian model achieves its aim of peaceful co-existence under conditions of value pluralism (and, indeed, whether this is a good aim to prioritize and pursue). Since the turn of the present century, the question of religious belief has been to the fore in these discussions. While conf licts over religion are certainly not the only or even the main challenge addressed by the Rawlsian theory of political liberalism, they can be taken as representative for disagreements over ideas of the good life more generally. (Rawls himself is careful to speak of disagreements in so-called comprehensive doctrines, which can be religiously, morally or philosophically based.) The core objections, articulated in various ways, are that the Rawlsian model is unacceptable and unworkable because it requires citizens to abstract from their most deeply held values, together with the beliefs based on them. First, the Rawlsian model is criticized as unacceptable in the sense of unjust: The objection here, to use the example of religion, is that religious believers think they ought to base their decisions concerning fundamental issues of justice on their most deeply held values, in this case, religious ones. To require them to leave behind their religious values when engaging as citizens in political life is unjust. It is unjust because for many non-believers no comparable demand is made: The core values of many non-believing citizens in contemporary “Western” democracies are fundamentally in tune with the liberal individualist ideologies that underpin the basic structure of society and its constitution (to be sure, this also holds for some religious believers).15

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Second, it is criticized as unworkable in the sense of unstable: The objection here is that any consensus achieved by way of the required abstraction from identity-shaping ideas of the good life will be precarious, since it is built on the voices and votes of individuals and groups who are obliged to suppress their most deeply held commitments and convictions; these commitments and convictions are likely to resurface in moments of crisis, motivating destabilizing protests by individuals and groups against the existing social and political order.16 These objections are forceful, and I find them generally convincing.17 The challenge is to find an alternative model of pluralist politics – one that does not require individuals to leave behind their most deeply held values and beliefs when engaging as citizens in public life. In the following, I sketch an alternative model, which I claim meets this challenge. As a first step, it detaches the concept of political legitimacy – normatively binding political power – from the requirement of a general consensus, be it an overlapping, reasonable, consensus (as in Rawls) or a “rational consensus” (as in Habermas18). It does so partly for epistemological reasons, to which I return brief ly later in my discussion. It will be helpful to clarify the point at which my proposed pluralist model departs from Rawlsian versions of pluralism. In basic agreement with Rawlsian theory, the proposed model holds that on a general level there must be a commitment among citizens to the value of democracy, as well as to closely connected ideas such as freedom and equality. It moves beyond Rawlsian theory, however, not only by allowing for deep disagreement as to the meaning of democracy (and closely connected ideas) but also by seeing disagreement as conducive to individual human freedom by opening up possibilities for mutual learning. Thus, the alternative model advocates engagement between citizens concerning the validity of their interpretations of even fundamental political concepts. As will be discussed in more detail in the following sections, it considers such engagement important in order for the conf licting parties to clarify what is at stake and to learn more about the ethical values of their interlocutors. Furthermore, assuming that the ultimate concern of citizens when engaging in such discussions is to find the best ways of thinking about and practicing democracy, their engagement with others enables them to take steps in this direction. By contrast with Rawlsian models, in the alternative picture, citizens are not required sincerely to believe that other citizens can accept their arguments and reasons as appropriate; they are required, rather, to accept arguments and reasons if, following processes of public deliberation and contestation, they seem to be the best available ones. Of course, from their own particular perspectives, each citizen initially considers their subjectively held arguments and reasons valid; nonetheless, they acknowledge the epistemic unreliability of their subjectively held positions and are willing in principle to revise them, should they have good reasons to do so. Importantly, what it means to have good reasons to revise a position is not solely the fact that others hold a different view (though certainly this is potentially a good reason), nor is it necessarily the unconstrained force of the better argument, but rather a complex set of factors, partly deliberative but often including various

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kinds of life experiences. I return brief ly to this point later. The upshot is that reaching agreement among citizens becomes far more elusive than in Rawlsian theory. This is why in my model even ref lectively achieved citizen consensus does not finally determine political legitimacy. While I do not attempt to define political legitimacy in the following, I want to make clear that I follow Rawls in distinguishing legitimacy from mere legality. However, not only do I reject the conceptual connection between legitimacy and consensus in his account; I also do not share his focus on legitimacy in normatively evaluating the institutions that exercise democratic power and the basic constitutional principles that structure it. Certainly, the question of the legitimacy of the state and other political institutions is an important concern for contemporary democratic political theory and practice. However, I consider it significantly distinct from the question of the authority of the state and other institutions, political and non-political. In the contemporary global political context, in which political authoritarianism appears to be a rising phenomenon, I see a need to address the question of authority independently of legitimacy and to provide a basis for criticizing authoritarian authority. I do this in the second section of my discussion. Severing the conceptual link between ref lectively achieved citizen consensus and political legitimacy makes my proposed pluralist model vulnerable to the “majoritarian objection”. This is the objection that it removes an important normative barrier that prevents a majority of citizens from imposing their ideas of the good life on others who hold diverging or even conf licting ones. In other words, severing the Rawlsian link between legitimacy and consensus opens my proposal to the accusation that it allows for the tyranny of the majority.19 In the contemporary global political context, in which populism, too, is on the rise, this is a serious objection, since some forms of populism are well-described as examples of an pernicious majoritarianism.20 I contend, however that the proposed model is decisively distinct from these troubling populist versions of democracy and, indeed, provides a basis for criticizing them.

Freedom as ethically self-determining agency The key element of my alternative model of pluralist politics is a conception of individual freedom as constitutively intersubjective. I characterize it as ethically self-determining agency. This is because the intersubjective processes that constitute freedom are processes of ref lective engagement by particular human subjects with other human subjects, which are understood as processes of mutual learning with respect to leading an ethically good life. Ethical learning, as I conceive of it, brings about changes in affect, cognition and behaviour, resulting in turn in changed self-understandings. The concept of autonomy has frequently been attacked on grounds of its reliance on normative pictures of identity that are held to be fundamentally misconceived.21 Thus, for Nietzsche and his followers, the concept of the autonomous agent was a regressive illusion, part of a broader picture of a reason-driven,

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unitary subject that disregards the non-rational dimensions of human subjectivity and denies its fragmented character. His critique of the notion of a reason-driven, unitary subject gained support in the early 20th century from the discipline of psychoanalysis (Freud), resonated with sociological observations on the effects of modern urbanization (Simmel) and found expression in modernist poetry and fiction (Kaf ka, Beckett, the dada-ists). In the last decades of the 20th century, there was renewed attack on the concept of autonomous agency, with two broad lines of criticism emerging: the poststructuralist line, which developed the Nietzschean critique of the reason-driven unitary subject, and the communitarian line, suspicious of the prioritization of individual over collective values. These two lines of criticism came together in the feminist critique, which, by highlighting the intersubjective relationships that historically have been central to many women’s sense of self, gave further reason for looking suspiciously on the ideal of self-determining agency.22 Rather than jettisoning the idea of autonomy completely, however, I seek to re-imagine and re-articulate it. In this endeavour, I find Charles Taylor’s account of the modern self a productive starting point. Thus, I begin with Taylor’s thesis that modern (Western) selves are “strong evaluators”.23 By this he means human subjects who construct their identity in ref lective engagement with a range of questions about the good. Strong evaluators are concerned not only with the questions of where or who they are but also with where they are going and who they want to be. Taylor draws attention to the orientation to the good implicit in such evaluation. To ask such questions is to position ourselves ref lectively in relation to ideas of the good; “the good” is that which is picked out as comparably higher in a qualitative distinction and hence a “higher good”.24 Drawing on Taylor, I propose a processual conception of autonomous agency in terms of an individual human subject’s on-going ref lective engagement with the question of what it means to live an ethically good life and how best to go about doing so. The subject’s ref lections are oriented by particular ideas of the good, which shape its particular identity and provide it with ethical guidance in its day-to-day life. These ideas of the good may be multiple and even conf licting; moreover, they are normally tacit as opposed to explicitly articulated. The key point is that they can be evaluated and, as necessary, modified, changed or abandoned, only through ref lective engagement by individual human subjects by way of interaction with other human subjects. Freedom develops in and through these encounters. In short, freedom in my account is a process of qualitative identity-formation on the part of individual human subjects that takes place in interactions with others that are processes of mutual ethical learning. While I find Taylor’s picture of modern selves as strong evaluators a productive starting point for re-imagining and rearticulating the idea of autonomous agency, it requires development in at least three respects. To begin with, there is a need to develop his account of ethical justification and truth. I move beyond Taylor, too, by building intersubjectivity into the very

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concept of strong evaluation. Finally, I take an additional further step by tying modern identity formation to the ethical authority exercised by and within multiple social institutions. While Taylor often grapples with the question of conf lict between rival conceptions of the good, he does not confront the question of how to assess claims to ethical truth; by this I mean a subject-transcending, context-transcending idea of validity relating to the good life for humans. An idea of ethical truth as at once context-transcending and context-dependent is a crucial element in my account of autonomous agency. The thesis of the context-transcending nature of ethical truth refers to the possible ultimate inaccessibility of truth to humans. I hold that ethical deliberation can lead to responses to questions relating to the good life that are better justified in a truth-related sense, but we cannot know if it will arrive at definitive answers. The thesis of the context-dependence of ethical truth refers to the inescapable mediation of truth by language, culture, individual biography and individual psychology. Since we cannot know if truth is directly or finally accessible, we must assume that it is available to humans only as particular articulations of truth. When combined with an argument in terms of the evaluative horizon of democratic modernity, which I sketch in other writings,25 ethical truth’s contextdependence implies an idea of truth that is necessarily dependent on justification. In my account, justification is conceived as the intersubjective exchange of reasons in public processes, in which all participants are concerned to find the ethically right responses to the concrete judgments, decisions and actions under discussion in a given instance. When ethical truth is understood as at once context-transcendent and justification-dependent, the subject’s ref lective engagement with the question of what it means to lead a good life requires interaction with others who are similarly ethically engaged. In this way, intersubjectivity is built into the very concept of autonomous agency. To begin with, this is because we cannot grant to individual subjects direct or final access to truth; then, since the evaluation of all claims to truth must takes place in deliberative processes with others, each subject can determine the validity of its own judgments, decisions and actions only in interaction with others who share its concern with ethical validity. This concern is shared generally by all subjects who see themselves as ethically self-determining agents in the sense outlined. It relates to the truth of the ideas of the good life on which a particular subject’s judgments, decisions and actions depend. By contrast, each individual subject’s concern with the validity of its particular judgments, decisions and actions is not generally shared, for their validity depends on a host of factors relating to the particular situation in which that subject find itself. Evaluation of ethical validity claims is thus a matter of on-going challenge and response, an agonistic process in which individual subjects learn from each other with respect to leading an ethically good life. This is how I conceive of freedom as ethically self-determining agency: as an agonistic process of mutual ethical learning through contestation, by way of encounters between human subjects.

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An evident difficulty here is that particular ethical reasons may not be readily accessible or, indeed, even intelligible, to others, especially under conditions of value pluralism. Since mutual intelligibility and accessibility is a precondition for intersubjective engagement with the validity of ethical judgments, decisions and actions, how then is ethically self-determining agency possible? Again, in other work, I respond to this objection.26 An important element in my response is to distance myself from the conceptual connection between truth and idealized rational agreement that Jürgen Habermas asserts in the domain of practical reason.27 Departing from Habermas, I show that meeting conditions of general intelligibility and accessibility may depend on epistemically significant shifts in affect and cognition. These shifts in affect and cognition are not restricted to deliberative contexts; indeed, they are typically set in motion not by arguments but by experiences independent of deliberation. This is why truth as I conceive it is not defined in terms of general rational agreement but is, rather, transcendent even of idealized rational agreement. The challenges of general intelligibility and accessibility are, of course, exacerbated when individuals and groups from very different cultural backgrounds seek to engage in mutual deliberations with respect to their ideas of the good life. However, I argue that difficulties of this kind do not render the process of intersubjective deliberation fruitless; rather, it calls on those engaged in it to be receptive to the epistemic significance of ethical experiences that are formative for other identities, to be hermeneutically sensitive in discussions of such experiences and to acknowledge the relative fragility, in the sense of epistemic contestability, of their own particular ethical convictions and commitments. Furthermore, I point out that my conceptual split between truth and rational agreement means that the unlikelihood of reaching rational agreement in matters of the good life is an ethical-political rather than an epistemic problem. Ethical disagreements may have serious consequences for intersubjective relationships and for the socio-cultural contexts in which they are embedded, urgently requiring some kind of resolution. In such cases, settling for compromise rather than agreement is ethically and/or politically necessary and has no troubling epistemic consequences. I have construed self-determining agency as a matter of ref lective engagement with questions of the ethically good life in processes of agonistic contestation in which ethical truth is at stake. In this account, each individual subject shares a concern to lead an ethically good life with every other individual subject, although each of them may have very different ideas as to what an ethically good life might be. This presupposes that each individual subject acknowledges every other subject equally as an agent engaged in a process of ethical selfdetermination. Such acknowledgement of equality is fragile. It is vulnerable to implicit social biases (relating to gender, ethnicity, race, social class and so on), to the competitiveness structurally built into the capitalist economic system which, so far, has provided the material basis for the identity formation of modern subjects; and to human failings such as envy and malice. For this reason, reciprocal

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acknowledgment of each individual subject’s ethically self-determining agency must be formally supported by law: by institutionalized legal recognition of the equal importance of each subject’s identity formation as an ethically selfdetermining agent. In addition to political recognition of each individual’s equal status before the law, ethically self-determining agency depends on other material and social conditions. Basic needs for food, accommodation and clothing must be met, for example. Furthermore, there must be an economic redistribution system that guards against significant discrepancies in wealth and social status and an educational system that grants all children access to schooling from childhood to maturity. In the pluralist model of politics that I envisage, these are not just external, enabling conditions for ethically self-determining agency: They contribute to the very constitution of such agency. In other words, autonomy itself is imperilled when these material and social conditions are insufficiently realised.

Non-authoritarian authority In a further step that again takes me beyond Taylor’s picture of the modern subject as a strong evaluator, I tie the formation of the identities of modern subjects to the authority exercised by, and within, social institutions. I argue that autonomous agency depends in significant measure on the non-authoritarian exercise of such authority. My proposed pluralist model of politics rests on this thesis. Authority is a distinctive form of power, differing, in particular, from domination. One important difference between authority and domination is authority’s connection with obligation. The power of authority depends on acknowledgment of obligation, tacit or explicit, on the part of those over whom it is exercised. The 19th century German historian Theodor Mommsen captures its salient features well when he describes the force of authority as “more than advice and less than a command, an advice that one may not safely ignore”.28 Furthermore, it is an obligation that is in some sense self-imposed. This means that it has an integral moment of freedom. Hannah Arendt draws attention to this when she writes: “Authority implies an obedience in which men retain their freedom”.29 Arendt here makes explicit a connection between authority and freedom that others, too, have noted. The concept of authority has a moment of freedom built into it that is lacking in domination: At a minimum, authority involves freedom in the sense of voluntary recognition and affirmation of the bearer of authority. At least on the face of it, the concept of authority seems well suited to describe the exercise of a mode of political power that is conceptually connected with the idea of freedom and, accordingly, is not intrinsically dominating. But, though conceptually connected in some sense to freedom, the power of authority is not always benign. Authority is often authoritarian. I call authority “authoritarian” when it undermines ethically self-determining agency. Authoritarianism has an epistemological and an ethical aspect: an aspect relating to what it means to know something in a truth-related sense and an aspect relating to what it means

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to lead a good life, again in a truth-related sense. Epistemological authoritarianism is a mode of authority based on a claim always to know best what is factually or normatively correct. The power of authority resides in this claim to superior knowledge, which typically rests on a claim to privileged access to truth. Thus, in its authoritarian modes, authority’s claim to knowledge cannot be challenged by those over whom it is exerted. For example, teachers are epistemologically authoritarian when they assert the unquestionable truth of the information or theories they teach to their students. Religious leaders are epistemologically authoritarian when they claim privileged and unquestionably valid insight into the truth of the holy texts on which they base their teachings. Politicians are epistemologically authoritarian when they proclaim the unquestionably valid truth of particular opinions and judgments, thereby blocking public contestation of their validity. Ethical authoritarianism is closely related to this. It is a mode of authority based on a claim to privileged and unquestionably valid insight into what is good in an ethical sense for those over whom it is exerted. For example, teachers are ethically authoritarian when they assert the unquestionable validity of the school rules, policies and other prescriptions that are supposed to help their students to lead a good life in an ethical sense. Religious leaders are ethically authoritarian when they require their congregations unquestioningly to observe the behavioural prescriptions issued by religious hierarchies. Politicians are ethically authoritarian when they support and implement laws, ordinances and public policies based on their claims to privileged, unquestionably valid insight into the ethically good life for human beings. By contrast, non-authoritarian authority enhances the identity-formation of ethically self-determining agents. More precisely, in my account, autonomous agency is a process of identity formation for which the exercise of nonauthoritarian authority within social institutions is significantly constitutive. What are social institutions? Classical sociological accounts of social institutions define them as socially constructed, supra-individual entities.30 Examples include families, parliaments, religious bodies, trade unions, sports clubs, courts of justice, the internet, schools, the World Bank, the printed media, the United Nations and cultural institutes. I follow Luc Boltanski in using the term “institution” to refer to entities that primarily serve the semantic function of shaping and stabilizing social meanings.31 They have other functions, such as policing and administration, but their primary role is to form and stabilize meanings. In his words, “To institutions falls the task of saying and confirming what matters”;32 as he also notes, they give an enduring semantic shape to reality, “they seem removed from the corruption of time”.33 However, while Boltanski’s account of social institutions is helpful for its emphasis on the semantic shaping and stabilizing functions of social institutions, it pays little attention to the specifically ethical character of the meanings they shape and stabilize. By contrast, I emphasize the role of social institutions, individually and in configuration, in constituting webs of ethical meaning.34 In my

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account, social institutions are incorporations of – often diverse and sometimes conf licting – ethical values. As such, they have (more or less stable) ethical identities. The incorporated ethical values shaping their identities form a multi-layered and multi-dimensional ethical sedimentation. This ethical sedimentation is the complex historical product of human interactions within the institution, as well as with the institutional environment, but may pass unnoticed by the institution’s members (broadly understood). Nonetheless, by way of their webs of ethical values, social institutions, more or less tacitly, provide their members with ethical orientation and specific guidance: They point them in certain ethical directions and offer direction in concrete instances, thereby impacting on their particular identities as ethical beings. This ethically orienting and directing power defines the authority of social institutions. Its concrete manifestations include laws, ordinances, policies, prescriptions, recommendations and doctrines. These are authoritative for particular human subjects in particular life situations, whenever they affirm them as important aids in their endeavours to live an ethically good life, and as powerful motivations to live such a life. In the case of subjects who aspire towards autonomous agency, affirmation is ref lective, based on reasons they are able and willing to provide to other subjects, if challenged to do so. All too often, the authority of social institutions becomes authoritarian. Social institutions are authoritarian when they compel their subjects to accept unquestioningly certain ways of thinking and acting, disallowing challenge and contestation on the basis of good reasons. If social institutions are to exercise power that is authoritative yet non-authoritarian, they must be open to change in response to the ethical challenges they encounter from their members; these challenges are directed at aspects of the institution’s ethically inf lected identity: at its operation, its organization or its incorporated ideas of the good life. This means, in turn, that social institutions must see themselves, and be seen by their members, as in a permanent process of construction through contestation: they must recognize the inherent instability of their institutional identities. Social institutions must acknowledge, furthermore, that the process of construction is ethically motivated: driven by a concern by their members to shape a particular institution’s identity through incorporation of particular ethical values. Since in the societies of democratic modernity, the ethical values orienting the members of social institutions are often plural and sometimes conf licting, the process of construction will be agonistic rather than harmonious. Nonetheless, the institution’s members, insofar as they aspire to be autonomous agents, will consider themselves part of a common project of construction – as co-authors of a common good that constitutes the (unstable) identity of the social institution in question and as co-authors of their own ethically self-determining agency. In short, for institutions to be non-authoritarian yet authoritative, they and their members must engage in a perpetual process of mutual identity construction. In political contexts, I use the term “common good” to refer to the ethical purpose of an ensemble of legal-political institutional arrangements that

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contribute to the identity formation of citizens as autonomous agents (again, “citizen” is broadly understood). These institutional arrangements establish a system of law that guarantees the equal status of citizens as putatively ethically self-determining agents, both in their memberships of particular social institutions and as participants in the collective process of constructing political common goods. They also contribute to the constitution of the identities of citizens as ethically self-determining agents. They do so by incorporating ideas of the good life that offer citizens general ethical orientation and specific guidance, which they can accept or challenge in processes of critical engagement with their own ethical ideas and practices. From this we can see that in the envisaged model of pluralist politics, legal-political institutions contribute to the subject’s identity formation as an autonomous agent in two interconnected ways. First, they enable autonomous agency in the sense of establish conditions necessary for its formation. They do so by granting each citizen a legally guaranteed equal status, typically in the shape of a system of rights, as the basis from which citizens are equally empowered as ethically self-determining agents. Second, they contribute to the constitution of the quality of autonomous agency. They do so by way of processes of constructing political common goods. With the help of concrete laws, ordinances, policies and other kinds of prescriptions and recommendations, they offer citizens general orientation and specific guidance in relation to the ethically good life, which citizens may accept, reject, contest or ignore. Thus, like institutional and citizen identities, common goods are permanently in process of construction through contestation. More precisely, they are constructed collectively and continuously in processes of democratic engagement in which citizens, driven by their concern for ethically self-determining agency, articulate and respond to multiple, often conf licting, ideas of the good life. From this we can see that political authority, too, is permanently under construction: It is constituted in an on-going dynamic movement, in which humans, individually and collectively, engage with specific articulations of common goods, affirming or challenging them, modifying them or rejecting them out of hand, but in every case contributing to critical evaluation of their claims to authority. Does this imply the priority of political engagement over engagement in other kinds of institutionalized social practices, for example, religious, educational, sporting or recreational ones?35 In other words, does the proposed model demand commitment from citizens to participate in the process of construction of political common goods, without requiring commitment to participation in constructing any other kinds of common goods, such as religious, educational, artistic, sporting or recreational ones? If so, this could give rise to serious conf licts, both on an intra-subjective and intersubjective level. For, citizens might readily accept the proposed constructivist, processual view of political common goods but deny their priority over other kinds of common goods. In cases of conf lict between their non-political ethical values and the ethical values expressed in

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particular laws, ordinances and public policies, they might feel compelled to give priority to their non-political ethical commitments and convictions. It is easy to imagine that citizens in such situations would find deciding between their conf licting commitments and convictions painful; Berlin alerts us to this possibility when he refers to such decisions as the tragedy of human life. It is also easy to imagine that their decisions could lead to conf licts with their fellow citizens as to which commitments and convictions should have priority – conf licts that are potentially destructive of social integration and cohesion and, hence, in need of a Rawslian or similar model of pluralism to contain them. On closer consideration, however, we can see that this worry is unfounded. Recall that in the proposed pluralist model, citizens are human subjects whose identities are formed within the evaluative horizon of modernity. As such, they are for the most part agents committed to the importance of autonomy in the sense of ethically self-determining agency.36 Furthermore, their identities are formed in significant measure within modern democratic social institutions, whether they are political, religious, educational, artistic, sporting, recreational or other ones. Modern social institutions are shaped and structured by the legal requirement to formally acknowledge the equal status of their (adult) members as citizens, which in turn is a precondition for ethically self-determining agency. This implies the logical priority of the formal recognition afforded by legal-political institutions. It does not imply their normative priority or, indeed, the normative priority of any particular kind of social institution. Nor does it imply that identity formation as an autonomous agent requires active engagement in legal or political activities. The question of which particular institutionalized social practices are important for identity formation as an autonomous agent must be left open, made dependent on particular contexts and biographies. There is a further reason to look warily at the idea of a political common good. With some justification, liberal-democratic thinkers tend to treat this idea with suspicion. They worry that it permits the imposition, by socially dominant groups, of particular visions of the good life on all citizens, to the detriment of their individual freedom. Even Habermas, whose political theory has evident republican as well as liberal features,37 connects the idea of the common good with an ethical understanding of citizenship that he describes as an “ethical constriction of political discourse”.38 This objection may be seen as a version of a longstanding worry about the tyranny of the majority in democratic politics. However, it is addressed by my processual interpretation of common goods as perpetually under construction by the agents affected by them. For, in the pluralist model I propose, a processual conception of common goods calls for a form of democratic politics in which political authority, too, is constructed on an ongoing basis by all citizens. As we have seen, the ethical values incorporated by particular institutions are articulated in the form of specific laws, ordinances, policies, doctrines, prescriptions, recommendations and the like. As articulations of common goods, they lay claim to authority, in the sense of offering ethical orientation and guidance.

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Articulations of common goods validly lay claim to being authoritative, but not authoritarian, when they offer ethical orientation and guidance in the service of autonomous agency. This means that they do not command unquestioning obedience but rather gain acceptance, if they do, for reasons that the human subjects concerned can themselves ref lectively endorse. Furthermore, for autonomous agents, rational acceptance of authority is not something static; rather, it is a moment within a never-ending process of agonistic communication with other agents and with the (unstable) ethical identity of the institutions to which they belong: Authority is constructed in an on-going dynamic movement in which human subjects feel the power of specific articulations of common goods, engage with them and respond to them, thereby strengthening or challenging their particular claims to authority. This view of authority allows us to distinguish between authoritarian laws on the one side and laws that are authoritative, yet non-authoritarian on the other. It captures the Rousseauian-Kantian intuition that we are free politically (and morally) only insofar as we are authors of the laws to which we are subject.39 Authoritative laws are not imposed on citizens but made by them in significant measure. It also enables us to see how pluralist politics, when understood along these lines, is at once “collective self-rule” and “rule by laws”.40 Establishing a relationship of balance between these two principles is a challenge facing any form of contemporary democracy that takes seriously the idea of the demos. For, democratic politics threatens to turn tyrannical when it gives up either of the two principles. If there is “rule by laws” without “collective self-rule”, democracy may turn into despotism. If there is “collective self-rule” without “rule by laws”, democracy may turn into a tyrannical majoritarianism. Since it maintains a productive tension between the two principles, the pluralist model I propose is neither despotic nor objectionably majoritarian. By contrast, in its antagonism towards the prevailing social and political elites, and the legal-political procedures and institutions supporting them, contemporary populist politics fails to maintain a relationship of balance between the two principles, privileging the principle of “collective self-rule” over “rule by laws”. This makes it hostile to the development of autonomous agency. By construing legal-political procedures and institutions as inherently hostile to “the people’s” concerns, it allows for no distinction between authority that is authoritarian and authority that is non-authoritarian. As a result, “rule by laws” is seen as inherently a threat to “collective self-rule”. Put differently, populism makes “collective self-rule” the sole normative principle of political power; it jettisons the principle of “rule by laws”, which is required to balance it, if democratic politics is to contribute to the identity formation of every citizen as an ethically self-determining agent. Thus, many contemporary forms of populism leave no room for the on-going, vibrant, critical engagement with the authority of legal-political institutions that I have argued is constitutive of autonomous agency. It is this engagement that enables citizens potentially to accept particular laws, ordinances and policies as authoritative but not authoritarian – to see them as “made by us”, not “imposed on us”.

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Notes 1 J. Harrington (1992) The Commonwealth of Oceania and a System of Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2 A. Hamilton, J. Madison, and J. Jay (1982) The Federalist Papers, Toronto: Bantam Books. 3 J. S. Mill (1972) “On Liberty”. In his Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative Government, edited by H. B. Acton, London: Dent. 4 R. Dahl (1961) Who Governs? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 5 I. Berlin (1969) “Two Concepts of Liberty”. In his Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 6 Ibid., p. 31. 7 Ibid. 8 An emphasis on choice in normative accounts of human identity formation, and especially in conceptions of freedom, is characteristic for the liberal-democratic tradition of political thinking. However, is also a feature of one of the most prominent contemporary neo-republican accounts, Philip Pettit’s conception of freedom as non-domination. See, for example, P. Pettit (2013) On the People’s Terms. A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The model of pluralist politics I propose breaks with this emphasis on individual choice and decision as the salient feature of autonomous agency. 9 Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”, p. 30. 10 J. Rawls (1996) Political Liberalism, 2nd ed., Chicago: Chicago University Press. The continuity between Berlin and Rawls is also recognized by: A. Buchwalter (2001) “Political Pluralism in Hegel and Rawls”. In Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn, edited by W. Rehg and J. Bohmann, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, pp. 339–360 (p. 354). 11 Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. xvi. 12 Ibid., p. xvii. 13 Ibid., Lectures IV–VI. 14 Ibid., p. 140. 15 See, for example, Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s contribution to R. Audie and N. Wolterstorff (1997) Religion in the Public Square, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 16 An early objection of this kind is articulated by Brian Barry (1995) in his review essay “John Rawls and the Search for Stability”, Ethics, 105 (4): 874–915. 17 I pass over the subtleties of Rawls’s own thinking with regard to conflicts of values and its development from Rawls (1971) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971 to Rawls (1997) “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”, University of Chicago Law Review, 64 (3): 765–807. For a helpful account of the development of Rawls’s idea of public reason/political legitimacy, see S. A. Langvatn (2016) “Legitimate, But Unjust, Just, But Illegitimate: Rawls on Political Legitimacy”, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 42(2): 132–153. 18 J. Habermas (1996) Between Facts and Norms, trans. W. Rehg, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 19 See J. Adams (1971) A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, Vol. 3, Boston: Da Capo Press; A. de Tocqueville (1966) Democracy in America, Vol. 1, edited by J. P. Mayer, trans. G. Lawrence, New York: Harper and Row, Book I, chapter 15; Mill, “On Liberty”, pp. 67–68. 20 In this respect, I am in agreement with Nadia Urbinati. See N. Urbinati (2014) Democracy Disfigured, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 131–133, 149. 21 Here I draw on my discussion in M. Cooke (2006) Re-Presenting the Good Society, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 133–134. 22 M. Cooke (1998) “Questioning Autonomy: The Feminist Challenge and the Challenge for Feminism”. In Questioning Ethics, edited by R. Kearney and M. Dooley, London: Routledge, pp. 258–282. 23 C. Taylor (1989) Sources of the Self, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 47. 24 Ibid., p. 91.

