[00:00:00] SPEAKER 1:
It is my pleasure to introduce Chancellor Birgeneau.
(applause)
[00:00:12] CHANCELLOR BIRGENEAU:
Thank you so much. It’s great to see this, uh, group again. Again, uh, it gives great, me great pleasure to welcome all of you to the Berkeley campus this afternoon and for the Tanner Lectures on Human Values.
This distinguished public lecture series is presented annually at each of nine universities, uh, including UC Berkeley. Uh, in, in fact, it used to be the University of California as a whole, but, uh, the Tanner Committee sensibly condensed down to, of course… Oh, I can’t say it.
Uh, in case I, in case this is on tape and it gets communicated to the other chancellors. Uh, the other universities involved are Cambridge and Oxford. Actually, Cambridge, it’s Clare Hall, uh, uh, where, where it’s, uh, hosted and, uh, I once was a distinguished lecturer at Clare Hall for a while, so I have great affection for it.
Uh, and Oxford, uh, Brasenose. I was at Balliol, but still Brasenose, it’s a great college. Uh, and here in the United States, Harvard, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, Utah, and Yale.
And Josh, you notice MIT’s not there. So both Josh and I had to leave MIT to come to schools that were renowned enough to have a Tanner Lecturer. Uh, the series was founded in, uh, nineteen seventy-eight by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner, who was also a member of the faculty of philosophy at the University of Utah.
And, uh, Professor Tanner was, uh, also an honorary fellow of the British Academy. Tanner’s goal in establishing the lectures through the Tanner Philanthropies was to promote a search for a better better understanding of human behavior and human values. Uh, he hoped that the lectures would advance scholarly and scientific learning in the area of human values and contribute to the intellectual and moral life of mankind.
Human values are defined as broadly as possible, and the lecturers may be chosen from any discipline. The lectureships are international and transcend national, religious, and ideological distinctions. At Berkeley, these public lectures are given in the deep scholarly tradition with which philosophy is identified at Berkeley.
Uh, the lectures from all nine universities are published in an annual volume. Uh, and in addition, Oxford University Press publishes a series of books based on the Berkeley Tanner Lectures. And I think it’s true that, uh, our university is the only one where the lectures are given at a level where Oxford publishes them as a series.
Uh, the Tanner Lecturer is chosen for his or her, I hope you’re listening, Josh, uncommon achievement and outstanding abilities in the field of human values. Uh, and, uh, here at, uh, Berkeley, the Tanner Lecturer is appointed through, uh, a faculty committee, which technically I chair, uh, but like many of the things attributed to the chancellor, actually s-some other group of people do all of the work. Uh, and, uh, in this case, uh, I wanna thank my colleagues, uh, first of all, Vice Chair Professor Sam Scheffler.
But as I think as most of you know, Sam’s been on sabbatical in New York th-this year, and his responsibilities were ably assumed by Professor Martin Jay, uh, who’s acting vice chair this year while Sam is on leave, and Professors Hannah Ginsborg, Victoria Kahn, Christopher Kutz, and R.J. Wallace. And of course, I want to thank them for their brilliant choice of renowned political theorists and longtime former colleague and friend of mine at MIT, Josh Cohen, uh, as this year’s Tanner Lecturer. So now let me call on my distinguished colleague, Professor Jay Wallace, who’s chair of the Philosophy Department, professor of philosophy, and a member of the Tanner Lecturers Committee, to introduce Professor Cohen and the commentators.
And Professor Wallace will also moderate the discussion that follows.
(applause)
[00:04:43] JAY WALLACE:
It brings me great pleasure to introduce this year’s Tanner Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Joshua Cohen of Stanford University. Professor Cohen is one of the leading political philosophers of the present day. More than that, he’s also a dedicated public intellectual, someone who has made serious and successful efforts to engage large political and cultural issues in the public sphere.
His career exemplifies the enlightened commitment to informed and reasoned discourse about normative issues that it is the aim of the Tanner Lectures to promote, and we’re very happy to have him in Berkeley for these events. Professor Cohen was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, and raised on Long Island. He did his undergraduate work at Yale University, where he received both BA and MA degrees in philosophy in 1973.
He moved to the philosophy department at Harvard University for graduate study, where he worked with the distinguished moral and political philosopher John Rawls. He received the PhD degree in 1979 for a thesis that was awarded the Francis Bowen Prize at Harvard. Professor Cohen tells me that when he first went out on the academic job market, he was a candidate for a position in his areas of Berkeley.
In fact, he arranged to visit our campus in connection with a trip to California to give a job talk down at UCLA. He enjoyed his time at Berkeley, but says that he kept running into people who told him about the exciting work being done by one of his competitors on the job market that year, who, it gradually emerged, had at that point already been offered the Berkeley position, and who remains on our faculty to this day. I’m not going to tell you who it is.
Uh, it all worked out well enough in the end, however, as Professor Cohen was offered a position at MIT. I’ll def– have to deter– defer to our chancellor to tell us whether that was a better or worse job than the one at Berkeley that he didn’t get. He spent almost three decades in the departments of Political Science and Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT, serving in succession as head of the Philosophy section of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, and as chair of the Political Science department.
From 1995 to 2001, he was Sloan Professor of Political Science at MIT, and from 2001 to 2006, he held the Leon and Anne Goldberg Professorship, uh, of, of the Humanities. He moved to Stanford at the beginning of the current academic year, drawn in part, no doubt, by the proximity to Berkeley, Uh, but also, it seems, by the opportunity to increase his institutional entanglements. At Stanford, he’s a member not only of the Departments of Political Science and Philosophy, but also of the law school faculty, and in addition, he serves as director of the Stanford Program on Global Justice.
It must be a rare day down on the farm when he doesn’t have a department meeting or a job talk to attend somewhere. You will have received the correct impression from this brief account of his, uh, professional trajectory that Josh Cohen is a man of unusual intellectual energy. This is reflected as well in his extensive and wide-ranging bibliography.
Professor Cohen works primarily on problems in democratic theory. He describes himself as having a special interest in issues that lie at the intersection of democratic norms and institutions. He’s written influentially on the deliberative approach to democratic theory and its implications for a range of issues and debates, including freedom of expression, toleration, equality, political lib– uh, personal liberty, human rights, and campaign finance.
He’s also made important contributions on issues from the history of political philosophy. His work on these topics includes scores of influential articles and essays in leading journals and scholarly volumes, a number of which will be reprinted in a collection that’s forthcoming, uh, from Harvard University Press. A separate book, A Free Community of Equals: Rousseau on Democracy, uh, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
His professional activities include involvement in a number of institutional and editorial boards, including those of the MIT Press and of the important journal Philosophy and Public Affairs. Professor Cohen’s scholarly and professional accomplish accomplishments have rightly attracted an impressive range of academic honors and awards. At MIT, he was a repeated recipient of the Teaching Award from the Political Science Department.
He also received the Harold E. Edgerton Award and the Levitan Prize. He’s had fellowships from the NEH and the ACLS, and was Wesson Lecturer at Stanford in 1996, and Carlyle Professor at Oxford in 1999. In 2002 to 2003, he was the Phi Beta Kappa
Romanell Professor of Philosophy, and in 2002 he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Cohen’s academic contributions are only part of the story, uh, of his career, however. To a degree that’s unusual for a scholar of his distincti-distinction and accomplishment, he’s ventured into the public sphere to provoke and to participate in thoughtful debate about many of the leading political and social issues of the day.
His contributions in this dimension include four books that he has co-authored with Joel Rogers, uh, from the University of Michigan Law School, which address serious issues of democratic theory in a more popular and accessible style than do his more purely scholarly publications. Also noteworthy in this connection is his involvement with The Boston Review, a bimonthly journal which he, uh, founded in nineteen ninety-one, and which he has edited ever since. He continues to serve as one of two co-ed- editors-in-chief of this publication now that he is at Stanford.
We can only hope that his name will not change to the Palo Alto Review, which somehow lacks the punch of the original. The journal is an unusual and successful combination of political debate, cultural criticism, fiction, and poetry. Uh, among other things, it brings academics and theorists into conversation with activists and others involved in political and cultural institutions, fostering the kind of reasoned and respectful public debate that Professor Cohen himself takes to be essential to a flouri- flourishing democratic culture.
Profess- Professor Cohen is co- co-edited more than twenty volumes that grew out of debates originally published in The Boston Review.
Googling his name the other day, I discovered that he’s now branching out into video as well. You can watch him discussing global warming and the current crop of Democratic political candidates on the website Blogging Heads, uh, TV. His video cam technique is a little rough, uh, but I sense a definite potential to succeed in this important and emerging, uh, medium.
His forays into the public sphere include, in addition, two multi-year stints as coach in the North Cambridge Little League. For most of us, these public activities would be more than a full-time job. How Professor Cohen manages to keep all of them going while maintaining a distinguished academic career is something of a mystery in the profession.
There’s speculation that he’s, uh, somehow impervious to sleep. We are delighted, in any case, that he has agreed to serve as Tanner Lecturer at Berkeley this year. His overarching topic will be power, reason, and politics, and he will be addressing this topic in a series of events on three consecutive days, all of which will take place at the same time and location, so right here.
The format will be as follows: Today and tomorrow, Professor Cohen will present lectures on his general theme, which, which will be followed by responses from his commentators. One response today and two tomorrow. On Thursday, there will be a general seminar-style discussion at which the three commentators will offer further responses, and Professor Cohen will reply to them.
Uh, there may and probably will be opportunity for questions from the audience on all three days. Possibly not today, but we’ll see how things go. Without further ado then, let me now cede the podium to Profes- Professor Cohen, whose topic today will be on public reason.
(applause)
[00:13:13] JOSH COHEN:
Thank you. Uh, thanks, uh, Bob. Chancellor Birgeneau, now excuse me. All right, Jay, thank you very much. Uh, uh, what… Jay, what you don’t know is that when you multiply your, uh, d- Uh, departmental affiliations, what you do is you increase your number of excuses,
(laughter)
not the number—not the number of obligations you have.
(laughter)
Um,
(laughter)
and, uh, I particularly really appreciated, uh, Bob’s comment about the Berkeley Tanner lectures, um, operating in the, the deep, uh, scholarly tradition associated phil- with philosophy because these lectures are going to be really deep. Um, and I hope we all don’t, and, and long also. And, uh–
(laughter)
And, uh, I hope we all don’t drown. Um, anyway, I’m really, uh, incredibly grateful for this, uh, opportunity, grateful to Obert Tanner and to the Tanner Foundation for endowing and sustaining the Tanner Lectures, grateful to the Berkeley Tanner Lectures Committee for selecting me. It really is an extraordinary honor.
Uh, grateful to Liz and, uh, Charles and Avishai, wherever he disappeared to. Ba- ah, right back there. Uh, from whose work I’ve learned so much, uh, over the years for taking the time to respond to my presentations.
Uh, grateful to Ellen Gobler, wherever she disappeared to, in the back. Ellen, uh, for her, all her good, and I have to say, patient work in, um, making this event happen. And, uh, grateful to my late, uh, well, I should say our late friend and teacher, John Rawls, um, who makes it possible for us to do what we do.
So, uh, orientation. Uh, there’s a handout and, um, you can follow along the lectures on the handout. I may occasionally refer to it.
