Public reason requires that the moral or political rules that regulate the common life of a community be, in some sense, justifiable or acceptable to all those persons over whom the rules purport to have

authority Authority is commonly understood as the legitimate power of a person or group of other people. In a civil state, ''authority'' may be practiced by legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government,''The New Fontana Dictionary of M ...

. It is an idea with roots in the work of

Thomas Hobbes Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679) was an English philosopher, best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan (Hobbes book), Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. He is considered t ...

Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (born Emanuel Kant; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German Philosophy, philosopher and one of the central Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works ...

, and

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau (, ; ; 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Republic of Geneva, Genevan philosopher (''philosophes, philosophe''), writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment through ...

, and has become increasingly influential in contemporary moral and political philosophy as a result of its development in the work of

John Rawls John Bordley Rawls (; February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American moral philosophy, moral, legal philosophy, legal and Political philosophy, political philosopher in the Modern liberalism in the United States, modern liberal tradit ...

Jürgen Habermas Jürgen Habermas ( , ; ; born 18 June 1929) is a German philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere. Associated with the Frankfurt S ...

, and Gerald Gaus, among others.

Kant and Rawls

The phrase "public use of one's reason" (''Vernunft in allen Stükken öffentlichen Gebrauch'') was used by

in his 1784 editorial piece responding to the question " What Is Enlightenment?", where he distinguished it from private usage of reason, by which he meant reasoning offered from a specific civic office or post. This Kantian conception was further developed by American philosopher

to refer to the common reason of all citizens in a pluralist

society A society () is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. ...

and identified it as a component of political liberalism. Although Rawls cited the Kantian origin of his concept, his understanding is distinguished by the way he explained how public reason embodies the shared fund of beliefs and reason of those who constitute a democratic

polity A polity is a group of people with a collective identity, who are organized by some form of political Institutionalisation, institutionalized social relations, and have a capacity to mobilize resources. A polity can be any group of people org ...

—those who are concerned with the good of the public and matters of basic justice. Public reason giving, in the Rawlsian sense, involves justifying a particular position by way of reasons that people of different moral or political backgrounds could accept. Although in his later writings he added what is known as the proviso, meaning that non-public reasons could be given assuming that public reasons would be provided in due course. In order to accomplish this, however, one must overcome what he refers to as the burdens of judgment, which can produce disagreement among reasonable citizens. These burdens include conflicting evidence, giving differing weights to considerations, conceptual indeterminacy, differing experiences and value conflicts. Private reason, by contrast, is the exercise of an individual's reason to the constrained norms and interests of some sub-set of the public as a whole (such as a business, a political party, the military or the family). Rawls also divided the concept into public reason for "liberal peoples" and public reason for the "society of peoples". The former involves public reason of free and equal liberal peoples who

debate Debate is a process that involves formal discourse, discussion, and oral addresses on a particular topic or collection of topics, often with a moderator and an audience. In a debate, arguments are put forward for opposing viewpoints. Historica ...

their mutual relations, while the latter involves equal citizens of domestic society debating political issues and justice concerning their government.

References

External links

Legal Theory Lexicon: Public Reason
Concepts in political philosophy

Reason Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing valid conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. It is associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, religion, scien ...

{{poli-philo-stub

Kant and Rawls

See also

References

External links