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25 M. Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, pp. 132–133. 26 M. Cooke (2013) “Violating Neutrality? Religious Validity Claims and Democratic Legitimacy”. In Habermas and Religion, edited by C. Calhoun, E. Mendieta and J. VanAntwerpen, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 249–274. 27 J. Habermas (2003) Truth and Justification, trans. B. Fultner, Cambridge: MIT Press. 28 Cited in H. Arendt (1961) Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought, London: Faber and Faber. See T. Mommsen (1888) Römisches Staatsrecht, Vol. 3, Part 2, Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, p. 1034: “In diesem Sinne ist auctoritas mehr als ein Ratschlag und weniger als ein Befehl, ein Ratschlag, dessen Befolgung man sich nicht füglich entziehen kann . . .”. 29 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 106. 30 P. Berger and T. Luckmann (1967) The Social Construction of Reality, New York: Anchor. 31 L. Boltanski (2011) On Critique, trans. G. Elliott, Cambridge: Polity Press. 32 Boltanski, On Critique, p. 75. 33 Ibid. 34 Cf. R. Jaeggi (2009) “Was ist eine (gute) Institution?”. In Sozialphilosophie und Kritik, edited by R. Forst et al., Suhrkamp: Frankfurt/Main, pp. 528–544. Cf. also L. Boltanski, On Critique, Chapter 3. 35 I am grateful to Karim Sadek for raising this question in written correspondence. 36 Commitment to the importance of ethically self-determining agency follows naturally from Taylor’s picture of the modern self as a strong evaluator if this picture is developed along the lines I propose. However, the persistence of this self-understanding cannot be taken for granted. It is currently under serious threat by global trends that create fertile grounds for rival pictures of the self. These are, above all, pictures of an essentially instrumentalizing self: a self that uses itself, other humans, the natural and material environments it inhabits, and even its own bodily and spiritual practices as means to further its own ends. 37 Habermas, aligning himself with Rousseau and Kant, seeks to reconcile what he sees as the positive elements of the “liberties of the ancients” and the “liberty of the moderns” (B. Constant). Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Chapter 3. 38 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, pp. 279, 283. 39 See Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Chapter 3. 40 Cf. F. Michelman (1988) “Law’s Republic”, Yale Law Journal, 97(8): 1493–1537 (1500–1). Michelman describes this as the paradox of American constitutionalism.

9 RAWLS, RELIGION, AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS David Rasmussen

In this chapter, I deal with two conceptions of the political – one that entails a clash of civilizations associated with a Schmittian critique of liberalism and a second that envisions the political as an emerging domain in relationship to the idea of overlapping consensus. The discovery of the emerging domain of the political in the later work of John Rawls separates the comprehensive from the political in a way that breaks the link between modernization and secularization. In so doing, Rawls accommodates the rise of religion that has become a major issue in the twenty-first century. I follow Rawls’s development from the last part of A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism, arguing that finding a way to accommodate a pluralism of comprehensive doctrines kept alive the liberal project that began with Hobbes’s attempt to overcome the war of all against all. At the same time, his orientation toward comprehensive doctrines and therefore religion was simultaneously liberating and constraining. In the end, although the liberal project under Rawls presents an alternative to the war of all against all, a trace of the clash of civilizations remains. The first part of the chapter deals with the clash of civilizations and the definition of the political.1 In the second section, I take up the liberal project as it was defined by Hobbes and reconstructed by Rawls, who resolves the problem of stability from the moral point of view. The third section deals with Rawls’s accommodation of religion through the distinction between the comprehensive and the political. I then consider how Rawls’s various interpretations of the idea of overlapping consensus resolve the stability problem by reducing the tension between the comprehensive and the political. Finally, I conclude with remarks on the remaining trace of the clash of civilizations within the Rawlsian model.

The clash of civilizations and a definition of the political In his 1993 article “The Clash of Civilizations?”2 Samuel P. Huntington presented what we must acknowledge, written three years or so after the break-up

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of the Soviet Union and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, was a more or less new theory about politics and power. Using a phrase that had been first been popularized by Bernard Lewis, the potential clash of civilizations was to replace now outmoded forms of conf lict. His “hypothesis” was that the forms of conf lict would no longer be either “primarily economic” or “primarily ideological”; rather, the new form of conf lict will be “cultural.”3 The nation state would continue to be the principle actor, but the new conf licts would be between “civilizations,” which would more or less define nations and groups. Hence, the bold prediction, “The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics.”4 And that in turn would mean that the “fault lines” that mark civilizations would be the “battle lines” that will define the future. Following a brief typology of conflict that characterizes its evolution from the Treaty of Westphalia, Huntington designates the evolution of conflict first among princes, then between nations, then through ideologies, and now between civilizations. Civilizations in turn are characterized as that phenomenon with which people can identify on the broadest level even though they are possibly within the nation state. Huntington gives six reasons for the potential clash of civilizations. First, civilizations are characterized by basic differences in culture, tradition, and religion. Second, as the world grows smaller the potential for confrontation between civilizations is increasing. Third, modernization is having its effect on local identities. This does not necessarily mean that there is an increase of secularization. Quite the contrary: De-secularization and the revival of religion may be the result of modernization because new identities can transcend national boundaries. Fourth, the fact that the role of the West in the process of modernization both effects a new mode of Westernization and at the same time produces a counter-tendency toward “Asianization,” “Hundization,” “re-Islamization,” and “Russianization.” Fifth, cultural characteristics are “less mutable” than economic and political ones. And finally, sixth, the very forces of modernization in the form of trade produce a new regional-ism, i.e., the growth in trade in Europe, East Asia, and North America. The major point of the argument is that civilizational “fault lines” were replacing the ideological and political boundaries that were the true basis for conf lict in the last half of the twentieth century. In 1993, when the article was written, one could already see the potential shadow of the burgeoning crisis evoked by 9/11 when the Twin Towers collapsed in New York. The West would be confronted with the Muslim world. However, according to Huntington, in 1993, that was not the end of the story: Arab Islamic civilization would confront the Christian South of Africa, and on the northern border of Islam, there would be the confrontations Bosnia and Sarajevo. Although it was not clear then, the outlines of the Turkish realignment with Syria and Iran were foreshadowed in the somewhat difficult relations with the Armenians and the Russians. Equally, China would confront its Buddhist neighbors in Tibet and carry on a confrontation with the United States. More than a generation later, we can look back on Huntington’s rather dire prediction with some ambivalence. On the one hand, much of what Huntington

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predicted has come true. Al-Qaeda has made its mark, provoking a true bellum omnium contra omnes. The details of such a clash are well known, and it is not necessary to go into them here. However, it was no accident that the term quoted in Huntington’s article originates from the conservative Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis. The point that might be taken from the article, on the one hand, is that the prediction was true and that what we have seen in the past few years is the coming to be of a clash of civilizations. On the other hand, during this same period, we have witnessed and are witnessing an opposite movement that represents a certain evolution of the liberal claims to democracy. Today as we watch the revolution in Egypt, the demonstrations in Bahrain, the violence in Syria, the international action against Gaddafi that resulted in his downfall in Libya, and all of the contagious demonstrations sparked by the self-immolation of a fruit stand owner in Tunisia, we must seek an alternative explanation to the one provided by Huntington’s provocative article. No doubt Huntington’s thesis was already present in Carl Schmitt’s idea of the political. Certainly, one of the most interesting and inf luential notions of the “political” was developed by Carl Schmitt in his famous essay The Concept of the Political.5 What I find most fascinating about the essay is not only that it is a critique of liberalism but also that it is a certain kind critique that must be associated with Nietzsche’s critique of Western civilization, which began in his famous The Birth of Tragedy. Quite simply, Nietzsche found in the birth of Attic tragedy the truth of existence, which would be covered over later by the emergence of Western philosophy under the guise of Plato through his representative, Socrates. The truth of human existence is simply that human beings must die, a truth that can only be rendered aesthetically according to Nietzsche.6 Philosophy, with its scientific potential, was able to conceal this truth with the questions of knowledge and being. As a consequence, the human being could forget its destiny, seduced by what he or she conceives to be a more fundamental set of questions. Apparently, Schmitt thought that liberalism did for politics what, according to Nietzsche, classical thought did for humanity in general: Namely, it made individuals forget about their fundamental destiny, seduced in this case by the “neutrality” of liberalism. So, for Schmitt, the rise of liberalism meant the death of politics. Equally, the end of liberalism would mean the return of politics, and Schmitt believed that liberalism had come to an end. For Schmitt, the task of liberalism was not to replace but to conceal the truth of politics, which is based on the friend–enemy distinction: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” 7 Schmitt believed this dichotomy was sui generis, not to be derived from other criteria, i.e., criteria from either the moral or the aesthetic or even the religious sphere. In this sense we could say that every group, whether it be economic, cultural, or religious, has the potential of developing itself into a political one by transforming itself into an organization based on the friend–enemy distinction. No doubt here is the secret of the clash of civilizations thesis, the assertion of a return to the state of nature with its prediction about the primacy of evil. For

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Schmitt, in a fundamental sense, the concept of friend is dependent on the concept of the enemy: “The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing.”8 It is true that liberalism in its various forms attempts to move us beyond the friend–enemy distinction by organizing society under a scheme of cooperation that provides assurance for everyone that they will not remain isolated in a state of nature. Schmitt thought that he could show that the three-hundred-year history of liberalism ended in a fundamental contradiction in which liberalism returned to the friend–enemy distinction, hence proving his thesis regarding the primacy of the political. He states: Nothing can escape this logical conclusion of the political. If pacifist hostility toward war were so strong as to drive pacifists into a war against nonpacifists, in a war against war, that would prove that pacifism truly possesses political energy because it is sufficiently strong to group men according to friend and enemy. If, in fact, the will to abolish war is so strong that it no longer shuns war, then it has become a political motive, i.e., it affirms, even only as an extreme possibility, war and even the reason for war. . . . The feasibility of such war is particularly illustrative of the fact that war as a real possibility is still present today, and this fact is crucial for the friend-and-enemy antithesis and for the recognition of politics.9 This conclusion proves, if nothing else, that no matter what we do, we cannot escape the necessity of politics, or as Leo Strauss says, for Schmitt, politics is the inescapable “destiny”10 of humankind. From a philosophical point of view, this creates a serious dilemma for the human community in the sense that the very attempt to escape the reality of the political results in the return of the political and with it the ominous message regarding human tragedy. So much for liberalism.11 Of course, it would be unfair to Huntington to claim that his thesis about the clash of civilizations should be taken as an ontological description of the destiny of humankind. It should be noted that the very title of the 1993 article was followed by a question mark. No doubt it is with that question mark that we are still preoccupied. Certainly, the article reminds us of how we should consider the relationship of politics and power and how we can get beyond the state of nature without a clash of civilizations. Or to put the problem in another way, can we conceive of the political without indulging in Schmittian metaphysics? I think we can by conceiving stability for the right reasons.12

Redefining liberalism: stability from the moral point of view Clearly, if one wants to understand Rawls’s developing position on religion, one must put that account in the context of his attempt to build on the Hobbesian

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foundation in political philosophy, which in contrast to the Schmitt–Huntington thesis would elaborate the liberal narrative. What is unique about Rawls’s defense of liberalism it that it is conceived neither as an enlightened triumph over religion nor as a secular undermining of religion. Rather, Rawls would construct an orientation toward liberalism that would accommodate religion. The uniqueness of Rawls’s orientation to liberalism is that he would implicitly reject what came to be known as the secularization thesis, i.e., that there was a link between modernity or modernization and secularization.13 From his point of view, the modern history of political philosophy could be interpreted without diminishing the claims of religion. This eventual orientation toward religion was not apparent when Rawls wrote the third part of A Theory of Justice, in which he attempted to extend the claims of that theory beyond the foundations established by Hobbes. However, having embarked on the justification of a theory that accounts for justice on the basis of stability, he would be propelled toward a fundamentally different account than the one established by Hobbes. In so doing, he would keep the liberal project alive by accommodating it to pluralism. The formula “stability for the right reasons,” which came to characterize the thinking of the later Rawls, belies a struggle by its author to formulate a political theory appropriate to the emerging conf licts that characterize recent political history. In this sense, Rawls, unlike the conf lict of civilization theorists, would attempt to provide a framework that accounts for conf lict by moving beyond it.14 In my view, the first step in this argument takes up the problem of stability from the point of view of the convergence of the right and the good. Rawls’s wager is that it is possible to construct a theory of stability that can account for a plurality of goods and at the same time go beyond the limitations of a Hobbesian framework that achieved stability at the price of the assertion of public over private interests. The principle issue with regard to the construction of a notion of the good is freedom. How is it possible for persons to fulfill adequately their own self-interests and at the same time comply with the demands of justice? In brief, Rawls, in contrast to Hobbes, attempted to maximize one’s freedom to act, perceived as a good, while at the same time conceiving that action as congruent with justice. Apparently, the background conception here is a Kantian notion of autonomy in which the authority for action is derived from the self-legislating subject. Hence, the constraint that justice will demand will be brought about by the authority of the self as opposed to the power of the sovereign (Hobbes). The aim of such an account will be to achieve a theory of stability on moral grounds. The argument that Rawls constructs attempts to accommodate both the claims of a traditional or classical Aristotelian and a more modern utilitarian account of the good. As we know from Aristotle’s account of the good, it is rational to want well-being, and we know from a utilitarian account of the good that it is desirable to maximize well-being. Combining Royce’s notion that a rational life plan is a good that it is rational for someone to want with both the “Aristotelian Principle” that happiness depends on an ever greater enjoyment of complexity and Sidgwick’s idea that one would choose such a plan as a potential

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imagined life possibility, Rawls contextualizes the idea of the good.15 Going back to the formula, stability for the right reasons, certainly one of the reasons for achieving a stable society would be the maximization of the freedom of action. Everyone ought to be able to freely choose a rational life plan in accord with her or his respective desire for fulfillment. This would be one element of a stable liberal society. However, it is not the only element because this version of the pursuit of well-being gives no assurance that there will be sufficient reason to cooperate with others who are pursuing their own life plans. The second step in the argument is based on the idea that the basic structure of the Hobbesian attempt to overcome the war of all against all could be transferred from the level of instrumentality to the realm of morality. In Rawls’s view, both the assurance and the isolation problems could be resolved on the level of morality.16 Hence, to return to the formula, stability for the right reasons, the reasons for cooperation would have to be moral reasons. The guarantee of personal freedom to pursue one’s own life plan would not be enough. Beyond this, it would be necessary to construct an argument for a sense of justice and a moral psychology to sustain that orientation toward justice. The framework for a sense of justice would be provided by three forms of moral experience: namely, the initial experience of justice in the family; the morality of association, which leads to cooperation; and finally, the morality of principles, which leads, in Rawls’s view, to the development of just institutions. To this Rawls adds a set of complementary assumptions from the realm of moral psychology. The initial psychological experience is based on caring and the second on friendship, which leads to the acceptance of duties, while the third, emerging from the larger realm of social experience, consists in participation in the arrangements of justice. What is surprising to the reader of this albeit schematic narrative is its extraordinary conclusion. Rawls claims that the experience of the sense of justice and the evolution of moral experience does the same thing as Hobbes does but this time on a moral level, i.e., connect “the question of stability with that of political obligation.”17 Significantly, at this point in his development, Rawls believes that he has resolved the isolation and the assurance problems on moral grounds. On the one hand, people will be motivated to do what is “just,” which means that individual interests will not be advanced “unfairly.” Here then is the resolution, in Rawls’s terms, of the isolation problem. At the same time, no one will violate the “rules” of political association to protect their private interests. This, of course, is the resolution of the assurance problem. At this point, one might surmise that Rawls believes that his theory of justice has achieved stability, in contrast to Hobbes, for the right reasons. Happily, for us, that is not the end of the story. Looking back, it is possible to surmise that Rawls had not achieved stability for the right reasons because he came to realize, as he stated later, that the problems of political philosophy come not from philosophy but from democratic culture.18 The turn toward the history of political philosophy in the last part of A Theory of Justice would foreshadow an ever more radical confrontation with the political culture of diversity. Clearly,

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this reconstruction of the problem of stability was not enough. Rawls would have to venture more deeply into the conf licts that would characterize contemporary culture. In so doing, he began a trek toward the construction of Political Liberalism (1993), which, as it turns out, was aptly titled because in the process Rawls would find a way to keep alive the liberal project that began with Hobbes. Liberalism was still about overcoming the war of all against all, only now it was conceived from the moral point of view.

Accommodating religion: comprehensive vs. political In my judgment, the key realization in this saga occurs in 1985 when Rawls states the following: “Brief ly, the idea is that in a constitutional democracy the public conception should be, so far as possible, independent of controversial philosophical and religious doctrines. Thus, to formulate such a conception we apply the principle of toleration to itself, the public conception of justice is to be political and not metaphysical.”19 As he begins to work this thesis out, the key distinction would be between the terms “political” and “metaphysical.” In the future, the term “political” would become the central object of Political Liberalism, while one of the descendants of the term “metaphysical” would be the term “comprehensive.” This distinction in turn would inform Rawls’s approach to religion because religious doctrines would be classified as comprehensive doctrines. Working out the distinction between the comprehensive and political would be no easy task, and Rawls would make at least two attempts at formulating the proper relationship. Of course, the great idea that came to characterize this mediation between the comprehensive and the political would be the idea of overlapping consensus. This is the third step in the argument that led to Rawls’s distinctive form of accommodation to religion. To make this step, he had to seriously ref lect on why it was necessary to distance himself from a metaphysical justification of a theory of justice. It is one thing to state that everyone should construct his or her orientation to well-being, implying that there can be no single overarching orientation to the good to which everyone must comply. The idea of basic goods affirms the multiplicity of goods. It is quite another thing to claim that there are multiple theories of justice. If the latter were the case, the very orientation toward a congruence between the right and the good would be undermined, or so it would seem. And yet in 1985, Rawls claims that “as a practical matter no general moral conception can provide a publicly recognized basis for a conception of a modern democratic state.”20 I regard this as a major turn in Rawls’s philosophical development, which stems from the frank acknowledgment that modern political history has so affected the discipline of political philosophy that it can no longer rely on the insights of philosophy alone to justify its orientation. The reasons for this are, as he argues, both historical and cultural. Among the historical conditions that forced the change from the metaphysical to the political Rawls lists three: religious toleration, the emergence of constitutional democracy, and the development of market economies. First, religious and

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political toleration brought an end to the wars of religion and changed the political landscape, ending religious establishment particularly in the United States. As a consequence, it was no longer possible to assert one point of view, one religious ideology, as the basis for political cooperation. The consequence of the public acceptance of toleration would be the affirmation of diversity, which would render problematic future forms of political consensus. Second, constitutional democracy as an emerging phenomenon would effectively remold the concept of political cooperation by accommodating diverse traditions of interpretation without singling out any one as distinctive. Kant’s transcendental appropriation of the idea of a constitution through the force of reason would be replaced by more pragmatic orientations Third, the emergence of market economies would effectively change, as Hegel saw earlier, the modes of cooperation sought by political societies and effectively transform theories of justice. These historical trends, in Rawls’s 1985 view, have combined to produce a democratic culture that is characterized by diversity. This phenomenon will in turn affect the manner in which Rawls’s basic theory, justice as fairness, may be retained. What is most interesting about this turn toward democratic culture, and what will be key to his interpretation of religion, is the development of a new strategy for the preservation of the doctrine of justice as fairness, which can be rescued this time not on epistemological but on interpretative terms. Whether it is between traditions ancient and modern or between traditions instrumental or philosophical, the wager is that justice as fairness can be preserved in the context of what others have called the conf lict of interpretations. The task as he defines it is to justify justice as fairness as a political conception of justice that “tries to draw solely upon the basic intuitive ideas that are embedded in political institutions of a constitutional democratic regime and the public traditions of their interpretation.”21 This, of course, is one of the most interesting moments in Rawls’s work after A Theory of Justice, not only because of the context he turned toward the interpretation of traditions but also because of the particular course he took toward these traditions. In essence, he argued that justice as fairness would occupy its own space both as a mediator between the classical and the modern and as a “third option” between the instrumental (Hobbes) and the philosophical (Kant and Mill). Further, this interpretative decision would shape the way in which he would construe overlapping consensus, not as a compromise between comprehensive doctrines but as a process that must accommodate itself to the emerging domain of the political.

Overlapping consensus Rawls wrote three essays on overlapping consensus, two in 1988 and one in 1993, included as a chapter in his Political Liberalism. Individually, they represent three distinct phases in his thinking about this very unique idea. Together they frame Rawls’s mature thinking about religion as a comprehensive doctrine. Many wonder why Rawls, who was one of the first if not the first to see the

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necessity to accommodate religion to political thinking, would come to be so controversial regarding his interpretation of the role of religion. No doubt the traces of both his affirmation of religion and his seemingly rigorous circumspection of religion are to be found in his development of overlapping consensus.22 However, one must note that the framework for his interpretation of religion was already set when he discovered that a theory of justice could no longer countenance a metaphysical justification. This would lead to his reliance on an interpretative framework that would be able to distinguish the emerging tradition of justice as fairness from other traditions of interpretation, be they metaphysical, in a religious or philosophical or even secular sense, or instrumental. The first essay on overlapping consensus does essentially two things: It distinguishes its position from that of Hobbes, and it gives an account of pluralism.23 The immediate reference to Hobbes is no accident because most important, overlapping consensus is constructed to meet the stability problem that Hobbes originally formulated and to which the entire last third of A Theory of Justice was addressed. As one might expect, according to Rawls, Hobbes got the first part of the argument for stability correct when he focused on the isolation and the assurance problems to achieve consensus. But according to this scenario, as could be expected, Hobbes achieved stability for the wrong reasons. Hobbes in this interpretation went for the basics, among which Rawls lists self-interest, fear of death, and desire for the commodious life.24 As opposed to Hobbes, Rawls wanted to characterize his type of consensus, overlapping consensus, as a moral idea. So, while Hobbes was correct in rejecting as an overarching teleological perspective the classical notion of the good, he failed, from Rawls’s point of view, to see the moral implications of consensus. Rawls assumes that there should be lurking behind the idea of political consensus some enduring idea of social unity that would serve as the moral basis of motivation.25 Unfortunately, here I can’t go into the historical development of religious and political toleration. However, the historical development of toleration, moving from an instrumental idea to something desired on moral grounds, must provide the background for this critique of Hobbes. (We might observe that history of toleration working in an Hegelian sense behind the backs of the actors provides the possibility for the movement from instrumental to moral reasons for consensus.) In any case, this leads to the second major issue in the first essay: Rawls’s characterization of pluralism. Looking back, we can now see that at this point in his career, having chosen a reconstructed Hobbesian framework, he was not only addressing the question of the place and status of religion; he was also inadvertently providing a new perspective on the original liberal project. True, Hobbes had addressed diversity but only instrumentally. As we know, Rawls choose the moral route. The major negative insight he developed at this time sustained throughout his later career was that any universal enforcement by state power of a singular comprehensive doctrine would amount to tyranny.26 So when one realizes that Rawls means not only any religious position but also any philosophical position as well as – although this is ambiguous, to be sure – any

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secular position, one sees how distinctive the position is. He states, “a public and workable agreement on a single general and comprehensive conception could be maintained only by the oppressive use of state power.”27 This, of course, is the consequence of what he called the fact of pluralism, defined as a permanent feature of modern democratic culture, which means that it, pluralism, has to be accommodated. His task of accommodating pluralism because it is defined morally will be to try to find a place for the authentic expression of religion, curtailing the prominence of secularism and reconstructing the project of liberalism. The narrative that began with Hobbes’s attempt to provide an alternative to the war of all against all, known later as overcoming the friend/enemy distinction or the clash of civilizations, would have a new chapter. It is one thing to conceive of the project of overlapping consensus; it is quite another to clarify its meaning. One obvious meaning that Rawls’s critics have seized upon is modeled on the idea of a kind of happy convergence, suggesting that comprehensive doctrines having inhabited the same culture of modernity through experience of that modernity have come to agree on a certain political structure that in some ways inhabits their various positions. Hence, the term “acceptability” is used to designate that political sphere, that small area of commensurability among otherwise incommensurable positions. Rawls soon came to realize that this was not what he meant by overlapping consensus, i.e., the mere acceptability of a realm of agreement on political matters. Indeed, his position, which openly gives up on the doctrine of truth in politics, would leave that impression. This explains why it was necessary for him to write the second essay, “The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus” (1989).28 As I have argued, he already accounted for the domain of the political in his 1985 essay in which he gives up on epistemology and metaphysics and turns toward historical interpretation as a mode of justification. There, he clarifies the relationship between the political realm and overlapping consensus. This clarification was needed because after he had abandoned epistemological justification the relationship between the two arguments, the one for the emergence of the political and the one for overlapping consensus, were in some ways at odds with one another. The decision he made regarding how he would integrate the arguments would place an indelible mark on his interpretation of religion, providing ammunition for his critics29 and some confusion for his supporters.30 The problem was that of finding a way to integrate the comprehensive and the political without the appearance of establishing a mere compromise between the two realms. In this sense, the basic problem confronted by the later Rawls was how to move beyond a mere modus vivendi. Rawls’s solution was to construct a two-stage model that gave primacy to the domain of the political by conceiving it as the first stage while the question of stability would only manifest itself at a later time. Perhaps this is the way he always thought of the stability problem, given its place in the final third of A Theory of Justice after the basics of the theory had been presented.31 However, whether he was entitled to make that move after abandoning epistemology for historical justification is an open question.32 Certainly, this

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much is true: Rawls domesticates the battle of the titans over comprehensive doctrines by making them appear at the end of the story and not as the harbingers of conf lict that they actually were. No doubt the aficionados of the clash of civilization theory would want to see a f law here because it might appear that the resolution achieved by the domain of the political is superficial. However, while the two-stage theory puts the domain of the political first while we turn to overlapping consensus second, in actuality, the priority of the domain of the political gets us far down the path of the resolution of the stability problem because the strong political values that triumph over other values are forged there. In the end, it is the predominance of those values that makes stability possible.33 To be sure, the second stage, overlapping consensus, completes the resolution of the stability problem because it is there that the values of the comprehensive doctrines accommodate themselves and therefore eliminate a fundamental clash of values. Allow me to return to the initial question regarding the role of religion in relationship to the political, namely, the question of stability for the right reasons. At first glance, it appears that the development of the two-stage model resolves the problem of irreconcilable conf lict between religion and the political because the securing of political values is prior to the encounter with comprehensive doctrines. With regard to the first level, the political level, Rawls enunciates four facts: the diversity among comprehensive doctrines is permanent, any one comprehensive doctrine could remain in force as a political doctrine only by the oppressive use of state power, an enduring and secure democratic regime must be supported by a majority of democratic citizens, and a reasonably stable democratic society contains “intuitive ideas” from which it may work up a political sense of justice “suitable for a constitutional regime.”34 Significantly, and this is a crucial but little noticed step in Rawls’s argument, the facts do not lead to the conclusion that there will be agreement on all things political. One might surmise that although he wants to delay the problem of stability to the second level, overlapping consensus, the potential for conf lict actually first emerges here. In a curious manner, the trace of overlapping consensus manifests itself first as a problem for the political because frankly in a modern democratic society conf lict, dissensus, not consensus, is the order of the day.35 Rawls fully acknowledges, and there is much misunderstanding on this point, that conf lict characterizes the political realm. Clearly, there are reasons for this. Rawls lists differing views on what counts for evidence, making different judgments about the evidence, vagueness of concepts, different appropriations of experience, different normative considerations, and different values.36 Given this, he acknowledges a fifth basic fact, i.e., in modern democratic culture, agreement is difficult and in many cases not possible. Again, we are operating in the shadow of the war of all against all. Here it is the reasonable subject who comes to the rescue as she who both acknowledges the burdens of reason and is able either to overcome conf lict or live it. In 1980, Rawls introduced the distinction between reason and reasonability or reasonableness, arguing that reason should be subordinated to reasonableness and subordinated absolutely. Reasonability is defined as

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the kind of thinking that takes the other into account, while reason is oriented toward one’s own well-being. There will be political disagreement, but reasonable citizens will be able to tolerate disagreement, and under normal conditions, they will be able to accept other points of view. As we shall see, this concept of the person is the key facilitator for overlapping consensus because within the Rawlsian framework, it is ultimately the citizen who makes stability possible by mediating between her own comprehensive doctrine and the realm of the political. Now to the question of how political liberalism is possible. The answer is the following: “Only a political conception of justice that all citizens might be reasonably expected to endorse can serve as the basis for public reason and justification.”37 This idea, Kantian in origin, expresses the liberal principle of legitimacy. The assumption here is more or less transcendental or constructivist in the sense that it functions as the condition for the possibility for the actuality of political liberalism. Further, this legitimacy is based on the dual criteria of the political, namely, its function as an involuntary and therefore necessary condition and the right to coerce.38 Comprehensive doctrines are in principle voluntary, and they no longer have the right to coerce because of the historical development of a pluralist society – or, put succinctly, because of the fact of pluralism. It follows that a reasonable comprehensive doctrine will incorporate the domain of the political within it and that this is its claim to reasonability. When conf lict comes between the claims of a religious comprehensive doctrine and the domain of the political, the political claim wins on the basis that the values of the political outweigh the values of the comprehensive. Rawls’s singular example of this, referred to at least twice, is the idea derived from comprehensive religious doctrine that there is no salvation outside of the religious community. The believer can believe this, but it does not follow that the doctrine can be enforced as a political doctrine. This is where the principle of liberal legitimacy trumps comprehensive doctrine. However, there is a caveat, namely, that political liberalism makes no claim regarding the truth of comprehensive doctrines except when they assume validity for the general public. It follows that overlapping consensus is not about a compromise between comprehensive doctrines but rather about incorporating the domain of the political within comprehensive doctrines. For Rawls, this is both a matter of historical development and of the activity of the citizen. Reasonable comprehensive doctrines tend to adopt a version of the domain of the political within their specific respective frameworks. Of course, in the end, it is the citizen who acknowledges both the liberal principle of legitimacy and the validity of a particular comprehensive doctrine. Since the domain of the political is essentially a moral doctrine for Rawls, the incorporation of the liberal principle of legitimacy should not be at odds with the comprehensive doctrine.

