Dans le cadre des midis de l’éthique du CRÉ, Emil Andersson nous offrira une présentation intitulée « Autonomy, Community, and the Justification of Public Reason ».

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Résumé

According to the Rawlsian idea of public reason, fundamental political questions should be settled on the basis of reasons that are acceptable to all citizens. Recently, there have been attempts at offering new justifications of this idea. Blain Neufeld has suggested that it is the ideal of political autonomy that justifies public reason, while RJ Leland and Han van Wietmarschen have instead sought to justify the idea by an appeal to the value of a certain kind of political community. In this paper I argue that these two justificatory strategies share structural features that make them vulnerable to a common problem: that in non-ideal circumstances, these proposed justifications often turn into reasons to oppose, rather than support, public reason. There are, however, alternative ways of conceiving of autonomy and community that may allow us to avoid this problem. These alternative conceptions may, I suggest, provide a more solid foundation for the idea of public reason.