Do the reactive attitudes justify public reason?
| Author | Collis Tahzib |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885119886205 |
| Published date | 01 July 2022 |
| Date | 01 July 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article EJPT
Do the reactive attitudes
justify public reason?
Collis Tahzib
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
According to public reason liberalism, the laws and institutions of society must be in
some sense justifiable to all reasonable citizens. But why care about justifiability to
reasonable citizens? Recently, Gerald Gaus has developed a novel and sophisticated
defence of public justification. Gaus argues that our everyday reactive attitudes of
resentment and indignation presuppose public justification and that these reactive
attitudes are essential to social life. In this article, I challenge the first premise by
considering cases in which agents are liable to the reactive attitudes for violating
moral rules that they had no sufficient reason to endorse, and I challenge the second
premise by drawing on recent work on moral responsibility that suggests that social life
would still be possible, and perhaps even improved, in the absence of the reactive
attitudes. Finally, I question whether the reactive attitudes are even the kind of thing
that could justify public reason.
Keywords
Gerald Gaus, moral responsibility, public justification, political liberalism, public reason,
reactive attitudes
It is a central tenet of contemporary public reason liberalism that the state must
abide by a principle of public justification. According to this principle, the laws and
institutions of society must be in some sense justifiable to all reasonable citizens.
As Waldron (1987: 149) puts this idea, ‘liberals demand that the social order
should in principle be capable of explaining itself at the tribunal of each person’s
Corresponding author:
Collis Tahzib, Merton College, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 4JD, UK.
Email: Collis.tahzib@philosophy.ox.ac.uk
European Journal of Political Theory
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885119886205
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2022, Vol. 21(3) 423–444
understanding’. For Rawls (1996), the principle of public justification primarily
implied that important political decisions must be justified in terms of shared
public reasons such as fairness and equality, and not by appeal to controversial
religious and ethical doctrines. But since then it has been argued that the implica-
tions of this principle are even more radical and far-reaching, and that the public
justification principle calls into question the legitimacy of much egalitarian liber-
alism and in fact tilts towards the minimal state (Gaus, 2011a).
But the principle of public justification is by no means self-evident. So political
liberals and public reason liberals need to provide a justification (or grounding or
moral foundation) for public justification. They need, that is, to answer the ques-
tion: Why reason publicly? Why care about justification to all reasonable citizens?
Why not simply implement the political rules and institutions that are correct –or
at least that are most likely to be correct – regardless of whether those rules and
institutions could be reasonably rejected by some citizens?
The traditional answer to these questions was that the public justification
principle is grounded in respect for persons. Thus Larmore (1999: 607) states
that ‘if we try to bring about conformity to a rule of conduct solely by the threat
of force [and not by offering reasons that others recognize as valid], we shall be
treating persons merely as a means, as objects of coercion, and not also as ends,
engaging directly their distinctive capacity as persons’. However, in recent years,
and in light of powerful criticisms of the respect-based grounding (see, e.g.,
Eberle, 2002: 109–151), a number of other moral foundations for public justifi-
cation have been proposed, including stability (Weithman, 2010), justice (Quong,
2013), civic friendship (Lister, 2013) and social trust (Vallier, 2019). Of these
more recent groundings, one of the most interesting, detailed and original is
Gerald Gaus’s reactive attitudes argument. Yet, despite its sophistication and
novelty, Gaus’s argument has received little critical scrutiny (the notable excep-
tion being Taylor, 2018).
In this article, I argue that the argument from the reactive attitudes to public
justification is unsuccessful. I first spell out in more detail, in the first section,
Gaus’s reactive attitudes argument. I then critique the two key premises in
Gaus’s argument. I argue, in the second section, that the reactive attitudes do
not presuppose public justification because there are plenty of cases in which we
appropriately blame and resent agents for violating a rule despite their not having
a reason to accept that rule. The rejection of public justification thus need not also
imply the rejection of those reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation that
Gaus takes to be essential to social life. Next, I argue in the third section that, in
any case, social life would still be possible, and perhaps even improved, in the
absence of the reactive attitudes. Finally, in the fourth section, I delve into Gaus’s
complex views about the relation between the normative and the empirical in order
to query whether the reactive attitudes are even the kind of things that could justify
public reason.
424 European Journal of Political Theory 21(3)
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