Shared intentions, public reason, and political autonomy

Abstract

John Rawls claims that public reasoning is the reasoning of ‘equal citizens who as a corporate body impose rules on one another backed by sanctions of state power’. Drawing upon an amended version of Michael Bratman’s theory of shared intentions, I flesh out this claim by developing the ‘civic people’ account of public reason. Citizens realize ‘full’ political autonomy as members of a civic people. Full political autonomy, though, cannot be realised by citizens in societies governed by a ‘constrained proceduralist’ account of democratic self-government, or the ‘convergence’ account of public justification formulated recently by Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier.

Firms as Moral Agents in the COVID-19 Era: Ethical Principles That Shall Guide the Company’s Relationship with Its Stakeholders

“…Logically, these rules must be supported by a legitimately established power. In any case, the power of society to condition the corporate purpose, provide a mission, create norms of conduct or impose boundaries to the actions of the members of society without the affected parties completely losing autonomy is highlighted here (Donaldson and Dunfee 1994;Bratman 2018;Neufeld 2019).…”

Church Under Leviathan

“…Although Rawls, Audi, and Rorty disagree on the level of restriction, they all agree that engaging in political advocacy merely by appeal to religious grounds is prima facie disrespectful. The exclusivist view is also endorsed by Stephen Macedo (1997, 1998), Charles Larmore (1996, 2008), Kent Greenawalt (1988), Joshua Cohen (1989), Martha Nussbaum (2011), Jonathan Quong (2011), Micah Schwatzman (2011), James Boettcher (2005, 2012) and Blain Neufeld (2019). I shall stick to the weak interpretation for the sake of economy of argumentation.…”

Democratic Public Justification

“…This requires setting aside a number of disputed theoretical issues. As such, questions pertaining to the constraints on what reasons may be offered in public justification (e.g., Gaus and Vallier 2009;Hartley and Watson 2009;Hartley and Watson 2018) and whether the appropriate outcome of the exchange of public reasons is convergence or consensus (e.g., Boettcher 2005;Gaus 2011;Neufeld 2019;Vallier 2011) are left open here. This is not to suggest that we may simply dismiss these questions-any complete theory of public reason must answer them at some point.…”