Uh, uh, the– things get a little intricate, so you have it there. You can hum along or just, uh, if you fall asleep or something, you can pick up, pick up. Anyway, so in the lectures I’m going to explore the ideal of public reason as an ideal both for democratic and global politics.
And I start with six quotations which orient my exploration. The first from Plato’s Republic. Socrates, it looks to me as if you’d started on your way back to the city.
Quite right. Do you see how many we are? Of course I do.
Well, you must either be stronger than we are or you must stay here. Isn’t there another alternative? Namely that we may persuade you to let us go?
Socrates, could you persuade people who do not listen? Not possibly. Well, you can take it that we are certainly not going to listen.
Rousseau, fast-forward, I don’t know, two thousand years or so, uh, almost. Uh, so the strongest is never strong enough to be master forever unless he transforms his force into right and obedience into duty. This leads to the right of the strongest, a right
that’s apparently taken ironically and in principle really established. But won’t anyone ever explain this word to us? Force is a physical power.
I don’t see what morality can result from its effects. Yielding to force is an act of necessity, not of will. Let us agree that might does not make right, and that one is only obligated to obey legitimate powers.
A few years later, opening sentence of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, “Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it’s burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss since they’re given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer since they transcend every capacity of human reason. Reason falls into this perplexity through no fault of its own.” John Rawls, Justice is Fairness, 1957.
Persons engaged in a just or fair practice can face one another openly and justify their respective positions, should they appear questionable by reference to principles which it’s reasonable to expect each to accept. Only if such acknowledgement is possible can there be true community between persons. Turn the page.
Thank you. Community between persons in their common practices. Otherwise, their relations will appear to them as founded to some extent on force.
From Ibn Abd al-Salam, “The benefits and harms of the profane world” and the causes thereof are known via necessity, experience, custom, and considered opinion. And if something is ambiguous, inquiry is made using its evidence, that is, of necessity, experience, custom, and considered opinion. And whoever wishes to understand the substantive reasons for revealed rules, the costs and benefits, and the weightier of these considerations, he should present these questions to his mind, imagining that revelation was silent on these matters, and then he should derive rules.
In this case, hardly will a rule imposed by revelation differ from the conclusions reas- reached, save for such devotional rules as God imposed upon his servants with respect to which he did not reveal to them either its benefit or its harm. Finally, sixth, from Joyce’s Ulysses, the Nighttown sequence. Leopold Bloom runs to Stephen Dedalus and says, “Come along with me now, before worse happens.”
“Here’s your stick.” Stephen Dedalus says, “Stick?” “No, reason.”
This feast of pure reason.” Well, the ideal of pure reason is about the, the ideal of pure reason, the ideal of public reason, excuse me. Uh, the ideal of public reason is about the conduct of political life.
In the first instance, about the justification of political relations and decisions. Roughly stated, the ideal of public reason says that in our political affairs, justification ought to be conducted on common ground. More particularly, on the common ground provided by considerations that participants in the political relations can all acknowledge as reasons.
I come to the ideal of public reason both from ethical conviction and practical concern. On the ethical side, I take the ideal of public reason to express the value of inclusion, a fundamental political value. In his second treatise, John Locke said that the earth belongs to us all.
This common ownership, he says, gives each of us a certain kind of claim over the use of the world. Carrying this thought about common ownership of the earth to a higher level of abstraction, deterritorializing it, so to speak, the ideal of public reason expresses the idea that the space of the political is common, a res publica that belongs to us all, us all. Its so belonging is expressed in its account of political justification, that such justification ought to proceed on the basis of reasons that can be shared, and justification being part of political life, therefore, in its account of the proper conduct of politics itself.
The more focused practical concern comes from the pathologically polarized state of American political discourse. Simplifying a complicated terrain, there are two views about political polarization. First, that it’s principally an elite phenomenon expressed in the political discourse of partisan elites and intense partisan congressional cleavages.
Second, that it’s a mass phenomenon, perhaps provoked by partisan elites, but at the same time expressing a profound cultural divide, arguably associated with religious division. I’m very skeptical about the case for mass polarization, though I can imagine that sustained high levels of mass partisanship joined to fractured media markets, a persistent political presence of an uncompromising religious fundamentalism, and persistent and partisan issue polarization among elites might produce the as yet unobserved mass polarization. Whatever its explanation, current polarization is not only associated with an embarrassing lowly low level of political discourse, it damages what is, at the end of the day, at the beginning of the day, and at the day’s middle, a central purpose of politics, which is not to provide occasion for adults to rediscover their inner child, nor, nor for ad-, more, more advanced forms of theatrical display, mixing greater grandeur with correspondingly greater destructive potential, but to address consequential, sometimes momentously consequential, and conflictual matters of human concern.
From issues of basic personal and public security, health, education, and a decent standard of living, to promoting a tolerably just and maybe even livable planet. I won’t be addressing the issue of polarization in these lectures, but it sits anxiously throughout in the background. Part of what is so disturbing about contemporary political argument is its apparent rejection of the ideal of public reason.
Disturbing because political inclusion is an important value, because public reason arguably provides a more promising basis than polarized disagreement for doing the work of politics, and because decent and inclusive political life is not only a profoundly important good, but a painfully fragile one. Rejecting even an ideal of public reason may express a deep political division and may foster an irreparable one. Now, public reason is an old ideal.
We find something like it in early modern ideas about reasons of state as a distinct domain of reasons autonomous from morality, concerned with the state’s survival, health, and perhaps glory. In his Leviathan, Hobbes suggests something closer to what I have in mind by public reason. He argues that the sovereign’s artificial will and judgment trumps the private will and judgment of subjects and must trump if we are to live in peace.
That’s closer because each person has argued for his or her own distinct private reasons of personal preservation and happiness to have sufficient reason to authorize the sovereign’s supremacy on public matters. The sovereign’s reason is, at least in this attenuated sense, the reason of members. Rousseau comes closer in his idea of a general will as a concern for the common good that provides the ultimate standard of political rightness.
Closer because here the people are sovereign, so the reasons that play a role in political justification are deeply implicated in the thought and conduct of the individuals whose conduct is regulated by them, at least the adult male citizens whose conduct is regulated by them. But the most proximate point of departure is the account of public reason in John Rawls’s political liberalism. The ideal of public reason is, arguably, the central theme in Rawls’s final writings.
Certain elements of that ideal were, as Charles Larmore, among others, has forcefully argued, certain elements of it were a forceful presence much earlier, but it takes on a distinctive inflection in the political liberalism of Rawls’s later work. So in a striking passage in the opening pages of his doctoral dissertation, Rawls says that, quoting, “The democratic conception of government looks to the law and not to the state as the primary source of authority, and it views the law as the outcome of public discussions as to what rules can be voluntarily consented to as binding upon the government and the citizens. The law is regarded as those rules which discussion has shown to be right and reasonable so far as the citizens, as a group of intelligent men, have been able to ascertain that fact.
(coughs)
Rational discussion, he continues, is not outlawed or held to be irrelevant. On the contrary, it constitutes an essential precondition of reasonable law. Democratic theory and practice must consider the process of reasoning as one of the crucial points in its whole program.
It is, he says, be- because authoritarian and positivistic views about moral thought strike at what is essential to democratic theory, that the question about the rational foundation of ethical principles is worthy of our attention. So from the start, Rawls was focused on political justification in a democracy and emphasized a public use of reason in such justification. Thus, the comment I referred to, that quotation on the handout about justification by reference to principles which it’s reasonable to expect each to accept.
But until his later work, with its idea of a political liberalism, Rawls lacked the distinction between reasoning about morally right conduct generally and a specifically public reason suited to political justification in a democracy unalterably divided by religious and moral conviction. He concluded that his earlier theory of justice had had depended too much on an overarching philosophy of life associated with modern liberalism, with its distinctive views about the importance of reflective choice in a dignified human life, and about our nature as free and equal choosers of ends, as if to say that only such philosophical liberals could embrace politically liberal values of toleration, equal rights, equal opportunity, and a fair distribution of resources. Rawls ultimately rejected this over-moralization of the political domain and the associated sectarianism in its understanding of political justification, this dominance of philosophy over politics.
He came to the idea of a political liberalism. At its heart was an account of public reason that proposed at once to honor the ideal of the political as a common space with justification founded on reasons that can be shared and to acknowledge the profound unresolvable disagreements of the participants in that space. Public reason would reconcile these apparently competing aspirations by requiring that political justification proceed on a common ground of political values that it would be reasonable to expect others to accept with those values expressed in a range of competing politically liberal conceptions of justice.
But the idea of public reason as belonging specifically to political life was, I think, not as fully developed in Rawls as it might have been, in part because Rawls, I believe, retained an overly moralized view of politics. Moreover, he did, as a general matter, continue to associate the ideal of public reason with political democracy and more generally with a constitutional state. The idea of public reason, he says in his essay, The ideal of pub– the idea of public reason revisited, the first sentence.
The idea of public reason belongs to a conception of a well-ordered constitutional democratic society. So in these lectures then, I’ll be placing large emphasis on the idea that public reason belongs to political life while embracing what I’ll describe as a less moralized view of politics. At the same time, I broaden the scope of this important ideal.
I’ll present an interpretation of public reason as the reason of politics and on which it does not belong to a conception of constitutional democracy, nor any kind of state at all. Public reason takes on, as I’ll describe, a particular content and importance in the context of a democracy, but the ideal of public reason is more fundamental and more capacious. More capacious and more fundamental, it has wider scope with purchase and importance in a range of distinct political contexts, Thus, my final theme tomorrow of global public reason.
In developing this idea of political justification by our common re– by our common reason, the view that I’ll present comprises three main elements. First, the ideal of public reason expresses a fundamental value of inclusion, suited in particular to political life and framed for conditions of fundamental disagreement. And not simply disagreement, but what I’ll be describing maybe with a little too much portentousness, but anyway, there we are, as the fragmentation of reason.
So politics, inclusion, fragmentation of reason. An essential element of inclusion, call it inclusion in the space of reasons, is a need to present reasons in support of the conduct of common affairs that other participants in those affairs can reasonably be expected to acknowledge as such. In particular, political justification is to rely on reasons that can be acknowledged as such by people who themselves acknowledge the value of inclusion.
First. Second, I’ll present political morality as a relatively autonomous domain of argument and reflection. It has neither the utter independence from moral thought urged by the idea of reasons of state or by Carl Schmitt, who saw at the heart of the political and existential distinction between friends and enemies associated with a willingness to use violence and with no moral roots.
But it also lacks the continuity with moral thought associated with traditional moral liberalism, including Ronald Dworkin’s contemporary philosophical liberalism, and also with conventional religious reflections on political morality, which treat political life as one department of ethical thought. Third, an animating idea in my presentation is that modern political thought since the seventeenth century has tied notions of public politics, justice, and sometimes reason itself to the state as supreme authority in a territory. I’ll present the notion of public reason as the relatively autonomous reason of politics without assigning so large a role to the state in our normative thought.
In a world of global politics, this statist inflection of public reason, the identification of public reason with the reason of a state, democratic or otherwise, does not give inclusion its due importance. That’s the background. The lectures fall into three main parts.
