Chapter 13 - Public Reason, Positive Liberty, and Legitimacy

Summary

Public reason approaches to political legitimacy typically claim that members of society are free and equal when they live under institutions that are publically justified. Institutions are publically justified when they can be justified in the right way to the reasoning of each member. However, the requirements of publically justified institutions are also backed by political coercion or other social practices through which individuals are held accountable to those requirements, though the result is supposedly citizens being free in a positive sense. Throughout this development, public reason theorists have seemed to presume that legitimate institutions are sufficient for securing the freedom of its members, even the members that do not think those institutions are best. This change from best to merely legitimate, however, raises serious difficulties for the account of freedom within public reason theories, particularly when we consider the level of divergence that may exist between the institutions favored by one’s own reason and the merely legitimate institutions one may live under. This chapter elaborates the difficulties that public reason views face regarding liberty in a merely legitimate regime, and considers the main strategies available to such accounts for understanding the liberty of members of legitimate societies.