Drafts by James Boettcher
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2019
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John Rawls and the Common Good, ed. Roberto Luppi (Routledge, forthcoming 2022)
According to the Rawlsian idea of public reason, government officials and even ordinary citizens... more According to the Rawlsian idea of public reason, government officials and even ordinary citizens should decide fundamental matters of law and policy on the basis of reasons that are in principle acceptable to others in light of some reasonable political conception of justice along with other publicly accessible standards of evaluation. One requirement of public reason is restraint, i.e., the willingness to refrain from supporting such laws and policies solely on the basis of nonpublic reason. This chapter begins by revisiting Rawls’s remarks on respect and self-respect, mutually reinforcing moral attitudes essential to a well-ordered society. I argue, first, that the restraint requirement is based primarily on an underlying duty of mutual respect. Second, an ideal of civic friendship plays a complementary but secondary role in grounding the main requirements of public reason. This is because we are civic friends not just as fellow citizens but also through our participation in the smaller groups, associations, and affiliations of civil society, which are part of the social bases of self-respect.
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Public Reason, 2017
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Res Publica, 2019
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Papers by James Boettcher
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2014
Compared to standard liberal approaches to public reason and justification, the asymmetric conver... more Compared to standard liberal approaches to public reason and justification, the asymmetric convergence model of public justification allows for the public justification of laws and policies based on a convergence of quite different and even publicly inaccessible reasons. The model is asymmetrical in the sense of identifying a broader range of reasons that may function as decisive defeaters of proposed laws and policies. This paper raises several critical questions about the asymmetric convergence model and its central but ambiguous presumption against coercion. By drawing on the theory of structural coercion, a main conclusion of the paper is that the asymmetric convergence model ultimately encounters the very incompleteness problems that its proponents often associate with more familiar consensus models of public justification. The paper also develops an alternative, Rawlsian-inspired account of public justification that includes elements of both convergence and consensus but not asymmetry. The Rawlsian model enables us to understand how democratic decisions may possess a degree of procedural, but still morally significant, liberal legitimacy under conditions of pluralism even when citizens fail to agree fully about either the premises of or conclusions to their political arguments.
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Social Philosophy Today, 2019
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John Rawls
This chapter proposes to widen Rawls’s idea of public reason in order to respond to a dilemma ori... more This chapter proposes to widen Rawls’s idea of public reason in order to respond to a dilemma originally developed by David Reidy in his article “Rawls’s Wide View of Public Reason: Not Wide Enough” (2000). The dilemma is that public reason is either indeterminate or inconsistent with the animating values of political liberalism, including the value of political autonomy. Reidy’s article identifies two different ways in which public reason might turn out to be indeterminate, one arising when there are too few public reasons in support of some law or policy and the other when there are too many. The latter problem is not as serious as Reidy supposes, at least with respect to several conceptions of justice that might provide the content of public reason. The problem of there being too few reasons suggests that the idea of public reason should include a more expansive set of politically relevant justifying reasons than is otherwise suggested by Rawls’s theory. The chapter proposes a pr...
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Radical Philosophy Review, 2022
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Drafts by James Boettcher
Papers by James Boettcher