First, I’ll discuss the idea of public reason. Second, democracy’s public reason with illustrative discussions of religious liberty and distributive justice. Then, global public reason, founded on an idea of global politics and brought to bear on issues of governance, distribution, and human rights.
Okay. Section two, I think it’s called. So I, I start then with reasons.
Reasons are considerations that bear on a belief or action, bear by way of supporting or infirming a belief or course of action. Supporting or infirming by way of inference and argument. Of course, argument and inference are matters of reasoning.
So when I say that reasons are considerations that support or infirm by way of inference and argument, I’m saying something pretty close to reasons are reasons, and that might seem unpromising to platform a political ideal on a tautology. But I’m not sure that we can do better than that as an account of reasons. The notion of a reason can’t be reduced to some non-normative category, and I don’t see that there’s a more basic normative category than that of a reason.
But the unavailability of illuminating analysis is not troubling. The ideal of public reason is not animated by a theory about the nature of reasons, but by a more substantive ideal of a common or shared reason suited to governing our political affairs. So there are two ideas then that are important in filling out the generic idea of public reason, the idea of political affairs or political relations, and an idea of reason’s fragmentation.
I’ll take them in, in order starting with political, and I’ll say that relations of human interdependence are political when they meet the following six conditions. On your handout. First, practicality.
So the participants in the relations face practical issues about how to conduct their relations and common affairs and about the dis-disposition of available resources. Politics is not simply a matter of interdependence, but emerges in the face of awareness of the need for coordinated action for the sake of problem-solving, and is concerned both with how those problems will be addressed and how people will relate to one another in their address. Whatever its larger ambitions, politics is also about addressing practical problems.
Second, importance. Moreover, these practical issues about the conduct of relations and distribution of resources are intuitively, and I have no idea how to do better than intuitively here, are intuitively important. The way the issues that are, the, are addressed is, and they are understood to be consequential for the good or the interests of those affected by the resolution of the issues.
Politics isn’t a game, its conduct matters. Third, contestability. There are, and participants understand that there are, competing ways to address the consequential practical problems they face.
Political problems arise in the face of uncertainty and implicate always a range of distinct values. So it’s not evident to any reasonable observer what the proper solution is or even what the right balance of the relevant values is. Say, whether resources should be devoted principally to those who are worst off, or those who would benefit most, or with equal chances for all above some acceptable level, or which problems should have priority.
So sharing broadly specified goals doesn’t eliminate politics from relations, nor does sharing reasonably well-specified goals when there’s disagreement about the weights that are to be attached to the various goals. So, a world in which people embrace a misguided fatalism, a false sense of necessity that denies these complexities and decision by endorsing the idea that there’s only one way to address practical problems, isn’t the political world, even if its depoliticization is a product of intentional efforts by people with greater power. The domain of the political is narrower than the domain of the p– of power.
Contestability is among its features. Fourth, conflict. Typically, there are not only competing ways to address problems, ways that one person herself may feel pulled between and among, but conflicts among participants, disagreements about how best to address a consequential and contestable practical p-problem.
Part of political life is disagreement, sometimes organized disagreement, about which of the competing ways is the right way or at least the way that the issue is to be resolved. Fifth, decisions. It’s understood that the consideration of an issue within a set of political relations is normally expressed in a decision, often in the form of some more or less general rule.
Political relations are neither about making trades nor giving orders in stylized relations of perfect authority with unchallenged obedience, nor arriving at judgments. Politics is about making decisions, decisions about the address of consequential problems in the face of contestability and conflict. The conclusion of a political issue is that one side wins, not that it’s right.
(coughs)
Of course,
(coughs)
it might be right.
(coughs)
Parties might care about being right. They might argue about which view is right. Uh, and winning might even sometimes be evidence, as in well-conducted jury decisions, of being right.
Indeed, it would defeat the purpose of the idea of public reason to deny that judgments of what ought to be done, of what is just, have an important place in politics. Still, an essential feature of political relations, as against philosophical arguments, is that they issue in decisions, where a decision does not, as Bernard Williams observed, does not in itself announce that the other party was morally wrong, or indeed wrong at all What it immediately announces is that they have lost. Fifth.
Sixth, justification. Political relations are associated, understandably in view of the five aforementioned features, with demands for justification. So Bernard Williams again says that political relations are to be distinguished from the naked exercise of force in that the state, he says, is to be held to a basic legitimation demand requiring a justification of its power to each subject.
Rousseau’s remark at the– that I quoted at the beginning about turning power into right and obedience into duty expresses a comparable point about the demand for legitimacy. But as a terminological matter, though the terminology expresses a subs– an, I think, an important substantive point, I associate legitimacy specifically with relations of authority and take justification, giving reasons, as the more comprehensive idea comprising concerns both about the form of consequential, contestable, and conflictual decision-making in the address of practical problems and about the substance of the decisions in which those relations issue. Max Weber hit the right note.
He referred to the observable need of any power or in even, even any advantage of life to justify itself. Thus his trenchant assertion that the fortunate is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate. Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune.
Good fortune wants to be legitimate fortune. I’d prefer to say good fortune wants to be justified fortune. Concerns about justification which respond not simply to a psychological need, need of the advantaged are addressed both to ways of conducting political relations and to the decisions that they issue in.
And I’m emphasizing too that this concern about justification answers to a demand associated with the political relations associated with consequential decisions that are known, that are, and are known to be contestable and subject to disagreement, and that issue in decisions. It thus has wider coverage than the concern about the legitimation of authority. This is a point that Charles and I are going to talk about later on.
[00:40:15] CHARLES:
Yeah.
[00:40:16] JOSH COHEN:
Um,
(coughing)
so concerns about justification then are not the philosophers’ or the theorists’ add-on to political life, but an important and understandable element of that life. As Habermas has long emphasized,
(coughing)
political life itself is lived between fact and norm. So what kind of reasons are suited to answering the demands for political justification that are internal to political life, to contestable and conflictual decision-making about consequential practical matters? So here on the handout, this is the fragmentation of, uh, reason.
Reason’s fragmentation. I got the, you know, you edit a magazine long enough, and you get rid of those prepositions.
(laughter)
Reason’s fragmentation. It’s not a bad idea. Um, Okay.
So, um, So here I, I’m, I have arrived at what I’ve been, what I described earlier as reason’s fragmentation.
This is an idea suggested by Kant’s cautionary note that I referred to in my opening, without prejudice to the importance of reason, he expresses caution about whether reason delivers on all its promises. To be sure, Kant believed in reason’s unity, not its fragmentation, but he also thought, and this is the essential point here, that convictions about reason’s practical importance can be accompanied by a sense of humility about its scope. Uh, so, uh, in describing reason’s fragmentation, I’m not meaning to offer a general philosophical theory about the nature of reason, say an account of how norms of reason are specific to cultures or traditions.
I as– I’m assuming that reflections about reason’s fragmentation are themselves part of political life in the sense just described, where you’re trying to work out principles and norms for the political case, attending to the idea of inclusion, and always resisting a temptation to depth, to mistake politics for philosophy. This will– Force of this point will emerge as we proceed through the three aspects of reason’s fragmentation. So first, we have disagreement about what Rawls has called comprehensive doctrines, overarching outlooks, religious or secular, that bear on the meaning and proper conduct of human life.
Such disagreement is politically reasonable in virtue of obtaining even between and among people who embrace the ideal of inclusion and acknowledge the importance of defending the organization and conduct of political relations on common ground. Saying that such disagreement is politically reasonable underscores that the point here belongs to politics. In particular, that the demands that people in political relations can reasonably make on one another do not include demands to agree on a religious or philosophical outlook, even if that outlook claims to be the absolute truth, as is asserted in the deco- Declaration of the Congregation of the Faithful, Dominus Iesus, two thousand.
Uh, that demand is unreasonable because of the complexities of settling on such a general outlook, because such common settlement is not needed for the conduct of common political affairs, and because inclusion itself is an important political value. So the first dimension of reason’s fragmentation is the fact of reasonable pluralism, the fact that when politically reasonable people engage in conscientious good faith efforts at the exercise of practical reason, those efforts do not converge on a particular philosophy of life. In such matters, the truth, if there be such, transcends the exercise of practical reason that we can appropriately, uh, expect of others with whom we share a political space.
So it affirms a kind of toleration of reasonable differences in ultimate outlook. Why suppose that there is such politically reasonable disagreement about these ultimate matters? To start with, there’s the sheer observation of persistent disagreements across traditions of ethical thought about, for example, the importance of values of choice and self-determination as against honoring the gifts we are blessed with, about whether or not we are best understood as situated in an ethical order, more or less dense or latitudinarian in the demands it makes on us, and whether those demands are congruent with our nature or exiguous impositions on it.
Moreover, among people who endorse views with elaborate structures and histories, the exercise of practical reason generates no apparent tendency to convergence. The areas of convergence in human thought under the pressure of reflective reason are extraordinary, both in their importance and in their rarity. Furthermore, we have no theory of the operations of practical reason that predicts convergence after sufficient reflection or evidence or argument are brought to bear, nor has anyone ever identified even marginally attractive social or political processes that might generate comprehensive agreement.
Finally, as Rawls observed, we can explain the persistence of disagreement without accusations of unreason. For example, because evaluative concepts are often impre-imprecise, empirical constraints are typically weak, in part because disagreement extends to them, because cases are complex in virtue of the fact that competing values bear on them, and because practical reason com-commonly proceeds within distinct traditions of thought, each with its own complex internal structure. So that’s the first dimension of reason’s fragmentation.
A second, internal fragmentation of public reason. It seems clear, too, that all complex practical problems from trade and security to schools and transportation to clean water, public safety, healthcare, and fair compensation implicate a range of distinct values. Reasonable people who acknowledge all these values as bearing on the proper resolution disagree about the precise content and weights to be assigned to them.
In allocating medical resources, some think that priority goes to the worst off, others to those who would benefit the most. Others think we should assist the largest number of people. Others may hold that we should ensure that all people have fair chances at receiving help, regardless of the urgency of their situation and of expected benefits from treatment.
So in addition to reasonable pluralism about overarching philosophies of life, we also have the fact that the content and weight of the considerations that are appropriate for regulating our common political relations are not fixed in definite form by inference and argument and attentiveness to the demands of inclusion and the nature of our political relations. So public reason is itself plural, and politics, even guided by reasons, is always about resolving disagreements. However we understand the idea of justification on common ground, we cannot reasonably expect people, even when they judge the same values to be relevant to a disputed question, to interpret those values in the same way or endorse the same ways of balancing those values, much less to arrive at the same conclusions.
Once more, I’m not simply observing that disagreement is part of life. It is. Uh, after all, it– though it’s part of life, disagreements are sometimes driven by partiality, by unreflective allegiance to the status quo, or by envy, greed, and love of power.
But if we accept the political value of inclusion, then we need to be cautious about this, assuming that disagreement is objectionable. Political disagreement is neither ground for accusation nor ground for rejecting the ideal of public reason. Unlike philosophy, politics at its best is always in part about addressing disagreement and reaching a decision, never only about getting things right.
