This book investigates the unresolved issue of democratic legitimacy in contexts of pervasive disagreement and contributes to this debate by defending a relational version of political liberalism that rests on the ideal of co-authorship. According to this proposal, democratic legitimacy depends upon establishing appropriate interactions among citizens who ought to ascribe to one another the status of putative practical and epistemic authorities. To support this relational reading of political liberalism, the book proposes a revised account of the civic virtue of reasonableness along with an investigation of the epistemic-specific dimension of political equality.
By engaging with political epistemology and social theory, this book explores ways to address inherent tensions within the liberal paradigm, using the following strategies of addressing these tensions: first, it defends a twofold model of legitimacy that distinguishes the goals, methodologies, and justificatory tasks of both ideal and nonideal phases of the two-level justificatory framework; second, it contends that democratic legitimacy requires an engaged and contextual critical appraisal of the injustices that characterize our daily social lives, illustrating how structural forms of injustice represent a profound betrayal of the liberal ideal of democratic legitimacy.
Author(s): Federica Liveriero
Series: Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, 24
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 300
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Liberal Legitimacy
1.2 Disagreement as raison d’être of Democracy
1.3 The Justificatory Dilemma of Liberalism
1.4 An Epistemic Reading of the Justificatory Dilemma
1.5 Justification for Whom?
1.6 Ideal vs Nonideal Theory
References
Chapter 2: Political Legitimacy Under Epistemic Constraints
2.1 Rawls’s Political Turn
2.1.1 Continuism vs Discontinuism
2.1.2 Freestanding Justification and Overlapping Consensus
2.1.3 A Multi-layered Justificatory Procedure
2.1.4 Stability in the Face of Deep Disagreement
2.1.5 Epistemic Abstinence
2.2 Rescuing Epistemology: A Coherentist Theory of Public Justification
2.2.1 A Virtuous Circularity
2.2.2 How to Reply to the No-Contact-With-Reality-Objection
2.2.3 Coherentism and the Intrinsic Flexibility of Collective Justificatory Processes
2.3 The Method of Reflective Equilibrium
2.3.1 Nelson Goodman and the Riddle of Induction
2.3.2 The Role of Reflective Equilibrium in the Rawlsian Framework
2.3.3 A Deliberative Interpretation of Reflective Equilibrium
2.4 Wide Reflective Equilibrium in the Real World
2.4.1 Narrow and Wide Reflective Equilibrium
2.4.2 Strong Coherentism: Initial Credibility and the Epistemic Relevance of Fixed Points
2.4.3 Criticisms of the Method: A Disguised form of Intuitionism or a Too Relativistic Process?
References
Chapter 3: An Epistemic Reading of the Ideal of Co-authorship
3.1 For a Modest Epistemic Paradigm
3.1.1 The Doxastic Presupposition
3.1.2 The Fallibilistic Clause
3.1.3 The Appraisal of Evidence: An Intrinsically Opaque Process
3.1.4 Objectivity in Practical Reasoning
3.1.5 The Burdens of Judgment
3.2 Political Epistemology
3.2.1 Reasonable Disagreement in the Political Domain
3.2.2 Bite-The-Bullet or Stick-To-My-Own-Guns
3.2.3 The Deliberative Constraint of Intellectual Modesty
3.3 Reasonableness in Practice
3.3.1 The Civic Virtue of Reasonableness
3.3.2 The Epistemic Dimension of Reasonableness and the Notion of Opacity Respect
3.3.3 Epistemic Deference and Inconclusive Collective Reasoning
References
Chapter 4: Justification Under Nonideal Circumstances: Reflective Agreement and Relational Liberalism
4.1 Anti-perfectionist Political Liberalism
4.1.1 Two Models of Political Liberalism
4.1.2 Foundational and Justificatory Disagreement
4.1.3 Overlapping Consensus: The Input of the Whole Justificatory Procedure?
4.2 The Background Normative Framework
4.2.1 Coherentism and Overlapping Consensus: A Happy Liaison
4.2.2 Ideal Justification: Two Forms of Reflective Equilibrium
4.3 Justification Under Nonideal Circumstances
4.3.1 The Nonideal Phase of the Justificatory Paradigm
4.3.2 Sharing a Normative Framework: The Notion of Reflective Agreement
4.3.3 Liberalism-Frame and Liberalism-Painting: How to Give Priority to Democratic Participation
References
Chapter 5: The Ideal of Public Justification Revisited
5.1 The Notion of Public Reason
5.1.1 Public Justification and the Duty of Civility
5.1.2 The Deliberative Dimension of Public Reason
5.1.3 The Sincerity Requirement
5.2 Public Justification and the Reflexivity Requirement
5.2.1 Two Requirements of Public Justification
5.2.2 The Reconciling Function of Public Justification
5.2.3 Is there a Possibility to Publicly Justify the Public Justification Principle?
5.3 Justificatory Liberalism
5.3.1 The Libertarian Clause
5.3.2 Open Justification as a Weak Externalist View
5.3.3 Justificatory Populism
5.3.4 How to Maintain Integrity: The Distinction Between Intelligible and Accessible Reasons
5.3.5 Victorious and Undefeated Public Justifications
5.3.6 The Adjudicating Function of Public Reason
References
Chapter 6: Compromises for a Pluralistic World
6.1 Why We Need Compromise for Democratic Decisions
6.1.1 Epistemic and Pragmatic Reasons in Favor of Compromise
6.1.2 A Voluntaristic Reading of Compromise
6.2 Against a Winner-Takes-All Model of Democracy
6.2.1 Pragmatic Compromise
6.2.2 Principled Compromise
6.2.3 The Normative Assumptions of Compromise
6.3 Compromise in Nonideal Circumstances
6.3.1 The Role of Power and Structural Forms of Injustice
6.3.2 How to Fight the Tyranny of the Articulate
References
Chapter 7: A Case Study: Extending Marriage Rights to Same-Sex Couples
7.1 Political Conflicts Over Symbolic Public Space
7.1.1 Marriage Equality and the Public Sphere
7.1.2 Symbolic Public Space as a Public Good
7.1.3 When the Structural Asymmetries Kick in: Arguments Against Marriage Equality
7.2 The Adjudicative Role of Constitutional Courts
7.2.1 Judicial Review: The Legal Case for Marriage Equality in the U.S.
7.2.2 The Countermajoritarian Difficulty: Backlashes to the Courts’ Decisions
7.3 An Adequate Compromise? The Case of Civil Unions in Italy
References
Sitography
Chapter 8: Conclusion
Index