Conclusion In the end, the question remains, does Rawls’s post – A Theory of Justice effort, which culminates in Political Liberalism, overcome the potential for a clash of civilizations? In other words, has Rawls achieved stability for the right reasons?

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In my exposition of Rawls, I have attempted to show how the very use of the phrase “stability for the right reasons” led to a struggle that found its culmination in the writing of Political Liberalism. Looking back at the liberal project that began with Hobbes, Rawls clearly sought to keep the liberal project alive. He did this, first, by reconceiving the Hobbesian project on a moral level and, second, by reconciling liberalism with the incommensurable comprehensive doctrines that constitute a pluralist democratic culture, i.e., pluralism. Chief among the enabling conditions for this to occur were Rawls’s separation of the metaphysical from the political, the circumscribing of the domain of the political, the construction of a two-stage model, and the development of the idea of overlapping consensus. In so doing, his theory allowed comprehensive doctrines to f lourish. In this sense, we might conclude that his theory achieved stability for the right reasons. However, these reasons would never escape controversy39 because overcoming the clash of civilizations would necessitate drawing the line between the political and the comprehensive with the political always keeping a watchful eye on the comprehensive. Taking an analogy from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, as taste always clips the wings of genius, so in the Rawlsian framework the political will always circumscribe the comprehensive. So, religion is allowed to f lourish but under certain political conditions. This may well be the way Rawls wanted to end the story, leaving the tension between religion and politics ever to be resolved by the activity of citizens. In this sense, even in Rawls’s work, the trace of the clash of civilizations will always remain, and the problem of stability will continue as a living tradition.

Notes 1 A version of the first part of this essay appears in Philosophy and Social Criticism 38, no. 4 (2012): 457–466, under the title “The Emerging Domain of the Political.” This version was originally published in Telos 167 (Summer 2014): 107–125. 2 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22–49. 3 Ibid., 22. 4 Ibid. 5 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 6 The truth to which Nietzsche points is this “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified,” a claim that occurs in section five of The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Random House, 1967), 52, and repeated later. Nietzsche’s claim is that the truth of existence was replaced – or perhaps better, covered over – by “Greek cheerfulness,” heralded by Socrates, who replaces the capacity to confront tragedy with science that masks the truth of tragedy in forgetfulness. To paraphrase Schmitt in light of Nietzsche, liberalism masks the political in its attempt to work out a scheme of cooperation. 7 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 26. 8 Ibid., 33. 9 Ibid., 36–37. 10 Leo Strauss, “Notes on The Concept of the Political,” in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 117. 11 In my view, Schmitt uses the term “liberalism” in a more or less metaphysical sense, namely, as that which obscures the political in the sense that it covers over the friend–enemy

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12

13

14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21 22

23 24 25

distinction. There are, of course, many ways in which one might think of Hobbes as an illiberal thinker. Hobbes is clearly afraid of what the power of private interests would be if they were allowed to reign and were not held in check by a higher power. This would mean that one would have to give up freedom to gain protection by the sovereign. Following from this, Hobbes believed that the subjects of a commonwealth needed to be kept in check by fear. Later forms of liberalism, beginning with Locke and culminating in Kant, would ally the realization of freedom with moral autonomy. However, Hobbes sought to create a theory of politics in which individuals, through the exercise of reason, could unite under a common power in order to overcome the horrendous consequences of a state of nature. In my judgment, it is in this metaphysical sense that Schmitt quite rightly classifies Hobbes as a liberal. Hobbes’s conception of the salus populi in De Cive shows he is the author of an ideal civilization (more than Bacon), that is the demand for rational social relations of humanity as one partnership in production and consumption. By this very fact, he is the founder of liberalism. For Hobbes, the right to life is a natural right pure and simple, an inalienable human right, and this claim of the individual takes precedence over the state and determines its goals and its limits. This is the foundation of human right in the liberal sense. Hobbes differs from later liberalism in that he fights against the evil of man while later liberals believe in the natural goodness of man. But the forgetting of the natural evil is to be blamed on the position of the ideal civilization by Hobbes. There are many versions of the secularization thesis, the most familiar being associated with the work of the sociologist Max Weber, who constructed the phrase “disenchantment with the world” as a way of indicating that with modernization came secularization. Rawls is often misunderstood on this point. As I will show later, the point is not to eliminate conflict but rather to frame it. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 370–374. This discussion refers to Rawls’s thin theory of the good, which represents an accommodation to traditional theories of the good without making the theory of the good prior to a deontological conception of justice. Ibid., 435. Ibid. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). In the introduction, Rawls makes the following statement: “The dualism in political liberalism between the point of view of the political conception and the many points of view of comprehensive doctrines is not a dualism originating in philosophy. Rather, it originates in the special nature of democratic political culture as marked by reasonable pluralism. This special nature accounts, I believe, at least in good part, for the different problems of political philosophy in the modern as compared with the ancient world” (ibid., p. xxiii). 116. John Rawls, Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 388. The paper in question is “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical” (1985). As I shall argue, this paper marks a major development in Rawls’s thought. Ibid., 390. Ibid. It is from this peculiar duality between the affirmation of religion on the one hand and the rigorous circumscription of religion on the other that much of the modern criticism of Rawls on religion stems. While religion is affirmed by allowing comprehensive positions to stand be affirmed by constituents, critics balk at the line drawn between religious values because political values are said to be stronger. John Rawls, “The Idea of Overlapping Consensus” (1987), in Collected Papers, 421–448. Ibid., 472. This idea, the social union of social unions, was articulated in the third part of A Theory of Justice.

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26 This could be seen as Rawls’s most radical insight because it would necessitate a reconstruction of the notion of reason radical enough to accommodate pluralism. No doubt, the distinction between reasonability and reason stems from this insight. 27 Rawls, Collected Papers, 425. 28 Ibid., 473–496. 29 This provided ammunition for his critics because of his strong affirmation of the domain of the political to the detriment of, so they would argue, the religious. 30 Many of Rawls’s students and supporters found this distinction confusing and therefore rejected it because it seemed to undermine the work of A Theory of Justice by Rawls’s categorization of it as a comprehensive position. 31 What I mean here is that it is only after Rawls elaborated the original position in A Theory of Justice would he address the stability problem placed in the last third of the book. 32 To the historical interpreter, the data are not given in their separate manifestations. Hence, the prioritizing of the political in the order of things is a constructivist move that alters the presentation of phenomena in a particular manner. 33 If we take a look at the isolation and assurance problem and their resolution, it is clear that they are accommodated in A Theory of Justice on the political level. Hence, stability is originally formulated as a political problem with a political solution. When he turns to the distinction between the comprehensive and the political, he still must deal with problem of stability on the political level. In truth, overlapping consensus takes the stability to a second level where the potential for the clash of civilizations is resolved. 34 Rawls, Collected Papers, 473–474. 35 Rawls is often interpreted, particularly by agonistic theorists, as a theorist who has his eye only on consensus. I think that is a serious misinterpretation of his work. Rather than consensus, his work attempts to frame potential conflict. 36 Rawls, Collected Papers, 475. 37 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 136. 38 Coercion is a major issue in Rawls’s thinking because it is in the political realm that coercion is legitimated. The only coercion that can be legitimated is that to which all people consent. Traditionally, that is in terms of realistic political theory; this would be the place for a philosophy of state action. However, Rawls, following Kant, sees the political subject, and not the state per se, as the guarantor of legitimacy. 39 Unfortunately, I cannot go into the controversial legacy that Rawls’s orientation toward religion brought forth. Suffice it to state that he modified his views regarding the extent to which comprehensive positions could contribute to political discourse. Beginning with the notion of the duty of civility, the mutual obligation of citizens to translate their political views in the terms incorporate public reason, Rawls would cite three possibilities: the proviso, the declaration, and the conjecture. These three procedures would modify Rawls’s idea of public reason contributing to the wide view of political culture.

PART III

Cultures, religions, and politics

10 THE PRACTICE OF LIBERTY Erin I. Kelly

A problem for liberal toleration A free society contains a plurality of worldviews – different notions of the meaning, purpose, and ethics of individual and social life. One source of pluralism is the open-endedness of rationality’s demands. Rational deliberators reach different and mutually incompatible conclusions because rationality does not mandate particular ends. Another is the compatibility of pluralism with the requirements of morality. Morality places substantial requirements on an agent’s value and aims, yet the moral truth can be difficult to discern, and on some matters, multiple moral perspectives can be reasonable. We should expect that people who are committed to morality will not reach consensus on the full range of important moral questions. In these ways, pluralism results from the permissiveness of rational and moral principles. Nevertheless, rational and moral agents share certain fundamental interests and needs. A liberal account of rights and liberties affirms this commonality. All citizens are entitled to the same basic rights and liberties, including freedom of belief, freedom of expression, the rights of political participation, freedom of association, and equal protection under the law. Protecting these rights and liberties is crucial for the exercise of rational thought and to enable political cooperation on reasonable and fair terms. In fact, the demands of rational and moral thinking are critical to an account of the importance of securing individual rights and liberties. A society that protects equal basic rights and liberties will be tolerant. Toleration expresses a principle of political morality requiring deliberate noninterference with an opposed individual or group agent’s exercise of freedom.1 It involves restraint and recognition. It is not the same as indifference, resignation, or neutrality.2 It acknowledges those with whom one disagrees as equal participants in a shared society, entitled to the same rights, liberties, and opportunities.3

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For example, liberal justice prohibits us from interfering with another person’s expression of religious beliefs, though we may reject those beliefs. Toleration permits rational dialogue and some forms of social pressure; what it prohibits within its domain is coercive behavior. A just society will protect people with unpopular views. It not tolerate intimidation or assault and may apply legal and other social sanctions to prevent and remedy those wrongs. Furthermore, a tolerant society will not deny demonstration permits to unpopular minorities, restrict their access to media outlets, or block their participation in the political process. The possibility of social conf lict entails that individual rights and liberties require boundaries. Not every exercise of freedom should be tolerated. Some philosophers have arrived at a theoretical understanding of the scope of liberal toleration from claims about the nature of disagreements that might arise between rational and moral agents. Their thinking is that the proper scope of toleration can be identified by specifying the extent of rational and moral disagreement.4 Rational and moral agents should accept the fact of reasonable disagreement, but they need not tolerate life plans that are demonstrably irrational or unethical. The limits of rational deliberation and moral epistemology define the boundaries of acceptable toleration, or so it is argued. This line of thinking is mistaken. Tolerable pluralism extends beyond the edges of rational and moral thought. Toleration should be understood in relation to a political requirement of justice – in the liberal tradition of constitutional democracy – that protects equal basic rights and liberties for all.5 Social norms and individual values often have little to do with what is required by rationality or morality. They are inf luenced by practice and chance; they are conditioned by culture, biology, institutions, and history. Liberal toleration can accommodate the inf luence of these factors. A political understanding of toleration takes us beyond the parameters of rational and moral deliberation to recognize historically contingent norms of culture and social structure as well as the idiosyncrasies of individual preferences. The demands of rationality and morality are an important source of pluralism, but they do not determine its proper limits. Toleration is required whenever a person’s exercise of freedom is compatible with other people’s equal rights. Individual rights and liberties, when they are fundamental, can justly be limited only to maintain a basic scheme of equal liberties for all.6 This means that a liberal account of toleration must accept what I will call “the practice of liberty”: the social outcomes of people’s exercise of the rights and liberties recognized by a liberal account of social justice. In fact, the proper scope of toleration, as it is inf luenced by the practice of liberty, includes the possibility that some people will endorse and enact false and even morally repugnant views. This possibility generates a difficulty for liberal toleration. A liberal society justly tolerates some points of view that are irrational and even morally objectionable. They include the distortions of self-interest and group bias. They include some forms of provincial and inegalitarian thinking. Toleration of these viewpoints, when their adherents do not violate the equal rights and liberties of their compatriots, is required by the priority a liberal

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theory of justice assigns to a principle of equal basic rights and liberties.7 But this makes historically persisting injustices difficult to remedy. Enduring injustices generate ongoing disadvantages for some groups. These disadvantages play out through the channels of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, ethnicity, caste, and religion. They persist in part through the inf luence of irrational and morally objectionable viewpoints that have become entrenched in the background culture. The cultural entrenchment of irrational and morally objectionable points of view is permitted by the practice of liberty. A tolerant political culture should grapple with this problem.

Pluralism and practical reasoning I begin by examining a conception of practical rationality that is intuitive to many people and often accepted by economists, social theorists, and philosophers. It is commonly referred to as means-ends reasoning. This form of deliberation supports a plurality of reasons. I underscore the importance of individual rights and liberties to this notion of rational deliberation. Means-ends reasoning involves deliberating from psychologically given starting points. Its principle normative requirement is that we take the means to our ends. It is rational, generally speaking, to try to fulfill our desires and irrational to fail to do so.8 Rational behavior involves acquiring relevant facts about available means and adjusting one’s behavior to fit those facts. For example, if I want to travel to New York City, I need a plan, such as one that involves a vehicle and a road map. If I am rational, my behavior will conform to this or another feasible plan, or I must relinquish my stated aim. Rational deliberation also enables us to specify our ends, to rank them in order of importance, and to schedule our activities.9 Whether reason is called to these tasks depends on what happens to motivate a given agent and whether there is conf lict or tension between her aims that needs resolution. If my plans to travel to New York conf lict with my plans to visit family in Seattle, I must determine which is more important to me or engage in some rescheduling. The aim of rational deliberation, so understood, is not to evaluate our aims.10 What we do when we deliberate rationally is to make our fundamental commitments more specific and practically determinate. Rational deliberation enables us to clarify how much relative support a potential course of action finds in our subjective psychology, once we are informed by the relevant empirical facts. This support is measured by the (relative) strength of the motives in us that deliberation draws out. Whether a more specific formulation of an aim generates reasons for us depends on whether it resonates with us motivationally.11 If it resonates with us more strongly, then it is likely that deliberation was sound. If our desire for an end is weakened by deliberating, it would be rational to look for a different specification. We may infer that we deliberated soundly if and only if no motivationally more compelling specification of our end is available. In this way, an agent’s reasons are identified in the proximity of desires.

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This does not mean that an agent’s commitment is measured only or primarily by her felt desire to act upon it (even after deliberating). As Hume argued, strength of desire does not necessarily correspond to the intensity of its felt quality.12 One might determine whether a person has a certain reason by seeing whether, in the decisive moment, she acts upon it.13 This may be the best test of her commitment. Reasons can also be identified by noticing which desires tend to have an effect on a person’s deliberations over time, that is, which ends a person consistently attempts to serve through her deliberations.14 We may thus draw a distinction between an agent’s values and the phenomenology of her desires. In sum, on this account of rational deliberation, the course of an agent’s deliberative reasoning is guided by the agent’s motives. Deliberation involves channeling a psychological force down a narrower path, a path defined by an agent’s motives together with judgments of efficiency and feasibility, judgments that include an appreciation of relevant empirical facts. Successful specification tends to strengthen motivation, although not necessarily its felt quality. Clearly, the practice of rational deliberation depends on an agent’s freedom to affirm her beliefs and values, to acquire information relevant to the success of her pursuits, to confer and collaborate with other people, and to change her mind in formulating and reformulating her plans. A liberal society will protect her right to do these things. Now since different people are motivated by different considerations, rational deliberation is bound to generate a plurality of ends, including various and even incompatible notions of the good. Rational deliberation is open-ended. People may seek pleasure, happiness, love, money, fame, social status, validation, thrills, comfort, family, community, peace, salvation, memorialization, or solitude. Means-ends reasoning does not require that a person’s ends meet the requirements of morality or any other substantive criteria regarding their content. A person’s ends will be shaped by group affinity, culture, and historical circumstance, as well as individual psychology and values. Rational deliberation begins from a variety of starting points, and a spectrum of ends is compatible with it. The relevance of moral criteria as interpersonally justified correctives for rational agents, however, indicates that instrumentally rational deliberation does not exhaust the possibilities for sound reasoning. Moral deliberation concerns what makes a reason morally defensible to other people, and it is sound when and because it responds to the legitimate interests of everyone who is affected. Moral deliberation articulates an interpersonal standard. The justification of reasons is constructed, we might say, in accordance with principles that reasonably take the interests of all relevant parties into account.15 While a relational account concedes that only people with a general desire (or disposition) to conduct their lives in ways that are compatible with the fundamental interests of other people can be said to have reason to deliberate morally, the presence and strength of that desire is not what guides the specification of an agent’s moral reasons (or lack thereof ). That is, strength of desire is not what determines the outcome of sound deliberation. An account of sound moral deliberation draws upon considerations moral

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agents could (ideally) share, whether or not those considerations are supported by an agent’s existing motives. The desire to be able to justify one’s actions to others may be only loosely linked, if at all, to an agent’s more particular aims and commitments. Moral reasons come from considering the moral compatibility of a person’s behavior with the interests of people affected by it and how deliberation with those persons would play out. It is not a matter of the psychological support reasons garner that confers upon them their moral status or authority. The normative force of moral reasons derives instead from their interpersonally justifiable content. This is the case even though the possibility of having moral reasons may well be contingent upon an agent’s concern to stand in interpersonal relationships that are morally justifiable to people affected by them. This point is clarified by thinking of moral reasons as akin to reasons that arise from contractual agreements. The fact that an agent is not bound by rationality to enter into a contract does not entail that contractual obligations are contingent upon an agent’s continued desire to remain bound by them. Similarly, in our ordinary moral relations with other people, we make commitments and form expectations of one another. We do this not only when it is in our interest but also because we have a general and reciprocal concern for one another and desire to have a certain esteem in each other’s eyes, for example, to be viewed as dependable. The reasons that can be constructed within this framework of mutual commitment and expectation, however, do not depend on whether the reasoning that supports them always promotes our personal interests or focuses and strengthens our general concern for other people. Participating in social relationships on mutually agreeable terms presupposes that other people, as equal and independent members of those relationships, have claims no less important or pressing than our own. Their claims generate reasons for us, whether we like it or not.16 Moral reasons are autonomous. The autonomy of moral reasons is acknowledged, I believe, in the way we commonly think about morality. Moral motivation is a concern or disposition to structure deliberation to accord with the interests of other people.17 When we deliberate morally, what we explore is that justification requirement, not the psychological strength of our motives. In this sense, moral deliberation takes on a life of its own. We may rightly accept the result of a piece of deliberation even when we are disinclined to act on it. Commitment to morality takes seriously the requirement that in social life we conduct our lives in ways that are compatible with the fundamental interests of people who are affected by our actions. It involves accepting that practical deliberation should be organized by a recognition of the importance of being able to justify our conduct on the basis of considerations that take the basic interests of all affected persons into account.18 Although it is not a requirement of rationality that persons engage in moral reasoning, we may suppose that people who respect each other will adopt the requirement of mutual justifiability as a regulative principle and will be committed to participating in social relationships on

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mutually agreeable terms. To accomplish this, participants must learn about the interests and needs of other people. They must be able to associate freely, to communicate their beliefs and values, to engage in dialogue and discussion, to form commitments together, and to affirm a sense of commonality. Liberal justice protects the rights and liberties on which moral relationships depend. The moral terms of interpersonal relationships are permissive in ways that are similar to the open-endedness of means-ends rationality: Shared ends will be shaped by group affinity, culture, and historical circumstance, as well as the psychology and values of the people involved. People disagree about what we owe to one another: for example, how much we ought to do to help people in need; what measures, if any, we ought to take to protect other people from harming themselves; whether to be honest or evasive when the truth hurts; the extent to which love is compatible with independence; and under what circumstances hierarchical group norms are acceptable. A diverse set of shared ends is morally permissible; morality supports a variety of human relationships. The basic requirements of rationality and morality, as I have outlined them, suggest that we should expect a plurality of individual and collective commitments. Under free institutions, conscientious people are bound to disagree about which norms for individual and social conduct are best. The indeterminacy of rational and moral principles is an important source of a plurality in worldviews. The history of philosophy bears witness to just this sort of disagreement. Philosophers have argued passionately and at odds with one another about the value of freedom, the common good, human rights, aesthetic values, love, family, community, nation, religion, power, self-interest, and justice. The Western tradition alone evinces a plurality of notions of the right and the good. Plato insisted that persons each do their part in a just city. Aristotle argued that we are political animals who f lourish only in community. Kant defended the primacy of individual freedom and autonomy. Mill emphasized the virtue and satisfactions of contributing to the common good. The history of ideas is instructive. We should expect rational and moral agents to endorse a variety of ends and values.

Just toleration A liberal account of justice recognizes that rational and moral forms of reasoning generate a plurality of values. It does this by affirming the rights and liberties needed for people freely to engage in the rational pursuit of value and to negotiate morally justifiable relationships. That is, liberal justice shifts its attention from the rational and moral evaluation of particular doctrines to the compatibility of these doctrines with a scheme of equal basic rights, liberties, and opportunities that serve the fundamental interests of all rational and moral agents. This means that what is important to justice is not the credentials of rationality or morality. Rather, what matters is whether a point of view is compatible with the political requirements of justice: the rights and liberties of other people. Reasonable people committed to democratic values would be tolerant of irrational and even

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incoherent views, provided that adherents of these views respect the requirements of democratic institutions. As long as people are peaceful and respect other people’s rights, they count as reasonable, politically speaking. Politically reasonable people might believe false things and subscribe to supernatural claims. They might hold beliefs in miracles, predestination, or fate, for which they have no credible evidence. Nevertheless, there is a place for them in a just society. The norms of rational and moral thought help us to understand the importance of individual rights, but they do not define the sources of value and meaning to individuals, nor do they set the boundaries of liberal toleration. As critics of liberalism have often pointed out, adherence to tradition, including the symbols and practices of religion and culture, commonly generates a sense of belonging and identity for group members. Group norms and practices are sometimes accepted without rational or moral justification. Nevertheless, they are a source of acceptable pluralism and multiculturalism in a liberal society, provided that they are consistent with the individual rights of both members and nonmembers.19 The same rights, liberties, and opportunities needed to support rational and moral inquiry also protect people’s right to adhere to traditions and cultural practices they find meaningful, whether or not those practices would survive rational and moral scrutiny. Public reasoning guided by the norms of justice bears some resemblance to moral reasoning, yet the norms of justice are more permissive than the norms of morality. Within limits, they affirm the rights of individuals and groups to pursue conceptions of value that are morally f lawed. The demands of justice lie in between self-interest and the demands of moral consideration.20 Just citizens need not be altruistic, benevolent, generous, kind, or even all that caring toward others. Justice permits people to be indifferent or self-interested, provided their behavior is not unfair to other people. All members of society must respect the equal standing and entitlements of their compatriots. Self and group-interested ends can be accommodated by liberal norms of justice, provided that they do not infringe on any person’s rights, liberties, or fair opportunities. Another way to put this point is that liberal justice involves moral commitment at an institutional level. Politically reasonable people will respect fair terms of cooperation understood as institutional requirements of justice. But justice does not require that people exemplify commitment to a liberal morality more thoroughly in their conduct. Reasonable pluralism does not require agents to engage in moral reasoning as they negotiate their personal and social relationships, generally speaking. It permits self and group-interested agents, within the limits imposed by the institutional requirements of justice. This means that certain forms of bias and group preference are tolerable. The broad scope of liberal toleration leads to a problem. Permissible personal forms of bias and exclusion threaten to undermine the requirements of justice by eroding support for just institutions in the background culture. Especially threatened are fair opportunities. Forms of historical injustice may linger in the public culture and erode the fairness of consideration for open positions. Or

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they may be produced anew through legal forms of individual and group preference and bias.21 Injustice persists through cultural practices, social structures, and group norms, not only in objectionable institutional policy and legal norms. Even when unjust legal norms and institutional policies are overturned, historical injustice might persist or be rekindled in civic life. As a result, injustices from the past – particularly surrounding race, ethnicity, or religion – become a source of entrenched social inequality decades or even hundreds of years later. In the United States, being white, Christian, and heterosexual increases one’s job opportunities, social status, and prospects for obtaining positions of political and social inf luence. This is partly because group bias and norms of exclusion operate in the background culture. Of course, liberal theories of justice must distinguish between pluralism and acceptable pluralism. The scope of toleration is defined by acceptable pluralism, not the mere fact of pluralism.22 Permissible worldviews must be compatible with principles of liberal justice, which do not permit institutional policies that favor the social exclusion or subordination of disfavored groups. As I have stressed, worldviews belonging to tolerable pluralism must respect the basic rights and liberties of all members of society, which include equal standing and the rights of nondiscrimination. Yet among worldviews that respect the institutional requirements of justice will be those that do not accept the norms of equality in practice – in daily life. Some people’s affinities, their choice of friends, neighbors, partners, and associates, exemplify patterns of bias and social hierarchy. These patterns have pernicious effects over time. In particular, differential access to social networks determines a subject’s degree of cultural capital – the leverage a person gains from her social connections and know-how for personal advancement – and this affects whether social inequalities are reproduced. Social networks extend well into and, in fact, help to organize the informal sphere of a society’s background culture. Access to social networks is vital to a person’s life prospects. It enables some people to showcase their talents and deprives others of the same opportunities. Access to social networks is complex; it typically requires an integration of cognition, identity, performance, and emotion that enables a subject to engage with the network.23 The complexity of integration with a social network implies that social alienation and the dynamics of disadvantage can occur along several lines. For example, a person might understand a task without adapting to an expected cultural performance style, and this might disadvantage her. Forms of bias may be disguised in an evaluation of a person’s qualifications when this evaluation depends on norms of articulateness and dispassion.24 These norms do not track intelligence, knowledge, skills, or motivation per se; they are cultural norms that privilege forms of expression typical of people with social privilege and high levels of formal education. Iris Young summarizes empirical findings in this way: “The speech culture of white, middle-class men tends to be more controlled, without significant gesture and expression or emotion. The speech culture of women, racialized or ethnicized minorities, and working-class people, on the other hand, often is, or is perceived

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to be, more excited and embodied, values more the expression of emotion, uses figurative language, modulates tones of voice, and gestures widely.”25 Norms that govern the expression of thought and emotion function unfairly to restrict the openness of positions by disadvantaging certain candidates, especially members of historically marginalized groups. Generally speaking, because they lack social and cultural capital, members of these groups are less successful in securing opportunities to which they are entitled. Cultural identity, which often corresponds to religious or racial difference, is a source of pride and group identity that can support in-group partiality. Consider in-group tendencies. Advantaged individuals tend to form alliances that track these differences – forming exclusive pairings and residential communities and aiming to maintain for their offspring whatever advantages they have accrued. This affects the social distribution of material goods and resources. In-group tendencies might also be inf luenced more directly by a society’s history of injustice. The stigma of membership in a disfavored group might persist and be hard to eliminate, even were disparities of income and wealth to be reduced. Members of historically disadvantaged groups might be subject to discrimination in ways that are not overtly pernicious. They might be treated as dangerous, or socially invisible, or their presence as uncomfortable, or their accomplishments as less significant, in comparison with members of their historically more advantaged peer group.26 This kind of biased treatment, however informal, erodes equal standing. Stigma invites overt hostility toward outsiders, but it also supports more subtle forms of bias.27 The operations of bias and stigma in the background culture can produce entrenched forms of social disadvantage despite efforts to ensure that social institutions are not unjust. Even when members of historically disadvantaged groups do not encounter overt discrimination, anxiety about the possibility of being treated unfairly or of confirming group stereotypes and low expectations can lead to underperformance or lack of motivation to engage with available opportunities. Psychological studies confirm that the perception of bias and unfairness, whether accurate or not, significantly affects the performance of historically marginalized groups via “stereotype threat.”28 Individuals tend to underperform when they are anxious about confirming negative stereotypes or receiving unfair treatment. In these ways – the unequal distribution of social and cultural capital, the detrimental effects of in-group partiality, and the impact of “stereotype threat” – the liberties and opportunities available to members of disadvantaged groups are compromised. Fair and accurate cross-group assessments of individual talent and motivation as the basis of qualification for desired social positions are spoiled. The dynamics of historical injustice inf luences hiring and promotion decisions, for example, and the recognition of educational achievement or creative accomplishments. As a result, a disproportionate number of those who are least well off are members of historically disadvantaged groups. A politically liberal requirement of toleration comes with some real costs. A cost of protecting the personal liberties of conscience, speech, and association

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is the possible persistence of injustice. The legacy of historical injustice presents an ongoing challenge to liberal democracies in view of the latitude offered by a liberal account of individual rights for individuals and groups of people to adhere to cultural norms and social practices of their choosing. Job discrimination is impermissible, but it can be difficult to identify and to redress, when social norms in the background culture are themselves biased. As I have noted, acceptable pluralism restricts permissible worldviews to those that respect the rights and liberties of all members of society. But the historical dynamics of individual and group identity can perpetuate social inequalities even when they do not directly violate individual rights. The practice of liberty may undermine the requirements of justice even when it does not involve overt acts of discrimination.