The best we can hope for in a world in which people are prepared to conduct justification on common ground are different reasonable balances of a common set of political values, hoping that we, and those with whom we argue, are prepared to listen to our common reason is not a confidence that we all will, with sufficient time and world, come to the same answers. So if the first fragmentation of reason concerns overarching views about the meaning and proper conduct of human life, and the second is about justification within a political setting, the third fragmentation asserts that different reasons are suited to different political settings. Now, the idea that the content of the reasons that are appropriate to guiding activity in a setting depend on the setting may seem a puzzling idea, maybe dependent on some organic picture of society, with different social orders having different essential natures and no deeper account of the differences in reasons for different contexts.
In contrast, say, with the way that a Kantian may have an explanation of the, the different implications in different settings of an i– Underlying idea of autonomy. I’ll say more about this contextual fragmentation later, distinguishing in particular the public reason of a democratic society from global public reason. Suffice it to say here that the basis of the distinction in reasons, in the content of public reason, lies in differences in the problems that are addressed in different political set-settings, and in the background relations that structure those settings.
Those problems and relations give shape to what one can reasonably expect others to accept, thus to what inclusion involves, thus to the content of public reason. The contextual fragmentation of public reason is a natural consequence of the idea that public reason belongs to political life. Once more, we’re not aiming in public reason to find the deepest bases of argument.
Instead, operating within the political domain, we’re looking for an inclusive basis of justification no deeper than is necessary. Public reason is about how reason might work its way in our political life without turning ph– politics into either philosophy or science. So with these comments about politics, six points, reason’s fragmentation, the threefold fragmentation of reason, I turn to the ideal of public reason itself.
And here, the handout suggests that I have six points, and I do, but I’m only going to mention five of them. So first, all others. So public reason is the reason that belongs to political relations.
The ideal of public reason is that we justify proposed decisions on the basis of considerations that we can reasonably expect others, others who themselves are assumed to accept the value of inclusion, that we can reasonably expect others to acknowledge as relevant reasons despite the differences in outlook associated with reason’s fragmentation. It presents an account of how shared reason might play a role even under conditions of deep disagreement. To be sure, we can’t expect the acknowledgment of everyone governed by decisions or everyone affected by them.
So when I say that justification depends on considerations we can reasonably expect others to acknowledge as reasons, I mean others who both accept the value of inclusion and the associated idea that among those who accept that important value, reason remains– remains fragmented. Here can reasonably be expected to, to acknowledge means that the considerations can be acknowledged as relevant to the political issue, consistent with an acknowledgement of the importance of the value of inclusion under conditions of reasonable disagreement. This is hopelessly abstract.
I was gonna say nearly hopelessly abstract, but it’s hopelessly abstract. Uh, but, uh, I think it’s difficult to say anything much less abstract, in part because the considerations that are reasonable to expect others to accept depends, as I said earlier, on the… in part on the setting, and I’ll get to that, those different settings in a bit. The essential point is that when we think of public reason as belonging to political relations and aim to start and remain within that domain, then the range of considerations that are plausibly relevant to addressing problems are confined, confined by the nature of the political relations, by the kinds of problems that they, that emerge, and by the acknowledgement of reasonable differences.
But once more, I don’t think it’s possible to say anything more substantive about the nature of public reason absent more specific political contexts. That will come with the discussion of democracy’s public reason and global public reason. Second point, a terrain, not a subject.
Public reason comprises values expressed in norms, standards, and principles for use in political justification, that is, in justifying political relations and decisions. Public reason is not the reason of a distinct agent or subject, a collective personified. It’s a ter– better understood as a terrain of communication and argument suited to political circumstances, and suited in part because the values, norms, standards, and principles it comprises can be shared by all who participate in those relations, who acknowledge the value of inclusion and acknowledge the fragmentation of reason.
Third point, the value of public reason. The ideal of public reason, I’ve said, expresses the value of inclusion, at least when that value is interpreted as belonging to the space of reasons. And there are at least three reasons why inclusion, and thus public reason, is an important political value.
First, for reasons of efficient coordination. An acknowledgement of common ground may help to reduce costs of coordination and decision on political matters. Second, it will often engender greater compliance because when justification proceeds on common ground, people will have more stable grounds for compliance that extend beyond their strategic calculations, including the grounds provided both by the reasons used in justification and by the importance of inclusion itself.
Third, and most importantly, I assume that people have a concern for the justifiability of the conduct of political relations and the content of those decisions. Answering that concern not simply with some rationale, but with a rationale that’s acceptable to people who themselves accept to the, the value of inclusion, answers to the concern that we conduct our common affairs as common. It answers the demand for justification, a demand that’s an important element of political relations, not simply by justifying with reasons that support a resolution, but with reasons that it’s appropriate to expect others to accept, and this puts those political relations themselves on a more compellingly attractive footing.
More could be said here that offering such reasons and justification shows a kind of respect, or that it shows respect to persons as self-governing, or that it establishes a kind of community to the extent that community is possible, given reason’s fragmentation, by putting justification on common ground. And it may be that these additional considerations can be formulated within public reason. Still, I’m not sure how much they add to the observation that there is an important political value in the political relations that we establish with others, when we agree that political justification is to proceed by reference to considerations that are acknowledged as such by others.
Keep in mind that political importance does not track philosophical depth. Think of the ideals that have animated the largest and most politically ambitious and morally admirable political movements against slavery as a form of social death, for religious toleration, for the extension of full civic membership beyond the circle of white male property holders or co-ethnics, against racial apartheid, for civil rights, against the exclusion and subordination of women, against class domination, and for universal human rights. All of these have been animated by an ideal of inclusion, by a rejection of the status of no count.
To be sure, and to reiterate, inclusion takes on different content in different settings. No surprise that the substance of inclusion depends on the context in which that inclusion is located. But the importance of inclusion in the space of reasons is fundamental.
Of particular importance in the political life of people with profound differences, aiming to occupy a common space. Fourth point, consensus. Political argument, even when it operates on the terrain of public reason, with considerations that everyone can acknowledge as reasons, typically doesn’t issue in consensus.
This reflects what I refer to as the internal fragmentation of public reason. So conducting justification on a footing of public reason is not an alternative to voting under some form of majority rule. Indeed, political justification may work best when people don’t, as in a jury setting, feel the pressure to adjust their views for the sake of consensus, as if attention to reasons ensured consensus convergence, and as if disagreement revealed bias or incapacity or some other failure.
They don’t. Finally, fifth point, a comment on a certain disquiet that may be settling in. I announced that public reason is connected to politics, and some of you, I mean, I’ve been in a political science department for 30 years now, and when I started, people would say, “Well, this is all very interesting, but where’s the politics?”
Where’s the politics? So that’s the disquiet that may be settling in as you… Right?
People here. So yeah,
Yeah. Uh, where’s the politics? With all this focus on political justification and public reasoning?
And it’s true that if you identify the political with the strategic, then you’re bound to be disappointed. Everything I’m saying depends on resisting that easy identification. I, I’m not disputing the political importance of strategic conduct, but rejecting its exhaustiveness.
More particularly, I’m denying that the political is the strategic because, and it must be s- politic- Politics must be all a matter of strategic interaction because, as if it followed from the fact that politics involves making decisions under conditions of reason’s fragmentation. Even then, you know, even when decisions are made under conditions of fragmentation of reason, even then public reason remains a coherent and attractive ideal.
The issue is whether we’re prepared to endorse it and act on it. So, uh, that was section two. It was politics, six points.
Reasons, fragmentation, three. Five points about public reason, conduct of political argument, political justification. Not argument, political justification.
Justification of consequential, contestable, disagreement, disagreeable, uh, disagreement, uh, bounded, whatever. What, what’s the word? Decisions that involve disagreement that are contestable and, uh, consequential.
Um, uh, and so p– So I say, well, p– There’s an ideal of public reason that makes, that, that makes coherent sense. An idea of conducting argument on common ground despite those elements of reason’s fragmentation.
S- But that’s all well and good or not well and good. I mean, bad and, uh, not well.
Whatever. Um, uh, I said deep, it was going to be deep. No, I promised you.
I promised and I’ve been deep. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Good. Yeah. Good.
Okay. But it’s not time to stop, um, ’cause now I, I, I wanna, uh, come… I’m gonna come a little bit closer to the ground, but it is, it’s philosophy, so not too close.
We’re not gonna get close to the ground. Um, I mean, and that’s okay. Uh, you know, I think, um, uh, One of the last sentences that John Rawls wrote was, um, that his stuff was abstract and he said, “And I make no apology for that.”
(laughter)
So, uh, Okay. So I make no apology for everything I said so far. So I’ve been, I’ve been talking in very general terms about politics and public reason.
(cough)
Coming a little closer to the ground, I want now to explore what I’ve been referring to as democracy’s public reason. So as a first step, uh, I underscore the central role of an idea of equality in an account of democracy. I’ve been emphasizing throughout
(coughs)
the association between public reason and inclusion, and that the nature of inclusion, thus the content of public reason, depends on the political relations for which it’s formulated. Um, that… I should say that point is a point that I associate with, among others, uh, Liz and, and, uh, the absent and unmentioned, Uh, by name, uh, 1941 professor of something or another.
Um, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so it depends on the political relations for which it’s formulated. So the account of equality then, though not confined to politics, helps to fix the context, and thus the interpretation of inclusion that shapes the content of democracy’s public reason.
So the concept of democracy is used to characterize a form of politics, say government, as Lincoln said, of, by, and for the people. But it’s also applied to a kind of society characterized by conditions of equality, a society of equals whose members relate to one another as equals. So consider Tocqueville’s discussion in Democracy in America of the democratic revolution.
That revolution was not, in the first instance, about elected government and suffrage rights, nor even about a government that works for the people. Tocqueville’s point was more sociological about the shift from an aristocratic to a democratic society, the transformation of fixed feudal social hierarchy into something that could be described as equality of condition. So two ideas play a role in characterizing a society of– as democratic, as a society of equals.
First, each member is understood according to the norms of the public culture to be entitled to be treated with equal respect and therefore is entitled to the same basic rights regardless of social position. In contrast, an aristocratic society requires equal respect and equal rights within social ranks, but differential respect and rights across ranks. Second, the basis of equality lies, in particular, in what might be called political capacity.
We owe equal respect to those who have a minimally sufficient capacity to understand the requirements of mutually beneficial and fair cooperation, grasp their rationale, and follow them in their conduct. So the basis of equality in a society of equals lies in the capacity to understand and follow the requirements that provide the fundamental standards of public life. But, by the way, I forgot to say before, Jay, you’re right that on the Bloggingheads PBS too close to the camera.
Yeah. So that’s why I’m trying to stand back from the microphone a little bit.
[01:04:35] JAY WALLACE:
Yeah.
[01:04:36] JOSH COHEN:
Yeah. And I appreciate… Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that. Anyway, um, uh…
[01:04:43] JAY WALLACE:
You said you had a promise.
[01:04:45] JOSH COHEN:
A promise? No, no, I’m, I’m working on it. I’m working on it.
I’m, uh… I also talk too much and too fast, and I’m not working on that. You know, as Bob knows, at MIT, they describe the education it’s a fire hose.
So you show up, they stick the fire hose in, turn it on, and, and you spend four years- and, uh, getting drowning. And, um- and it’s a point of, I, I, I don’t know.
I mean, it’s a sort of a point of pride when students come to you and say, “That was a fire hose lecture.” And that did happen to me more than once. So, okay.
