Epistemic Foundations of Political Liberalism*
In: Journal of Moral PhilosophySearch for other papers by Fabienne Peter in
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At the core of political liberalism is the claim that political institutions must be publicly justified or justifiable to be legitimate. What explains the significance of public justification? The main argument that defenders of political liberalism present is an argument from disagreement: the irreducible pluralism that is characteristic of democratic societies requires a mode of justification that lies in between a narrowly political solution based on actual acceptance and a traditional moral solution based on justification from the third-person perspective. But why should we take disagreements seriously? This—epistemic question—has not received the attention it deserves so far. I argue that the significance of public justification can be explained through the possibility of reasonable disagreement. In a reasonable disagreement, the parties hold mutually incompatible beliefs, but each is justified to hold the belief they do. I shall use the notion of a reasonable disagreement to explain the possibility of an irreducible pluralism of moral and religious doctrines and, on that basis, why the justification of political institutions has to be public.
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1
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 137.
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2
See Thomas Nagel, “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (1987): 215-240, for a related view.
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4
Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 27.
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6
Fabienne Peter, Democratic Legitimacy (New York: Routledge, 2009).
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11
Joseph Raz, “Facing Diversity: The Case of Epistemic Abstinence,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 19 (1990): 3-46.
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12
Charles Larmore, The Autonomy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 139ff.
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16
Adam Elga, “Reflection and Disagreement,” Noûs 41(2007): 478-502.
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17
See David Christensen, “Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News,” Philosophical Review 116 (2007): 187-217; Elga “Reflection and Disagreement,” and Richard Feldman, “Reasonable Religious Disagreements,” in Louise Antony (ed.) Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 194—214.
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28
Sosa, “The Epistemology of Disagreement,” p. 290; italics omitted.
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29
Sosa, “The Epistemology of Disagreement,” p. 288; italics omitted.
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30
Sosa, “The Epistemology of Disagreement,” p. 290; italics omitted.
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32
Goldman, “Epistemic Relativism and Reasonable Disagreement,” p. 201, describes the resulting position—he calls it “objectivity-based relativism” as follows: “There is a uniquely correct E-system that governs the objective justifiedness and unjustifiedness of people’s doxastic attitudes. However, people occupy different evidential positions vis-a-vis this system and other candidate E-systems. Hence, the objective justificational status of different people vis-a-vis different E-systems is varied rather than uniform. Some people are objectively justified in believing certain E-norms and E-systems to be correct; others are objectively justified in believing other E-norms and E-systems to be correct. Similarly for attitudes other than full belief toward E-norm-related propositions.”
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40
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 31.
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Epistemic Foundations of Political Liberalism*
In: Journal of Moral PhilosophySearch for other papers by Fabienne Peter in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
At the core of political liberalism is the claim that political institutions must be publicly justified or justifiable to be legitimate. What explains the significance of public justification? The main argument that defenders of political liberalism present is an argument from disagreement: the irreducible pluralism that is characteristic of democratic societies requires a mode of justification that lies in between a narrowly political solution based on actual acceptance and a traditional moral solution based on justification from the third-person perspective. But why should we take disagreements seriously? This—epistemic question—has not received the attention it deserves so far. I argue that the significance of public justification can be explained through the possibility of reasonable disagreement. In a reasonable disagreement, the parties hold mutually incompatible beliefs, but each is justified to hold the belief they do. I shall use the notion of a reasonable disagreement to explain the possibility of an irreducible pluralism of moral and religious doctrines and, on that basis, why the justification of political institutions has to be public.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 879 | 145 | 16 |
| Full Text Views | 292 | 9 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 166 | 12 | 0 |