Historical redress To remedy this problem, liberal toleration should be paired with a public commitment to redressing historical injustice. It is not enough for a theory of justice to describe the institutional parameters of justice. It must also outline strategies for redressing background injustice. Historical redress should be understood as a requirement of justice, but it should not involve restricting personal liberties. It must attend to the public culture. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu demonstrated courage and leadership by speaking forcefully in favor of the removal of confederate monuments in the city of New Orleans. He not only defended the removals; he also explained why it was important to do so. In a public address, he stated, These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for. After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city. . . [T]he Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered.29 This example of leadership engages with historical injustice and its legacy. The mayor’s words exemplify a measure of reparative justice through naming a historical injustice and repudiating it. The historical injustice is one that has persisted in multiple registers of disadvantage for Black Americans: measures of income, wealth, employment, and health, among others. Its symbols are celebrated by some southerners as glorified remnants of their historically rooted

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White Southern identity. Mayor Landrieu’s speech instructs the public about history and the significance of history to the present; at the same time, the city of New Orleans acted to remove symbols celebrating injustice. Other American cities have made symbolic efforts to commemorate historical struggles against racial injustice. For example, in August 2017, Philadelphia erected a memorial statue in honor of Octavius V. Catto, a Black American who, after the civil war, fought against racial segregation and advocated ratification of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which extended the franchise to recently emancipated Black American men.30 On a federal level, for example, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in 2007 commemorating the 70th anniversary of Mendez v. Westminster, a U.S. federal court case that ended the segregation of Mexican American children in Orange County California schools. Three years later, President Obama recognized Sylvia Mendez, then 81 years old, with a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Gestures like these are opportunities for public education. Of course, public statements and symbolic gestures require the support of a broader policy agenda if they are to be taken seriously and eventuate in lasting change. Reparative justice must involve concerted effort to reroute social dynamics that are an obstacle to fair opportunities. The use of institutional incentives need not be at odds with personal choice and freedom in social relations. For example, incentives directed against de facto racial barriers in education, hiring, promotion, and housing could take a variety of forms.31 Government subsidized low-interest home mortgages and business loans for historically burdened racial minorities would help to reverse the consequences of decades of discriminatory and predatory lending practices.32 Federal and state funding could be increased for voluntary school integration programs such as METCO (Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity), which buses nonwhite students from Boston to better quality schools outside the city, so that suburban school districts would have more to gain financially by participating. State agencies could adopt or strengthen policies to contract with firms that are racially inclusive or, at least, sincerely seek to be through internal mandate that minority candidates must be interviewed (a practice adopted by the National Football League, for instance) and actual hires charted over time.33 My present task is not to evaluate possible measures of historical redress for efficacy or constitutionality.34 Rather, I am stressing that a politically liberal theory of justice should make the case that a society encumbered by a history of historical injustice has an obligation to confront this past and to take substantive measures to rectify entrenched inequalities. The work of historical redress is called for in the civic realm as well as in the formal realm of law and politics. Without it, objectionable disparities are likely to persist and be reproduced.

Conclusion Philosophers have underestimated the consequences of liberal toleration. The priority a liberal theory of justice places on individual rights and liberties permits

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acceptable pluralism to include some views that are irrational and even morally objectionable. The legacy of historical injustice presents an ongoing challenge to liberal democracies in view of the latitude offered by a liberal account of individual rights for individuals and groups of people to adhere to cultural norms and social practices of their choosing. Acceptable pluralism restricts permissible worldviews to those that respect the basic rights and liberties of all members of society. But, I have argued, the historical dynamics of individual and group identity can perpetuate social inequalities even when they do not directly violate individual rights. The practice of liberty undermines requirements of justice even when it does not involve overt acts of discrimination or other direct violations of individual rights and entitlements. This presents a difficulty for a liberal democratic society. Rights and liberties have priority within its ideals of justice, but protecting basic rights and liberties may permit injustice to persist in the background culture. Thus, it is important for a liberal democratic society to acknowledge and respond to the dynamics of historical injustice, but it must do so without objectionably restricting individual liberties. I have argued that a just society would redress the legacy of historical injustice through efforts by the state to identify and rectify the persisting dynamics of injustice in the background culture. It can do so through measures that include memorials, museums, national holidays, and history curriculums.35 Such investments in remembrance and memorialization give weight to acts of political speech, including apologies, which can seem empty when not backed by substantive displays of commitment.36 Other measures include affirmative action, cash payments, and other forms of redistributive justice. The point is that a liberal principle of equal rights and liberties requires a supporting commitment to reparative justice. In a society marked by historical injustice, an anti-discrimination policy alone cannot rectify entrenched injustice. People’s relation to their opportunities must be underwritten by social conditions of fair access, which means opportunities must be genuinely accessible to them. To enable this, a society encumbered by a history of injustice must impress the meaning of that injustice within its collective consciousness and take explicit and direct measures to rectify entrenched inequalities. The work of historical redress is called for in the civic realm – to overcome historically entrenched disparities in schools, residential communities, and places of work – as well as in the formal realm of law and politics. It can proceed piecemeal, through education, politics, art, cultural engagement, and the provision of financial resources and incentives, and it can proceed incrementally. Without reparative justice, however, entrenched disparities are likely to persist. Granting priority to individual rights and liberties, as liberals do, means extending the proper scope of toleration to encompass the besmirched pluralism that is the legacy of the practice of liberty. This legacy necessitates a commitment to reparative justice.

Acknowledgement I am grateful to Lionel K. McPherson for conversations on the themes of this paper.

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Notes 1 See Jason Andrew Cohen, “What Tolerance Is,” Ethics 115 (October 2004): 68–95. On the distinction between toleration as a political concept and tolerance as an ethical attitude, see Jürgen Habermas, “Intolerance and Discrimination,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 1 (January 2003): 2–12. 2 Cohen, “What Tolerance Is,” pp. 71–76. 3 See John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 59. 4 See William A. Galston, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and George Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism (London: Continuum, 2002). For discussion, see Alex Zacaras, “A Liberal Pluralism: Isaiah Berlin and John Stuart Mill” and “Reply to Galston and Crowder,” Review of Politics 75(1) (Winter 2013): 69–96 and 111–114. See also Barbara Herman, “Pluralism and the Community of Moral Judgment,” Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 60–80. Cf. Rainer Forst, “Toleration, Justice and Reason,” in Catriona McKinnon and Dario Castiglione, eds., The Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 71–85. For illiberal versions of an argument from pluralism, see John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), and Stephen D. Smith, “Toleration and Liberal Commitments,” Nomos 48 (2008): 243–280. 5 See Erin I. Kelly and Lionel McPherson, “On Tolerating the Unreasonable,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (2001): 38–55. 6 John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin I. Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 111, also 104–105. 7 On the priority of liberty, see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 214–220, 474–480. 8 See Bernard Williams, “Internal and External Reasons,” in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and his “Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame,” Logos: Philosophical Issues in Christian Perspective 10 (1989): 1–11. Cf. Christine Korsgaard, “Skepticism about Practical Reason,” Journal of Philosophy 83 ( January 1990): 19–25. 9 See Williams, “Internal and External Reasons.” 10 Cf. Christine M. Korsgaard. “Kant’s Formula of Humanity,” Kant-Studien 77 (1986): 183–202. 11 Cf. McDowell’s charge that Williams’ concept of practical rationality is psychologistic. John McDowell, “Might There Be External Reasons?,” in J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, eds., World, Mind and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 77. 12 Hume cautions us against assuming that violent passions are strong, and calm passions are weak. To the contrary, he argues, strong, calm passions can prevail over weak, violent ones. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 418–419. 13 Economists commonly rely on this notion of revealed preference. 14 Williams also argues that whether a given deliberative process is sound (and thus correctly specifies reasons for us) sometimes depends on the contingent matter of how things actually turn out. In such cases, he argues, the test of deliberative success may depend in large part on the agent’s retrospective identification with his decision. See Bernard Williams, “Moral Luck,” in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 20–39. 15 For discussions of the features of ‘constructivist’ accounts, see John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 89–129; Thomas E. Hill, Jr., “Kantian Constructivism in Ethics,” in his Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Brian Barry, Theories of Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30

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Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), appendix 4; Christine M. Korsgaard, “The Reasons We Can Share: An Attack on the Distinction Between AgentRelative and Agent-Neutral Values,” Social Philosophy and Policy 10 (1993): 24–51; and Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton, “Toward Fin de Siecle Ethics: Some Trends,” Philosophical Review 101 (January 1992), especially pp. 137–144. Cf. Harry G. Frankfurt, “On Caring,” in Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 175. See T. M. Scanlon, “Contractualism and Utilitarianism,” in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See Erin I. Kelly, “Personal Concern,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (2000): 115–136. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). See John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 16–17, 50. I thank Ingrid Salvatore for emphasizing the possibility that injustice is continuously produced in the background culture, despite reparative justice efforts. Joshua Cohen, “Moral Pluralism and Political Consensus,” in D. Copp, J. Hampton, and J. Roemer, eds., The Idea of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 270–291. See Gary Alan Fine and Corey D. Fields, “Culture and Microsociology: The Anthill and the Veldt,” The Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 619 (2008): 130–148. Iris Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 38–39. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 39–40. Glenn C. Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 95–96. See Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1963). See Claude M. Steele, Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2010); Geoffrey L. Cohen and Claude M. Steele, “A Barrier of Mistrust: How Negative Stereotypes Affect Cross-Race Mentoring,” in J. Aronson, ed., Improving Academic Achievement: Impact of Psychological Factors on Education (San Diego: Academic Press, 2002); Yuen J. Huo, Heather J. Smith, Tom R. Tyler, and E. Allan Lind, “Superordinate Identification, Subgroup Identification, and Justice Concerns: Is Separatism the Problem, Is Assimilation the Answer?,” Psychological Science 7 (1996): 40–45; Albert Bandura, Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986); Carol S. Dweck, Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development (Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis/ Psychology Press, 1999). “Mitch Landrieu’s Speech on the Removal of Confederate Monuments in New Orleans.” The New York Times. May 23. 2017. Op-ed. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/ 05/23/opinion/mitch-landrieus-speech-transcript.html Born in 1839 in South Carolina, Cato successfully led efforts to integrate streetcars in Philadelphia. He was 32 years old when, in his official capacity as a National Guardsman assigned to protect newly registered African-American voters, he was killed on his way to a polling site in South Philadelphia. In New York City public schools, the average enrollment is almost 75% Black and Hispanic, with some schools over 95%, and the average is considerably higher in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Baltimore and Detroit. See Jonathan Kozol, “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid,” Harper’s Magazine, September 1, 2005. Regarding de facto racial segregation, including housing, see Orlando Patterson, “Equality,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas 11 (Winter 2009), http://democracyjournal. org/magazine/11/equality/. On the history of racist U.S. housing policy, see Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, May 21, 2014. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/ the-case-for-reparations/361631/.

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33 The NFL’s “Rooney Rule,” adopted in 2002, requires all NFL teams to interview at least one nonwhite candidate for all open head coaching positions. By 2006, the number of African American coaches in the league grew from 6% to 22%. See Brian W. Collins, “Tackling Unconscious Bias in Hiring Practices: The Plight of the Rooney Rule,” New York University Law Review 82 (2007): 870–912. 34 An extensive literature is available on measures of historical redress. See, e.g., David Lyons, Confronting Injustice: Moral History and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Colleen Murphy, A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Michael T. Martin and Marilyn Yaquinto, eds., Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States: On Reparations for Slavery, Jim Crow, and Their Legacies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); John Miller and Rahul Kumar, eds., Reparations: Interdisciplinary Inquiries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Howard McGary, Race and Social Justice (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999); and Bernard R. Boxill, Blacks and Social Justice, rev. ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992). 35 Truth commissions, war crimes trials, and narrative renderings of oppression are modes of public acknowledgement. See Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 68–72. See also Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 48–53; Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 135–136; and Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson, eds., Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 36 See Jeffrey M. Blustein, Forgiveness and Remembrance: Remembering Wrongdoing in Personal and Public Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Nick Smith, I Was Wrong: The Meaning of Apologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Charles Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See also Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001, orig. pub. 1947).

11 SHARING A CONCEPTION OF JUSTICE, SHARING A CONCEPTION OF THE GOOD Liberalism as a pluralist theory vs. pluralism as a non-liberal theory1 Ingrid Salvatore Pluralist and non-pluralist societies If we ask people whether we can make moral judgements about the social practices or institutions of other societies, it is common to receive a direct and unproblematic, positive answer. It is common for us to think that the caste system is unjust and that prescriptions against women’s education or the practice of marrying them at the age of six to men in their sixties are morally unacceptable. However, as soon as we attempt to consider whether the people living under these institutions are accordingly acting unjustly, our intuitive judgements become unsteady. Not only are we not ready to extend the judgements we make about the laws, practices, and institutions of societies to the actions conforming to them, but we are also rather inclined to view the people acting under their bounds as being obliged to do what they have done. In accommodating these not fully consistent intuitions, we can easily arrive at the conclusion that, even if to us, as members of a certain society (or group), a foreign practice may appear unjust, for the people belonging to that society (group), who act according to the rules of its institutions, things are very different. On ref lection, we should stop judging foreign societies. I collect under the head of cultural pluralism a range of different positions – communitarianism, forms of multiculturalism, identitarian theories, anti-secularist positions, and, perhaps, forms of the new realism as well – that promise to vindicate such a conclusion. Though my aim is to show that cultural pluralism cannot keep its promises, I believe that its theoretical strength is not yet completely understood, despite a long-lasting debate on the topic. I hope that the attempt to provide more clarity regarding it can shed light on a plausible defence of those views (primarily liberalism) that oppose it. For liberals, in contrast to cultural pluralism, it is not the case that moral judgements concerning institutions might depend on our different perspectives.

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Institutions are just or unjust, independent of the society of which they are part, and the obligations people have under them exist only if they are just. As liberals see them, the obligations that society imposes upon us, required for the sake of our collective interest, are such that we might be tempted not to accomplish them, as they are against our private interests or good. Obligations, in this sense, can be seen as burdens; their distribution is important to us. Liberals, in this sense, do not affirm that individuals’ private interests always prevail over the collective good (Nozick, 1974). Justice, on the contrary, is intended to establish when this is not the case. However, they also neither accept that individual interests ever prevail, and nor do they believe that there is a correspondence between private and common good. For liberals, essentially, we cannot assume as given a shared conception of good (Rawls, 1999a, pp. 27–28, 348). Modern societies are characterised by the fact that people do not share all of their interests. They have different conceptions of the good and different values. They pursue different projects of life, and very different things are considered to be of crucial importance in their lives (Rawls, 1999a, p. 359). As such a plurality of conceptions of the good is seen by liberals as an unavoidable internal phenomenon of a complex society, grounding obligations on a shared conception of the good is unrealistic from their point of view and can be obtained only with a sensible amount of oppression (Rawls, 1996, p. 77). This is why the protection of (some) individual, divergent interests is crucial to them. Cultural pluralists disagree. They claim that grounding obligations on such a forethought distributive view is not necessarily the only way to conceive them. Different societies may have very different ways to ground and conceive obligations (Bilgrami, 2014, pp. 58, 64; Sandel, 1983, p. 146). Pluralism, thus, plays a crucial role in both liberalism and cultural pluralism. But while liberal pluralism addresses the coexistence of many individuals within a society, each one maintaining her own irreducible values, cultural pluralism addresses the existence of many different societies in the world, each embodying its own specific moral values. The difference could not be more profound. From the liberal perspective, justice is distinct from the good, and any society will be just, only in so far as it is pluralist. On the contrary, when pluralism is conceived as the outcome of different societies embodying different values in their shared cultures, each society, internally, is an essentially non-pluralist society, where no distinction can be traced between the personal values and the political conceptions regulating their members’ common lives. The political conception is a conception of the good, sharing of which is essentially what it means to belong to a society (Sandel, 1983; Williams, 2005, p. 32). This shared conception of the good, not a distributive conception of justice, grounds our obligations. In contrast to liberals, cultural pluralists (pluralists hereinafter) reject the assumption that to conceive society as sharing a conception of the good is to conceive it as an organic unity. They accuse liberals of making a parody of their position, wrongly imputing to them the requirement of a social uniformity that they do not need to endorse. Sharing a culture, they claim, has nothing to do

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with oppression and is perfectly compatible with disagreements, disputes, social changes, new solutions, and persistent differences in styles of life. Liberals simply refuse to see the point they raise (Kukathas and Pettit, 1990). Pluralists do not deny that conf licts or controversies concerning our reciprocal obligations can and will arise in societies. Rather, they deny that there is only one way in which they must be solved. For pluralists, the criteria for assessing these kinds of disputes and disagreements are internal to the society. Different societies have different ways of conceiving their conf licts and different ways of resolving them. In this sense, there is not one conception of justice regulating societies but different conceptions of the good. In fact, there are as many of these conceptions as there are cultures. In defending their view of pluralism as an internal aspect of society, liberals only promote their own conception of the good (Sandel, 1983, p. 11); moreover, it is a disputable conception of the good in that it is aimed at the defence of some (perhaps moderate) form of self-interested egoism. Although my aim is to refute such an objection, as stated earlier, my primary interest is in clarifying its nature by trying to grasp the important insight that it embodies. It is helpful, for this purpose, to start with something that pluralists and liberals deeply share, by introducing a third perspective that they both reject. This perspective, in turn, tells us something about their disagreement.

Conventions Society is not a segment of scattered individuals. It is an environment, we can say, where individuals live strongly interconnected lives under systems of shared rules. What is the nature of such rules, and how did they emerge? What does it mean for us to follow rules? The most elegant and parsimonious account of how societies as regulated environments arise is one that explains social (and moral) norms in terms of conventions: the outcomes of (implicit) agreements among individuals, who, living in conditions of interdependence, have an interest in achieving coordination (Binmore, 2011; Lewis, 2002; Sugden, 2005). The elegance of the approach depends on its foundation in the mathematics of game theory. Its parsimony, depends on the way social norms operate as norms of rationality, with the possible addition of “natural human sentiments” (Binmore, 2011, pp. 13–14; Sugden, 2005, p. viii).2 It is somewhat paradoxical that game theory provides the bases for explaining the emergence of social and moral norms, given its traditional connection to those “cold-war” situations, emblematically represented by the prisoner dilemma, in which people, in fact, fail to coordinate. If they did, they would both gain, but reciprocal mistrust causes them to favor the less attractive choice of minimising their possible losses instead of maximising their gains. Yet, although the prisoner dilemma is certainly the most famous “game” in game theory, it does not exhaust the theory. According to some game theorists, conditions can arise that show

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how pursuing our interests does not condemn us to prisoner dilemma situations. More cooperative ways of interacting can be proven to arise, even in contexts in which conf lict plays a role. The essentials are discussed later. Regardless of how they are featured, the metaphors of games are meant to represent situations in which people (the players) must solve strategic problems. A strategic problem is “solved” when each individual replies best (for her) to the others’ strategies. Combinations of strategies shown to be the best mutual responses are called Nash equilibria, after their inventor. A set of choices is an equilibrium if no one complains about the choices. Given the others’ choices, no one could have benefitted by acting differently (Lewis, 2002, p. 8). One essential aspect of equilibria is that, generally, games have more than one solution. For instance, three people who, for some reason, want to picnic can share the food they bring in many different ways. Granted that they mostly want to picnic, the point is that, if Amy chooses to bring bread, Brian must choose to bring either wine or salami. And if Brian chooses salami, Connie must choose to bring wine. However, it changes nothing if Brian chooses wine, and Amy and Connie act accordingly. From a conceptual point of view, the existence of multiple equilibria is a perfectly understandable condition. In practice, however, people are able to coordinate only if they succeed in picking one of the choices. But which one? And why? The usual and easiest way to make sense of people’s coordination is with verbal agreements. However, it would be a serious limitation to the theory if verbal agreements were the only way for us to coordinate. Coordination, as stated, is meant to explain society, and it would be difficult to determine the language used to conclude such a verbal agreement.3 In literature on game theory, focal points bridge the gap (Shelling, 1980, pp. 56–58). A focal point is any prominent aspect of a situation that provides the basis for forming an expectation (and an expectation on an expectation) about what each person does (Shelling, 1980, p.  57). Depending on the circumstances, anything can be a focal point. The number one, the main square, and the biggest church are the usual examples indicated in the literature.4 The essence of the idea is that once coordination is obtained one time, whatever it is, when the same situation is faced again, assuming that same conditions persist, the solution that was adopted the first time is an obvious way to behave again. If this is repeated many times, sooner or later, shared knowledge emerges about what to do when that particular situation exists, and a convention is set (Lewis, 2002, pp. 36, 56). Two aspects must capture our attention here. First, as there are many equivalent equilibria, regardless of the convention that arises, in specific circumstances, many others could equally arise. This means that, no matter which rule people follow, when they do a certain thing, exactly the same thing could be done by following a different rule. Assuming that Amy, Brian, and Connie end up picnicking according to a given distribution, they could have picnicked according to a convention that distributed the food in a different way. It is, in fact, an essential

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characteristic of conventions that when a convention arises, there is at least one more that exists that could have equally arisen (Lewis, 2002, pp. 22, 24). A second element is that, for a convention to arise, it is enough that each person prefers picnicking to staying at home. Yet picnics are just picnics. We don’t give them importance. When this is the case, it might truly happen that, if anything exists that enables us to converge on a given distribution of the food, a convention is established regarding how to distribute the food. In cases like this, in fact, people are relatively indifferent about which food they bring. Admittedly, there are some rules of this kind. Family members often have a given place to put the house key or a given drawer for skimmers in the kitchen. They do not care at all about which place or which drawer, and so they don’t care about which rule gets established. They are only (mostly) interested in having a rule. Similar rules can be observed among neighbours. These forms of coordination can be seen as forms of pure coordination games, characterised by the fact that the only thing in which the people are interested is convergence, and divergent interests, if they are present at all, play no significant role (Lewis, 2002, p. 36). Yet to assume that people are always this indifferent about the ways to coordinate is extremely implausible, even for picnics, we must say. After all, bread is cheap, wine is costly, and salami might be more difficult to obtain. Each prefers the most convenient (for him/her) food; they will be in conf lict about this. Once a conf lict is added, however, it is much more difficult to assume that a convention can be established as easily as before. If Amy wants to picnic only on the condition that she is the one to bring the bread, but Brian adopts the same position, then they picnic only if one of the two has a reason to believe (expect) that the other converges with him/her about his/her favoured solution. However, if neither of them has such a reason, then what they have is a good reason to stay home. It might seem plausible that rationality suggests that they should behave in a wiser way. But the prisoner dilemma, the tragedy of commons, and the problem of public goods all teach us that this is not so, providing one of the bases for scepticism about the conventionalist account of norms in the social context, in which conf lict must be assumed to play a relevant role (Elster, 1991, p. 15; Hargreaves Heap et al., 1992). What evolutionary game theorists maintain, instead, is that prisoner dilemma situations are plausible in games that are destined never to be repeated again but become less and less credible in repeated games in which people interact for an indefinite amount of time.5 Time transforms pure conf lict games into mixed games, i.e., games in which, although a conf lictual element continues to exist, a mutual interest in converging operates to cause people to grow wiser in order to avoid self-destructive conf licts. To understand this point, we must imagine Amy, Brian, and Connie as a team engaged in a tournament. We might imagine they are required to organise the picnic. When they succeed in cooperating and reaching organisation,

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they are rewarded, but they receive nothing when they fail to coordinate. The rewards might be food, money, days of life, offspring, scores, or anything else they might want or like. To be sure, competition within the group does not disappear abruptly. Many features of the situation place them in conf lict with each other, leading them to act strategically against each other to achieve the best (for her) agreement (Shelling, 1980, p.  99ff ). Nonetheless, each time the strategy each of them adopts does not coordinate with that of the others, they all receive nothing. The essential idea is that, regardless of how long they might fail to coordinate, the pressure for rewards will, sooner or later, enable them to discover the proper strategy for coordinating, even in the presence of internal conflict. This generates their conventions. Clearly, a convention arises only if each has no reason to switch to another strategy, under the assumption that better strategies supplant those that are worse (Sugden, 2005, p. 62). But, given this proviso, many possible conventions might be established. In our picnic case, for instance, a convention may arise, establishing that Amy and Brian each must bring half of the bread and half of the wine for each, or there could be one according to which Amy brings wine one week and Brian the next. However, nothing prevents the possibility that the convention is one according to which Amy always brings both bread and wine and Brian brings nothing. Depending on the given conditions, Brian might be able to make Amy accept this if she has no better alternative. Once a convention has arisen, it is in the interest of anyone who follows the convention that the others follow it, too, even if the convention is not in her interest and she would strongly have preferred that a different convention had arisen (Sugden, 2005, p. 160). From the point of view of justice, this seems to be a very poor result, indeed. One might be tempted to say that one who is highly disadvantaged by an agreement, rather than accepting it, has been constrained to enter it. However, the problem with affirming this notion, according to some conventionalists, is that it requires an independent standard of fairness to which we are not entitled to appeal. Fairness, according to such view, works in the opposite way. Our own conventions set our standards of fairness (Sugden, 2005, p. 164). This means that people conforming to a convention, whatever it is, come to develop not only an expectation that others conform to it but also a sense of being entitled to expect conformity to it. For different conventions, what people come to see as conformity, which is due to them by the others, is different. Not only is Amy expected to bring both bread and wine, but Brian begins to have some kind of moral right to expect her to do this, and Amy feels discomfort if she does not do it (Sugden, 2005, pp. 8, 154). Understandable dissatisfaction with this result might lead us to try to improve the moral quality of our implicit agreements. This can be done with the addition of the empathetic preferences we are assumed to presumably have (Binmore, 2011, p. 114). Empathetic preferences need not be and are not taken to be part of our personal preferences, given that we do not care about strangers in the same way that we care about ourselves or about our beloved (Binmore, 2011,

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p. 116). Nonetheless, although empathetic preferences are different from personal preferences, the suggestion is that “most of us are capable of treating almost anybody as a relative of some kind” (Binmore, 2011, p. 112). If we are entitled to add empathetic preferences, in selecting how to act, each takes into account the point of view of the others. If Brian empathises with Amy, in considering how they should divide their food, he does not choose the course of action available to him that maximises his welfare but one that maximises the welfare of both, converging on a fairer way to share. Recognisably, this is essentially a utilitarian view. Interestingly, however, it can still represent a conventionalist viewpoint, in that people may empathise in very different ways, taking into consideration very different aspects and features of the respective positions and situations (Binmore, 2011, p. 125). This is the aspect that is of most interest to us. Whether with the help of empathetic preferences that cause us to converge on equilibria that we consider to be fair or under the assumption that all fairness depends on our development of a sense of being entitled to expect conformity, conventionalists assume that rules arise for the sake of reciprocal advantage and that people follow them for this very reason and would have followed different rules had different ones arisen. While it is impossible to overlook the importance of this perspective, so simply and elegantly explaining why it is rational to have social norms, for reasons that only partly overlap and with different emphases on those that they share, both liberals and pluralists reject such a view. For both of them, conventions cannot make sense of what social systems are.

Social practices In 1955, Rawls published an essay titled “Two Concepts of Rules”, tracing a distinction between what he called summary rules and practice rules (Rawls, 1999b, p. 34).6 Rather ironically, Rawls, at that time, defended a version of rule utilitarianism against what he identified as the standard understanding of utilitarianism, viz. a version of what we have just seen (p. 21). As everyone knows, Rawls later became one of the main critics of utilitarianism, never abandoning, however, the basic idea of his essay and, in particular, the distinction between the logic of an action falling under a system of rules or practice and its justification and the logic of the system itself and its justification.7 A conf lation of the two, according to Rawls, is what exposes (the standard version of ) utilitarianism to insurmountable problems with the notion of rules and following a rule (p. 22). To understand the point Rawls raises, we must distinguish the two senses in which, for instance, the question of why somebody has been arrested can be taken. On one side, we can take it as a question that asks why the police arrested John. So taken, this is an internal question meant to gain an understanding of what that person did to be arrested. The proper answer here mentions John’s actions, which, based on a given system of rules, qualifies John’s act as a crime for which he should be punished (p.  22). On the other side, however, we can take the

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question as an external one, concerning not the reason why that person has been arrested but the reasons why people are arrested at all and the reasons why we (they) have rules for arresting people in general.8 Regardless of the appropriate answer to this latter question (utilitarianism at that time), it is not the same as the answer to the first question. The common conf lation of the two, according to Rawls, ref lects the common conf lation of the two concepts of rules. Claiming that no principled distinction can be traced here, Rawls points out that there are certain acts, such as driving, eating, walking, sleeping, or picnicking (maybe), that are present for us, independent of whether they are regulated or not. We can say that people can walk, drive, drink, and sleep well before any system of rules arises. In this sense, they do not require being described as such, an antecedent system of rules (28). If, as a matter of convenience, these acts come to be regulated, they can be regulated one way or another. However, not all of our acts share such a nature. There exist, in fact, different kinds of acts that are not independent of a given system of rules (p. 37) and that stop being the acts that they are as soon as the system changes. The role that rules play, with respect to these kinds of acts, is different from the role that rules play in regulating previously existing acts. They do not merely regulate those acts but are constitutive of them, making it possible for them to be what they are (Taylor, 1990, p. 34). Games and social rituals are recurrent examples of constitutive rules. The acts of scoring a goal, making a fault, and checkmating, to be what they are, depend on the systems of rules constituting the game. For example, simply kicking a ball into a net is not scoring a goal – in itself, it is just a movement (Rawls, 1999b, p. 37; Taylor, 1990, p. 34). By specifying the conditions for an act to be that act, the constitutive rules make the case that only a player kicking a ball into the net scores a goal. The umpire doing exactly the same act does nothing, or, if the rules of the game qualify her act as such, she makes a fault. A system of rules, thus, not only specifies what it is for an act to be that act but also defines who is allowed to commit the act and when and how the act is allowed, forbidden, or required, attributing positions and roles to each of the participants. This being done, nothing remains for players to deliberate. They cannot decide to allow the umpire to score goals, because if they do, the umpire no longer acts as an umpire, and what she does cannot be qualified as a goal. Such people would no longer simply play soccer but would play some other game. When rules are constitutive, that is, in contrast to regulative rules, it is not the case that the very same thing can be done according to this or that rule. If you change the rule, you change the thing. This does not mean that systems of rules are immutable objects. In fact, any sufficiently complex system includes rules for changing the rules (Hart, 1997, pp. 95–96). Sports federations can certainly change the rules, and they often do. But in so far as those rules are part of the system itself, the possibility of changing the rules does not contradict the very idea of constitutive rules; only those entitled to change the rules can do it (Rawls, 1999b, p. 38). Players, as players, cannot decide, apart from the space for the strategies that a game embodies as part of being that game, if and how to apply the constitutive rules.