So the democratic society. Um, so there are two ideas. Um- one of the nice things about giving these lectures is I, I haven’t, um, looked at my watch ’cause I, you know…
But how, so how am I doing on time?
[01:05:44] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Oh, it’s about quarter past.
[01:05:45] JOSH COHEN:
Quarter past? Yeah. Oh, great.
Good. Good. Good.
Okay, that’s good. All right, I’ll slow down then. Okay.
Okay, so let me remind myself where we are. So it was politics, six things, the fragmentation of reason, three things. Democr- democracy’s public reason.
Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that.
And I’m– and, and I’m glad you were paying attention.
(laughter)
I’m grateful for that. Uh, so, so democracy’s public reason, I was saying that the content of democracy’s public reason, uh, reflects an idea of inclusion associated with democracy, which, in which there’s an idea about equality that’s fundamental. And I– then I was saying, well, so democracy, it’s used in these two ways: form of politics, form of society.
And now I was about to say, when I distracted myself, that this dual use of democracy applying to a form of society and a form of political regime expresses a fact of normative importance. Political democracy expresses in the basic desi– public design of its institutions, in particular at the highest level of political authority, the idea that the members of the society are equals, owed equal respect. And the connections between a society of equals and a government of, by, and for the people runs in both.
The connections run in both directions. So once we have the institutions of political democracy, it’s natural to regard the members of the society as equals, with a broader claim to equal status in the, in social arrangements. That is, natural to endorse the democratic soci– conception of society.
That’s because the conception of members as equal persons is itself suggested by the practices associated with democratic politics, practices that entitle individuals irrespective of class position or place in the distribution of natural assets or religious confession or gender to bring their interests and judgments of what’s politically right to bear on authoritative collective decisions. They provide that entitlement in the form of rights of participation, association, and expression. Not just any old rights, but equal rights to participate in making fundamental judgments about society’s future course.
At the same time, once the members of society are regarded as equal persons, once we reject as a matter of culture and practice the fixed hierarchy of unequal worth and entitlement, each person with a station in the order of things, then we have reason to conclude that there ought to be widespread suffrage and elected government under conditions of political contestation, with protections of liberties of speech and association and some concern for equal opportunities for political influence. That’s because the extension of political and other liberties expresses the respect owed to persons as equals. Once a democratic society is in place with its ideas of equal standing and equal respect, a political democracy is a natural concomitant inasmuch as it provides public expression to the idea of equality and equal respect in the design of a scheme of collective decision-making.
So the emergence of a democratic society fosters the emergence of political democracy with basic liberties of citizenship secured for all adult members. Fosters, at least in this sense, that it provides a forceful rationale for democratic politics. With those observations about the idea of a society of equals as background, as helping to shape the idea of inclusion in the space of reasons fundamental to the political justification in this setting, I come to the content of democracy’s public reason.
This content emerges from the joint work of three considerations. The reasonable pluralism that defines the first dimension of reason’s fragmentation, the idea of inclusion and associated requirement of public reason, and the conception of members as equals associated with democracy as a distinctive form of social and political life. Joining these three conditions together, reasonable pluralism, inclusion, eq-equality imposes restrictions on the principles and values that provide the proper terms of public political justification in a democracy.
They circumscribe the content of democracy’s public reason, the appropriate terms of political justification. To illustrate this point, I’m going to give two examples, one tonight, the other at the beginning tomorrow night. The one tonight has to do with religious liberty.
The one at the beginning tomorrow night has to do with distributive justice. So consider religious liberty, uh, including freedom of conscience and worship. Protections of re-religious liberties are, I say, essential parts of democracy’s public reason.
Why so? Start with religious convictions. These convictions set demands with two related features, demands on adherence with two related features.
First, they have a non-voluntary basis. And second, they’re especially stringent, perhaps ultimate obligations. Starting with the first, non-voluntary basis, a religious outlook typically asserts that its adherents don’t choose to place themselves under these requirements, say about time and manner of worship, or about the proper conduct of personal relationships.
As to the second, uh, stringency, uh, religious demands are stringent, and that stringency is part of the content of an adherent’s convictions. Among those convictions, on the list of basic convictions, so to speak, is the thesis that the views are of fundamental importance. That’s part of the content of the convictions that they’re of fundamental importance.
In this respect, religious convictions are different from the constituents of an ethnic, cultural, or national identity. In the case of such constituents, a judgment of importance is independent of the content of the identity, not among its defining features. To illustrate the implications of these features for democracy’s public reason, consider how people who don’t share a particular religious outlook might respond to the stringent and non-voluntary nature of religious requirements.
First, they might regard all religious views that impose such stringent requirements or demands as unreasonable. This response might issue either from the conviction that all religious views present the case for, uh, intolerant, politically unreasonable denials of inclusion, or because they say that religious beliefs can’t withstand reflective scrutiny and therefore are cognitively unreasonable. The first, that all religious views present the case for intolerant, politically unreasonable denials of inclusion.
That’s simply false. Nothing in religious conviction requires the endorsement of the view that as the Church, Catholic Church thought until Vatican II, that error has no rights, or that there is no salvation among the dema– damned, or that compulsion in religious matters is permissible, or that an entire doctrine is always germane to political justification. Nothing demands that, even if the doctrine claims, as, say, for example, Catholic, Catholic doctrine does, its abs- its own absolute truth and salvific universality.
As to the second, cognitively unreasonable, it may be true that some conceptions of reflective scrutiny condemn religious views, but those conceptions themselves belong to general philosophical outlooks, say empiricism, for example, that can’t be permitted to define democracy’s public reason any more than can natural theology’s conception of natural reason. In articulating the ideal of public reason and specifying its content, we operate so far as we can on the shared ground of politics and its reason, guided by an ideal of inclusion, here interpreted, here in the case of democracy, interpreted by reference to a background idea of equality. A second possibility is to treat concerns to fulfill religious obligations as intense preferences with their weight fixed by their intensity.
This would recommend that in the setting of political justification, we put aside the content of the convictions and their special role as first principles of practical justification in practical reasoning. A variant to this argument would give special weight to religious requirements,
(cough)
not because they’re especially intense preferences, but because those requirements are reinterpreted in the tempting tradition of Spinoza as ethical principles in mufti. The mufti provided by local color, a local color designed to make the ideas more intelligible and attractive. Attractive and intelligible because more imaginatively graspable to particular cultures and communities.
So Spinoza said, “The prophets taught nothing which is not very simple and easily grasped by all,” and further,” “they clothed their teaching in the style and confirmed it with the reasons which would most deeply move the mind of the masses to devote to devotion towards God. Ethical core, local color, to bring people in. Treating religious or secular moral convictions as expressions of intense preference neglects to take account of the special importance of religious or moral requirements to the adherent, particularly the importance of requirements that the religious or moral outlook designates as fundamental norms.
An unwillingness to see how the adherent’s convictions, in virtue of their content, imply that the requirements provide especially compelling reasons. And the same can be said for the tempting tradition of Spinoza for views that require that we treat religious convictions as essentially moral ideas with a little local color, local sound, and local smell to appeal to the senses and draw a crowd. We can’t, like Spinoza, make the case for religious liberty depend in this way on some favored philosophical reinterpretation of what religious convictions really express, a reinterpretation that the adherent is bound to reject.
Uh, yeah, there was an s– there was this survey that was done, it was reported in Time Magazine in 1997, that speaks to this issue of the power of the Spinozist reinterpretation. So the, the s- the survey asked people, say, “Do you believe in God?” Okay, so it’s the United States, so, uh, let’s say eighty-five percent of people said they believe in God.
And then they would say, So, you know, the philosophical, the Spinozist philosophical reinterpreter says, “Ah, yes,” people who are hopeful about their world, they think people aren’t so bad after all,” et cetera, et cetera. You give them an ethical reinterpret– And then they said to people, “And, and does God have a beard?”
And about forty percent said, “God has a beard.” So then they would say, “Well, um, uh,” do you believe in angels?” Eighty-five percent would say they believe in angels.
Eighty percent, maybe seventy, you know, whatever. First approximation. Uh, they believe in angels.
Then they would say, “Well, do angels have wings?” Forty percent would say angels have wings. And said, “Do you believe in hell?”
Maybe only 75% believed in hell. Is hell hot? 35% think that hell is hot. Um, so those of us, I mean, I think we all know, it’s, uh, you know, those of us who think, yes, I understand what religious convictions are.
Yeah, I don’t share them, but I understand what they are. They are ethical convictions, and then people have some figurative language for the ethical good. That’s the Spinozist idea.
It’s very hard to keep that line going
(laughter)
When there’s a s- there’s a kind of literalism that’s associated by a lot of people, and I’m saying that literalism has to be respected. So it can’t be, point here is, it can’t be that you make the case for religious liberty, say, by saying, “I– yes, there ought to be religious liberty because religious convictions are ethical convictions.”
(cough)
Of course, people have their color, sound, sight, and smell that they, uh, dress them up in. That, I say, is a, uh, is, is an example of what I’m calling a failure of inclusion. Okay, so if the adherent can’t plead the truth of the convictions about his religious obligations, and if we’re not prepared to dismiss the convictions as unreasonable or let their weight be fixed by their intensity as preferences, or treat them as ethical convictions plus some local color, then what’s the alternative?
Well, what we can do is accept that the convictions imposed what the adherent reasonably regards as fundamental demands, politically reasonably. Politically reasonably, somebody who accepts the value of inclusion, nevertheless– not nevertheless, also, and in addition, endorses these convictions either in the literalist form or the ethical form, either way. the adherent reasonably regards them as fundamental demands.
We accept the demand of public reason to find suitable reasons for overriding these demands, and we acknowledge that such reasons cannot normally be found because of the importance of the reasons. The result is rights of free exercise. Given the demanding character of religious requirements, religious liberty emerges from the shared concern to respect equal standing and inclusion under conditions of reasons fragmentation.
Think of the point this way. People who might be prepared to deny freedom of conscience and liberty of worship to others or restrict it for less than compelling reasons will typically want to claim it for themselves. And if they’re unable to defend that claim by appealing to the truth of their views, then they’ll need to defend it by reference to the importance of demands issuing from their convictions.
Though they regard themselves as under different fundamental obligations than others, they recognize the various obligations citizens are under as belonging to a common category, whose weight in political argument reflects the role assigned to its members within conflicting religious and secular outlooks. And then treating other people as equals, democracy’s public reason. Treating other people as equals will require that they give similar weight to other demands belonging to that same general category.
So how does this line of thought illustrate the idea of democracy’s public reason and express the kinds of relations that members of a democracy bear to one another? Suppose we prevent a person from fulfilling religious demands deemed compelling by a politically reasonable religious outlook. If we do, then we deny the person inclusion in the democratic society of equals.
We deny inclusion, not simply by denying public rights of participation and expression, nor simply by denying them liberty of conscience and freedom of worship. We, we reject inclusion by denying them standing in democracy’s public reason, denying them that standing by failing to offer considerations that we can reasonably expect them to accept. We have a failure of inclusion given a democratic background, a failure of inclusion not only in the space of liberties, but in the space of reasons.
So that’s a first illustration of democracy’s public reason. And there are three natural questions that arise at this point. Anyway, three questions that occurred to me at this point.
