Introductory

0.1 In the previous chapter we have seen how, on the liberal legitimacy view, the (hypothetical) consent of the citizenry is a necessary condition for the proper exercise of liberal political authority. However, as it has been pointed out by Rawls and others, this approach becomes problematic in societies characterised by a high level of cultural and ethical disagreement: the fact of ethical diversity makes it unlikely that citizens will converge towards and consent to the normative commitments of a liberal polity, at least as they have been traditionally understood—in fact, it seems unlikely that they will converge and consent to any single political framework.1 _{We have also seen that, as a}

response to this problem, proponents of the liberal legitimacy view construct their account of hypothetical consent through the idea of public reason, or public justification.2 _{The basic thought here is that of finding a way of bypassing}

this pervasive disagreement by providing a shared medium, or a procedure, to settle the politically salient disputes: if the political framework is one that could have been agreed upon by the citizens as the outcome of a process of deliberation conducted according to rules that safeguard the view’s salient normative commitments (e.g. the citizens’ personal autonomy), then the political framework is (hypothetically) consented to.

1 _{As detailed in I.1.2 By ‘political system’ or ‘political framework’ I roughly mean what Rawls} refers to as “the basic structure of society”, i.e. “constitutional essentials and basic questions of justice” (Political Liberalism, p. 10). Those cornerstones of a polity are what, according to the liberal legitimacy view, is in need of (hypothetical) consent—if this relation of consent obtains, every single action or feature of the government outside this domain, then, will be indirectly but still sufficiently legitimate.

2 _{Recall that I use the terms ‘public reason’ and ‘public justification’ interchangeably, except} where otherwise specified.

II – Public Justification

In opposition to that now predominant approach, in this chapter I set the stage for carrying out the task (to be completed over the next four chapters) of arguing that the public reason strategy is bound to fail, and that therefore the liberal legitimacy view should be abandoned as an account of the foundations of liberal politics. More specifically, I argue that the idea of public justification embodies two desiderata that are in tension with one another, and that this tension is very likely to become unsustainable under conditions of ethical diversity such as those typical of the citizenry of modern liberal democracies. Moreover, in anticipation of an argumentative convergence I shall expand on in Chapter VI, I argue that this internal difficulty of the idea of public justification is connected to the general worries about the structure of the liberal legitimacy view I presented in the previous chapter: my main contention here will be that the sort of restrictions on the acceptable modes of consent (i.e. the rules for the conduct of deliberation) called for by the public justification approach, besides being in tension with one another, also highlight the fact that the sort of consensus envisaged by the liberal legitimacy view is either irrelevant or redundant. In the light of those conclusions, I also try (very briefly) to anticipate what direction of inquiry I intend to pursue in order to characterise and defend an alternative normative foundation for liberalism, or indeed for political authority in general.

0.2 The chapter is structured as follows. I begin section 1 by briefly recalling the account of the structure of the liberal legitimacy view I provided in the previous chapter. That in turn leads me to present the sort of difficulties the liberal legitimacy view faces under conditions of persistent ethical diversity. Hence, in section 2, I come to the main focus of the chapter: I show how the idea of public reason or public justification, variously interpreted, is supposed to provide a solution to those difficulties. I briefly distinguish between two main conceptions of public reason (idealistic and realistic), show how they are connected to the liberal legitimacy view (by arguing that each embodies a crucial desideratum of the view), and how they inform some of the major strands of contemporary contract-based liberal theory: political liberalism, modus vivendi- based liberalism, and justificatory liberalism. In section 3, then, I point out what

II – Public Justification

are the questions worth asking in order to consider whether any of these theories, or families of theories, succeeds in achieving the desiderata of liberal legitimacy. I show that there is a problematic tension between the two desiderata and that this problem is connected to the structural worries about the view I flagged in Chapter I. In the fourth and last section, I summarise the main points discussed so far, and propose some rough ideas for a research programme (which I shall return to in the last chapter and in the conclusion) for the characterisation of an alternative to the contract-based account of the foundations of (liberal) political authority. Indeed, contrary to most recent liberal orthodoxy, I would like to argue that the demise of the liberal legitimacy view and, more broadly, of the contract-based tradition as an account of the foundations of political authority need not coincide with the demise of liberalism as a normative political theory. Rather, it should lead to the rediscovery of the unduly neglected substantivist strand of the liberal tradition.