Public reason is central to John Rawls’s political liberalism, as a mechanism for citizens to discuss about matters of common interest. Although free and equal, reasonable and rational, citizens of a ...democratic society disagree on their understanding of truth and right, giving rise to the fact of reasonable pluralism. Thus, Rawls works out an idea of public reason which allows citizens to argue about political matters and yet remaining divided in their comprehensive doctrines. On the other hand, African culture has developed the practice of palaver as way of dealing with social and political questions of the community. Usually held under a tree, scholars believe that the palaver is the African version of deliberative democracy. In this article, I elaborate the two ideas and compare them in order to see whether they are completely opposite or whether they can enrich each other. Thus, the first section focuses on Rawls’s idea of public reason, the second explores the palaver practice and the last section compares them.
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This paper argues for a view described as risk-limited indulgent permissivism. This term may be new to the epistemology of disagreement literature, but the general position denoted has many examples. ...The paper argues for the need for an epistemology for domains of controversial views (morals, philosophy, politics, and religion), and for the advantages of endorsing a risk-limited indulgent permissivism across these domains. It takes a double-edge approach in articulating for the advantages of interpersonal belief permissivism that is yet risk-limited: Advantages are apparent both in comparison with impermissivist epistemologies of disagreement, which make little allowance for the many distinct features of these domains, as well as in comparison with defenses of permissivism which confuse it with dogmatism, potentially making a virtue of the latter. In an appropriately critical form of interpersonal belief permissivism, the close connections between epistemic risk-taking and our doxastic responsibilities become focal concerns.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
In recent years, leading public reason liberals have argued that publicly justifying coercive laws and policies requires that citizens offer both adequate secular justificatory reasons and adequate ...secular motivating reasons for these laws and policies. In this paper, I provide a critical assessment of these two requirements and argue for two main claims concerning such requirements. First, only some qualified versions of the requirement that citizens offer adequate secular justificatory reasons for coercive laws and policies may be justifiably regarded as plausible liberal principles of public justification. And second, the requirement that citizens offer adequate secular motivating reasons for coercive laws and policies is untenable on multiple grounds. Public reason liberals should focus on assessing the justificatory reasons offered for and against coercive laws and policies rather than requiring citizens to offer adequate secular motivating reasons for such laws and policies.
This article aims to defend a novel account of pluralism in economics. First, it argues that what justifies pluralism is its epistemological benefits. Second, it acknowledges that pluralism has ...limits, and defends reasonable pluralism, or the view that we should only accept those theories and methods that can be justified by their communities with reasons that other communities can accept. Clearly, reasonable pluralism is an ideal, which requires economists of different persuasions to respect certain norms of communication while evaluating each other's theories. The article ends with a discussion of the conditions under which reasonable communication becomes possible.
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Constitutional review of legislation is the power to examine statutes for their conformity with the constitution. This competence is performed by the judiciary. The origins of this institution date ...back to XIX century and since that time constitutional review of legislation has became an important institution in most democratic states. In the paper, the author answers the most important charge raised against constitutional review – that it lacks democratic legitimacy. According to Jeremy Waldron, there is always a loss to democracy when a majoritian decision is overruled by a politically unaccountable court. As an answer to Waldron’s objection, the author introduces three arguments for the democratic status of constitutional review. These arguments point to three different sources of legitimacy for constitutional review: democratic will of the people, the principle of respect for the democratic reason, and substantial democratic values.
In 1971 the American philosopher John Rawls introduced to the world his work titled A Theory of Justice and in her the author defends, among other important points for the philosophy and the ...political theory, a constitutional theory of civil disobedience as a public, conscious, political and non violent act. From the Rawlsian idea of a constitutional theory of civil disobedience, in this work we wish to think how the civil disobedience formulated by the author in TJ would be "married" to his works after 1971, especially with Political Liberalism of 1993, since the author does not take up the theme in his later works. In this way, the hypothesis is raised that there is a continuity in the works of the American author, on which it is intended: (i) present the concept of civil disobedience coined by the author in the 1971 work; (ii) relate the Rawlsian concept of civil disobedience to the reasonable pluralism exposed by the author in his late works; (iii) and to discuss the role of public reason in Rawlsian thought and why one should appeal to the sense of justice of the majority - which once permitted an unjust law - in discussions about civil disobedience..