First question is, what more can be said about democracy’s public reason? I’ve given one example. What more can be said about it?
Um, Secondly, is public reason, which restricts the scope of political justification for certain kinds of considerations, is public reason really about inclusion or is it about exclusion? That’s a good question. What else can be said about it?
Is it really about inclusion or is it about exclusion? And what happens? I’m talking about here about public reason, democracy’s public reason.
Public reason in a particular political context. What happens to public reason outside the setting of a democratic society? Those are three good questions, and I’ll talk about each of them tomorrow night.
Thank you.
(applause)
[01:22:56] JAY WALLACE:
Charles Larmore, who is W. Duncan MacMillan Professor in the Humanities at Brown University. Professor Larmore is an exceptionally wide-ranging scholar whose interests, to the extent one can pin them down, include both moral and political philosophy and the history of philosophy from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. His work combines analytic cogency with an unusual degree of historical sophistication.
It also reflects a cosmopolitan commitment to engage with figures and issues from other cultures and traditions on their own terms. Professor Larmore received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in Classics and Philosophy in 1972. He did his graduate work in philosophy at Yale, where he received the PhD degree in 1978, following year-long stints, uh, visits to Paris and to Münster, Germany.
That same year, he moved to Columbia University, where he was to be– remain for nearly two decades, eventually becoming professor in the departments of both philosophy and German. He moved to the University of Chicago in 1997, where he was professor of political science and philosophy and lecturer in law. He held the Chester D. Tripp Profes-
Professorship in the Human- in the Humanities at Chicago from 2001 to 2005, and was Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in 2005 to 2006. He moved to Brown last fall, where he teaches in the Department of Philosophy. Professor Larmore has published widely and in-influentially on topics in political and moral philosophy, in the history of philosophy, and in other philosophical areas.
A persistent concern of his has been to explore the continuing influence of important historical ideas, such as the conception of the self in German Romanticism for contemporary political and ethical thought. His six books include Patterns of Moral Complexity, The Romantic Legacy, The Morals of Modernity, and three further titles in French. It is indeed a striking feature of his bibliography that it includes nearly as many publications in French and and in German as in English, something virtually unparalleled for a contemporary American scholar in these areas.
His articles, papers, and reviews have appeared in a broad range of prominent publications, including both specialist volumes and less specialized venues such as The New Republic, to which he has regularly contributed in recent years. Professor Larmore has been and continues to be involved on the editorial boards of numerous important journals, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in two thousand and five. We’re very pleased that Professor Larmore has agreed to participate in this week’s Tanner Lecture events, and welcome him warmly to Berkeley.
[01:25:55] CHARLES LARMORE:
Okay.
(applause)
It’s, it’s a pleasure to be here and I want to thank, uh, Berkeley’s Tanner Lecture Committee for inviting me to be one of the commentators. I have been reading and learning from Josh Cohen’s writings for decades now, and so this, um, being a commentator is a particular pleasure for me.
I’m putting my glasses on because I’m still wrestling with the fact that I need them. I’m trying to deny it. Power, understood generally, is the ability to get what one wants.
In its simplest form, power is the control which an individual or collectivity is able to exert over the natural environment. Power becomes more complex when it takes the form of a social relation. Then it consists in the ability to make the satisfaction of one’s own interests figure among the premises on which other people act.
Sometimes individuals and groups succeed in amassing considerable power of this sort, particularly because of the wealth they have accumulated. And then we have good reason to wonder whether they ought really to be able to exert so great an influence over the lives of others. In the particular case of political power, however, this sort of question is always in the air.
Political power, by its very nature, requires justification, and indeed it is never claimed or exercised without an accompanying or background story describing why it is justified. For the exercise of political power does not consist simply in the making of decisions that happen to have effects, be they profound, pervasive on the lives and well-being of others. Political decisions present themselves as rightful decisions, as having an authority which those who are subject to them ought to acknowledge.
Political power always comes wearing the mantle of legitimacy. It claims to be justified, and thus the question whether there are good reasons for the forms it takes and the uses to which it is put is not a question we raise, as it were, from the outside, because it has come to exert a considerable and perhaps worrisome influence over our own choices and plans. It’s a question which political power has already answered to its own satisfaction, and on the basis of reasons it demands that we accept as well.
In asking whether political power is justified, we are therefore asking a question that political power itself urges us to pose, if only to adopt unhesitatingly the answer which it already has at the ready. Once the question of justification is posed, however, there can be no guarantee that we will answer it in the way that those exercising political power expect us to do. It’s therefore no wonder that political power is an object of continual contestation.
The ideal of public reason is a conception of how the question of political legitimacy ought to be addressed. It is, as Joshua Cohen says, “An ideal concerning the justification of political relations and decisions,” and its essential trait is, he says, “its spirit of inclusion.” The ideal of public reason holds that the exercise of political power is to be justified, and here I quote from Josh’s lectures, is to be justified not by considerations that belong fundamentally to the views of some of us and not to others, that is, justified not by views of the human good, religious or otherwise, about which reasonable people are bound to disagree, but instead on the basis of reasons that can be shared by all those who are to be subject to it.
In our time, it was John Rawls who made the most systematic and influential contribution to our understanding of the assumptions, scope, and guiding principles of public reason. The heart of that ideal is summed up in what Rawls called the liberal principle of political legitimacy. And I quote from his book, Political Liberalism.
Rawls wrote, “Our exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with the constitution, the essentials of which all citizens, as free and equal, may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals access-accessible to their common human reason.” But Rawls also left a number of aspects of this ideal underdeveloped or obscure, and Josh’s lectures have as their aim to clarify and extend the doctrine further. One point of obscurity that— I have him here written, but I can’t call Josh Cohen, so I’m just gonna call him Josh.
One point of obscurity that Josh Cohen clears up without drawing as much attention to it as I think he ought to have done, is that the shareable reasons on which the terms of political a- association ought to be based have to be understood as reasons that citizens can acknowledge who, as he says a number of times, themselves acknowledge the value of inclusion. In other words, they are reasons predicated on a commitment to the very principle of basing the terms of political association upon shareable reasons. Josh Cohen is certainly right to insist on the necessity of this qualification.
Public reason cannot accommodate those who spurn its very assumptions, who hold uncompromisingly to the conviction that the terms of political association are acceptable only if they are pleasing to God, or only if they embody some particular and substantive, thus inevitably contentious, vision of the human good. If political decisions were to count as justified only if they could be acknowledged even by those who reason from this sort of baseline, then no decisions, or at least far too few, would ever turn out to be justified. This means, to put the conclusion rather strongly, and perhaps in a form that Josh Cohen himself would reject, but if so, I’d like to know why.
No political ideal, no political ideal can be completely inclusive. Every principle of political inclusion is also a principle of exclusion. The politics of inclusion cannot but exclude those who stand committed to ideals contrary to the values.
In this case, the pursuit of common ground as the proper basis of political which it embodies. In the light of this conclusion, we can see that the ideal of public reason involves some significant moral assumptions about the proper exercise of political power. Assumptions which very far from everyone is inclined to endorse.
What exactly is the moral content of the ethic of inclusion we are considering? On this score, I wish that Josh had had more to say. Perhaps he will in his next lecture.
He does remark a number of times that political morality, as instanced in the ideal of public reason, is, and I quote him again, “A relatively autonomous domain of principles, argument, and reflection concerned with specifically political relations and decisions.” I assume that the notion of relative autonomy, by it, he means that though the ideal of public reason certainly has the character of a moral principle, it’s a moral principle tailored to the distinctive features of the political domain. What is it then in the nature of political life to which the ideal of public reason constitutes a response?
Josh proposes a list of six defining characteristics. Political relations are marked, he claims, by this, the list of six that you’ve already been presented, that they are– their practicality having to do with solving social problems, the importance of the problems they deal with, that’s two. Three, the contestability of the solutions to these problems which they embody.
Indeed, four, the existence of social conflicts around the question of how these problems are to be handled. Five, the need to come to a decision about these problems, and one which invokes general rules for the handling of other issues. And thus, six, the essential openness of these relations to demands for justification.
Nowhere on this list, however, figures what seems to me a cardinal feature of political relations, and one to which, in my view, the ideal of public reason aims to be responsive. It’s the fact that politics essentially involves the exercise of power, even if, as I noted at the outset, it is power presenting itself as legitimate power. The terms of political association by which political relations are defined always rest, in the last instance, upon the possible use of force.
Political principles are coercive principles with which people may be compelled to comply if necessary. Indeed, I believe that it is precisely this link with coercion that serves to demarcate political principles from the other moral principles to which we may think that the people are subject, but with which we do not believe that their compliance should be brought about, if necessary, by force. Insofar as we think a moral principle should be imposed by force, if need be, we have concluded that the principle has the status of a political principle.
Oddly, given the title of his lectures, Politics, Power, and Public Reason, the essential connection between politics and power seems to have retreated, I think, too far into the background of Josh’s account of public reason. For once we take to heart the fact that political principles are coercive principles, compliance with which may have to be effected by force, we can better make out, I believe, the specific moral content of the ideal of public reason. The idea that political principles must be grounded in reasons that all can acknowledge, provided they are commitment– they are committed to a search for common ground, is the idea that coercion, if to be justified, must be based on principles embodying a certain kind of respect for persons.
The use or threat of force is not wrong in itself, for otherwise political association would be impossible. What the ideal of public reason holds to be improper is seeking compliance by force alone, without requiring reasonable agreement about the rules to be enforced. It does so because it regards as an essential feature of persons, requiring respect, their capacity to think and act on the basis of reasons.
If it were permissible to ensure their conformity to a political principle solely by the threat of force, this would mean treating them merely as means to the advancement of some ulterior social end, such as the establishment of public order. To require instead that political principles be ones they can see reason to endorse is to regard their reason as forming the basis of the very authority of those principles. True, they cannot be moved by threats except by seeing that they have good reason to fear the consequences if they do not comply.
As I said, their capacity to think and act for reasons is in that case being exploited for an ulterior purpose. To respect them as persons in their own right is to make the validity of a coercive principle turn upon its acceptability to their reason in just the same way as it presumably appears acceptable to those who have put it forward. This is certainly not the only sense that can be given to the notion of respect for persons, but it is the one which lies at the basis of the political ideal of public reason.
It helps us to understand why that ideal ties the validity of political, that is, coercive principles, to their rational acceptability to all those whom they are to bind. Near the beginning of his lectures, I think Josh read this sentence today, but I’m not sure now. But near the beginning of the written form of his lectures anyway, Josh declares that, “The ideal of public reason is,” he says, “not founded on an account of the normative implications of our status as rational agents.”
Now, taken in one sense, this claim does not seem to me right. For the ideal of public reason pretty clearly ties the acceptability of political principles to our nature as rational agents, and in virtue, as I have suggested, of an underlying principle of respect for persons as beings capable of thinking and acting for reasons. But I believe that Josh has something else in mind.
It is that a commitment to the ideal of public reason does not follow simply from the idea of practical
(cough)
rationality alone. That is, from such formal principles as maximizing expected utility or recognizing no reason for action as valid unless we can regard it as equally valid for all who find themselves in similar circumstances, even when such principles are applied to the basic givens of the human condition. With such a view, I could not agree more.
