We discuss whether religious reasons may be appealed to in justification and political debate in a polity whose laws must be justified to those subject to them in terms of reasons that are accessible to one and all. We argue that, properly understood, a commitment to public justification provides no grounds for the exclusion of religious reasons from politics. We trace the view that religious reasons are excluded from public reason to three basic errors: (1) the error of supposing that public justification must be based on shared reasons; (2) the error of supposing that in public justification the same constraints apply to reasons to impose coercion and reasons to resist coercion; and (3) the error of supposing that generating publicly justified laws must occur through public deliberations in which all aim at such laws.
I drive a wedge between public deliberation and public justification, concepts tightly associated in public reason liberalism. Properly understood, the ideal of public justification imposes no restraint on citizen deliberation but requires that those who have a substantial impact on the use of coercive power, political officials, advance proposals each person has sufficient reason to accept. I formulate this idea as the Principle of Convergent Restraint and apply it to legislators to illustrate the general reorientation I propose for the public reason project.
This chapter develops a conception of the public justification of the moral rules that are the object of social trust. The goal is to explain how complying with moral rules and abiding by our personal values and commitments are compatible. When this compatibility relation is established, a system of social trust can sustain itself in the right way by driving appropriately trusting and trustworthy behavior, and motivating holding the untrustworthy accountable. When moral rules are publicly justified, that is, justified for each person by her own lights, the compatibility relation obtains and moral rules can then form the basis for trust and trustworthiness and so sustain a social system with a high degree of justified social trust-moral peace. The chapter explains precisely what is to be justified, the kinds of reasons that constitute public justifications, and how public justification is rooted in moral peace and social trust.
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