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Punishing, promising, arresting, prosecuting, legislating, marrying, stealing (which depends on ownership), etc. are all acts of this kind. Not only do they only exist under systems of rules, but, as before, they are also acts that depend solely on the system. Rules in these cases do not regulate the antecedently given act of punishing. They constitute punishing. Analogously, because an arrest of a person is the act of a policeman stopping her, I can successfully stop a thief, but I cannot arrest her. Only a policeman can do so. It is both the condition under which policemen are policemen and a faculty that they have, under the range of the system, to do that, according to the way our rules constitute the act of arresting. Recognisably, regulative rules exemplify what conventionalists take a rule to be. Constitutive rules are the rules in which we are interested. Because they do not merely describe the diverse ways that crimes, promises, or marriages are regulated but constitute them, they establish what people in a society are permitted, required, prohibited, and entitled to do, and do or do not have the faculty to do, depending on the position occupied. Society, so understood, presents a system of rules or a system of systems of rules that structure different roles and positions, each of which is characterised by different faculties and prohibitions, requirements and permissions, as well as burdens and possibilities, which are attributed to the people occupying them. Such a system is not at all unamendable, as stated above. Rather, any complex system embodies rules for changing the rules and permitting the introduction or abolishment of rules. Moreover, to say that people live under systems of rules does not prevent a certain degree of variation within the society. Quite probably, some people interpret norms in a very rigid way, and some others are much more relaxed. There is a certain degree of disagreement about what a norm requires and so on (Rawls, 1999b, p. 41). In so far as liberals are able to endorse such a view, there is no disagreement between liberals and pluralists (see Taylor, 1990, Chapters 2 and 3 as examples). They both conceive of the society as a system in which different positions are assigned to individuals, as their different burdens and faculties define them. But liberals maintain, in addition, that, no matter how existing social systems are currently organised, certain principles of justice should ground them, specifying a distribution of burdens and faculties, duties and obligations among the members of the society, protecting certain very profound individual interests and configuring a social scheme that, overall, results as acceptable to each (Rawls, 1999a, pp. 4–5). Justice might not be the only condition the different practices and institutions have to satisfy. Efficiency and stability, for instance, are also important criteria. But it is central to the liberal idea that, as a whole, the combination of the institutions by which a social system is constituted has to satisfy, first of all, criteria of justice. Pluralists deny this. According to pluralists, as any social system embodies its own public self-conception, the criteria with which the members of the society evaluate their duties and obligations are internal to the society. We cannot add an extra-social point of view that people must address

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(MacIntyre, 1988, p. 350; Williams, 2005, p. 31). The liberal claim that an existing social systems can be evaluated amounts to saying that a distinction can be traced by explaining the relation that people entertain with the social system in which they live and the position they occupy in it along with the genuine acceptance of its rules. But pretending to do this, for pluralists, objectifies people and ignores their own perspective of the world (MacIntyre, 2007). Surprisingly enough, it is Quine who provides the most solid ground for the pluralist thesis (Kinkaid, 1996, p. 191; Jarvie and Zamora-Bonilla, 2011, p. 18).9

An epistemological background Although it may come as a surprise that Quine plays a role in a debate on the nature of an obligation, it is actually impossible to overstate Quine’s relevance for pluralism. Quine’s sematic holism, ontological relativism, and primacy of the mind (language) over the world have been crucial in shaping pluralists’ conception of cultures. It all begins with “Two Dogma of Empiricism”, the locus classicus of epistemology in which, according to many, once and for all, Quine discharges the existence of any distinction between truths that are true only in virtue of language, analytical truths, and truths that are true in virtue of the world (Quine, 1953). Analytical truths are largely recognised as the logical-positivists’ attempt to solve what might be defined as “the problem of a priori”. The shift from a priori truths to analytical truths is usually considered to begin with Frege’s idea that, contrary to what Kant believed, mathematical statements are analytical. For Frege to prove that mathematics is analytic amounted to proving that mathematics is just a part of logic, which is analysable in terms of definitions and logical laws, taking definitions as part of logic (Coffa, 1993, pp. 64, 76). Frege’s essential idea moves from the basic assumption that there is something essential in the way in which, through language, we are able to communicate, with communication here being understood as the phenomenon according to which, whenever I say something, you understand me only if what I mean is exactly what you mean (Horty, 2007, p.  9). If I say “dog” and you understand me, then, completely independent of how many dogs you and I have seen, which is a reasonably different amount, and which kinds of dogs and under what circumstances, we understand each other only if we both “grasp” the meaning of dog (Coffa, 1993, p. 65). Such grasping of meaning was what analysis was meant to provide. Whether this would have guaranteed communication, distinguishing genuine disagreements from simple misunderstandings and equivocations and eliminating ambiguities, and so on, it also led Frege to conceive of meaning as an extralinguistic entity, autonomously subsisting in a third reign. When Frege’s project failed, it not only appeared clear that mathematics cannot be reduced to logic, but logic itself also appeared to be a much less unproblematic foundation than Frege believed (Quine, 1963, p. 385). What is logical validity itself? And from where is it assumed to come? Could there be more than one logic or more than

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one mathematics? The positivists’ conception of analyticity started at this point, positing conventions as an answer to all of those questions (Coffa, 1993). As they conceived it, conventions were meant to prove that there surely were analytical truths, as logic and mathematics statements as well as statements about meaning, but that they only amounted to statements that were assumed to be true in virtue of the freely adopted linguistic rules that cause them to be true (Burge, 1992, p. 4). Deep traditional questions concerning ontology and knowledge soon succumbed to the same fate. For whether meanings (if they existed) were meant to be our hook-up to the world, ontological questions, according to positivists, are only relative to the conventions we adopt and make no sense apart from them. To quote Quine, “What was once regarded as a theory about the world becomes reconstructed as a convention of language” (Quine, 1949, p. 250). Quine, however, was sceptical (1949), raising doubts about the plausibility of the distinction. There is an obvious intuitiveness, Quine grants, in the distinction between analytical and synthetic statements. Given that truth partly depends on language and partly on the world, it makes sense to consider that, for some of our statements, the world-component shrinks to nothing (Quine, 1953, p. 36). At a deeper level, however, the apparent plausibility of the distinction can be kept only on the basis of the peculiarly strict view of verification that the logical positivists have endorsed. As they see it, in fact, verification is a phenomenon that has a place, statement by statement. But this is not what really happens because verification always takes place against the background of a larger set of implicit assumptions (Quine, 1953, p. 41). If this is true, however, in encountering recalcitrant experiences, we are never told, ipso facto, what exactly went wrong. On the contrary, given the logical interrelation among our beliefs, “there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate” (Quine, 1953, p. 42). In the light of any “single contrary experience”, we can stick to our more general principles “by pleading hallucination”, or we can do the opposite: we can give up our principles, thus making sense of the experience (p.  43). The fact that “latitude” is at our disposal to accommodate our experience means that experience always underdetermines theories, so that reciprocally incompatible theories might all be compatible with experience (p. 44). In a sense, this was already clear to the positivists. In fact, this was exactly the problem they wanted to solve. Constructing languages and their analytical truths, they wanted to distinguish the kind of disagreements we have when we disagree, for instance, about John owning a dog or not, from the very different situation with which we are faced when we disagree about, for example, dogs being barking quadrupeds. Given a language and its conventions, this latter situation is not a disagreement at all. All that it shows is that we do not share the same conventions. The question of what “dog” really means (viz. about what a dog is or if there really are dogs) is senseless. Conventions, it must be emphasised, were not conceived as a study of natural languages. The basic idea was that the enormous improvements of sciences were due to its special method and, in particular, to the clarity of its terminology and to the procedures employed for bringing

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agreement among scientists (Hookway, 1988, p.  27). With the same method, thus, analogous improvement could be produced in philosophy (Burge, 1992, p.  3). What was essential, however, was that the way the methods of sciences were conceived was in terms of conventions. Nothing substantive was forced to adopt a given convention instead of another. They were adopted only on the basis of pragmatic considerations, such as convenience, fruitfulness, or productivity (Burge, 1992, p. 5; Hookway, 1988, p. 31). Once adopted, on the other side, we were bound to follow them. What puzzled Quine was what these pragmatic considerations could ever be (Hookway, 1988, p. 36). To understand the point, we have to consider that, if we assume that dogs are barking animals, it is true by convention that dogs are such a thing. This means that, in facing an animal that is quite similar to a dog, but which meows, it is a priori true (by definition) that it is not a dog (Sober and Hylton, 2000, p. 246). Certainly, saying this does not say much. Nothing prevents us from rejecting such a previous convention and adopting one according to which dogs can meow. But in so far as meanings are conventions, acts of accepting, keeping, or rejecting them must be taken as essentially different from what we do when we accept or reject an empirical truth. The problem is that it is quite unclear what, apart from an overall consideration of our system of beliefs, can ever cause us to establish if we should exclude something from being a dog or that dogs are barking animals. Once we understand the holistic nature of verification, it appears simply arbitrary to distinguish the method for accepting certain rules for forming our beliefs from what we do once we have accepted those rules. On the contrary, it is necessarily from the inside of our system of beliefs as a whole that we evaluate what to do when experience challenges us, nothing in principle distinguishing what underlies an experience and what does not (Hookway, 1988, p. 53; Quine, 1969, p. 83). The consequence is Quine’s holistic theory of meaning (De Rosa and Lepore, 2004, p. 67). In fact, as Quine agrees with positivists that the meaning of empirical statements depend on their conditions of verification, if, as he believes, verification is a holistic phenomenon, then meaning has to be a holistic phenomenon (Burge, 1992, p. 19). The meaning of any statement and the reference of any concept are not established in isolation but depend on their relation to correlated beliefs. Changes in some of the correlated beliefs modify the meaning of some others and, accordingly, our concepts, so that my coming to believe that John has a dog is not in principle distinguishable from my concept of “dog”. If this bans the “dubious idea” of sameness of meaning, given the overly improbability of two people having exactly the same system of beliefs, it neither bans communication nor privatises language (Quine, 1969, p. 27). Languages, for Quine, are public objects (institutions, he says, p. 27), and publicly, we apprehend learning our language, the use of dog in our community, how dog is distinguished by John walking with his dog, how John’s dog is the same dog we see now walking with John’s wife, and how the dog of Mary is a distinct dog (Quine, 1969, pp. 30–31). In such a way, in brief, we apprehend the conceptual scheme of our community and its implicit ontology.

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If this is true, however, there will be no way to simply translate words of a given language into another. Different languages exemplify different worldviews, establishing different partitions of the world (Quine, 1969, p. 30). Even if we become a perfect speaker of another language, there are things that we can say in one language but not in another and vice versa. Translations eventually are ways to adapt (force) words structured by a certain conceptual scheme into our own conceptual scheme. This is clearly a crucial step for pluralism. Endorsing it, pluralists can take for granted that, in trying to understand (to say nothing about judging) a society of which we are not a member, we are always mindshaped. Exactly as we can translate their language into ours only by trying to frame their language in our terms, we can try to make sense of their uses and practices, only reformulating them in our own terms. But this is essentially an arbitrary move. Conventionalists are often proud of the relativism implicit in their view. They make a point of their position being one according to which a given society has certain rules for marriage, for example, while another society has others. So what? They don’t seem to perceive that the problem is deeper than this. The point is not that there is nothing problematic in the fact that marriage might be regulated in one or another. The problem is that, once it is conceded that the only way we face the world, comprehending in it communities different from our own, is from a given point of view, the practices of those other communities become irremediably opaque to us and vice versa. We might call marriage or punishment the practices of a different society, but in so doing, we apply our conception of marriage, embedded as it is in our worldview, to another society, whose conception of what we call “marriage” is different from our own. But rather than speaking about one object, differently regulated, we should talk about different objects, depending on different conceptions (Taylor, 1990, p. 34). But if we do not understand what they do in the way they understand it, how can we claim to know or understand if it is just or unjust? The just or unjust redistribution of the faculties and obligations people have in a society are necessarily evaluated according to criteria internal to the society, depending on the way they understand what they do. As I said, it is difficult to overstate Quine’s importance for pluralists. In the absence of such a powerful theory, it would have been difficult to make sense of the notion of worldviews (cultures) as essentially closed systems through which we face each other. My claim, however, is that pluralists cannot and do not really base their argument against liberals on Quine. An important element is added, on whose plausibility pluralists’ argument against liberals stands or falls. Granted his holism, in fact, Quine never ceased being a naturalist. This means that, though experience does not determine our theories, there is still nothing apart from experience, for Quine, on which to go (Quine, 1969, pp.  75–76). Given the impossibility of deriving our conception of the world directly from experience, what Quine suggests is that, instead of positing fictitious rules and conventions, we should turn to psychology to explain how effectively our

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worldviews and experience connect to each other (Kim, 1988, p. 387; Quine, 1969, p. 78). This is Quine’s naturalised epistemology, which leaves it to psychology to explain how we obtain so much, in terms of our theoretical constructions, from so little, in terms of the world’s delivery (Quine, 1969, p. 83). What Quine meant by psychology, however, is different from what we are used to it being. Quine did not believe meanings could be part of a science, and because psychology, for him, is just an empirical science, no room is left for meanings in his psychology. Words like fear, belief, hope, desire, etc., for Quine, must not be taken as referring to mental states representing (meaning) the state of the world that specifies about what is that belief or about what is that fear (Stich, 1993). For Quine, we do not find any fear that something or any belief that something else in our brains. What believing something or wanting something have to be taken to mean, for Quine, is attributing to somebody or to us dispositions to behave in a certain way in certain circumstances. This is unacceptable to pluralists (MacIntyre, 2007, p.  84). Pluralists agree with Quine that meanings are not scientific objects. But they take this as a reason for rejecting psychology as science, not for accepting dispositions. “On the phenomenological level or that of ordinary speech [. . .] a certain notion of meaning has an essential place in the characterization of human behaviour. This is the sense in which we speak of a situation, an action, a demand, a prospect as having a certain meaning for a person” (Taylor, 1990, p. 21). For pluralists, unless the vocabulary of goals and aspirations, desires and fears is available, something crucial to our self-understanding gets lost (McDowell, 2000, pp. 95, 125; Taylor, 1990, p. 27; Williams, 1981, Chap. 12). Misfortunes of logical behaviourism must not make us pass over what pluralists try to get, for pluralists agree with Quine that reality is socially (linguistically) constituted. But when Quine says that reality is socially (linguistically) constituted, what he means is that the social constitution is a theoretical constitution. This means that it is the constitution of a certain view of the world and of us as pieces of this world, driven by the attempt of good previsions. In these terms, our self-comprehension is indirect, mediated by scientific, third-person theories. By adding first-person phenomenology, instead, pluralists pass from the idea that the linguistic constitution is the constitution of pieces of empirical theories, to the idea that, at least concerning human beings and their social reality, the linguistic constitution is the constitution of agents, not subject to the same empirical treatment of the external world (MacIntyre, 2007, Chap. 8). The agent of pluralists is different from that of conventionalists, for nothing before language is given, and language, for them as for Quine, is a social object, requiring society for existence. Still, the public (alias intersubjective, alias linguistic) constitution is the practical constitution of agents. Once this is done, however, social reality comes to be exhausted by meanings, having no empirical content and referring to nothing. It is easy to miss the passage, for the same expression can represent both positions. In both cases, we can say that our language is the world in which we live. But it is one thing to say that having a certain conception establishes

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what we have to be ready to believe and defend in the face of experience; it is another thing to say that our conceptions create our social reality, full stop. If the linguistic construction of the world is a theoretical matter, not only can we try to explain why we have the worldviews we have, as we said, but they are also sensitive to experience. If we are allowed to say, for instance, that having a conception of slavery amounts to believing that certain people are different from others or do not possess certain qualities, this is something that might not resist (and has not resisted) experience. Analogously, our conception of marriage amounts to believing that women are different from men in some essential way. This might be (and has been) challenged by experience. That is, theories might be corrected. But if, on the contrary, our cultures and worldviews have such a practical aspect, so that the existence of slavery is an act of agents constituting slavery, then our cultures and worldviews are just there, perfectly unexplained. As creative products (Parekh, 2000, p. 120), they arise, change, or perish only by magical inspiration. The passage from the theoretical to the practical conception of our worldview is, I believe, the reason why pluralists’ argument against liberals continues to appear so convincing. Shaping their conception of an agent as culturally bounded, pluralists can easily make the very idea of principles, specifying the distribution of faculties, duties, and obligations that people would accept appear implausible. Evidently, people from different cultures judge according to different criteria. In this way, pluralists can easily make it appear as if liberals simply judge according to their own values and criteria of another society. And who are they for doing this? But liberals do not claim anything like this. In requiring a ground for the institutions of different societies, in asking to protect certain deep interests of people, liberals do not invoke something external to the social system in question. They are perfectly internal. The majority of liberals agree with pluralists that claiming that social institutions can be grounded on eternal principles of a third reign makes no sense. Further, liberals do not claim that other societies must endorse liberalism right now, as pluralists tend to believe. Instead, what liberals assume is that there are good reasons to think that different societies, in the appropriate circumstance, would endorse these principles, recognising as crucial the very same interests they aim to protect, correcting theories and conceptions that are at the basis of their different practices.

Notes 1 I thank Luciano Andreozzi, Giovanni Bisogni, Carlo Burelli, Alessandro Ferrara, Volker Kaul, Sebastiano Maffettone and the participants in the seminar on Practical Rationality for their comments. 2 I am not trying to suggest that the quoted authors have the same positions because they do not. Binmore, for instance, rests on many innatist hypotheses (14), while Sugden is interested in history and social context. Lewis, on the other side, mainly treats games in which conflict does not play an essential role.

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3 Famously, writing about conventions, with the help of game theory, Lewis, in fact, tried make sense of how linguistic conventions could arise, referring to Quine’s rejection of analyticity. 4 Focal points, on the other side, are not devoid of problems (Hargreaves Heap et al., 1992). 5 Time must be undefined to avoid a phenomenon known as backward induction. Intuitively, to avoid any temptation to defect, it is better that we not know when the game finishes (Elster, 1991, p. 5; Hargreaves Heap et al., 1992). 6 Searle (1995) traces a similar distinction, referring to regulative against constitutive rules. I am not suggesting, however, that Rawls and Searle raise the same question. I believe that Searle’s realism is essentially incompatible with Rawls’s concept of practice, but I cannot deepen the question here. It is more important for us that the centrality of practices is shared by Charles Taylor (1990, C hap. 3), defending a pluralist point of view. 7 I take this to be plainly evident of Rawls’s distinction between principles for individuals and principles for institutions (Rawls, 1999a, p. 108). 8 Hart (1997, pp. 89–91) traces this distinction. 9 It might be claimed that the late Wittgenstein, much more than Quine, plays this role for pluralism (MacIntyre, 1981; McDowell, 1998; Williams, 1981). However, if Wittgenstein clearly played a crucial role for practices, his (conventionalist?) view of them is unclear and highly controversial.

Bibliography Bilgrami, A. (2014). Secularism, Identity, and the Enchantment, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Binmore, K. (2011). Natural Justice, (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Block, N. (1995). “An Argument for Holism”, Proceedings for the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 95, 151–169. Burge, T. (1992). “Philosophy of Language and Mind: 1950–1990”, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 1, 3–51. Coffa, J. A. (1993). The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap, (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press). De Rosa, R. and Lepore, E. (2004). “Quine’s Meaning Holism”, in Gibson, R. F., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Quine, (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press). Elster, J. (1991). The Cement of Society, (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press). Gutman, A., ed. (1994). Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Heap, H. S., Hollis, M., Lyons, B., Sugden, R., and Weale, A. (1992). The Theory of Choice: A Critical Guide, (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell). Hart, H. L. A. (1997 [1961]). The Concept of Law, (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hookway, H. (1988). Quine, (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Horty, J. (2007). Frege on Definitions, (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Jarvie, I. C. and Zamora-Bonilla, J., eds. (2011). The Philosophy of Social Sciences, (New Castle: Sage). Kim, J. (1988). “What Is ‘Naturalized Epistemology’?”, Philosophical Perspective, Vol. 2, 381–405. Kinkaid, H. (1996). The Philosophical Foundation of the Social Sciences, (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press). Kukathas, C. and Pettit, P. H. (1990). Rawls: A Theory of Justice and Its Critics, (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Lewis, D. (2002 [1969]). Conventions, (Oxford: Blackwell).

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MacIntyre, A. (1981). Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). MacIntyre, A. (2007). After the Virtue, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). McDowell, J. (1998). Mind, Value, and Reality, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). McDowell, J. (2000). Mind and World, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia, (New York: Basic Book). Parekh, B. (2000). Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory, (London: MacMillan Press). Quine, W. V. O. (1949). “Truth by Convention”, in Feigl, H. and Sellars, W., eds., Readings in Philosophical Analysis, (New York: Appleton Century Crofts). Quine, W. V. O. (1963). “Carnap and Logical Truth”, in Schilpp, P. A., ed., The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (La Salle: Open Court). Quine, W. V. O. (1969). “Epistemology Naturalized”, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, (New York: Columbia University Press). Quine, W. V. O. (1980 [1953]). “Two Dogma of Empiricism”, in From a Logical Point of View, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Rawls, J. (1955). “Two Concepts of Rules”, in Freeman, M., ed. (1999b), John Rawls: Collected Papers, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Rawls, J. (1996). Political Liberalism, (New York: Columbia University Press). Rawls, J. (1999a [1971]). A Theory of Justice, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Sandel, M. (1983). Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press). Searle, J. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality, (London: Penguin). Shelling, T. (1980 [1960]). The Strategy of Conflict, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Skyrms, B. (1998). Evolution of the Social Contract, (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press). Sober, E. and Hylton, P. (2000). “Quine”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 74, 237–299. Stich, S. (1993). “Naturalizing Epistemology: Quine, Simon and the Prospects for Pragmatism”, in Hookway, C. and Peterson, D., eds., Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences, (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press). Sugden, R. (2005). The Economics of Rights, Cooperation and Welfare, (New York: Palgrave). Taylor, C. H. (1990). Philosophy and the Human Sciences, (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press). Walzer, M. (1994). Thick and Thin: Moral Arguments at Home and Abroad, (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press). Williams, B. (1981). Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980, (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press). Williams, B. (2005). In the Beginning Was the Deed, (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

12 PLURALISM AND SOLIDARITY Non-authoritarian reasoning and nonfundamentalist attitude Karim Sadek

Introduction1 With the enormous growth in international migration and more expressive and assertive minorities, groups demanding public recognition for their identities increasingly characterize the pluralism of modern societies. As we witness additional waves of immigration, group identities and differences are increasingly coming to the fore. Coupled with an unexpected global rise in religious revivalism, such demands are best exemplified in religion’s heightened struggle for more public space and a greater inf luence in the public order. This is visible nowadays in, though not restricted to, the case of Islam and Muslim communities in Europe and the United States. Given its commitment to democracy, modern political philosophy is charged with the task of adequately responding to such pluralism without violating the requirements of democracy. In order not to reduce the rule of the people to the rule of the majority, democracy requires a democratic citizenry, that is, citizens that are capable of relating to and engaging with one another as free and equal political actors. This in turn depends on citizens sharing some sense of belonging that integrates them in such a way that they are induced to responsibly and respectfully cooperate and reason with one another in a constructive way to make collective decisions and solve common problems. Democratic citizenry depends on social solidarity. A successful modern democratic polity, thus, must be capable of responding to the pluralism it contains without undermining the solidarity it requires. Pluralism and solidarity, however, seem to be in tension. While pluralism tends towards diversity and hence inclusion, solidarity tends towards homogeneity and hence exclusion. In this chapter, I approach the task of adequately responding to the pluralism of modern societies as a task of adequately responding to the tension between pluralism and solidarity. In doing so, I take for granted the

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centrality of public reasoning for the realization of the normative ideals of freedom and equality and presume that by properly including individuals and groups in public reasoning as free and equal political actors, we go beyond the recognition of citizens and groups as bearers of rights (thin sense of political belonging) and move towards their recognition as free and equal political actors with their own modes of being political, their own ways of engaging and conducting social and political affairs (thick sense of political belonging). My hope is to derive a lesson for democratic citizenship from the tension between pluralism and solidarity. I, thus, neither articulate a pluralist political model that takes seriously the importance of public expression of identity nor describe the solidarity such a model might require. Instead, I ref lect on how to delimit a most inclusive public reasoning and draw some implications for a non-exclusive democratic citizenry. Jumping ahead, I defend the requirement of non-authoritarian reasoning on public debates and argue for the centrality of a non-fundamentalist attitude for democratic civic competence. In doing so, I do not mean to acquit systemic conditions and blame citizens’ capabilities. Nevertheless, in fast-changing and ever more complex societies, it is increasingly easy and attractive for citizens to blame systemic failures and absolve themselves of any responsibility for the alarming social polarization we are witnessing. My discussion revolves around Maeve Cooke’s “requirement of non-authoritarian reasoning (and acting)” (Cooke 2007: 234) and Rached al-Ghannouchi’s political demands and thought.2 Starting (see The liberal response to pluralism and Islamic politics) with how the liberal response to pluralism structurally excludes Islamic politics as the public expression of Muslim ethical-political communities, I pave the way for adopting the requirement of non-authoritarian reasoning on public debates (see Drawing the boundaries of public reasoning) and make an initial case for non-authoritarian Islamic modes of reasoning (see Authoritarian citizenship and Islamic politics). I also identify another sort of exclusion, socio-cultural exclusion (my focus onward), which springs from the pre-political commitments of a majority on a particular issue and gets manifested in the exercise of public reasoning (see Socio-cultural exclusion). I then (see Ghannouchi’s group pluralism and sociocultural exclusion) sketch Ghannouchi’s political model, a model based on group rather than individual pluralism, to make explicit the way in which it also exhibits socio-cultural exclusion. Next, I attempt to remedy socio-cultural exclusion by showing how non-authoritarian reasoning is conducive to democratic civility (see Non-authoritarian reasoning and democratic civility) and complementing it with a non-fundamentalist attitude, which I construct from Ghannouchi’s conception of Islamic unity (see The non-fundamentalist attitude as a meta-civic-virtue). Finally, I take stock (see Taking stock) of the main points and arguments and conclude with a note on civic education.

The liberal response to pluralism and Islamic politics Political liberal philosophy has primarily conceived of the pluralism of modern societies in terms of different and incompatible individual conceptions of the

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good and has responded by separating the political realm from the social realm that contains the diversity of ideas and practices of how to live a good life (Rawls 2005).3 This separation is typically coupled with a requirement of public reasonableness whereby citizens are to support their political behavior on the basis of reasons that others can see as good reasons – reasons that all can accept. Characteristic of such response is a commitment to the principle of political secularism and a “reasons-based” strategy for drawing the boundaries of public reasoning. Accordingly, the realm of the political (at least that part that concerns the constitution, public policy, and coercive law) gets separated from religion by not being justified on the basis of religious reasons. This is achieved by filtering out religious reasons from public debates (in particular those that result in binding decisions). While many have revised the application of the principle of political secularism to better accommodate the place of religion in the public order, few have revised the principle itself. This can be observed in the work of two of the most inf luential contemporary political philosophers, John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Even with Rawls’s famous proviso and Habermas’s distribution of the burden of translation on all citizens, they both maintain some sort of a filter between the public forum (or the formal public sphere) and the background culture (or the informal public sphere). The central function of such filtering is to prevent religious reasons from having direct legislative or political authority (Rawls 1997; Habermas 2006). Keeping this in mind, let us consider Ghannouchi’s (positive) demand for the public recognition of Islamic identity. Other than wanting to get rid of oppressive state measures (negative project), there is a positive project behind Ghannouchi’s demand for the public recognition of Islamic identity.4 On my reading, and using his own words, the positive project is concerned with developing a “genuine modernity, one that emanates from within, one that is in response to local needs and that is in conformity with local culture and value system” (Ghannouchi 2002: 100). Ghannouchi argues that Muslims live in dangerous times not because they are deviating from the shari’a,5 but because they are resisting the authority of shari’a – they are less and less taking shari’a to be authoritative over them (Ghannouchi 1993: 100). This is so, Ghannouchi contends, because of a hegemonic discourse on modernity and democracy according to which, in order for Islamic societies and Muslims to join modernity, they must adapt shari’a to the modern context in which man is independent from his creator (Ghannouchi 1993: 100). At the core of the Islamic perspective, however, is a God-dependent view of the human being, that the human being “is always in need of the creator and is incapable of separating from the creator without jeopardizing his own humanity” (Ghannouchi 1994: 48). To accommodate the positive demand for public recognition, we need more than legal equality since the demand calls for the public recognition of a characteristically Islamic way of engaging in political affairs – the recognition of Islamic politics as a legitimate mode of being political. Islamic politics refers to the various ways in which movements, groups and individuals, as well as ideologies explicitly and purposefully draw on Islamic tradition, values, principles, and

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fundamentals seeking to give Islam an, or the, authoritative voice in political affairs. There is thus a multiplicity of ways that Islamic politics could get manifested. To put it differently, the point of Islamic politics is the realization of Islam. The question for Islamic politics is what the realization of Islam means and how to achieve it. The recognition of Islamic politics does not imply the recognition of all manifestations Islamic politics could take. The idea, instead, is that Islamic politics should not be disregarded right from the get-go – that the various manifestations of Islamic politics should not be discounted, rejected, or disrespected merely because they draw on Islamic tradition, values, principles, and fundamentals. Doing so would misrecognize the value and importance such resources have for the community in question and the social bonds that tie its members together. By requiring that only reasons that all can accept can justify law and public policy, we set the rules of the political game in such a way that what Islamic politics has to say about politics cannot in principle have any direct legal or political authority. As members of an ethical-political community, Muslims need to alienate themselves from the resources that their community provides them with to the extent that they are to participate in public reasoning and have direct effect on binding political and legal decisions. The issue here is not about succeeding or failing to provide, in due course, “properly public reasons” (Rawls 2005: 453) in support of the policies Islamic political actors think are implied by their understanding of Islam. The issue is that the political system is structured such that the reasons that most relate, and speak, to Muslims are not acknowledged as public. What an Islamic politics has to say, for instance, about what the ideals of freedom and equality require is structurally filtered out of debates resulting in binding decisions. The liberal response to pluralism fails to properly recognize Islamic identity, which in turn affects Muslims’ sense of political belonging.