Indeed, I would go myself further and maintain, in opposition to a recurring philosophical fantasy, the practical reason by itself is an insufficient reason for our allegiance to any moral principle. In general, moral principles, of which political principles are a subset, can be justified only by reference to other moral principles already assumed to be valid. At the most basic level, when the question is whether to adopt the moral point of view at all, we must simply see that another’s good is in itself a reason for action on our part.
There’s no way to reason ourselves into the moral point of view from some position or perspective located outside it. So yes, the ideal of public reason cannot be justified by a bare appeal to the concept of practical reason. And uncovering the moral principle of respect for persons that underlies this ideal should make the point all the more clear.
Those who reject such a principle of respect, if they are making a mistake, are not making a mistake about reason. They are, I would say, making a moral mistake. In any case, different conceptions of political legitimacy are also possible.
And thus I repeat a point I made earlier. The politics of inclusion also excludes. We will understand ourselves better, assuming we have an allegiance to that politics, if we make plain just what it assumes and what it excludes.
Yet at the same time, public reason does not represent merely one conception of political legitimacy among others. It operates at a more reflective level. For it turns on a recognition of the fact, the fact which Josh Cohen calls the fragmentation of reason.
It turns on a recognition of the fact that the religious and metaphysical worldviews, the substantive visions of the human good to which other conceptions of political legitimacy have appealed in the past, as well as today, have come to seem an inevitable object of reasonable disagreement. Since political power always requires justification, but since such doctrinal legitimations have proved so controversial and divisive, one response, not the only possible response, since we might instead insist that our opponent’s reason is defective in some regard, but a response motivated by an intrinsic respect for the capacities of reason of all those to which, um, to whom such justifications appeal, is that the exercise of political power ought to be grounded in principles to which all reasonable persons can assent, despite their differences about controversial issues, provided they stand committed to searching for common ground. That response is the ideal of public reason.
(applause)
[01:42:37] JAY WALLACE:
Okay. Josh Cohen will now make a few brief remarks in response to the response.
[01:42:44] JOSH COHEN:
I’ll make a few. Um, so the brief… Thanks very much, uh, Charles.
It’s, uh, I, I found– I got the comments from Charles yesterday, and I read them over, and I found them extremely helpful, uh, in understanding what I had, uh, said. As I said to Charles before, uh, session started today, that what I– there were some things that he thought I had overlooked and, um, and I realized that what I hadn’t made a point of saying was that those were things that I emphatically rejected.
I just put them to the side. Anyway, we’ll s- so my– there are six points, um, that I wanted to say something about. I’ll be– I will s-say something brief about each.
Uh, and my responses to the six points are first, hmm; second, careful; third, Yes and no; four, five, and six are each no. Um, so now let me say something about what the points are and fill out those responses.
So first, and I, I don’t know that this makes any difference at all, I just want to observe this, that, um, there is in, in the presentation, uh, what I regard as a somewhat puzzling and disturbing personification of power. Like power is doing a bunch of stuff, and I feel that, uh, I don’t know, somehow you were channeling Foucault or something when you wrote that. I don’t know.
Anyway, I, uh, or not. Something.
(laughter)
But, uh, but I, I, I don’t know why th-there was that personification, that power, uh, political power urges us to pose a question of justification. I, I don’t know what that is. Anyway, but that’s point zero.
Now there are five more substantial points. The first– The second, my, my second response is careful what to be careful about. The careful about.
Um, so, uh, Charles says, “Public reason cannot accommodate those, those who spurn its very assumptions, who hold uncompromisingly to the conviction that the terms of political association are acceptable only if they are pleasing to God.” Now, I’m not sure that I agree that an uncompromising commitment to act pursuant to God’s demands is in itself disqualifying. Everything depends on what you think the content of those demands is.
So if you think you’re obligated by those demands to live in relations of community with others and accept the demand not to interfere with conscientious conviction, after all, all are created in God’s image, say, then I don’t think that the uncompromising commitment, um, it provides any, uh, source of, um, concern. Uh, everything depends on the content. And I, I, a part of my reason for mentioning that, and this’ll come up with the second and more forcefully in the third, is that I think that there’s maybe a kind of, um, uh, an over-willingness to jump to exclusion.
Okay, so I’ll come to that. So that’s a first point, is that I’m not sure that an uncompromising commitment, uh, is somehow disqualifying, uh, but that it depends on the content of the convictions. Now, second point is, um, Charles says rightly, and, uh, I don’t think there’s any disagreement that, uh, at thirty thousand feet or maybe at twenty thousand feet or I don’t know, um, about that, uh, inclusion and that every inclusion.
There’s no complete inclusion. There’s always some exclusion. Though, just a, an obvious point on this, which is that, a-and, and, and, it’s an obvious point, and I don’t think we disagree about this, but I think it’s always important to be clear on this, which is that, um, uh, you have to distinguish between exclusion from rights and interests and exclusion from what I was describing as the space of reasons.
Exclusion from the space of reasons means that you’re not trying to present a justification to a certain kind of– to a person who has a certain kind of view. Um, say an intolerant view. You’re not trying to present the justification to them, that’s exclusion.
But it’s exclusion from the space of reasons, that is from the space of justification. Nothing follows directly or immediately or forthwith from that about what the rights and interests, W-what about the rights of that person or whether or not their interests are taken into account. So yes, bec–
It’s a very important point. Exclusion, you don’t want to pretend to some kind of univer– your inclination– It’s a just completely capacious inclusion.
That is a fraud. But, but in saying that there’s exclusion, it’s very important to be clear about, you know, what exactly is the exclusion, and it is this particular thing about exclusion in the space of justification. Okay, now third point.
Uh, Charles says that public reason is founded on a moral idea and an idea of respect for persons, and it says in, in the written version, respect for persons as ends in themselves. And this is in Charles’s own development of the idea of public reason in a wide range of writings. This has been a central theme of his work.
Um, and I– what worries me about this, of course, a lot depends on what’s said about the idea of respect for persons and the idea of ends in themselves. What concerns me about this is that it has the deficiency of connecting the ideal of public reason too closely to a general moral idea not confined to politics, a, a general practical principle. I mean, the scope of the ideal of respect for persons is not it’s not a specifically political idea.
And it seems to me, as a consequence, again, depending on how it’s interpreted, to run up against the ideal of, uh, the idea of reasonable pluralism. Uh, and I don’t see it as the only route to pu- the, the, the, the the idea of respect for persons, certain respect for persons as ends in themselves is, uh, the only route to public reason. I mean, a utilitarian who doesn’t feel comfortable with the idea of respect for persons as ends in themselves might nevertheless accept the idea of public reason.
The same for a Catholic natural law view. Now, you might say, well, their idea of dignity is really a, I guess, a variant of the idea of respect for persons, but I, I don’t think so. I mean, th-there’s a specific idea of dignity ha-having to do with the idea of creation in God’s image, which is the central idea of the doctrine.
Um, or y-you could construct a, a route to the idea of public reason within, uh, an Islamic view that doesn’t give principal emphasis to, uh, Sharia, uh, as a basis for public order. Uh, there’s, uh, something I recently read, and it’s a very good piece by a guy named Mohammad Fadel, who’s at University of Toronto Law School. Um, I mean, what you need to emphasize is the idea of vicegerency, um, and, um, uh, the inappropriateness of, um, the use of, uh, of compulsion in matters of, uh, religion.
Um, so I think that the s– the, I, what I, what worries me, and again, everything’s depend on the details here, but what worries me a little bit about tying the ideal of public reason so closely to the idea of respect for persons is it strikes me as an example of going too deep. Um, and, uh, related to that, and this is what connects it to the first two points, I worry that by going too deep, by tying it to this conception of respect for persons, uh, that what you end up with is a view that’s more exclusive than is necessary, or exclusionary than is necessary. Anyway, that’s a concern.
Fourth, and this I think is really the, maybe the most im-important issue here, um, I think Charles gives too much weight to the, in his account of politics, to, um, coercion. Now, there’s a nice historical story about political inclusion that emphasizes coercion. The nice historical story says that political inclusion involves an exchange.
You get included rights and welfare in exchange for paying taxes and providing your body to the army. It’s the levée en masse story. But we’re not concerned about the evolution of the modern, you know, the democratic state, about, about justification.
And I’m not so sure that coercion is so basic to the constitutive issues about justification in the domain of politics, uh, which is why I distinguish between what I was calling legitimation and justification. So for example, I mean, when we’re trying to figure out how best to address an issue, uh, we don’t focus on the fact, if it is a fact, that the resolution is going to be coercively enforced. I mean, take the case of global warming, for example.
Trying to figure out what to do about this and how to distribute responsibilities for it. It’s not part of the discussion that, gee, you know, the way that the issue is resolved is going to be coercively enforced or not. That doesn’t play any role in figuring out what the, uh, an appropriate resolution is.
And I think the same is true for a wide range of others. You’re trying to figure out what to do about healthcare or education. In each case, we ask what a reasonable resolution is without focusing on whether or not it will be con– coercively enforced, instead looking for a decision that people have reason to accept.
And that, I say, is where public reason comes in. You have a public activity addressing a common problem, and what you look for is some common ground for justifying the address of that problem. I don’t think of it as in the first instance about the justification of coercion.
Though, um, Lord knows, and every American ought to, that coercion is a big part of, um, life. Uh, we have eight times the prisoners as of the EU. Um, Glenn Loury gave Tanner lectures at Stanford last week, and it was about incarceration.
So this is vivid in my mind, but anyway, I think it’s, uh, uh, t-too much of that coercion. Last point, um, and I think at bottom, maybe, related to this previous point, Charles and I disagree about the importance in an account of public reason to attach to the state. He, I think, believes, doesn’t say this, but I think this is part of the view she presents, is that public reason is the reason of a coercive authority.
Um, and I, I have, have various problems with that view, including the ones that I was just describing, but also, and this’ll come up tomorrow night, I think if we adapt, we adopt that view, then we don’t really have much of a grip on the idea of global public reason. Now, maybe that’s a grip that we best lose, Um, but my thought, and it’s a thought that I’ll fill out tomorrow night, is that, um, public reason with its idea of inclusion in the space of reasons has power and purchase outside the setting of a state in virtue of there being a domain of global politics without a conventional authority and coercion. Of course, I mean, of course, there’s coercion in the world of global politics, but it’s not coercion in enforcing agreed rules and decisions.
It’s generally coercion in enforcing unagreed-
[01:55:34] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Mm-hmm.
[01:55:34] JOSH COHEN:
rules and, uh, decisions. In any case, so there are these… So, so I, I think, I’m not sure about this, but I thought as I was, uh, uh, looking at the emphasis given to authority and coercion, at the end of the day, I was con-
I got myself convinced that, um, you were, that Charles was doing what I really wanted to distinguish myself from. That is, you can think of the idea of, uh, public reason as the democratization of the classical idea of reasons of state, bringing it to bear on a democracy where people are equals, and it has a certain kind of attractive quality there. And, uh, my…
The, the aim in the discussion of politics, reasons, fragmentation public reason is all really to set to say that that association of public reason with the existence of a state is something to be, um, a-as, uh, somebody might say, problematized.
