Convergence and Consensus in Public Reason

Abstract

Reasonable individuals often share a rationale for a decision but, in other cases, they make the same decision based on disparate and often incompatible rationales. The social contract tradition has been divided between these two methods of solving the problem of social cooperation: must social cooperation occur in terms of common reasoning or can individuals with different doctrines simply converge on shared institutions for their own reasons? For Hobbes, it is rational for all persons, regardless of their theological beliefs, to consent to the sovereign’s power. But for Locke, only Protestants with a shared theology could be party to the social contract. Rousseau thought that private reasons are not part of the general will and in Kant’s hypothetical contract, pure noumena reach common principles for the social order through the same reasoning process. In Theory of Justice, John Rawls agreed with Rousseau and Kant: selecting the principles of justice requires modeling parties to the original position as having identical reasons. But in Political Liberalism, he embraced the idea of an overlapping consensus, which accords distinct reasons justificatory force. The social contract tradition recognized that political legitimacy could not rest on a comprehensive theology, as theology was subject to radical disagreement. The liberal political project arose as an attempt to locate an impartial method of political justification despite these differences. If only implicitly, all the social contract theorists grappled with what Rawls called “the fact of reasonable pluralism,” i.e., that the free exercise of reason leads to pervasive and persistent disagreement about even life’s most important questions. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Rawls (quite a group) sought agreement despite disagreement. They sought a common point of view in the face of disparate points of view. When Rawls drew political theorists’ attention to the challenge of reasonable pluralism, he inaugurated a new era of public reason liberalism, the tradition within liberal political theory that holds that coercion must be justified to all on terms they can reasonably be expected to endorse. This is to say that each and every reasonable member of the public must have good reasons to endorse the laws (or, for Rawls, constitutional essentials) of their society if they are to be treated as free and