Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” John Rawls implied that a well-ordered society would be a deliberative democracy and said that public reason is essential to it. After his turn to political liberalism, he was chary about claims of truth. In Section 1, I lay out essential features of Rawlsian deliberative democracy. In Section 2, I introduce some prominent commentary on Rawls’s treatment of truth and public reasoning. On these readings—collectively “the non-permissive reading”—Rawls’s treatment of truth has problematic implications for public reasoning and therefore for deliberative democracy. In Section 3, I survey those implications. In Section 4, I argue that the texts which are taken to support the non-permissive reading support a very different reading. In Section 5, I argue that Rawls does not endorse the theses imputed to him by the non-permissive reading and that his view does not have the implications surveyed in Section 3.
Source: The Review of Politics
Author: Paul J. Weithman
Institution: University of Notre Dame
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W4409439020