No proviso: Habermas on Rawls, religion and public reason
| Author | James Gordon Finlayson |
| Date | 01 July 2021 |
| Published date | 01 July 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885118804797 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article EJPT
No proviso: Habermas
on Rawls, religion
and public reason
James Gordon Finlayson
University of Sussex, UK
Abstract
In this article, I argue that a common view of Habermas’s theory of public reason, which
takes it to be similar to Rawls’s ‘proviso’, is mistaken. I explain why that mistake arises,
and show that those who have made it have thus overlooked the distinctiveness of
Habermas’s theory and approach. Consequently,I argue , theytend to wrongly infer that
objections directed at Rawls’s ‘proviso’ apply also to Habermas’s ‘institutional transla-
tion proviso’. Ironically, Habermas’s attempt to rebut those objections leads him to
advance a peculiar, and ultimately indefensible, thesis about the cognitive requirements
of democratic citizenship for secular citizens. I argue that the underlying problem that
Habermas takes the peculiar thesis to solve is not that the public reason requirements
of the secular state are unfair towards religious citizens, or biased towards secular
views of the world, but that the nature of religious arguments, and of scientism, as
Habermas understands these, prevents citizens who adhere to them from participating
in discourse. I end by suggesting a simpler, less controversial solution to that problem.
Keywords
‘Cognitive’ requirements, democratic citizenship, fallibilism, Habermas, institutional
translation proviso, proviso, public reason, Rawls, religion
Rawls’s Idea of Public Reason and the ‘Proviso’
The central ideas of Rawls’s account of public reasonin Political Liberalism are ‘The
Liberal Principle of Legitimacy’ and the duty of civility. The first states:
Corresponding author:
James Gordon Finlayson, University of Sussex, Arts A029, Brighton, BN1 9QN, UK.
Email: j.g.finlayson@sussex.ac.uk
European Journal of Political Theory
2021, Vol. 20(3) 443–464
!The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885118804797
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Our use of political power is ... proper only when ...exercised in accordance with a
constitution the essentials of which all citizens ... may reasonably be expected to
endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human
reason. (Rawls, 2005 [1993]: 137)
Rawls (2005 [1993]: 217) holds that this principle implies the duty of civility,
namely the duty ‘to explain to one another on those fundamental questions how
the principles and policies they advocate and vote for can be supported by the
political values of public reason’.
What does it mean to explain to others that the principles and policies one
advocates ‘can be supported by the political values of public reason’? The answer
is that they must be able to be supported by the values and ideas that fall within the
overlapping consensus of all reasonable comprehensivedoctrines, and which as such
form the normative commonground of all reasonable citizens. I take it that theideas
of a reasonable comprehensive doctrine and of an overlapping consensus of such
doctrines are familiar and relatively clear. The political ideas and values of public
reason are those that happen to fall in the overlap between reasonable comprehen-
sive doctrines, and are thus part of a common stock of ideas and values held by all
reasonable citizens.
1
They include the values of justice, equal political liberty, fair
equality of opportunity and economic reciprocity. They form the components of the
political conception of justice, which is an arrangement of those ideas into a theory.
A justification is political (or ‘public’) when it appeals only to the values and ideas
that fall within the overlap, and to none that do not, and is thus ‘public’ because
shared by all reasonable citizens.
Now consider the relation between the political conception of justice and rea-
sonable comprehensive doctrines. The former is a ‘module’ that fits in different
ways in all the various reasonable comprehensive doctrines (Rawls, 2005 [1993]:
12, 145, 387). This is important because there is an ambiguity in the way Rawls
uses the term ‘comprehensive doctrine’. One can think of a reasonable compre-
hensive doctrine either as being separate from and merely compatible with the
‘module’ or as including and being congruent with it. The full sense of ‘reasonable
comprehensive doctrine’ should be the inclusive sense because otherwise the doc-
trine is neither ‘reasonable’ nor ‘comprehensive’ strictly speaking. Thus there are
inclusive and exclusive senses of ‘reasonable comprehensive doctrine’, and Rawls
uses now one, now the other.
2
The relevance of this ambiguity is that most reli-
gious reasons are comprehensive in the exclusive sense, i.e. non-political.
Rawls (2005 [1993]: 217) says that the duty of civility is ‘a moral, not a legal
duty’, which forms part of a political morality not of a general moral theory of
right conduct (Rawls, 2005 [1993]: xv). As a moral duty it is not enforceable by
law. The duty falls on judges, ‘government officials’, ‘legislators’ and ‘candidates
for public office’, but also on ordinary citizens (Rawls, 2005 [1993]: 443, 217).
However, it only applies in ‘political’ contexts, namely where citizens advocate
indirectly or directly for policies that call for coercive legislation. It does not
apply in the background culture. Political contexts, though, include voting
444 European Journal of Political Theory 20(3)
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