The requirement of non-authoritarian reasoning and socio-cultural exclusion After introducing the requirement of non-authoritarian reasoning on public debates as an alternative to reasons-based strategies (a), I elaborate on the requirement and draw on Ghannouchi’s work to identify resources for nonauthoritarian Islamic modes of reasoning (b). I conclude this section by making explicit socio-cultural exclusion, which will be our focus onward (c).

a. Drawing the boundaries of public reasoning Structural exclusion colors any strategy that draws the boundaries of public reasoning by targeting reasons. Any such strategy will necessarily have two categories: reasons included versus reasons excluded from public debates, and every time we make such bifurcation, we invite the charge of begging the question against the substantive way in which the excluded understands the world and themselves in it. As long as the boundaries of public reasoning are drawn on the

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basis of the content of reasoning (i.e., reasons, for instance, religious reasons versus secular reasons), some community or group will be structurally excluded. A promising alternative strategy is to draw the boundaries on the bases of the way of reasoning rather than the content of reasoning. Maeve Cooke defends such strategy with her “requirement of non-authoritarian reasoning (and acting)” (Cooke 2007: 234) on public debates. Religious reasoning as such is not excluded. It is religious-authoritarian reasoning, like any other authoritarian reasoning, that gets excluded. This requirement is inclusive about the content of arguments and reasons but exclusive about ways of arguing and giving reasons. At this point, a concern that many might have is whether Islamic political actors, and religious political actors more generally, could meet the requirement of non-authoritarian reasoning.

b. Authoritarian citizenship and Islamic politics6 Cooke’s requirement of non-authoritarian reasoning springs from the notion of situated rationality which, according to Cooke, gives expression to the antiauthoritarian impulse characteristic of the modern Western self-understanding, which came to endorse a normative assumption against authoritarian judgments about truth and validity (Cooke 2006: 16). Cooke distinguishes between an epistemological and an ethical dimension of situated rationality, and when we understand Cooke’s requirement of non-authoritarian reasoning and acting in terms of situated rationality, we get to her notion of non-authoritarian citizenship. According to Cooke, the citizen who internalizes and acts on the basis of authoritarian conceptions of knowledge and justification exemplifies authoritarian citizenship. That is, a citizen’s reasoning and acting is authoritarian when her conception of knowledge “restrict access to knowledge to a privileged group of people and tend to assert the availability of a standpoint removed from the inf luences of history and context that could guarantee the unconditional validity of claims to truth and rightness” (Cooke 2007: 234–235), and/or when her conception of justification “split off the validity of propositions and norms from the reasoning of the human subjects for whom they are proclaimed to be valid” (Cooke 2007: 235). Citizens, religious or not, who internalize and behave on the basis of authoritarian conceptions of knowledge and/or justification would exhibit authoritarian citizenship, and their contributions should be excluded from public debates. Cooke is explicit in stating that religious belief and conviction do not necessarily imply authoritarian reasoning: “There is no conf lict in principle between non-authoritarian reasoning and an orientation towards some ‘otherworldly,’ transcendent source of validity (for example, God or the good)” (Cooke 2007: 235). So, it must be possible, on Cooke’s view, that one can be a religious person without internalizing and acting on the basis of authoritarian conceptions of knowledge and justification. For one to be religious without reasoning and acting in an authoritarian fashion, it must be possible that she can accept divine

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authority without internalizing and acting on authoritarian conceptions of knowledge and justification. The case of the religious hypocrite is of no interest to us here. What we need is a non-hypocritical religious person who does not employ authoritarian modes of reasoning. With the condition of non-hypocrisy, the religious person should internalize and act upon the conceptions of knowledge and justification that his religion embodies. Therefore, what this tells us about authoritarian citizenship is that it depends on the content of divine authority rather than the mere fact that one accepts divine authority. The fact that a person accepts divine authority does not necessarily imply that she will be-authoritarian. And for sure, one can be-authoritarian even if she is an atheist. Thus, on the level of citizenship, one can (in principle) accept divine authority without reasoning and dealing with others in an authoritarian fashion. This, however, would depend on the divine authority in question and the way human authority relates to it. I now draw on Ghannouchi’s conception of ijtihad (interpretation)7 as the bridge between divine and human authority to show how it embodies nonauthoritarian conceptions of knowledge and justification. To investigate the conceptions of knowledge and justification Ghannouchi’s model embodies, we should investigate the structure of the relation between man and God as far as determining the content of divine authority is concerned. Ghannouchi locates the fundamental core of Islamic political philosophy in the vicegerency theory: that the human being is God’s vicegerent on earth (Ghannouchi 1993: 97). On the basis of this theory, Ghannouchi derives the two sources of authority in his theoretical model of the Islamic state, which he describes as the “state of God and the people, the state of al-nass and shura” (Ghannouchi 1993: 148). While al-nass8 represents divine authority, shura (consultation) represents human authority. The whole point of the Islamic state, its raison d’être, is “to realize shari’a [as embodied in al-nass], to instantiate the absolute in the course of history, and to connect the divine with the human . . .” (Ghannouchi 1993: 104). How does divine and human authority relate?9 Al-nass’s directives are general and abstract while human life is concrete and changing. This creates a gap between the universal general and the concrete particular. This gap must be bridged in order for humans to successfully carry out their appointed authority. The point of ijtihad is to figure out the meaning of alnass and how it applies to concrete and changing human situations. It is the function of ijtihad to bridge the gap between the universal general (i.e., the directives of al-nass) and the concrete particular (i.e., everyday human life). God’s law as found in al-naṣṣ, Ghannouchi writes, “is not a summation of rigid texts, neither is it articulated in a final manner, nor is it a legalistic document that identified a ruling for every act and state. Rather, there is plenty of room for interpretation, specification, addition, and renewal through the use of individual and collective ijtihad” (Ghannouchi 1993: 120). Here the jurists, who are the experts on al-nass, play a crucial role. They are to derive from the text specific rulings and interpretations, which are then picked up by the Muslim community.

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Now, given the changing nature of social life, ijtihad must be f lexible.10 Ijtihad is also revisable and fallible since it could never reach the epistemic status of certainty. “What the ‘ulamā [ jurists] suggest is no more than their understanding, or their ijtihad” (Ghannouchi 2002: 114). Claiming certainty amounts to speaking in the name of God and that counts as authoritarianism from the Islamic perspective (Abou el-Fadl 1997, 2009). Ijtihad, as the product of human effort, is always an approximation and never reaches the epistemic status of certainty.11 There is an unbridgeable gap between God’s law and all actual human attempts to understand, interpret, and apply it. With ijtihad always being an approximation, having access to the ethically valid standpoint (al-nass) does not imply that human knowledge can be atemporal, objective, and impartial. Any knowledge claim to accessing the ethical standpoint is mediated through ijtihad, and ijtihad is temporal, subjective, and partial. With this conception of ijtihad, accepting divine authority does not express epistemological authoritarianism. Furthermore, Ghannouchi maintains that although jurists have the authority and responsibility to derive rulings form al-nass, they have no authority to impose their interpretations on Muslims. For him, the essence of the mission of jurists is to “transform the Book into an umma (community)” (Ghannouchi 1993: 297). The success (not the legitimacy) of juristic interpretations cannot be determined independently from the subjects for whom they are made and through whom they are to take shape and get implemented. In addition, and crucially, the community’s acceptance and/or rejection of certain interpretations is based on how comfortable they are with a particular ijtihad. There should be a harmony of fit between the jurists’ understanding of the text on the one hand and that understanding’s fit with the community’s self-understanding, including the deep-seated, normative expectations and intuitions of social members, on the other hand. The community, through accepting or rejecting the different interpretations of God’s law, determines whether the jurists have succeeded in understanding and accounting for the needs and interests of the people. Ijtihad is thus guided, though indirectly, by a respect for the “human subjects for whom [it is] proclaimed to be valid.” Thus, accepting divine authority on Ghannouchi’s model does not express ethical authoritarianism.

c. Socio-cultural exclusion The exercise of public reasoning gets determined both by the formal constraints on public reasoning, as well as the substantive instantiation of normative ideals and principles in a particular socio-cultural context; i.e., the broadly shared set of beliefs, norms, and practices concerning public affairs, the relation between individual and collective, the normative ideals of freedom, equality and justice, etc. Consider “reasonableness.” Formally, it is understood thinly, say, in terms of a commitment to freedom, equality, and the “burdens of judgment” (Rawls 2005). And on the basis of that, a requirement on public debates that filters out religious reasons could be derived. That aside, however, “reasonableness” takes a

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substantive shape in terms of a commitment to freedom, equality, and the burdens of judgment as instantiated in a particular socio-cultural context. One can say, for instance, that in a liberal democratic society, the socio-cultural context does not accept the contributions of Islamic politics regarding public affairs, normative ideals, etc. as reasonable – the particular way the dominant group or majority construes what is and what is not reasonable has no room for Islamic modes of reasoning. Thus, even if we let go of a “reasons-based” limit on public reasoning and allow non-authoritarian Islamic modes of reasoning into public debates, Islamic politics could still get excluded on the socio-cultural level. Such exclusion is not based on the claim that those who employ these modes of reasoning are dogmatic or fundamentalists or are incapable of seeing the import and value of any reasoning other than their own. And even if those who employ Islamic modes of reasoning are reasonable (thinly, i.e., commitment to freedom, equality), drawing on the resources that shape their views, determine their behavior, and motivate their actions, would be pointless if not counter-productive when debating with their co-citizens. This is so because they won’t be listened to in any significant meaning of the term since Islamic modes of reasoning are considered unreasonable (thickly, i.e., commitment to freedom and equality in the socio-cultural context). This sort of exclusion on the socio-cultural level might be the ref lection of social biases and prejudices, but it need not be. Any society or culture as a set of beliefs, norms, and practices articulates substantive instantiations of the normative ideals and principles that society or culture is committed to. The point here is simply that given a dominant group or majority position on a particular issue, say, the place and role of religion in politics, non-dominant groups or minoritarian positions might not be heard, ignored, or repressed and thus have no effective place in the exercise of public reasoning, hence, socio-cultural exclusion. In structural and socio-cultural exclusion, Islamic politics is regarded as not appealing to all – un the former because of how the boundaries of public reasoning are drawn and in the latter because of how the dominant group instantiates its commitment to freedom, equality, etc. Each sort of exclusion demands its own remedy. And while the requirement of non-authoritarian reasoning successfully addresses structural exclusion, more needs to be said to see if and how it could address socio-cultural exclusion. Before I do so, however, I want to sketch Ghannouchi’s model of group pluralism to make explicit a different instance and form in which socio-cultural exclusion could obtain.

Ghannouchi’s group pluralism and socio-cultural exclusion According to Ghannouchi, the problem of politics is that, for practical considerations, only some are to directly manage God’s appointed authority. Ghannouchi forcefully argues that this task must be carried out under the surveillance of the people via shura. Shura is best understood as a principle rather than a particular

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system of governance – a principle that applies not only to formal mechanisms and procedures for decision-making and will-formation but also to social norms and habits on a pre-political level. In terms of its content and function, Ghannouchi describes shura as “the spinal cord of the umma’s [community] authority in establishing political rule on the basis of participation, cooperation and responsibility” (Ghannouchi 1993: 109). In the most general terms, shura is supposed to guarantee that no one person, group, or institution can have a monopoly on human authority. “Islamic rule is based on shura, and shura is the distribution of authority and prohibiting the latter’s concentration in the state” (Ghannouchi 1993: 299). And in a different place, he writes: “The more distributed political decision is, the wider the base of participants in political decision making, the more the Islamic rule is achieved, and the same goes for the democratic rule” (Ghannouchi 1993: 62). In his theoretical model of the Islamic state, Ghannouchi defends non-creedal citizenship that is based on allegiance to the state and is open to people of all creeds and points of view, including atheistic ones (Ghannouchi 1989: 19, 20, 27; Ghannouchi 1993: 137). The point is to ref lect Islam’s respect for all human beings as equal and free agents irrespective of creed, color, ethnicity, etc. Consequently, the Islamic state, which is supposed to grow out of an Islamic society, is to respect and protect that openness and diversity. All citizens are equal in their rights and duties in the eyes of the state, be they Muslims or not (Ghannouchi 1989: 20, 27; Ghannouchi 1993: 46). And just as Muslims enjoy the freedom to exercise, express, and defend their religion, so do non-Muslims. Importantly, Ghannouchi construes accepting someone’s creed as implying acknowledging their right to defend it and to show its advantages over, and the disadvantages of, what differs from it. He, thus, allows non-Muslim citizens to preach to Muslims and attempt to persuade them to join their creed. Citizens of all faiths are welcome to engage in public debates, to defend their views, criticize others, etc. (Ghannouchi 1989: 37; Ghannouchi 1993: 47, 292). Further, Ghannouchi tries to remove obstacles that could prevent groups from turning the opportunity to express their identity into an active exercise of the right to political self-determination. This is most explicit in his views on political parties in the Islamic state. Non-Muslims can form political parties and don’t need a license to do so, nor to establish newspapers, magazines, and other forms of expression (Ghannouchi 1993: 300). In his model, political parties play a fundamental role as the organizers of civil society. Without an organized civil society, the principle of shura won’t fully manifest, which will in turn undermine the authority and sovereignty of the people. In this regard, Ghannouchi writes: “The truth is that in the absence of mechanisms that organize the crowd, in order to transform it into a power, there will be an imbalance between the ruler and the ruled” (Ghannouchi 1993: 296). Without political parties, the distribution of authority and the principle of shura won’t instantiate and materialize. Ghannouchi’s explicit and main requirement on public reasoning is that “all parties of the debate must abide by the general morals of dialogue” (Ghannouchi

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1993: 293). Debate contenders are to engage with one another respectfully and on the basis of arguments aiming at convincing and persuading rather than shaming or coercing. While Ghannouchi does not elaborate on such requirement other than it excludes coercion and force, it is clear that it targets the ways in which public reasoning is conducted rather than the content of public reasoning. No one is excluded on the basis of the content of her views but only on the basis of how she defends her views. That said, however, Ghannouchi seems to also impose an implicit limit on public reasoning when talking about restrictions on citizens in the Islamic state. The terminologies he uses for such restrictions include: “the requirements of the general system or social identity and the higher values that society abides by” (Ghannouchi 1993: 46), the “general opinion . . . of the majority” (Ghannouchi 1993: 47), and “the feelings of the majority” (Ghannouchi 1993: 47). This is an indirect reference to Islam as the social identity of the majority. While these restrictions neither constrain the questioning of juristic rulings nor make Islam a taboo topic, they imply that citizens and groups cannot set as their goal getting rid of the basis of society, i.e., Islam (Ghannouchi 1993: 294). This sort of restrictions has to do more with the underlying intention behind one’s reasoning – as opposed to the content and way of reasoning. This is problematic, however. Consider Ghannouchi’s position on apostasy. On his model, apostasy is not a theological crime but could become a political crime. Political authorities could interfere and punish apostasy only if it takes significant momentum as part of an organized attempt to undermine the foundational basis of state and society. We already saw, however, that a critical engagement with Islam is entailed by the Islamic state’s acceptance of different creeds and points of view and that it is welcomed on Ghannouchi’s model as part and parcel of groups’ struggle for self-determination. Thus, the intention-based limit hinges on the distinction between a constructive engagement with Islam and an inimical attack on Islam. This is a dangerously slippery distinction. Intentions are subject to varying interpretations and are resilient to measurement and verification. If political authorities are to determine which is a constructive and which is an inimical engagement with Islam, then the balance between rulers and ruled gets distorted. Any intention-based limit on public reasoning presents a serious threat to an all-inclusive public sphere as well as to the principle of shura, in addition to opening the door wide open for political authorities to manipulate and exploit such limits in the service of their own interests. The intention-based limit should be dropped altogether. Nevertheless, “social identity,” “higher values,” etc. will get substantiated on the socio-cultural level and could undermine the exercise of public reasoning by excluding apostates and/or others. At times, Ghannouchi seems to rely on such exclusion for controlling apostasy. He contends that apostasy in an Islamic society would be looked down upon and thus indirectly controlled by the majority. What shape and form would social punishment take and how damaging would it be depend on the socio-cultural context. Societies instantiate

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particular substantiations of normative ideals and principles, and these have a say in what, when, and how something (ways of reasoning, public behavior, reasons, policies, etc.) counts as a violation of the “general system,” “higher values,” “general opinion,” “feelings of the majority,” “equality,” “freedom,” “reasonable,” “authority,” “authoritarian,” etc. This in turn will draw in practice substantive constraints on the exercise of public reasoning potentially leading to sociocultural exclusion. Again, we are met with exclusion resulting from how a dominant group in a particular socio-cultural context lives out, purposefully or not, its own way of instantiating ideals, norms, values, or principles as a boundary for social and political inclusion. This boundary will determine, in the actual exercise of public reasoning, what counts as reasonable and what does not, what counts as authoritarian and what does not, what counts as a healthy engagement with Islam and what does not, what violates normative ideals and what does not, etc., which in turn determines who gets heard (ignored, repressed, marginalized) and who does not. Those whose voice can be expressed but not heard are socio-culturally excluded in a way that undermines their sense of political belonging. I now look into the remedy for socio-cultural exclusion.

Democratic civility and the non-fundamentalist attitude Socio-cultural exclusion is a ref lection of the civic incompetence of members of a dominant group or majority. It is those members’ unwillingness to listen to others’ arguments, and inability to reconsider their own positions in the face of such arguments, that minority cultures and marginalized groups do not get heard for what and who they are and feel ignored or repressed, which in turn undermines their sense of political belonging and threatens social solidarity. Fundamentally, what is required is a certain way in which members interact and relate to one another in the exercise of public reasoning. This is the domain of democratic civic virtue or democratic civility. Here, I shall argue, the requirement of non-authoritarian reasoning takes us a long way in the right direction; I do so by showing how it is conducive to democratic civility (a). I also argue that there is a corresponding dimension to civic competence that concerns the way in which one relates to oneself that complements non-authoritarian reasoning, allowing it to successfully translate into the proper application of democratic civility. For this, I turn to Ghannouchi and his conception of Islamic unity to extract what I call the non-fundamentalist attitude (b).

a. Non-authoritarian reasoning and democratic civility After convincingly arguing that the work the notion of “reasons that all can accept” gets done by substantive normative constraints of morality and/or reasonableness, rather than the notion itself, Bohman and Richardson (Bohman and Richardson 2009) give an account of democratic civility which, I believe,

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exemplifies the connection between non-authoritarian reasoning and democratic civility. They write: “In sum, civility for those making arguments requires forthright rather than distanced engagement, and for listeners, it requires openmindedness in considering anyone’s (civilly offered) arguments” (Bohman and Richardson 2009: 272). Their illustrative examples of the devoutly religious citizen conversing with the atheist are very helpful (Bohman and Richardson 2009: 269–270), and I reproduce them here using the case of a politically secular liberal and an Islamist: If, when conversing with the Islamist, the liberal presumptuously and arrogantly argues for a public policy by reference to the life of the Prophet Muhammad, the Islamist can rightly conclude that the liberal is not respectfully engaging with him given the common knowledge that the life of the Prophet has no normative grip on his debate contender. This is the first failure of civility on the part of the liberal; Bohman and Richardson call it ad hominem hypocrisy. If alternatively, however, the liberal totally avoids addressing the Islamist’s religious objections to the policy under consideration, he would fail to address the Islamist’s real concerns and in effect be treating him as a dogmatic person and pointless to reason with. This is the second failure of civility on the part of the liberal; Bohman and Richardson call it cognitive apartheid. To each of these failures of civility on the side of those making arguments, there are corresponding failures on the side of those listening to arguments. For the first, we get “the incivility of closing oneself off to the arguments offered by another,” for example, if the Islamist does not even consider engaging the arguments of the liberal. And for the second, we get the “incivility of being unwilling to consider revising his or her position, which is effectively the same as refusing to continue to deliberate” Bohman and Richardson 2009: 272), for example, if the Islamist is categorically not open to revising his position on a particular political issue. These examples are helpful in showing how non-authoritarian reasoning is conducive to democratic civility. Having internalized a conception of knowledge that is atemporal, objective, and impartial, an authoritarian reasoner will be closed to the arguments offered by those who reject, challenge, or attack her position, nor will she be willing to re-consider her position when listening to arguments not in line with her position. Further, this reasoner would comfortably deliver her arguments presumptuously and arrogantly while avoiding addressing the real concerns, needs, or interests of her contender since her conception of justification “split off the validity of propositions and norms from the reasoning of the human subjects for whom they are proclaimed to be valid” (Cooke 2007: 235). Non-authoritarian reasoners, on the other hand, accept and have internalized a conception of knowledge that is temporal, contextual, and partial as well as a conception of justification that respects the autonomous agency of those to whom it is intended. Reasoners have the requisite conceptions of knowledge and justification to not close themselves off and be willing to reconsider their position when listening to arguments and be forthright rather than distanced when giving arguments.12

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To be sure, more can and should be said on the connection between nonauthoritarian reasoning and democratic civility, and more needs to be said on democratic civility and civic virtues. That is another chapter. I want to proceed to the non-fundamentalist attitude as a complement to non-authoritarian reasoning.

b. The non-fundamentalist attitude as a meta-civic-virtue To the extent that individual identities get constructed and are constituted by the set of communal norms and practices, they, typically, find their safe haven within these norms and practices. The substantive instantiations of ideals and principles exhibited in communal life infiltrate and prominently figure in our identities. This is why, for example, insulting the set of norms and practices we are embedded in affects our sense of self by undermining our self-esteem (Honneth 1995). By not closing oneself to challenging arguments, being willing to reconsider our position, and taking debate contenders seriously and respectfully, we open the door for shaking and dislocating the safe haven of individual identities. Realizing that these parts of communal norms and practices that have infiltrated our identities and inform our reasoning are contingent, historically situated, shaky, and in need of revision and revamping is not comfortable and might even feel threatening. This is particularly so when material and systemic conditions put the community in question at a disadvantage. And to be sure, a contenders’ discourse of enmity and blame, or supporter’s discourse of superiority, threat, or righteousness only makes things worst. Now, how those who have internalized non-authoritarian conceptions of knowledge and justification relate to the contingent in their sense of self and modes of reasoning can significantly inf luence their performance in public reasoning. Given the challenge to identity that disagreement with those who hold alternative and conf licting substantive instantiations of the ideals and principles we are committed to, even non-authoritarian reasoners might opt for fixing rather than loosening their own particular substantive instantiations of ideals and principles. This is so not because they gave up on non-authoritarian conceptions of knowledge and justification but because they want to, consciously or not, stick to the security of what they know and how they do things. Put simply, non-authoritarian reasoning is one thing, and having the existential courage to actually face our contingency, reconsider our position, and stepping towards what is alien and unknown to us in public contestation battles about the terms of social and political organization is another thing. Taking refuge in our (and/or our community’s) convictions is the easy way out of confrontations and disagreements; this would exhibit existential cowardice. I want to shed some light on existential courage by trying to pinpoint the elements involved in its structure. I do so via a short commentary on Ghannouchi’s attempt to square his dual commitment to group pluralism and Islamic unity. Many inf luenced by the works of Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb13 construe pluralism as inimical to Islamic unity (Ghannouchi 1993: 256–257). Ghannouchi

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disagrees. He argues that Banna’s call for a single Islamic party results from the oppressive Egyptian context at that time. In doing so, Ghannouchi implicitly identifies the failure of not seeing through Banna’s defense of a single Islamic party as a failure to distinguish the particular from the universal in Banna’s reasoning. Rejecting the single-party solution and being committed to group and party pluralism, Ghannouchi needs to square that commitment with his commitment to preserve Islamic unity in the Islamic state. He thus puts forward a conception of Islamic unity through variety, or solidarity through pluralism: “it is better to understand Islamic unity not in terms of simple unity but in terms of unity that is produced by variety through al-nass and shura, or commitment and freedom” (Ghannouchi 1993: 256–257). Islamic unity “can only be achieved and established through acknowledging and respecting pluralism, and organizing the methods of dialogue, convincing and negotiation to resolve conf licts” (Ghannouchi 1993: 139), and that rejects all uses of force and coercion for “deleting or silencing the opinion of the other under the pretext of preserving unity” (Ghannouchi 1993: 139). Now, given that disagreement is pluralism’s inseparable companion and that disagreement could lead to social fragmentation, unity through pluralism depends on a distinction between (1) disagreement that is conducive to social fragmentation and (2) disagreement that is conducive to social unity. I suggest that the key to understanding this distinction lies in the background against which disagreement occurs. Disagreements in the Islamic state should be conceived as disagreements between different expressions of the same thing. Debate contenders should not see themselves as competitors but rather as partners in expressing a common and shared commitment to the state of al-nass and shura, the state of God and the people.14 Against a common shared commitment, disagreements are between different substantive instantiations of that commitment. In case of disagreement, we are made aware that fundamentally we agree, and we would cooperate rather than compete to resolve that disagreement. Through such cooperation, we are pressed to sharpen, improve, and revise our own particular way of substantiating the shared commitment. In this way, disagreement could be conducive to unity since it presents an opportunity for growth and development. It is in this spirit that I read Ghannouchi’s recommendation to Muslims in case the openness of public debates starts to undermine their faith. He writes: “the only solution for those Muslims lies in deepening their faith, or in raising these challenges to their scholars” (Ghannouchi 1993: 48), and the only way to protect against such debates is to develop and provide stronger and more cogent arguments (Ghannouchi 1993: 47–48). A common commitment, be it to al-nass and shura, to a Habermasian constitutional patriotism or to a Rawlsian political liberalism can only go so far, however. This is so because disagreements conducive to social unity (type b) typically degenerate into disagreements conducive to social fragmentation (type a) when contending parties do not place their loyalty to the common commitment they share but instead place their loyalty to their respective substantive instantiations

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of that commitment. Consider as an example an American and a German citizen, both committed to freedom of speech, disagreeing as to whether neo-Nazis are allowed to demonstrate on the streets. If both are loyal to their respective society’s particular way of concretizing freedom of speech, then in an important sense, each of their identities would also be attached to that particular concretization. The disagreement here might very well lead to division and not solidarity since it poses a threat to who these citizens take themselves to be. The lesson I want to draw here can be phrased in terms of a distinction between fundamentalist versus non-fundamentalist attitudes. While the fundamentalist’s loyalty is fixed to a particular concretization, say, of freedom of speech, the non-fundamentalist’s loyalty is to freedom of speech in its abstract form. When social members are loyal to substantive instantiations of ideals and principles, their identity (as a collective or as individuals) would be attached to that substantiation. And thus, in the case of a disagreement that challenges that particular substantiation, those concerned would consequently perceive that disagreement as a threat to who they are. Adopting a non-fundamentalist attitude is conducive in actually turning disagreements into opportunities for growth and learning. Adopting a fundamentalist attitude leads to experiencing disagreements as threats to identities and perceiving debate contenders as enemies rather than partners. One can arguably make the case that the current situation in Europe is moving in that direction as far as immigrant and Muslim communities are concerned. That the European commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of religion, for example, is in fact more of a commitment to a particular way of substantiating that commitment rather than to the ideals themselves, which, could explain, at least in part, the increasing intolerance towards Muslims and their practices. Let us consider again the gap between the universal general and concrete particular. On Ghannouchi’s view, figuring out the meaning of the universal general is a human effort mediated through fallible human reason, and the application of the universal general is sensitive to the situation and the human context. As Muslims try to live out (concrete particular) al-nass’s prescriptions (universal general), Muslims are to be diligently aware of the distinction between the voice of man and the voice of God. This in turn requires a constant and rigorous awareness of what is universal and what is particular in rulings, what has to do with our contingent sociopolitical, historical, and subjective situatedness on the one hand and what has to do with divine will and intention on the other. The tendency to be guarded against is that of confusing what is universal with what is particular in the different rulings and opinions in the Islamic tradition (starting with the Prophet, his companions, the great jurists of the tradition, and other inf luential Islamic thinkers). The importance of guarding against such tendency lies in guarding against human imperfection taking over divine perfection and of dominating and oppressing in the name of God. Doing so amounts to authoritarianism from the Islamic perspective (Abou elFadl 1997, 2009).

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Now, whereas Muslims do not put in question the authoritativeness, universality, and validity of God’s law, Islamic law as a man-made law is the product of human effort and so cannot but be an approximation of God’s law and thus can never reach the status of certainty, validity, or truth. In everyday life, however, Muslims are to act as if juristic interpretations, man-made law, were epistemically certain; i.e., they act with practical-certainty. Nevertheless, they are to simultaneously keep their commitment to epistemic fallibilism on a more theoretical level, i.e., theoretical-uncertainty. What matters with regard to social and political interaction is one’s awareness of, and attitude towards, practical-certainty. This awareness and attitudinal dimension operates on the level of “being” and not merely on the level of words or beliefs, that is, the manner in which one embodies and lives out the relational space between practical-certainty and theoreticaluncertainty when interacting with others. This links up with one’s ability to practice non-authoritarian reasoning in the exercise of public reasoning. The sought-after existential courage is best articulated in terms of a dwelling between theoretical-uncertainty and practical-certainty. Only when we can do so will we be able to distance ourselves from our own convictions, from what is particular in our own reasoning, and from our community’s substantive instantiation of ideals and principles, without feeling insecure or experiencing a threat to our identity in such a way that makes taking refuge in our convictions appears as the only way out. The non-fundamentalist attitude does not entail that one ignores or has no attachment whatsoever to their or their community’s substantiations of ideals and principles. By placing one’s loyalty (which can have different intensities and strengths) to the ideals and principles rather their substantiations, one is less prone to take refuge in particular substantiations of those ideals and principles. The non-fundamentalist attitude is a dynamic state of being towards, or relating to, one’s own identity and ways of reasoning that supports and facilitates the development and the exercise of democratic civility. In this way, it is best understood in terms of a meta-civic-virtue – an attitude towards oneself that underlines and plays a significant contributing role in a variety of civic virtues without itself having the status of civic virtue proper. The point here is not evaluative. That is, from the outset, I am construing the distinction between the fundamentalist and the non-fundamentalist attitudes in non-evaluative terms. Whether the German citizen from above is right in holding on to her particular specification of freedom of speech or whether Europeans are justified in placing their loyalty in their particular substantiations of normative ideals remains an open question. To close such questions and determine whether one should revise her position or stick to it, we have to look much closer into the specifics of the situation and context of disagreement. The point is that the fundamentalist attitude comes at the cost of social fragmentation, division, and exclusion, which in certain cases and under specific circumstances might be the right and justified cost to pay. Be that as it may, in all cases, we have to be aware of such dynamic and responsibly act accordingly.

