Mardi intime: Catering for Responsibility: Brute Luck, Option Luck, and the Neutrality Objection

Anthony Taylor (Bernheim Fellow, Oxford)
In this paper I defend three claims which together constitute a defence of the liberal public reason requirement that the exercise of political power be justifiable to each reasonable citizen.
(1) If we were in circumstances where our moral and rational competences were operating undistorted, our normative beliefs would converge.
(2) The circumstances in which our moral and rational competences operate undistorted are those of what John Rawls termed a well-ordered society.
(3) Only a conception of justice that expresses our fallibility (in a sense to be elaborated) could be the object of convergence in a well-ordered society.
My aim in defending claims (1) and (2) is to lay the groundwork for a novel defence of the public reason requirement. On this view, we ought to accept the requirement because the reasonable citizens to which it refers are idealised such that they are in circumstances where their moral and rational competences operate undistorted. And my aim in defending claim (3) is to explore what kind of principles could be justifiable to this idealised constituency.