Em 1971 o filósofo estadunidense John Rawls apresentou ao mundo sua obra intitulada Uma Teoria da Justiça, e nela o autor defende, entre outros pontos importantes para a filosofia e a teoria política, uma teoria constitucional da desobediência civil enquanto um ato político, público, consciente e não-violento. A partir da ideia rawlsiana de uma teoria constitucional da desobediência civil, neste trabalho deseja-se pensar como a desobediência civil, formulada pelo autor em TJ, estaria “casada” com suas obras posteriores a 1971, em especial com o Liberalismo Político de 1993, uma vez que o autor não retoma o tema em suas obras tardias. Dessa maneira, levanta-se a hipótese de que há uma continuidade nas obras do autor estadunidense, sobre a qual se pretende: (i) apresentar o conceito de desobediência civil cunhado pelo autor na obra de 1971; (ii) relacionar o conceito rawlsiano de desobediência civil com o pluralismo razoável exposto pelo autor nas suas obras tardias; e (iii) discutir o papel da razão pública no pensamento rawlsiano e o porquê deve-se apelar ao senso de justiça da maioria – que outrora permitiu uma lei injusta – nas discussões sobre desobediência civil.
In this paper, we argue that solutions to normative challenges associated with autonomous driving, such as real-world trolley cases or distributions of risk in mundane driving situations, face the ...problem of reasonable pluralism: Reasonable pluralism refers to the fact that there exists a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive moral doctrines (religions, philosophies, worldviews) within liberal democracies. The corresponding problem is that a politically acceptable solution cannot refer to only one of these comprehensive doctrines. Yet a politically adequate solution to the normative challenges of autonomous driving need not come at the expense of an ethical solution, if it is based on moral beliefs that are (1) shared in an overlapping consensus and (2) systematized through public reason. Therefore, we argue that a Rawlsian justificatory framework is able to adequately address the normative challenges of autonomous driving and elaborate on how such a framework might be employed for this purpose.
Rawls' conception of political liberalism does not reckon exclusivist salvation religions to be, for that reason alone, unreasonable. He posits, however, that exclusivist doctrines of salvation are ...likely to become more generous in their views of the religious other with the experience of toleration. While the religious welcome toleration by the majority, relaxation of doctrines of salvation dilutes the urgency of religious truth, and so reduces a religion's ability to justify its existence. Paradoxically, political toleration creates a countervailing demand within a religious community to articulate more precisely what is intolerable in the religious other. This paper explores the dialectic between toleration and nontoleration in the history of Muslim sects and suggests that this history offers lessons on the kinds of strategies that can be successful in promoting religious tolerance in a Muslim society, as well as the limits that might reasonably be expected in those societies.
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This paper argues for a reconsideration of social cohesion as an analytical concept and a policy goal in response to increasing levels of religious diversity in contemporary Australia. In recent ...decades, Australian has seen a revitalization of religion, increasing numbers of those who do not identify with a religion (the “nones”), and the growth of religious minorities, including Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism. These changes are often understood as problematic for social cohesion. In this paper, we review some conceptualizations of social cohesion and religious diversity in Australia, arguing that the concept of social cohesion, despite its initial promise, is ultimately problematic, particularly when it is used to defend privilege. We survey Australian policy responses to religious diversity, noting that these are varied, often piecemeal, and that the hyperdiverse state of Victoria generally has the most sophisticated set of public policies. We conclude with a call for more nuanced and contextualized analyses of religious diversity and social cohesion in Australia. Religious diversity presents both opportunities as well as challenges to social cohesion. Both these aspects need to be considered in the formation of policy responses.
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