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Taking stock In radically pluralistic social realities where the very terms of social and political organizations are contested and where social pluralism is characterized not only by diverse and competing individual conceptions of the good but also by a multiplicity of ethical-political communities making demands for the public recognition of their identities, modern political philosophy is charged with the task of responding to such pluralism without undermining its commitment to democratic requirements. Adopting a reasons-based strategy in drawing the boundaries of public reasoning to make sure that no comprehensive conception of the good gets to rule and determine policies and laws structurally excludes some ethical-political communities (those whose reasons are not considered public by the structure of the political arrangement). A more promising strategy is to adopt the requirement of non-authoritarian reasoning which is inclusive about the content of arguments and reasons and exclusive about ways of arguing and giving reasons. Nevertheless, exclusion on the socio-cultural level could still occur as a result of the fact that the way societies substantiate ideals and principles in their norms and practices will determine whose voice gets listened to and taken seriously and whose voice gets ignored or repressed. This fact is here to stay. But whether this fact will in fact lead to socio-cultural exclusion depends on our civic competences. What is required is that social members of a dominant group or majority on a certain issue of controversy not take or approach their particular understanding of equality, freedom, reasonableness, social identity, etc. to be fixed or not questionable. By internalizing non-authoritarian conceptions of knowledge and justification, we come to accept the contingency of our particular understandings and our ways of reasoning, and this is a necessary condition for opening ourselves to the arguments of contending others, being good listeners, revising our positions, and giving arguments while taking into account and respecting the agency of contending others. This takes us a long way in properly relating to others in the exercise of public reasoning and thus in properly including others and hence recognizing them for who and what they are. To be successful in doing so, however, we also need to have the right sort of relation towards ourselves. Placing our loyalties in the ideals and principles rather than their substantiations allows us to dwell more comfortably and les defensively in the space between the general and the specific, or the universal and the particular, in such a way that we are more capable of distancing ourselves from substantive instantiations without feeling a threat to our identity. For a modern democratic polity to be able to respond to radical pluralism without undermining solidarity, it needs to cultivate a citizenry of nonauthoritarian reasoners who also adopt a non-fundamentalist attitude towards their own selves. Some will be quick in rejecting this conclusion by referring to the difficulties in cultivating such citizenry. It would be naïve on my part to ignore or dismiss such difficulties. Still, such difficulties do not undermine the

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importance and significance of cultivating such citizenry. Without such citizenry, social disagreement will remain a source of division and fragmentation, which in turn undermines citizens’ sense of political belonging and threatens the stability of a democratic polity. The way it looks to me, there is no way around meeting these difficulties, and the sooner we collectively attend to them, the sooner we start deviating from a path that undermines the possibility of a radically pluralist and harmoniously f lourishing communal living. The proper democratic response to radical pluralism is, at least partially, dependent on cultivating a non-authoritarian non-fundamentalist citizenry and thus the centrality of civic education for modern political philosophy.

Notes 1 I thank Maeve Cooke, Anders Herlitz, and Jonathan Nassim for their comments on previous versions of this chapter. 2 Ghannouchi is a Tunisian Islamic thinker and founder-leader of Hizb Annahda (The Renaissance Party). His thought and politics have been well-respected and widely debated in Islamic and non-Islamic circles, both inside and outside the Arab world, and he is considered to be representative of a contemporary trend in Islamic revivalist thought and movements. Since the Arab uprising, Ghannouchi has been more of a politician than an intellectual. I engage him as a thinker, not a politician. For more on Ghannouchi, see Esposito and Voll (2001), Tamimi (2001), and Abu-Rabi (2004). 3 Rawls (2005) is a most influential case in point. 4 For a more elaborate reconstruction of Ghannouchi’s demand for the public recognition of Islamic identity in terms of a negative as well as a positive project, see Chapter 3 in Sadek (2018). 5 Shari’a is typically translated as Islamic law. Ghannouchi clearly and explicitly distinguishes between shari’a as divine revelation and fiqh (jurisprudence) as human interpretation. For a brief and helpful description of the changes in the understanding of shari’a, see Griffel (2007). 6 For a more comprehensive and elaborate argument on how Islamic politics does not exhibit authoritarianism, see Part II in Sadek (2018). 7 More specifically, ijtihad refers to the “legal methods of interpretation and reasoning by which a mujtahid (q.v.) derives or rationalizes law on the basis of the Quran, the Sunna and/or consensus; also, a judge’s evaluation of customary practices as they bear on a case brought before him” (Hallaq 2009: 173). 8 Al-nass for Ghannouchi includes both the qur’an and sunna (which refers to the life of prophet Muhammad, taken to be exemplary and admirable by Muslims). 9 The following two paragraphs are a condensed summary of Chapter 6 in Sadek (2018). 10 For instance, Ghannouchi writes, “Realism and flexibility are among the most important features of Islamic methodology” and then concludes on that same paragraph: “Therefore, it is imperative that a religion which came for the purpose of improving the life of all humans wherever and whenever they exist should have the capacity to respond to all emerging situations and forms of development through which the Muslim communities may pass” (Ghannouchi 1998: 90). Having said that, it is important to clarify that the flexibility of ijtihad does not undermine the universal validity of al-naṣṣ. The key idea here is that “perfection is not in the particulars, but in the generalities” (Ghannouchi 1993: 101). 11 Ghannouchi explicitly states that human knowledge is always deficient and lacking. This human deficiency, however, according to Ghannouchi, can be minimized when Muslims act as a community. This is to say that on his view collective deliberation and action

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has an epistemic value. So after acknowledging the fallibility of human knowledge, he continues to say that the umma‘s push in the road of God grants it an immunity from leading Muslims astray and elevates the relative to the absolute (Ghannouchi 1993: 119). Although Ghannouchi is not explicit as to whether the community’s epistemic value could in fact reach the absolute, in the name of consistency, he should not. Doing so would not only undermine his claim that human knowledge is “deficient and lacking,” but it would also contradict other claims he makes such as the claim that “perfection is not in the particulars, but in the generalities.” This epistemic dimension of the community appears again in his work as a way to justify the priority he gives to the community over the individual, which he also takes to be derived from the principle of shura. 12 It is worth noting that Ghannouchi can adopt all this under the rubric of “the general morals of dialogue.” It is encouraging and promising to adopt the requirement of nonauthoritarian reasoning with an eye on democratic civility as an elaboration on the general morals of dialogue. 13 Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb are among the figures in recent history who have significantly influenced and shaped modern Islamic revivalist movements. Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, and Qutb was among its most influential figures. 14 This becomes problematic when we consider non-Muslim citizens of the Islamic state. In Sadek (2014), I argued for replacing a common commitment to al-nass and shura in the Islamic state with another more inclusive common commitment. For my purposes here, however, this is not a concern.

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Habermas, Jurgen. 2006. ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, European Journal of Philosophy, 14 (1): 1–25. Hallaq, Wael. 2009. An Introduction to Islamic Law, Cambridge University Press, New York. Honneth, Axel. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Rawls, John. 1997. ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, The University of Chicago Law Review, 64 (3): 765–807. Rawls, John. 2005. Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, New York. Sadek, Karim. 2012. “Islamic Democracy: The Struggle for and Limits of Recognition”, Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University. Sadek, Karim. 2014. ‘Maṣlaḥa and Rāchid al-Ghannūshī’s Reformist Project’, in Adis Duderija (ed.), Maqasid Al-Shari’a and Contemporary Muslim Reformist Thought: An Examination, Palgrave, Macmillan, 151–177. Tamimi, Azzam. 2001. Rachid Ghannuchi: A Democrat within Islamism, Oxford University Press, New York.

13 POPULISM, LIBERALISM AND NATIONALISM Volker Kaul

The first analyses after the surprising successes of populism with Brexit and Trump’s election as president of the United States were still conducted in the light of liberalism, which dominated the international political scene in recent decades, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Jan-Werner Müller (2016), there is no question that the nationalist anti-pluralism, which he reproaches to populism, is illegitimate.1 As a strategy for dealing with populism, he can therefore point to John Rawls’s Political Liberalism (1993), whose moral pillar is precisely pluralism. Interestingly, Müller does not even see himself constrained to deal with questions and problems related to nationalism. The only alternative approaches he critically discusses are those that, like class struggle and socialpsychological theories, try to explain populism and reduce it to other factors without taking the populists’ claims really seriously. This is no longer so clearly the case in recent research on populism. Although there are still weighty voices that blame social injustice and inequality (Rodrik 2018; Eichengreen 2018; Bilgrami 2018) and the democratic deficit (Azmanova 2018; Müller 2016: 174–185) for the rise of populism, the question of the nation and its importance has clearly taken over. Even more so, it is the very pluralism that liberalism endorses and Müller proposes as solution that is said to have prepared the ground for the political success of populism. Michael Sandel accuses the Democratic Party in the United States to have dropped, under the pretext of pluralism, existential questions that concern Americans as a nation rather than just as individuals. According to Sandel, pluralism presupposes the neutrality of the state with regard to the various life plans, with the consequence that ethical questions about the good life are excluded from the public sphere. Where the state, according to the liberal principle of avoidance, is more likely to play an administrative role, the market takes increasingly charge of the accommodation of the various interests. The result is that politics, despite

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a constant reference to equal opportunity, is relatively powerless in the face of increasing wealth and power inequalities as well as social inequality. Politics can no longer address and make issues of self-esteem and social prestige part of the public discussion. The populist achievements are based on this sense of humiliation, deprivation and powerlessness, which then manifests itself in the ugliest forms of xenophobia. For Sandel, national identity, that lies at the heart of the populist discourse, is the solution to the problem: “What is the moral significance, if any, of national borders? Do we owe more to our fellow citizens than we owe citizens of other countries? In a global age, should we cultivate national identities or aspire to a cosmopolitan ethic of universal human concern?” (Sandel 2018: 357). The criticism of the liberal understanding of community has always been at the center of Sandel’s communitarianism. On the other hand, it is more surprising that even liberals break with pluralism in the wake of populism. In one of the key analyses of the defeat of the Democratic Party in the presidential elections in 2016, Mark Lilla accuses the left-wing establishment to have got lost in divisive identity politics that puts cultural, religious, sexual and ethnic diversity over national unity. Democrats have failed to make sense of the idea of the common good and of a common American future, “losing a sense of what we share as citizens and what binds us as a nation” (Lilla 2017: 13). Accordingly, Democrats should reassert common realities, address a sense of shared commitment among Americans, and help to rebuild it: “There can be no liberal politics without a sense of we – of what we are as citizens and what we owe each other” (Lilla 2017: 19f.). Yascha Mounk also sees a rebellion against pluralism to take place in Western democracies. He relates it to the fact that “the residents of various European countries were much more attached to their national cultures, and much more resistant to thinking of themselves primarily as Europeans, than I had wanted to believe” (Mounk 2018: 275). As a political solution, he therefore suggests a form of inclusive patriotism. Lilla’s and Mounk’s analyses show how difficult it is for pluralistic approaches to shape individual-transcendent policies for the whole community. This void of liberalism in what concerns community issues has been exploited by populism, and I agree with Lilla and Mounk that insisting once again on the value of pluralism cannot be the solution (Kaul 2018b). The question however remains whether liberals therefore need to take national issues more into account (Kaul 2018a). According to current liberal patriots, the nation faces two challenges. On the one hand, it is internally weakened by identity politics and multiculturalism (Lilla 2017). On the other hand, the nation is externally eroded by supranational institutions and globalization (Mounk 2018: 216–236). Liberal patriots believe that populism has its roots in this decline of national identity. Therefore, they believe that to rein in populism, the national idea needs to be reinvigorated. Liberal patriots face the question of what idea of the nation should be defended. Communitarians and populists basically agree upon one point, even though the

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former, of course, do not share the xenophobia, racism and aggressiveness of the populists: For them, the nation always comes first. This is because of our national affiliation, we have moral obligations towards members of our nation.2 This brings with it that we must prioritize their interests above everything else. If, for example, the welfare of certain workers is at stake through immigration, offshoring and free trade agreements, we have the moral obligation to protect them and, if necessary, to close the borders. Sandel makes this very clear when he asks about the moral value of national borders above but also in the passages on “Buy American” and US citizens’ voluntary guarding of the border with Mexico in his book Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (2010: 230–234). However, liberals cannot derive obligations from national identity to which individuals do not have consented in some way. Nor can they defend a policy that limits the basic liberties of their own citizens. This is why liberal patriots have a different, more reduced understanding of the nation than communitarians.3 They agree with communitarians that the good and meaningful life can be realized only within the nation and that the nation offers individuals ethically good life plans that promote their personal autonomy. Yet liberals do not believe that this creates special obligations that go beyond the preservation of the nation. Although liberal patriots agree with restrictions on immigration, they cannot ignore the freedom of their own citizens when it comes to economic policy (Kymlicka 2001). Will Kymlicka makes a distinction between internal and external restrictions. “The first kind is intended to protect the group from the destabilizing impact of internal dissent (e.g., the decision of individual members not to follow traditional practices or customs), whereas the second is intended to protect the group from the impact of external decisions (e.g., the economic or political decisions of the larger society)” (Kymlicka 1995: 35). Only the latter are justified from a liberal point of view. For communitarians, the comprehensive moral obligation to put the nation first is grounded in the embeddedness of the self. The nation constitutes the practical identity of individuals. It not only provides individuals with principles according to which they have to act but also forms the basis for the special obligations they have with regard to each other. Liberals do not deny that individuals can actually have a national identity. However, they claim that this can only be the result of an active and voluntary identification on the part of the individuals (Appiah 2005: 65–71; Korsgaard 1996). National identity is not simply given to individuals, but it is freely chosen. Since individual freedom is the foundation of national identity, the nation can never abolish certain freedoms. Given their understanding of identity in terms of identification, for liberal patriots, freedom always comes before the nation. With regard to populism, liberal patriots have a very attractive understanding of the nation. They take full advantage of the liberal model and yet are able to put the nation at the center of their politics. More radical populists may complain about the weakened concept of the nation, yet given the fact that the majority of

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citizens of Western nations prefer the liberal-democratic system, liberal nationalism seems to constitute a successful compromise. I would like to defend the thesis that liberal nationalism cannot maintain the tension between freedom and the nation, and ultimately is indistinguishable from traditional nationalism, as represented by populism. Liberal patriots can neither show that the nation embodies the good life and thus guarantees positive freedom. Nor are they able to question the embeddedness of the self and to understand identity as an expression of our freedom. In the first part, I focus on Joseph Raz’s theory of freedom, which forms the basis of liberal nationalism. In the second part, I refute step by step the connection between autonomy and nation as well as between freedom and identity. In the conclusion, I make some suggestions about how liberals have to deal with populism.

The liberal theory of nation Liberals are traditionally opponents rather than supporters of the nation and see themselves, like Kant, as cosmopolitans. As Martha Nussbaum writes in a muchdiscussed article on patriotism and cosmopolitanism, nationality is a “morally irrelevant characteristic” (Nussbaum 1994: 3). Liberals are primarily concerned with the freedom of individuals. However, they face the problem of defining freedom. Liberals in the tradition of Kant and Mill consider persons to be free, insofar as they determine their will and its principles on the basis of reason. From this point of view, nationalism contributes to heteronomy and thus to the immaturity of human beings, given that it prescribes external practical principles and duties (Kant 1974). Rawls expands the notion of autonomy in Political Liberalism (1993) and includes not only strictly moral conceptions but also reasonable, comprehensive doctrines, such as religious but also patriotic doctrines. Yet the pluralism of reasonable, comprehensive doctrines requires that none of these doctrines overrides others and that all accept liberalism as a constitutional principle. Some liberals claim that autonomy is not subject to the internal condition of an adequate use of reason, but that it is related to external conditions. Joseph Raz uses the examples of the “Man in the Pit” and “The Hounded Woman” (1986: 373f.) to show that freedom is dependent on a range of available options. Regarding liberalism, Raz notes: “much liberal thought has been dedicated to exploring the ways in which restrictions on individual choices, be they legal or social, can be removed, and obstacles to choice – due to poverty, lack of education, or other limitations on access to goods – overcome” (1994: 176). However, it is not enough in order to lead a free life to have any kind of possibilities, but the options available must also have value and implement the good. Raz defends the thesis that “our conception of Freedom is bounded by our notions of what might be worthwhile” (1986: 378f.). Only a good life can be a truly free life. He continues: “Autonomy is valuable only if exercised in pursuit of the good. The ideal of autonomy requires only the availability of morally acceptable options” (Raz 1986: 381).

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Raz goes a step further, claiming that his concept of freedom, based on a reasonable range of choices, entails value pluralism – “valuing autonomy leads to the endorsement of moral pluralism” (Raz 1986: 399). Since freedom requires the possibility of choosing between various morally acceptable goods, “the morally acceptable options must [therefore] themselves vary in the reasons which speak in favor of each of them. There are, in other words, more valuable options than can be chosen, and they must be significantly different or else the requirements of variety which is a precondition of the adequacy of options will not be met” (Raz 1986: 398). Raz in the following has to answer the question, what it is that determines the value of a given choice. One answer would be “that all value derives from choice which is itself not guided by value and is therefore free, i.e., arbitrary” (Raz 1986: 387 f.). This is, for example, the position of Rawls but also of Christine Korsgaard (1996) and Harry Frankfurt (2004). Raz, on the other hand, assumes “independently existing values which are transformed and added to by the development of one’s projects and commitments” (Raz 1986: 388). According to Raz, values are given in the world. The question remains, if the different values are really incompatible and there are “several maximal forms of life” making “complete moral perfection” (Raz 1986: 396) unachievable, how we can take a decision between the life forms available? If all values are on the same level and cannot be further ranked and if it is not us who decide on value or non-value, how can we make a decision between the different options? Would it then not be the same for us to lead a life as a Muslim or Christian, German or Turk, should we assume that all these life forms realize different but morally equivalent goods? The realization of a free, autonomous life is therefore, according to Raz, related to another condition. Autonomy requires not only a reasonable range of morally valuable possible choices but also that the options available have some meaning for the person. “The ideal of autonomy . . . requires . . . that the agent must be aware of his options and of the meaning of his choices”4 (Raz 1986: 389 f.). And how does a certain life form gain meaning for a person? Why is it that for a religious person Christianity has more meaning than Islam, always under the condition that both religions instantiate equivalent but incompatible values? Raz’s answer is that the meaning that the different values have for people is derived from their national culture. It is the particular culture of the nation to which people belong, which gives meaning to certain moral options and makes them appear more interesting, perhaps more plausible, and, above all, more natural than other, morally no less worthy possibilities. In this picture, to come back to the previous example, most people in Germany are Christians for the very reason that the German nation has been historically inf luenced by Christianity, so that only Christianity has meaning for Germans. Raz states very clearly that “options presuppose a culture. They presuppose shared meanings and common practices” (1994: 177). He specifies that “only through being socialized in a culture can one tap the options which give life

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a meaning. By and large one’s cultural membership determines the horizon of one’s opportunities, of what one may become, or (if one is older) what one might have been. Little surprise that it is in the interest of every person to be fully integrated in a cultural group” (Raz 1994: 178). It is the meaning that the nation attributes to various moral life forms that gives it value in the eyes of certain liberals, who, like Raz, Kymlicka or Kwame Anthony Appiah, defend a form of moral realism. These liberals see in the nation an indispensable good for individuals in the sense that only the nation provides “the core options which give meaning to our lives – the different occupations we can pursue, the friendships and relationships we can have, the loyalties and commitments which we attract and develop, the cultural, sporting, or other interests we develop” (Raz 1994: 178). It is the nation that makes freedom of choice possible. Kymlicka, a pioneer of so-called liberal multiculturalism and an important representative of liberal nationalism (2001: 203–290), gets to the heart of this point of view when he writes: “Put simply, freedom involves making choices amongst various options, and our societal culture not only provides these options, but also makes them meaningful to us. People make choices about the social practices around them, based on their beliefs about the value of these practices. And to have a belief about the value of a practice is, in the first instance, a matter of understanding the meanings attached to it by our culture” (Kymlicka 1995: 83). Appiah’s defense of cosmopolitan patriotism also focuses on the freedom of the individual: “The fundamental thought of the cosmopolitanism I defend is that the freedom to create oneself – the freedom that liberalism celebrates – requires a range of socially transmitted options from which to invent what we have come to call our identities. Second, they give us a language in which to think about these identities and with which we may shape new ones” (Appiah 1997: 625).

Critique of the liberal theory of nation Raz distinguishes between two aspects of personal autonomy. On the one hand, the ideal of autonomy does not mean much more than the freedom of nonintervention: “a life freely chosen” “opposed to a life of coerced choices” (Raz 1986: 371). On the other hand, however, Raz makes autonomy dependent upon the existence of certain capacities and conditions. Freedom requires, as we have seen, a conscious decision of the person for meaningful and morally good options, which the nation ultimately provides. Negative freedom guarantees autonomy only insofar as it is complemented by a specific form of positive freedom. Raz underlines this aspect: “Negative freedom, freedom from coercive interferences, is valuable inasmuch as it serves positive freedom and autonomy. In judging the value of negative freedom one should never forget that it derives from its contribution to autonomy” (Raz 1986: 410). Raz even goes so far as to say that “the significance of denial of options to one’s autonomy depends on the circumstances one finds oneself in. In some

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countries the vote does not have the symbolic significance it has in our culture. Its denial to an individual may be a trivial matter. Such factors do not diminish the importance of negative freedom, but they make it more difficult to judge” (Raz 1986: 410). On the other hand, however, he claims that “autonomy is, to be sure, inconsistent with various alternative forms of valuable lives. It cannot be obtained within societies which support social forms which do not leave enough room for individual choice” (Raz 1986: 395). Raz’s point is that the role of the nation is to ensure positive freedom without fundamentally questioning negative freedom. There are two questions here. First, does the nation really guarantee positive freedom? And second, does the nation leave negative freedom untouched? To realize positive freedom, the value of the nation would have to be purely instrumental in the sense that its value depends solely on the fact whether it gives meaning to enough objective values and thus guarantees freedom of choice between different forms of the good life. But is the relationship not exactly the opposite, namely, that the nation constitutes values and gives itself the laws? As far as negative freedom is concerned, it needs to be clarified whether the will can freely decide between the existing national values or whether the nation constitutes not only the values but also the will of the persons.

Nation and the problem of positive freedom Raz emphasizes that his theory of autonomy has nothing in common with cultural relativism. He writes, “‘value’ is sometimes used in a relativized sense, to indicate not what is of value but what is held to be so by some person, group, culture, etc. In this chapter ‘value’ is non-relativized” (Raz 1986: 397). Raz is not the only one who attributes to the nation the epistemological role to uncover the moral reality and make it accessible to us. Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor (2015) have a similar theory. The problems with this theory are that it, first, has very counterintuitive consequences and, second, that it cannot avoid a certain arbitrariness and relativism. If the value of the nation depends on its moral anchoring, it means that probably not all the nations of the world have value. Several nations come immediately to mind that are more associated with tyranny and poverty than with morality. This leads, first of all, to the fact that one is forced to create, similar to Hegel (1961),5 a sort of ranking of the various nations, cultures and civilizations, in which the ones ranked first come closest to the moral ideals. And as a consequence, we cannot recognize all nations and cultures equally and may even rightly exclude some nations violating morality as inferior. In this regard, Taylor concludes that “it can’t make sense to demand as a matter of right that we come up with a final concluding judgment that [the] value [of a nation] is great, or equal to others’” (Taylor 1994: 69). The epistemological theory not only justifies us to deny some nations their moral value, while we have to recognize this value to others. It also forces us

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to believe that so-called rogue or poor nations cannot have subjective value for their respective compatriots. In this regard, residents of an impoverished subSaharan nation, for example, could not be proud of their nation. And to give a German example, let’s suppose that the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was an illegitimate state, and East Germany has grown together into a nation in the decades of separation. Then, in this perspective, no citizen of the former GDR could and should feel as East German, and the much-vaunted ‘Ostalgie’ would be inappropriate. But, of course, it is not like that. The overwhelming majority of East Germans are in complete agreement that the GDR was an illegitimate state and nonetheless feel a certain proud of being East German. These are all practical problems, which, though having serious political consequences, do not undermine the epistemological theory of the nation from a logical point of view. The logical problem of this theory, however, is that it cannot prove that only objective values can establish and constitute a nation. Basically, the theory shows exactly the opposite, namely that the nation itself is the origin of values and thus cannot avoid the relativism that Raz seeks to escape from. On what basis can we say when a nation does realize objective moral goods and when not? The moral values themselves remain inaccessible to us in two ways. First, they are metaphysical in nature and thus cannot be known through experience.6 This is why we need the nation, in order to put the values into practice. Second, moral truth reveals itself exclusively through the meaning that the nation is able to give to certain life forms. The only access we have to moral truth is through the meaning that the nation can convey to us. It follows that we only understand the meaning and never the truth in itself. But who can guarantee us that the nation is actually tracking the truth, that it correctly interprets the moral facts? In Raz’s theory, any judgment as to whether a nation has moral character and thereby allows for positive freedom is purely arbitrary, a matter of opinion. This does not mean that within a Razian framework we cannot make moral judgments, only that those cannot be based on moral truths or facts. Liberal nationalists do not allow us to make a clear distinction between good and evil. Ultimately, what counts as a good life form depends upon which of the various historical narratives of the nation prevails in the political struggle over their legitimate interpretation.7 Of course, the relevant life forms of a nation can always be criticized with the help of alternative narratives (MacIntyre 1984: 13–15). Yet it must be clear that none of the life forms, as attractive and good as they may appear to us, has an independent moral justification that is not based on national myths. This is why all kinds of nationalism are always relativistic.

Nation and the problem of negative freedom Liberal nationalists could accept this criticism of their concept of positive freedom and still insist that nationalism nonetheless leaves the freedom of the will untouched. Be the various options that have prevailed within the nation good or

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bad, the nation cannot force determinate choices upon us. Despite everything, we decide freely which of the national contemporary life forms we want to follow. The fact that we can work for alternative life forms of the nation seems to support this claim. But if the focus is more on the meaning than on the actual value of the available options, then negative freedom is no longer guaranteed, as Raz’s earlier example on the relative importance of voting indicates. Liberals assume that the nation gives meaning to options without creating obligations that are incompatible with individual freedom. They insist that individuals freely choose one of the meaningful options available to them. Communitarians, on the other hand, as Kymlicka writes, “deny that we can ‘stand apart’ from (some of ) our ends. According to Michael Sandel, . . . some of our ends are ‘constitutive’ ends, in the sense that they define our sense of personal identity. It makes no sense, on his view, to say that my ends might not be worthy of my allegiance, for they define who I am.” And Kymlicka continues: “I believe that this communitarian conception of the self is mistaken. It is not easy or enjoyable to revise one’s deepest ends, but it is possible, and sometimes a regrettable necessity. New experiences or circumstances may reveal that our earlier beliefs about the good are mistaken. No end is immune from such potential revision” (Kymlicka 1995: 91). However, liberals face the problem to show that if the creation of meaning does not affect individuals and directly involve them, how the life forms of their own nation make respectively more sense than those of other nations. How do these different valuations come about if meaning is not somehow related to individuals and shapes their worldviews? Liberal nationalism lacks a theory of how subjective meaning is constituted, that means how a particular meaning manifests itself as meaning for an individual. The insistence on freedom of choice does not reveal how meaning affects the decisions of the individual. In liberal theory, freedom and meaning are strictly separated from each other, with the result that the foundations for the creation of meaning are lacking and meaning, consequently, cannot fulfill the role liberals ascribe to it. Communitarianism has a theory in this regard, which however questions individual freedom, as Kymlicka correctly states. The only way to establish a connection between meaning and individuals is by way of their identity. Identity constitutes the meaning that things take on for individuals. MacIntyre clarifies this, when he writes: “We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters – roles into which we have been drafted” (1981: 216). He continues: “Hence what is good for me has to be good for one who inhabits these roles. As such, I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. This is in part what gives my life moral particularity” (1981: 220). The nation and its values have meaning for me, just because I am already the person for whom these values have meaning. It is only through my specific,

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given social identity that certain values promoted by the nation have meaning for me. But this also means that the nation must first form the identity of individuals before it can have meaning and thus value for individuals. It remains to be seen in detail how, according to communitarianism, the nation constitutes the identity of individuals. Here it is only important to note that this does not happen on the basis of a voluntary identification with the nation, since identification already presupposes identity and meaning. If autonomy requires subjective meaning and latter presupposes an already given identity, then it also follows that identity determines the will and that free will does not exist. Each of my decisions is not derived from an unconditional free choice but is the result of the person I am and the meaning that certain actions have for me. Now, liberal nationalism could admit that it has a defective concept of subjective meaning and acknowledge the importance of national identity. And yet it could insist that freedom of the will, although restricted, is not yet completely abolished. After all, each of us has several other identities besides our national identity – gender, profession, class, religion, race, etc. Each of these individual collective identities makes demands on us, and we are forced to decide freely which one we want to follow (Sen 2007). However, if we understand the nation as a “societal culture” that brings about meaning in all areas of human activity, including social, religious and economic life,8 then the national culture shapes each of these particular identities. According to the theory of liberal nationalism, when we make decisions in the various roles we take on, these are always inf luenced by the spirit of the nation.

Final thoughts With the rise of populism, again, the opinion gains ground that we must attribute a moral status to the nation. The nation has an undeniable value for us that politics has to take into account. Interestingly, this position is not only supported by communitarians but increasingly by liberals. They defend the theory of socalled liberal nationalism, which ascribes to the nation a moral character on the basis of individual freedom. I have tried to show that individual freedom, in terms of both positive and negative freedom, cannot justify the value of the nation. Only communitarianism, according to which the nation constitutes the identity of individuals, would, from a logical standpoint, be able to establish the morality of the nation. This is the main conclusion of this chapter. However, liberals cannot endorse traditional, communitarian nationalism. Although communitarians do not accept the rhetoric of populism, they substantially agree with its freedom-restrictive policies, which results from obligations of national solidarity. Some liberals argue that I am indeed right, and liberal nationalism fails as a theory because of its conception of the atomized individual. However, they contend that I take communitarianism too literally. Communitarianism is rightly based on the assumption that the nation constitutes the identity of individuals.

