The Order Of Public Reason

Download or read book The Order of Public Reason written by Gerald Gaus and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-13 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative and important work, Gerald Gaus advances a revised, and more realistic, account of public reason liberalism, showing how, in the midst of fundamental disagreement about values and moral beliefs, we can achieve a moral and political order that treats all as free and equal moral persons. The first part of this work analyzes social morality as a system of authoritative moral rules. Drawing on an earlier generation of moral philosophers such as Kurt Baier and Peter Strawson as well as current work in the social sciences, Gaus argues that our social morality is an evolved social fact, which is the necessary foundation of a mutually beneficial social order. The second part considers how this system of social moral authority can be justified to all moral persons. Drawing on the tools of game theory, social choice theory, experimental psychology, and evolutionary theory, Gaus shows how a free society can secure a moral equilibrium that is endorsed by all, and how a just state respects, and develops, such an equilibrium.

Download or read book Natural Law and Public Reason written by Robert P. George and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Public reason" is one of the central concepts in modern liberal political theory. As articulated by John Rawls, it presents a way to overcome the difficulties created by intractable differences among citizens' religious and moral beliefs by strictly confining the place of such convictions in the public sphere. Identifying this conception as a key point of conflict, this book presents a debate among contemporary natural law and liberal political theorists on the definition and validity of the idea of public reason. Its distinguished contributors examine the consequences of interpreting public reason more broadly as "right reason," according to natural law theory, versus understanding it in the narrower sense in which Rawls intended. They test public reason by examining its implications for current issues, confronting the questions of abortion and slavery and matters relating to citizenship. This energetic exchange advances our understanding of both Rawls's contribution to political philosophy and the lasting relevance of natural law. It provides new insights into crucial issues facing society today as it points to new ways of thinking about political theory and practice.

Download or read book Public Reason written by Fred D'Agostino and published by Ashgate Publishing. This book was released on 1998 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays that make up this volume, explore the idea of public reason. The task of identifying a distinctively public reason has become pressing in our deeply pluralistic society, just because doubt has arisen whether what is good reasoning for one must be good reasoning for all. Examining the theories of Hobbes and Kant, and also using more recent work such as the comments and theories of John Rawls and David Gauthier, this book explores aspects of the idea of public reason. It explains public reason, and discusses areas such as pluralism, reasonable disagreement, moral conflict, political legitimacy, public justification and post-modernism.

Download or read book Science and Public Reason written by Sheila Jasanoff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays by Sheila Jasanoff explores how democratic governments construct public reason, that is, the forms of evidence and argument used in making state decisions accountable to citizens. The term public reason as used here is not simply a matter of deploying principled arguments that respect the norms of democratic deliberation. Jasanoff investigates what states do in practice when they claim to be reasoning in the public interest. Reason, from this perspective, comprises the institutional practices, discourses, techniques and instruments through which governments claim legitimacy in an era of potentially unbounded risks—physical, political, and moral. Those legitimating efforts, in turn, depend on citizens’ acceptance of the forms of reasoning that governments offer. Included here therefore is an inquiry into the conditions that lead citizens of democratic societies to accept policy justification as being reasonable. These modes of public knowing, or “civic epistemologies,” are integral to the constitution of contemporary political cultures. Methodologically, the book is grounded in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). It uses in-depth qualitative studies of legal and political practices to shed light on divergent cross-cultural constructions of public reason and the reasoning political subject. The collection as a whole contributes to democratic theory, legal studies, comparative politics, geography, and ethnographies of modernity, as well as STS.

Download or read book Public Reason in Political Philosophy written by Piers Norris Turner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-10 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When people of good faith and sound mind disagree deeply about moral, religious, and other philosophical matters, how can we justify political institutions to all of them? The idea of public reason—of a shared public standard, despite disagreement—arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the work of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. At a time when John Rawls’ influential theory of public reason has come under fire but its core idea remains attractive to many, it is important not to lose sight of earlier philosophers’ answers to the problem of private conflict through public reason. The distinctive selections from the great social contract theorists in this volume emphasize the pervasive theme of intractable disagreement and the need for public justification. New essays by leading scholars then put the historical work in context and provide a focus of debate and discussion. They also explore how the search for public reason has informed a wider body of modern political theory—in the work of Hume, Hegel, Bentham, and Mill—sometimes in surprising ways. The idea of public reason is revealed as an overarching theme in modern political philosophy—one very much needed today.

Download or read book Public Reason and Political Community written by Andrew Lister and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-10-24 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public Reason and Political Community defends the liberal ideal of public reason against its critics, but as a form of moral compromise for the sake of civic friendship rather than as a consequence of respect for persons as moral agents. At the heart of the principle of public justification is an idealized unanimity requirement, which can be framed in at least two different ways. Is it our reasons for political decisions that have to be unanimously acceptable to qualified points of view, otherwise we exclude them from deliberation, or is it coercive state action that must be unanimously acceptable, otherwise we default to not having a common rule or policy, on the issue at hand? Andrew Lister explores the 'anti-perfectionist dilemma' that results from this ambiguity. He defends the reasons model on grounds of the value of political community, and applies it to recent debates about marriage.

Download or read book Religion and Public Reason written by Maureen Junker-Kenny and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2014-04-02 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book compares three approaches to public reason and to the public space accorded to religions: the liberal platform of an overlapping consensus proposed by John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethical reformulation of Kant’s universalism and its realization in the public sphere, and the co-founding role which Paul Ricoeur attributes to the particular traditions that have shaped their cultures and the convictions of citizens. The premises of their positions are analysed under four aspects: (1) the normative framework which determines the specific function of public reason; (2) their anthropologies and theories of action; (3) the dimensions of social life and its concretization in a democratic political framework; (4) the different views of religion that follow from these factors, including their understanding of the status of metaphysical and religious truth claims, and the role of religion as a practice and conviction in a pluralist society. Recent receptions and critiques in English and German are brought into conversation: philosophers and theologians discuss the scope of public reason, and the task of translation from faith traditions, as well as the role they might have in the diversity of world cultures for shaping a shared cosmopolitan horizon.