Public reason

Hi. I’m Geoff Pynn, and I teach philosophy at Elgin Community College. In this video, I’m going to talk about the idea of public reason in discussions of political legitimacy. What gives the state the moral authority to rule through the use of force? How is the state’s rule different from the rule of a violent gang? In other words, what makes a state’s authority legitimate? According to the social contract theory, legitimacy rests on an agreement between each member of society to respect the state’s authority for the sake of the common good. In other words, legitimate states are based, as the US Declaration of Independence puts it, on the consent of the governed. But few of us have ever explicitly given consent. For this reason, social contract theories often talk about tacit or implicit consent. But the idea of tacit or implicit consent can be difficult to make sense of. A different way of developing a social contract idea is to move away from the idea of actual consent, whether explicit or implicit, and towards what’s called hypothetical consent. Hypothetical consent, in essence, means that you would give your consent, if you were given the right sort of opportunity to do so. Somebody is generally entitled to treat you in ways they know you would consent to, even if you haven’t actually done so. Suppose you’re ordering sandwiches for everybody in the office. You know your friend Alexia always gets a cucumber sandwich on pumpernickel. So you don’t bother asking her what she wants -- you just order for her. And when the sandwiches arrive, she thanks you for getting her just what she wanted. If you had asked her before putting in the order, she would have consented. So we can say that she hypothetically consented to the sandwich order you made on her behalf. If there were a way for the state to know exactly what laws we would consent to if given the right opportunity to do so, then maybe those laws have legitimate authority over us on the basis of our hypothetical consent. Of course, different people like different sandwiches, and some people like salads instead. But everybody has to live under the same laws. So for a law to be legitimate on this picture, the state would need the hypothetical consent of everybody. How might that work? One route is to consider what a reasonable person would consent to. Consider a rule like “Don’t contradict yourself.” Even if you’ve never thought about it before, I’m confident that you accept this rule. If someone points out to you that you’ve just contradicted yourself, you’ll accept that as a legitimate criticism in need of a response. And I’m sure you’d criticize other people on the same basis. Why am I so confident about this? Because, intelligent viewer that you are, I assume that you’re reasonable -- and avoiding self-contradiction is just part of being reasonable. Reasonable people can disagree about a lot of things. You might reasonably think pickled beets are preferable to cucumber sandwiches, while your friend Alexia reasonably thinks the opposite. Still, despite this disagreement, each of you can see that the other’s opinion is reasonable, even if you also think it’s ultimately wrong or deeply wrong. And you'd both agree that nobody should be forced to eat cucumbers or beets if they dislike them. Underneath many disagreements are shared assumptions about what’s reasonable. Public reason is the standard a policy meets when it’s justifiable to all of the reasonable people it affects, despite their disagreements. For example, take the idea that no one may be punished until they have been proven guilty in a court of law. That’s something every reasonable person will accept, whatever else they may disagree with about each other. If somebody wasn’t sure, there are a lot of reasons that might be given that could make them sure. It’s thoroughly justifiable through public reason. Now, let’s put the pieces together. Here’s the idea: 1: Hypothetical consent is sufficient to meet the requirement that a legitimate law requires the consent of the governed. 2: If a law is justifiable through public reason, then it has the hypothetical consent of all those affected by it. 3: So, if a law is justifiable through public reason, that means it has the consent required for legitimacy. Of course, you might take issue with the second premise, and wonder whether our hypothetical consent really is enough for legitimate authority. After all, even if somebody knows what sandwich you would prefer, it still seems like you have a right to complain if they don’t even bother to ask you. Plus, the idea of a standard of reason that applies across deep moral and religious disagreements may not withstand scrutiny. What if, for example, someone’s religion teaches that all other religions are unreasonable? Still, on its face, public reason seems a promising basis for justifying state authority. If all reasonable people really would agree to something, how could you reasonably disagree? What do you think?