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Yet individuals necessarily have to interpret the meaning that the respective identities provide (Taylor 1985). This is enough to guarantee the right to freedom.9 I also think that communitarianism is not able to show why individuals must necessarily accept their identity and cannot question the meaning that it brings about. Insofar as identity is largely based on practical reason, it is unclear to what extent communitarians can avoid Kant’s conception of autonomy. However, I believe that communitarianism is right to stress that we have no choice with regard to our national identity. We feel committed to the nation even though many of us are unaware of this feeling and would deny it. When Kymlicka wonders why the nation binds us psychologically, I agree with him that “a full explanation would involve aspects of psychology, sociology, linguistics, the philosophy of mind, and even neurology” (Kymlicka 1995: 90). The problem, in my view, is that liberals under no circumstances want to acknowledge the conditioning effects of the nation in individual behavior but also of other collective identities. Any kind of liberalism believes that in some way, we can distance ourselves from our collective identities and are free to question our identity. Therefore, liberals do not consider it necessary that our collective identities themselves must be governed. However, as long as nations play a moral and political role, they must be shaped accordingly and cannot be left to themselves. At first sight, this sounds very illiberal, but it only requires the implementation of a theory of justice that, like Rawls’s (1971), takes human nature seriously. In terms of populism, this means that the new inequalities created by globalization and immigration in Western countries (Rodrik 2018) are to be addressed and to be at the center of politics. At the same time, nations do not have to be sealed off, and national equality does not have to be played off against global poverty. It only entails that the participation of the most disadvantaged groups in economic, cultural and political life needs to be ensured. Populist nationalism has no other basis than a grudge against state institutions and the political and economic elite for insufficiently defending the interests of the disadvantaged of their own nation. For this reason, cosmopolitans face the task of reconciling the idea of an open world with the idea of equality over the next few years (Kaul 2018b).

Notes 1 Galston (2018) makes very similar claims. 2 So-called left-wing populists would question this point and clearly distinguish themselves from the communitarian understanding of the nation of right-wing populists. Rightwing populists presuppose the nation as given. Left-wing populists make it their task to construct the people (see, in particular, Laclau 2005). Similar to Müller (2016: 98f.), I believe, however, that the concept of nation of left-wing populism is indistinguishable from that of right-wing populism (Kaul forthcoming). 3 Liberals define the nation as “societal culture”: “a culture which provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational religious, recreational and economic life, encompassing both public and

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4 5 6

7 8 9

private spheres .  .  . [it involves] not just shared memories or values but also common institutions and practices” (Kymlicka 1995: 76). Emphasis mine. See also Singh Rathore (2017), who gathers all of Hegel’s writings on India. This touches upon the very big questions of moral realism that Sayre-McCord (2014) summarizes very well: “Non-naturalism comes with two distinctive burdens: (i) accounting for how the realm of moral properties fits in with familiar natural properties and (ii) explaining how it is that we are able to learn anything about these moral properties.” For the central role of narratives, see in particular MacIntyre (1981: 204–225). For a definition of “societal culture,” see footnote 2. I thank Alessandro Ferrara for this valuable objection.

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INDEX

9/11 156 abortion rights 114–116 alétheia 82, 87 alienation 100, 180 allegory 82–85, 87, 88, 92, 95 Allegory of the Cave (Plato) 82–88, 97n17; Rawls and 88–92 al-nass 210, 211, 218, 222nn8, 10 Al-Qaeda 157 analytical truths 197 Annas, Julia 83, 85 anti-discrimination legislation 100 ‘anti-political legalism’ 124 apaideusia 83, 92 apostasy 214 apparent disagreements 70–71, 72 Appiah, Anthony 230 Aquinas 113 Arendt, Hannah 62, 74n3, 82, 83, 86–88, 147 Aristotle 159, 178 Arrow, Kenneth 50 atopia (homelessness) 84 Audard, Catherine 7–8 authoritarian citizenship 209–211 authoritarianism 88, 143, 147–148, 219 authoritarian reasoning 209 authority 83, 94, 96, 113, 114, 143, 147–148, 152; divine 210, 211; ethical 145; human 210; moral 140; nonauthoritarian 148; political 123, 124, 126, 128, 131, 150, 207; religious 101; of social institutions 149

autonomous agency 144, 145, 148–150, 152, 216 autonomy 143, 228–231, 234, 235 axiological neutrality 117 backward induction 203n5 al-Banna, Hassan 217, 218, 223n13 Beit Dins 105 beliefs 103, 105, 106, 112, 141, 142, 173, 174, 178, 209; first-order 109; nonpublic 111 Berlin, Isaiah 2, 17, 20, 22, 24, 27, 29n2, 56, 94, 95, 99, 100, 103, 104, 106, 140, 151 Bianchin, Matteo 3, 4 Bilgrami, Akeel 115 bios theoretikos 84 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche) 157 Bistagnino, Giulia 5–6 Bodin, Jean 105 Bohman, James 215, 216 Boltanski, Luc 148 Bowen, John 110 Brexit 58, 225 British legal system 100 British Muslims 106; 1990s mobilization 113; organizations 100; struggles of contemporary (1989–2006) 110–111 burdens of judgment 35–36, 43, 44, 68, 75n20, 88, 91, 93, 211 Canada 101 Canada Multiculturalism Act (1988) 119n4

Index

capitalist economic system 146 caste system 135, 188 Catholic Church 119n13 Catholicism 124 Catto, Octavius V. 183 ceteris paribus laws 38 Chavismo 137n4 Christianity 101, 108, 113, 229 citizenship 115, 128, 151, 206; noncreedal 213 civil government 103 clash of civilizations 164, 167; definition of political 155–158; theory 165 “Clash of Civilizations, The?” (Huntington) 155 coercion 169n38 Cohen, Joshua 4, 38–39, 42; disagreements within public reason 41; political concept of truth 40 collective choice: social choice vs. 4 collective decision-making 4, 5, 49–50, 56, 59; disputes between plural values 57; epistemic power 55; framework of 57; social choice and 50–52; see also political disputes “collective self-rule” 152 Colloquium of the Seven (Bodin) 105 commensurability 27 commitments and convictions 142, 146, 151 Communism 156 communitarianism 188, 226, 233, 234, 235 comprehensive doctrines 141, 164–167; vs. political doctrines 161–162 compromise 71–72 ‘Conceptions of the Good/conceptions of the good’ 9, 12, 43, 88, 100, 109, 112, 160, 189, 190 Concept of the Political, The (Schmitt) 157 conceptual schemes 110, 119n11; reasonable 111; second-order 109, 115 confederate monuments 182 conf licts 99, 101, 104, 190–193; forms of 156; of interpretations 162; political 112; religion vs. political 165; social 174; value 108 constitutive rules 195, 196 contemporary pluralism 105 contemporary political theory 122 conventionalists 200, 201 conventions 190–194, 198–199, 203n3 convergence 42 Cooke, Maeve 9, 206, 209 coordination 191 cosmopolitanism 228

239

criminalization 111 Critique of Judgment (Kant) 167 Crowder, George 20 cultural pluralism 10, 100, 102, 188–189; liberal concept of 13 cultural pluralists 12, 189 culture 179; capital 180, 181; conf lict between justice and 11–12; meaning 13; national 229, 234; norms 180, 181, 182, 184; pluralists’ conception of 197; political 175; sharing 189–190; societal 235–236n3; speech 180 customs 101 Darwinism 115 decent non-liberal peoples 126 decision-making 48, 213; see also collective decision-making deliberation 40; epistemic role of 42–43; pluralism and 41–44; public 45n8; with voting procedure 44; see also specific entries democracy 205, 207; citizenry 205, 206; civility 215–217; constitutional 161, 162; contemporary 141, 152; culture 164, 165, 167; deliberative 117; epistemic pluralism and 2–6; liberal 8, 101, 105, 106, 117, 119n6, 123, 182, 184; modern 139; polity 221, 222; regimes 118; social decision-making and 4–5; societies 102, 105, 112, 118, 123; values 102 Democratic Party 225, 226 democratic public space: transformative power of 110–111 Democrats 226 deontological interpretation 85, 86 descriptive pluralism 32–33, 43 de-secularization 156 disagreements 33–34, 36, 218; apparent 70–71, 72; genuine 70, 71, 72, 75n19, 75n21; justice and 62; peer 71; political disputes 52–56; pragmatic compromise 71–72; Rawls's treatment of 37; resolving 48; sources of 35; see also specific entries discrimination 111, 181, 182, 184 distributive justice 11 diversity 105, 106, 115; politics and 62–63 “Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus, The” (Rawls) 164 doxa 82–84, 87, 89, 92, 96 Dreyfus, Hubert 231 dualism 168n18 Dworkin, Ronald 19

240 Index

East Germany 232 economic redistribution system 147 education 84, 85, 86, 92; system 147 Eigentlichkeit 84 eikasia (illusion) 82, 83 empathetic preferences 193–194 Empedocles 82 Enlightenment: rationalism 102; tradition and liberalism 64–65, 74n5 entailment 23 episteme 82–84, 87, 92, 96 epistemic abstinence 115 epistemic approach 88 epistemic humility 25–26 epistemic pluralism 2; and democracy 2–6 epistemology 197–202; justification 164; pluralism 3, 4, 24–27; theory 231, 232 epistocracy 7, 88, 95 equality 101, 104, 106, 111, 118, 128, 130–131, 135, 146, 180, 211, 212, 235 Estlund, David 74n2 ethical learning 143–145 eudaemonistic interpretation 86 Europe 100, 101, 205; Eastern 156 “experts’ role” 7 extremism 118 faith 102, 113; Catholic 102 fallibilism 33 Feld, S. L. 51 Ferrara, Alessandro 7 first-order pluralism 100, 106–111 Frankfurt, Harry 229 freedom 139, 144, 147, 153n8, 174, 178, 211, 212, 227–231, 235; individual 106, 139, 140, 143; negative 232–234; positive 231–232; religious 8, 101, 102, 219; of speech 8, 101, 219, 220 Freud, Sigmund 84 friend–enemy distinction 157–158, 167–168n11 fugitive philosophers 85–87, 89, 96 fundamentalist vs. non-fundamentalist attitudes 219 funding 183 Galston, William 103 game theory 190, 191 Gaus, Gerald 68, 69, 70 gay marriages 115, 116 gender inequality 115 Gentile, Valentina 8–9 genuine disagreements 70–72, 75n19, 75n21, 197 German Democratic Republic (GDR) 232

Germany 229 Ghannouchi, Rached 12, 207, 208, 210–215, 217–219, 222–223n2, 10, 11 Glaucon 82, 85, 90, 96 globalization 226 God’s law 211, 220 Goldman, Alvin 71 Good, idea of 85–88; see also ‘Conceptions of the Good/conceptions of the good’ Gray, John 66, 124 Grofman, B. 51 group norms and practices 179 group pluralism 212–215 Habermas, Jürgen 9, 38, 42, 102, 146, 151, 207 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 162 hegemonic discourse 207 Heidegger, M. 82, 84, 89 Heraclitus 82 historical injustice 179–182, 184 historically disadvantaged groups 181 historical redress 182–183 Hizb Annahda (The Renaissance Party) 222n2 Hobbes, Thomas 62, 155, 159, 160, 162–164, 167, 168nn11, 12 homogeneity 103, 104 Horton, John 74n8, 75n11, 125 human affairs 87 humanity 104, 157 human reason/reasoning 99, 141, 219 human rights 114, 134, 135, 136, 168n12, 178 human subjectivity 144 Hume, David 176, 185n12 Huntington, Samuel P. 10, 155–158 hyperpluralism 8, 9 idealization, degree of 75n17 “Idea of Public Reason Revisited, The” (Rawls) 99 identity 144, 213, 221, 230, 235; collective 235; cultural 181; ethical 101, 149; formation 145, 146–148, 150; group 181, 182, 205; for group members 179; human 140, 153n8; individual 217, 234; institution 149, 150, 152; Islamic 207; national 226, 227, 234, 235; personal 233; politics 226; racial 101; social 214, 234 ideologies 101, 141 ijtihad (interpretation) 210, 211, 222nn7, 10 Impossibility Theorem (Arrow) 50–51

Index

‘Inclusiveness Requirement’ (IR) 123, 129, 130 inclusivism 128–131 incommensurability thesis 2, 3 individualism: ethical standard of 103 individual rights 105; and liberties 173–175, 178, 179, 182–184 Ingham, S. 41 in-group tendencies 181 institutions: incentives 183; pluralism 103; policies 180; social 188, 189 international migration 205 interpersonal relationships 177, 178 intersubjective deliberation 88, 146 “intra-epistemic” disagreement 92 intra-philosophical diversity 92 intuitive argument 17, 18–23 intuitive pluralism 3 Islam 205; and liberalism 113; in liberal polity 101–102; party 218; politics 12, 206–208, 209–213; unity 217, 218 Islamist 216 James, William 24 John-Paul II (Pope) 119n13 Judaism 108 judgments 176 justice 58–59, 108, 115, 116, 196; conception of 3–4, 31, 32, 37, 190; conf lict between cultures and 11–12; disagreement and 62; as fairness 88, 93, 94, 95, 162; issues 141; liberal 174, 178, 179, 183; political 113, 114, 122, 127, 128; public principles of 118, 161; reparative 182–184; sense of 117, 160; social 140; theory 160–163, 175, 180, 182, 183 Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (Sandel) 227 Justificatory Requirement ( JR) 122, 123, 125–130, 132, 135, 136 kallipolis 83 Kant , Immanuel 62, 102, 112, 162, 167, 178, 197, 228, 235 Kaul, Volker 12–13 Kelly, Erin I. 10, 11 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 113 knowledge 84, 209, 216, 217 Korsgaard, Christine 229 Kymlicka, Will 227, 230, 233 Lamprecht, Sterling 56 Landrieu, Mitch 182, 183 languages 199–200

241

Larmore, Charles 35, 74n2, 93–95, 98n43, 120n14 left-wing populists 235n2 legal norms 180 legitimacy 83, 91, 101, 114, 123, 125; liberal 74n2, 123, 125, 129–131, 133, 134, 136, 166; political 49, 63, 74n4, 125–136, 137n3, 141–143 Letter Concerning Toleration (Locke) 103 Lewis, Bernard 156, 157 liberalism 3, 5, 6, 17, 23, 64, 117, 122, 157–158, 189, 225, 230, 235; affirmation of 23; challenges faced by 7–8; contingent practice-dependent model 123, 130–134, 136; defending 8; and Enlightenment tradition 64–65, 74n5, 112; ethical 105; incompatibility of 6; institutional model 123, 127–129, 131–133; and Islam 113; modus vivendi 9, 124, 129; and moral truth 65; nonperfectionist 89, 91; paradox of 102–103; and pluralism 63; political 82, 89, 94, 96, 140–141; post-Enlightenment 103; post-Reformation 103; ‘practicedependent’ model 127–129, 131–134; practice-independent justificatory model 123, 131, 134–136; and Rawls 159; redefining 158–161; Schmittian critique of 155; weakening 105–106 liberal political consensus 99–118; firstorder and second-order pluralisms 106–111; pluralism as obstacle 100–106; Rawls’s conception of pluralism 111–118 liberals 5, 13, 126, 190, 194, 196, 202, 216, 226–228, 233, 235; approach 5, 64; contemporary societies 11–12; defining nation 235n2; democracy 8; democrats 18; Islamic politics and 12; modus vivendi 6; moralism 74n8; nationalism 228, 230, 233, 234; nationalists 232; obligations 11; patriots 226, 228; pluralism 103, 106, 116; political agreement 64; political arrangements 27; political legitimacy 63; public reasons 5, 69; societies 2, 10, 11, 102; and stability 5, 65; theory 6, 122; toleration 11, 124; values 102, 105, 117 liberal theory of nation 228–230; critique of 230–234 liberty 5, 6, 22, 54, 62, 64, 65, 71, 116, 117, 140; see also practice of liberty Lilla, Mark 226 Locke, John 62, 65, 103, 113, 168n11

242 Index

MacIntyre, Alasdair 233 marginalized groups 181, 215 market economies 161, 162 mathematical statements 197, 198 McCabe, David 9, 122, 123, 126–131, 133–136 means-ends rationality 178 means-ends reasoning 175, 176 Mendez, Sylvia 183 Mendez v. Westminster 183 Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) 108–109 metaphysical justification 161, 163 metaphysical pluralism 23–25, 28, 95, 98n43 Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) 183 Middle Ages 102 “mild idealization” 75n17 Mill, John Stuart 19, 102, 119n8, 139, 162, 178, 228 minimal moral universalism 134, 135 moderate idealization 75n17 modern institutions 9 modernity 131, 149, 151, 159, 164, 207 modernization 155, 156, 159 Modood, Tariq 100, 101, 111 modus vivendi 5, 6, 63, 64, 73, 99, 103, 105, 123–127, 130, 134; agreement 116; approaches 66; commitment to peace and stability 66; defenders of 66; justificatory project 122, 135; liberalism 9, 129; of political arrangements 8; political theorizing 123–125; pragmatic compromise 67; public reason liberalism and 66–70; realist spirit of 66–67; stability of 67; theorists 67 Modus Vivendi Liberalism (MVL, McCabe) 9, 122, 123, 126–127, 129–135 Mommsen, Theodor 147 monism 27, 29n3; commensurability 20; pluralism vs. 19–20 monist 19, 20, 27 moral commitments 26 moral deliberation 10, 174, 176, 177 moral disagreement 44–45n4 moral doctrine 100, 102, 110, 116, 117 moral epistemology 174 moral experience 160 morality 127, 129, 160, 174, 177–179, 231, 234; political 43, 130, 131, 133, 136, 173 moral judgements 188 moral motivation 177 moral norms 190 moral objectivity 74n1 moral pluralism see value pluralism

moral powers 117 moral principles 178 moral psychology 37, 160 moral realism 44n3, 63, 74n2, 230, 236n6 moral reasons 176–179 moral relations 177 moral truth 66; liberalism and 65 Mounk, Yascha 226 Müller, Jan-Werner 225 Mulligan, Thomas 4–5 multiculturalism 101, 119n4, 179, 188, 226, 230 Multiculturalism Act (1988) 101 Muslim Council of Britain 111 Muslims 100, 111, 205, 208, 213, 218–220 mutually intelligible evaluative pluralism see reasonable pluralism Nash equilibria 191 nationalism 228, 232 nationality 228 nation and freedom: negative 232–234; positive 231–232 neutrality 117 Nietzsche, Friedrich 143, 144, 157, 167n6 Nitzan, Shmuel 49, 51, 58 No Dictators axiom 50 non-authoritarian reasoning 206, 208–212, 217; authoritarian citizenship and Islamic politics 209–211; boundaries of public reasoning 208–209; and democratic civility 215–217; sociocultural exclusion 211–212 non-fundamentalist: attitude as metacivic-virtue 217–221; reasoning 12 non-hypocrisy 210 normative pluralism 34, 43, 44 normative theory 18 Nussbaum, Martha 74n1, 228 Obama, Barack 183 obligations 189, 190, 202, 227 On Liberty (Mill) 19, 119n8 ontological pluralism 24 ontological significance 89 oppression 91–93, 94, 102 Orange County California schools 183 otherness 101 overlapping consensus 69–70, 115–117, 123–125, 155, 161, 162–167 Owen, G. 51 pacifism 158 paideia 83, 92 Parmenides 82

Index

Paroush, Jacob 49, 51, 58 patriotism 228 peer disagreements 71–72, 73, 76n23 perfectionism, principled compromise and 73–74 perfectionists 73–74, 74n4 Phaedo (Plato) 82 Phillips, Anne 106 philosophical pluralism 20 pistis (commonsense knowledge) 82, 83 Plato 62, 82–92, 96, 157; epistocracy 7; myth of the cave 7 pluralism 17, 18, 59, 66; conf licts among values 20; and deliberation 41–44; descriptive 32–33; different approaches to 2; disagreement 33; diversity 18; epistemological 23, 24; inclusion 18; incommensurability thesis 2–3; liberalism and 17, 63; metaphysical 23, 28; monism and 19–20, 27; moral deliberation 10; normative view of 33; objective incommensurable values 22; open-mindedness 18; philosophical 3, 20; political justification and truth 38–41; and political liberalism 3; political philosophers and 1; political relevance of 2; polity and 21–22; popular 18, 19; prima facie for 32; proposal for managing 6; rational deliberation 10; Rawls’s notion of 8; and reasonable disagreement 34–37; reasonableness and 39; relevance of 56–58; robust forms of 28–29; sources of 10; structure of 3; structure of value 22; theoretical position on 13; varieties 31–34; views on 1–2; see also individual entries pluralism to liberalism 17, 28–29; indirect argument 23–28; intuitive argument 18–23 pluralists 17, 21, 28, 58, 196–197, 200–202; metaphysical 28; and non-pluralist societies 2, 188–190 Pogge, Thomas 75n12 political autonomy 131, 133, 135 political community 102 political consensus 163 political consequentialism 105, 114, 115 political constructivism 127–128 political discourse 169n39 political disputes 52–56; conf licting preferences 52; debate over abortion 54–55; mobilization climate change 53–54; vaccine skeptics 55–56 political doctrines 165; vs. comprehensive doctrines 161–162

243

political justification: cognitive conception of 4; and truth 38–41 political legitimacy 49, 63, 74n4, 125–131, 142, 143; liberals 63; theory of 75n11 political liberalism 3, 9, 37, 38, 69, 74n2, 123–125, 140–141, 166, 168n18, 218 Political Liberalism (Rawls) 7, 62, 91, 98n38, 99, 103, 119n1, 122, 127, 155, 161, 162, 166, 167, 225, 228 political liberal philosophy 206 political life 83 political parties 213 political philosophers 62 political philosophy 1, 4, 81, 82, 87, 88, 95, 159, 160, 161, 205, 221, 222 political pluralism 2, 100, 135, 137n3; Ferrara’s defense of 7; and reasonable consensus 6–10 political principles 93, 94, 113, 118 political realism 81, 103, 122, 125; methodological approach of 6 political struggles 107, 232 political theorizing: practice-dependent justificatory model 131–134; practiceindependent model 134–135 political theory 143, 151, 159 polity 83, 89; Islam in liberal 101–102; pluralism and 21–22 popular pluralism 18, 19 populism 9, 143, 152, 225–227, 234, 235 practical reason 37, 95, 104 practical reasoning and pluralism 175–178 practice of liberty 11; historical redress 182–184; pluralism and practical reasoning 175–178; problem of liberal toleration 173–175; toleration 178–182 practice rules 194 “pragmatic compromises” 63–64, 67 praxis 87 prejudices 91, 212 principled compromise 70–73, 75n17; apparent disagreements 70–71; genuine disagreements 70, 71; peer disagreements 71–72; perfectionism 73–74; political opportunities 73; public justification 71; and public reason liberalism 72–73; sensitive to pluralism 72–73 private language 90 privatisation 117, 118 property rights 135 Protestantism 124 psychoanalysis 144 psychology 201 public deliberation 9, 45n8

244 Index

public education 183 public justification 37, 70, 71, 125–131; cognitive understanding of 38–39; convergence conception of 69 public reasoning 179, 206–209, 211–215, 217, 221 public reason liberalism 5, 63, 64, 72, 73, 75n13; conceptions of 67–68; convergence conceptions of 68–69; modus vivendi and 66–70; political philosophy 68; principled compromise and 72–73 public reasons 7, 8, 40, 44, 67–68, 89, 92, 95, 99, 100, 107–111, 113, 118, 135, 166, 169n39, 208; constrained by reasonability 42; disagreements within 41; liberals 69; reconciliation and 115–117 public recognition 207 Pythagoras 82 Quine, W. V. O. 197–201 Quong, Jonathan 75n16, 129 Qutb, Sayyid 217, 223n13 racial segregation 183 radicalisation 101, 118 radical pluralism 69 Ranciere, Jacques 62 Rasmussen, David 9–10 rational agreement 146 rational behavior 175 rational deliberation 10, 174, 175–176 rationality 103, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 190, 192, 209 rational reasoning 178 Rawls, John , 10, 36, 38, 68, 69, 74n1, 75n15, 75n20, 82, 89–93, 95, 96, 100–104, 109, 120nn14, 17, 131–133, 135, 136, 140, 158, 165, 168n22, 168nn18, 39, 194–195, 203n6, 207, 229; Allegory of the Cave and 88–92; burdens of judgment 35–36; conception of pluralism 111–118; ‘Conceptions of the Good’ 109, 112, 160; “The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus” 164; “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” 99; institutional practice-dependent model 123, 127, 129, 131, 133, 136; notion of decency 126; overlapping consensus 69–70; political authority 123, 124, 126, 128, 131; political constructivism 127–128; political legitimacy 143 (see also political legitimacy); political

liberalism 141 (see also political liberalism); Political Liberalism 7, 62, 91, 98n38, 99, 103, 119n1, 122, 127, 155, 161, 162, 166, 167, 225, 228; public reason 7, 8; reasonable pluralism 8; Theory of Justice, A 7, 31, 88, 98n38, 119n1, 129, 155, 159, 160, 162–164, 166, 169n33; treatment of disagreement 37; “Two Concepts of Rules” 194 Raz, Joseph 13, 115, 228–232 reasonability, definition 165–166 reasonable consensus: political pluralism and 6–10 reasonable disagreement 89, 98n43, 104, 110, 120n14, 174; pluralism and 34–37 reasonableness 39, 50, 128, 136, 165, 211, 215, 221; pluralism and 39; political truth and 45n7; public 207; of religious doctrines 113–115 reasonable pluralism 4, 8, 34, 43, 44, 69, 92, 93, 100, 111, 112, 128, 129, 132, 133, 179 reciprocity 114, 115 regulative rules 196, 203n6 relativism 33, 95, 103, 106, 200 religion 159, 168n22, 179; accommodation to 161–163; discrimination 111; doctrines 101, 102, 110, 112, 113–115, 116, 117, 118; freedom 101, 102, 219; minorities 100, 105, 117, 118; phenomenon 113; pluralism 102; reasoning 209; values 105 Republic, The (Plato) 82, 87, 88 Richard, Rorty 81 Richardson, Henry 215, 216 right-wing populists 235n2 Rorty, Richard 74n7 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 62 Royce, Josiah 159 “rule by laws” 152 Rushdie, Salman 106, 110, 111 Rushdie Affair 106, 110 Sadek, Karim 12 Salvatore, Ingrid 11–12 Sandel, Michael 225, 226, 233 Sangiovanni, A. 123, 127, 134, 136 Satanic Verses (Rushdie) 106, 110 Schmitt, Carl 157–158, 167n11 scientific progress 103 Searle, J. 203n6 second-order ‘conceptual schemes’ 109, 110 second-order pluralism 100, 106–111, 118

Index

Second Treatise of Government (Locke) 103 secularism 103, 117–118, 164; French 102; political 207 secularization 100, 113, 155, 156, 159 self-determining agency 143–148, 150, 151, 152, 154n36 Shakespeare 108 shari’a 207, 222n5 Sharia Councils 110 Sharia courts 105 Sharia law 110 Sheppard, D.J. 86 shura 213, 214, 218 Sidgwick, Henry 159 slavery 113, 182, 202 social capital 181 social choice 48–49; collective choice vs. 4; and collective decision-making 50–52; formalism of 5; framework of 57–58; normative 57; theory 50, 57 social conf licts 139 social contract 62 social decision-making 4; democracy and 4–5 social divisiveness 139 social dynamics 105 social exclusion 180 social inequalities 180, 182, 184, 226 social institutions 148–151 socialization 139 social networks 180 social norms 11, 190 social pluralism 221–222 social practices 182, 188, 194–197 social privileges 180 social relationships 177 social system 196–197, 202 social welfare function (SWF) 50–52, 56 Society of Peoples 126, 135 socio-cultural exclusion 206, 211–212, 212–215, 221 Socrates 82, 85, 90, 157 solidarity and pluralism 205–222; democratic civility and nonfundamentalist attitude 215–220; group pluralism and socio-cultural exclusion 212–215; liberal response and Islamic politics 206–208; non-authoritarian reasoning and socio-cultural exclusion 208–212; social pluralism 221–222 Sosa, Ernest 71 sovereignty 135 Soviet Union 156 stereotype threat 181 Strauss, Leo 83

245

summary rules 194 supranational institutions 226 system of rules 195–196 Talisse, Robert B. 2, 3, 57 Taylor, Charles 144–145, 147, 154n36, 203n6, 231 Taylor, Michael 74n6 tertium 95 theoretical reason 56, 104 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls) 7, 31, 88, 98n38, 119n1, 129, 155, 159, 160, 162–164, 166, 169n33 threshold autonomy 131–133 toleration 19, 23, 25, 65, 68, 101, 105, 124, 161–163, 178–182; international 126; liberal 11, 124, 173–175, 179, 182–183; mutual 103 traditional nationalism 228 transcendental illusion 112 Treaty of Westphalia 156 Trump, Donald 58, 225 truth 82, 84, 85, 89, 115, 146, 148, 157; in cognitive processes 39–40; Cohen’s political concept of 40; ethical 145, 146; incompatible with pluralism 39; moral 173, 232; ontological 95; political 42, 45n7; political justification and 38–41 “Two Concepts of Liberty” (Berlin) 140 “Two Concepts of Rules” (Rawls) 194 “Two Dogma of Empiricism” (Quine) 197 UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs 110, 111 United States 162, 180, 205, 225 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) 107 universality 103, 104 urbanization 144 U.S. Constitution: 15th Amendment 183 U.S. Postal Service 183 Utilitarian 57 utilitarianism 29n3, 102, 194 Vallier, Kevin 132 value pluralism 29n1, 75n9, 103–105, 118, 139–141; critique of 107–110 values 104, 107, 112, 142, 178, 231, 233–234; and conceptions 10; conflicts of 139; democratic 178; ethical 142, 149, 150, 151; expressions of 109; plurality of 178; political 105, 165; religious 105, 141 Venezuela 135

246 Index

verbal agreement 191 verification 199 Vocation Lectures (Weber) 104 Waldron, Jeremy 65, 124 Wars of Religion 103 Weber, Max 84, 99, 100, 103, 104 Weithman, P. 133 Western civilization 157 Westernization 156

Western philosophy 82, 157 Western tradition 104 Williams, Bernard 125, 185n14 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 8, 83, 109 women: education 188; equality 101; role in family 115; sense of self 144 worldviews 11, 43, 104, 173, 178, 180, 182, 184, 200–202 xenophobia 226, 227