(laughter)
(applause)
[01:56:50] JAY WALLACE:
All right, I see that we have a few minutes for dis– uh, for, for questions from the audience. Um, Yes.
[01:56:57] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Uh, one of the, uh, things that I found in the talk, uh, in the response was the emphasis on persons, whereas what we started out talking was about public reason. So my question to you, and I want this to orient myself for tomorrow, is, uh, what is your conception of the public, and how do you think that reason is generated in the public?
[01:57:23] JOSH COHEN:
I’ll repeat the question just so I can parallel s- process and see if I can think of… So, so the question is, what’s the account of the public, and how does reason emerge in the public? Is that, yeah?
Okay. So, um, I don’t think I have anything more to say about how I’m thinking about the public than what I said about it, that’s, uh, kind of embedded in, implicit in, explicit in part of my discussion of, uh, politics. So there are some set of, uh, problems that people face.
Uh, they need to arrive at a decision about the address of those problems. Um, uh, um- The, um… How do they, um… How does public reason emerge?
Um, I don’t– I mean, I th-
I guess I, I have this, uh, I’ll say something that’s almost mindless, but, I mean, I think there is a kind of basic concern. I don’t know how to understand it. I, I…
There are different stories about why it is. Basic concern that in settings in which there are consequential decisions that are getting made, there are decisions, they’re consequential, they’re contestable. Everybody knows that there are a bunch of ways of addressing them.
There’s disagreement about it. It’s context. That under those circumstances, that there’s a, that people have a concern, uh, that the decisions that are made get, um, justified.
Um, there are theories about why that’s true. Weber’s, you know, in the passage that I mentioned, he ties it to the social psychology of the advantaged. They don’t feel comfortable about being advantaged unless they can have some story about why they’re advantaged.
Um, uh, there, there are other stories about it. Habermas has some story about, well, you can’t have stable social cooperation unless there’s some normative dimension to the cooperation. Uh, Parsons…
I mean, there are lots of different stories about it. I’m not sure, I don’t know what the story is. I just take it to be a basic feature of political life, that there is a demand for the justification of these decisions that are c-
are, uh, contestable, contestable decisions about which there’s disagreement and which are consequential. And I think there’s– I’m more confident, very much more confident that– of that than I am of any of these what I regard as sort of speculative stories about why that’s true. But, but I have a feeling that I’m not– Go ahead.
Go, go, go ahead.
[02:00:28] CHARLES LARMORE:
Yeah. Um, I think there’s sort of a reciprocal… I mean, I completely agree with that part of what you said.
[02:00:35] JOSH COHEN:
Yeah.
[02:00:35] CHARLES LARMORE:
But when you look at it from the other point of view-
[02:00:37] JOSH COHEN:
Yeah.
[02:00:37] CHARLES LARMORE:
Uh, for, uh, those constituting the public, there is a political life, there’s a social life, there’s an economic life. Yeah. And, uh, all these are kind of intermixed. And so for the concept of what the public is and how reason emerges from that public-
[02:00:57] JOSH COHEN:
Yeah
[02:00:58] CHARLES LARMORE:
uh, There has to be some conception that takes into account all this-
[02:01:09] JOSH COHEN:
Yeah uh,
[02:01:09] CHARLES LARMORE:
right at the beginning, I think. Because if you go to the idea of persons-
[02:01:13] JOSH COHEN:
Yeah,
[02:01:13] CHARLES LARMORE:
then perhaps you do come out with coercive-
[02:01:16] JOSH COHEN:
Yeah uh,
[02:01:17] CHARLES LARMORE:
politics if you think about individuals and persons. So I mean, I think that conception of the public is basically necessary, uh, to further this discussion.
[02:01:29] JOSH COHEN:
Yeah. Well, I, I just– I’ll go back to what I said at the beginning, and I need to, it’s an important point, and I need to think about it more. My, uh, for the purp– for my purposes, I have this kind of crude, uh, picture of political relations, which are relations in which there are consequential, contestable, blah, blah, blah decisions being made.
And, you know, I think of those as giving rise to maybe by, by themselves, those as giving rise to, uh, some idea of a public as a bunch of people who are implicated in those, uh, decisions. I, I don’t… but I don’t know, that’s pathetic, but I don’t know.
It’s the best I can do.
[02:02:12] JAY WALLACE:
Uh, Vicky?
[02:02:18] VICKY:
Um, this is a question for Dr. Cohen, and it addresses your your your last comment.
[02:02:21] JOSH COHEN:
Yeah.
[02:02:22] VICKY:
I was surprised to hear you distance yourself from the reason of state tradition.
[02:02:26] JOSH COHEN:
Yeah.
[02:02:27] VICKY:
And in particular, uh, what you describe as a democratization of the reason of state tradition.
[02:02:31] JOSH COHEN:
Yeah.
[02:02:31] VICKY:
Because it would seem to provide precisely the sort of pragmatic, um, motivation for deliberation that
[02:02:37] JOSH COHEN:
Yeah.
[02:02:38] VICKY:
you seem to be arguing for in contradistinction to a moral
[02:02:42] JOSH COHEN:
Yeah.
[02:02:42] VICKY:
notion of argumentations too. Excuse me. Right.
And so I guess, I guess my question is: would you say that the difference between your argument and a reason of state tradition was that you’re interested in justification in a way that historically, um, Hobbes or Machiavelli have not been, or at least not in the same way?
[02:03:00] JOSH COHEN:
Yeah. Very good. So, um, So the first thing, a few points.
The first thing is, um, that I do take, as I said, the idea of justification to be more capacious, broader in its scope than the issues about the legitimation of the exercise of coercive authority. I think it’s a bad attenuation of the domain of the political to think of it as confined in that way. And I guess I think, you know, I feel bad about this, but I think this is probably a point that Hannah Arendt makes e-e-extensively and in detail, and I just have never been grip- gripped by her exposition of it.
But I think it is y– the distinction between power and force, the idea of power is tied to some kind of common space. So this is all, I think, in Hannah Arendt, but I, I, I, I, I need to check. I think I have some sense it is.
But so, so the first thing is that I, uh, the… I don’t wanna confine the account of the political to, um, the exercise of, um, uh, coercion.
Associated with that, though. The reason I don’t have anything against the idea of, you know, democracy. democratizing the reason of reasons of state idea.
I think you could treat the ideas that I was presenting about democracy’s public reason as that. Some relatively autonomous domain of argument justification that as distinct from classical ideas about reasons of state says, look, the state is the– a community of equals here. So you get a distinctive inflection to the idea of reasons of state.
But the reason I resist that is that I think that that’s just one illustration of, uh, what I think is a more fundamental idea, which is, um, uh, an idea of conducting justification of political relations and decisions on common ground, and I think it’s an unfortunate cabining of that. I don’t have any objection to the idea of de-democratizing reasons of state. It’s an unfort– I don’t think it’s an appropriate cabining of the more c– j–
broader idea of public reason to say that that’s all there is to it. Now, one last point on this. I said in the presentation today something that I think I ended up, I was a little bit more cautious about in the written version of this text.
So if you look at– there’s a puzzling thing, which is that if you look in Rawls’s work, you look at hi– one of his last essays, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” and it starts with the sentence that I read, which is that the idea of public reason belongs to a conception of constitutional democracy. When you turn to his book, “The Law of Peoples,” the kind of global society, he talks about, uh, the public reason of the society of peoples, and there’s never any acknowledgment given to the fact that, well, the idea of public reason must have some broader scope, if then democracy, if it makes sense to talk about the idea of a public reason of a society of peoples. So what I’m saying about global public reason and this broader idea of public reason, of which that’s an instance, is I, I don’t know that…
I mean, all good ideas you can find in Rawls pretty much, and it may be
(laughter)
I could be inspired by that discussion of Rawls, uh, to this. Although the official theory about the idea of public reason is really about, is more of this democratization of reasons of state idea. Yeah, I think.
[02:06:47] JAY WALLACE:
I think we have time for just one more question. And then there’s– I, I’ve made a list here just going back to when I first saw hands. Sherry Wong.
[02:06:56] SHERRY WONG:
I’m curious about the, um, proper role of ignorant people in ideal public reason on questions where it seems like you need knowledge in order to come to a justified belief about what, um, we ought to do. And then, um, I mean, like global warming— yeah, not how we ought to distribute responsibility, but what we should actually do given that people have interests and— Yeah, and, and so on. Yeah.
Um, and then the further worry is, um, that over time, more and more of us become these ignorant people who don’t have enough knowledge to come to a justified belief. And, um, well, ignorant people are, are worrying politically-
[02:07:33] JOSH COHEN:
Yeah, for obvious reasons. Yeah. Um, so the question is, uh, public reason, ignorant people. I, I think, um, the power of– the political power of ignorant people is really a big problem. I agree with you about that. Um, Really a big problem. Um, uh-
[02:07:57] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Could you-
[02:07:58] JOSH COHEN:
But, but, um, no. Uh, but I think, you know, if you consider, um, the, the issues, the fu- it seems to me the, the fundamental normative issue about, say, addressing climate change, I don’t mean the science of it.
I don’t mean what exactly the right policies are. But if you think about what the basic issues are, The basic normative issues, I don’t think they’re It’s really hard to figure out how to address them. It’s not that hard to figure out how to identify them.
One issue is a familiar issue, familiar in lots of settings. What responsibility do people bear who caused the problem? That’s one issue.
Um, uh, second issue is, uh, when you’re trying to figure out a fair solution to the problem, does a, a fair sol– is a fair solution a solution that gets bargained to from the status quo? Those are, I mean, those are, there are other issues as well, but um, uh, w-w-what kind of burdens should be borne by, not by people who are responsible for the problem, but by people who c– who have deeper pockets, who can afford that? What responsibilities do they have to helping to alleviate the problem in areas where people don’t have the capacity to alleviate it?
Those are three aspects of the issue: historical responsibility, bargaining from the status quo, and responsibilities to alleviate on the part of people who have, uh, deep pockets and who can help to pay costs of adjustment. Those strike me as re- Uh, you know, ign-
Uh, uh, tho- those issues, which I think are deeply implicated in the question about how to move forward on this issue are n- uh, are, are not that hard to identify. When it comes to figuring out what the right solution is, it seems to me completely inappropriate to say that there’s a special problem of ignorant people in figuring out what the right solution is because when it comes to addressing a problem like that, you know, ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent of us, including, unless somebody you know, since Bob is like, Most people in th- Uh, probably everybody in this room, it doesn’t, it doesn’t know nearly enough to figure out how to address the problem.
But on the issue about the, the justification, uh, it seems to me that the fundamentals are not that complicated and available to, I don’t know, pretty much everybody. Not the f- not the details, but the details aren’t ex– Oh, the details aren’t a problem for some special group of ignorant people.
The details are a problem for anybody, except a very small group of uneducated people.
[02:10:58] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Okay. All right.
[02:11:00] JAY WALLACE:
All right. All right. Um, yeah, I’d like to, uh, invite you to return tomorrow, um, at the same time and place for a continuation of these, um, these, these profound investigations and lively discussions.
And, uh, I invite you as well to join me in thanking, uh, Josh Cohen and Charles Larmore for a- for a wonderful talk.
(applause)
[02:11:23] JOSH COHEN:
Thank you.
