Reasonable Disagreement About, and Within, Watson and Hartley’s Political Liberalism

Paul Billingham

doi:10.1111/japp.12447

Abstract

AbstractThis article considers how successfully Watson and Hartley achieve the two main aims of their excellent book, Equal Citizenship and Public Reason: first, developing and defending a distinctive version of political liberalism and, second, showing that this is a feminist political liberalism. I challenge both their general defence of their view and the arguments regarding feminism. Both discussions raise questions about the conceptualisation of reasonable disagreement, so I finish with some further comments about ways in which reasonable disagreement about justice creates internal tensions within Watson and Hartley’s theory.

Highlights

Lori Watson and Christie Hartley’s excellent book Equal Citizenship and Public Reason: A Feminist Political Liberalism has two main aims.[1]
Watson and Hartley offer what I will call their ‘rationale’: their account of the moral foundations of public justification and public reason. This rationale provides their argument for the central claim of political liberalism, that the
Legitimacy of laws depends on their being acceptable to reasonable citizens. It centres on a conception of liberal democracy, which they call the ‘collective enterprise view’: Political liberals view liberal democracies as a shared project among persons with the end of living on terms of mutual respect with others whom they view as free and equal citizens and whom they take to share interests with them as such. (p. 41)

Summary

Introduction

Lori Watson and Christie Hartley’s excellent book Equal Citizenship and Public Reason: A Feminist Political Liberalism has two main aims.[1]. Thinking through the analogy and the forms of decision-making that seem plausible in that context is a way of evaluating the authors’ rationale.[7] Applying my observations to political life, the upshot is that even the collective enterprise view of liberal democracy might not require that public justification proceed solely in terms of shared reasons.

Results

Conclusion