Arguments for Liberty by Aaron Ross Powell & Grant Babcock

Author:Aaron Ross Powell & Grant Babcock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CATO Institute
Published: 2016-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

Consequently, public reason liberalism must “tilt” against coercive states, and public reason liberals are responsible for showing that their favored proposals do not use coercion, at least not in excess of what can be justified given the legal right against coercion.64

Emphasis on Nonideal Theory

The final feature of Gaus’s view that pushes public reason in a more libertarian direction is Gaus’s emphasis on nonideal theory. Gausian public justification is identified with a “testing conception” of evaluation, where the aim of a model of public reason is not to reconstruct social institutions from the ground up, but rather to help us evaluate our real-world practices in a way that accords with our real-world normative standards and commitments.

Moral evaluation for Gaus, following Hayek, must begin from our actual social practices and then “test” those practices via the deliberative model.65 In other words, public justification does not begin by asking whether our entire set of coercive institutions embodies a commitment to general principles of justice. Rather, we test real rules via a test of public justification only when challenges or concerns about the rules arise.

Further, Gaus does not assume that citizens and political officials will fully comply with the law; he limited original position reasoning and allows for far more economic realism than other public reason liberals. Readers of this volume are likely already sympathetic to the claim that formal economic models and empirical data favor libertarianism or alternatives, so by allowing nonideal behavior and real-world data into public justification, public reason liberalism is pushed further still in a classical liberal direction. Libertarians have frequently understood the case for libertarianism as resting in a commitment to nonideal theorizing, where the failures of government are impossible to ignore. In this respect, then, Gaus’s emphasis should be welcome.

Which Rawlsian Libertarianism?

The reader will notice that I have spent much more time developing the Gausian position than the Tomasian position. I did so in part because Tomasi is not reconstructing public reason from the ground up but is instead modifying justice as fairness to accommodate classical liberal economic liberties and a broader classical liberal outlook on political life.

But I have also focused more on Gaus because I find the Gausian view more plausible. Rawls was right to move from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism because of the problems of reasonable pluralism about the good and justice.66 Gaus plausibly develops public reason in a diversity-accommodating direction, which I regard as a natural extension of a broadly Rawlsian project. Tomasi’s free-market fairness, therefore, will fall prey to the same concerns as justice as fairness. Reasonable people disagree about what justice requires; thus, we cannot use Rawlsian reasoning to vindicate justice as fairness or free-market fairness. Ultimately, Gaus has set the stage for the next version of the Rawlsian project, a Rawls 3.0 that accommodates reasonable pluralism about the good and justice, and other forms of diversity as well. Tomasi’s project is associated with Rawls 1.0, the Rawls of A Theory of Justice.

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