Against Public Reason

Abstract

In this chapter I make yet another attempt to explain why public-reason accounts are hopeless. I share the feeling that there are already in the literature strong reasons to reject specific public-reason accounts and perhaps that tradition more generally, but I think that more can be done—and that given the state of the field, more should be done. In this chapter, then, I try to develop some of the strongest, most general objections to public-reason accounts. For this reason, I do not focus on the details of specific public-reason accounts, not even Rawls’s. Furthermore, in an attempt to get past the they-just-don’t-get-it predicament, I try to broaden my vision, and to place some of the controversies here in a wider philosophical context. Also, I try to pinpoint—from the point of view of a public-reason-skeptic—the underlying intuition that public-reason accounts get right, and to accommodate it without following them to their (unacceptable, I argue) conclusions Show more